Seeing Is Believing: on the Visibility of Late Capitalism
Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One opens with the claim that “It should not be surprising that Marx remains as inexhaustible as capital itself, and that with every adaptation or mutation of the latter his texts and his thought resonate in new ways and with fresh accents … rich with new me...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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University of Zadar
2015-12-01
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| Series: | [sic] |
| Online Access: | http://www.sic-journal.org/ArticleView.aspx?aid=376 |
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| Summary: | Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One opens with the claim that “It should not be surprising that Marx remains as inexhaustible as capital itself, and that with every adaptation or mutation of the latter his texts and his thought resonate in new ways and with fresh accents … rich with new meanings” (Jameson 1). Together with Valences of the Dialectic (2009), this is Fredric Jameson's latest chapter in a life-long project of actualization and affirmation of different categories of Marx’s dialectic, from alienation to commodity fetishism, all thoroughly criticized and somewhat abandoned after the (post)structuralist turn of Marxism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. By positing the category of representation in the center of his reading of Capital, Jameson is moving against the current of those appropriations of Marx that amidst the unprecedented global financial crisis of 2008, aimed to find their foothold in the supposed objectivity of the economy – projecting onto the economy the authenticity and the absoluteness of the Lacanian real. Having in mind his previous work, this is not something undertaken without a sense of self-responsibility, taking the form of admission when he writes that “the problem of representation today eats away at all the established disciplines like a virus, particularly destabilizing the dimension of language, reference and expression …, as well as that of thought” (Jameson 4). Rejecting the “false” debates around the (non)political nature of Marx’s magnum opus, Jameson claims that it is a figural work since by using different forms of value, space, time, and mediation, it ends up constructing a kind of ‘proto-narrative’ representation of capitalism as totality. Famous images scattered throughout Capital – capital as ‘vampire’ and other forms of recurring monstrosities, dancing tables or the play for recognition between the linen and the coat – are a way to grasp the specific form of capitalist reality which in appearance is neither true nor false but rather ‘objective illusion’. And yet concepts that aim to grasp this eluding totality – including the very term ‘capitalism’ – can rarely be found in Capital. This leads Jameson to conclude that Marx, after a well-documented laborious reworking of the opening chapters and the overall structure of Capital, found out that the accumulation of capital can be made visible only in its symptoms, distortions, crisis, and different cuts of structure. This return to the now famous Slavoj Žižek proposition that “Marx invented the symptom” (Žižek 1) is followed up with an even more far-reaching conclusion: the only possible Marxian totality of capitalism has a Freudian structure and is a result of a combination of different but ultimately partial representations unable to fully capture its field of phenomena. Jameson himself is unwilling to follow up the full implication of this parallel; insofar as Marxian capitalist totality can only be an aesthetic construct – or, to use psychoanalytic vocabulary, a ‘compromise formation’ – built for strategic purposes, it remains just one amongst other totalities, competing with them in a terrain not overdetermined by any recourse to economic objectivity. In order to avoid this, Jameson takes the road of Marx’s dialectic which for him resolves the duality of objectivism – economic determinism – and voluntarism underlying the whole history of Marxist theory. In actualizing Marx’s dialectics, Jameson is not returning to the mystic source itself as much as reading Marx via and alongside the likes of Althusser or Deleuze and other “unwilling” dialecticians he recruits along the way. At the same time, once more taking a jab at structuralist theory – claiming, for example, that one can mistake the structuralist notion of the synchronic for ‘conceptual ideology’ relating to the eternal present of capitalist accumulation – for Jame |
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| ISSN: | 1847-7755 |