Marx’s perpetual ambivalence to modernity becomes clear as soon as the argument turns to the ancient world. Here, as we are already accustomed to the fury of Marx’s moralizing thunderbolts on the depravity around him, we expect to find him more calm and relaxed. But this is not the case—indeed it is precisely here that he expresses his greatest misgivings: “Thus the old view, in which the human being appears as the aim of production, regardless of his limited national, religious, political character, seems to be very lofty when contrasted to the modern world, where production appears as the aim of mankind and wealth as the aim of production.” But it only “seems” more noble and lofty, since Marx has a clear intolerance to it; and certainly not for the same sentimental reasons (due, for example, to the old world being founded on slavery), but because that world lacks power and, above all, because it is not built in such a way that its operation necessarily and automatically exalts power regardless of the direction in which it is applied. “Wealth,” indeed, if observed in terms of its physiology, is far richer (and far more interesting!) than the service that man devotes to man in the ancient world, where “the question is always which mode of property creates the best citizens.” The bourgeois world of wealth is certainly not much concerned about creating virtuous citizens. If anything, it extends the comédie humaine to every kind of monstrosity, but in return “when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away [and Marx here, in officer’s uniform, visits the cocotte in her room and finally glimpses, behind the flimsy screen, her ancient—and, more than ancient, her modern!—sweetly veiled nudity], what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces, etc., created through universal exchange? The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity’s own nature?” Here, having banished all shyness, Marx at last declares his innermost feelings: antiquity, yes, fine statues, fine lines of verse, heroes, tombs and columns, etc.; but how poor and feeble if we think of the majesty of bourgeois wealth, of the irresistible abstractions from which it grows, of its vast warehouses, which are only seemingly filled with mere things: on closer inspection they contain the phantoms of ever-growing needs, pleasures, qualities, powers, gathered together in a pulsating and expanding nebula. Above all, we have to remember, Marx is greedy. He wants more of everything. He is suspicious of quality unless it is simply the mark of greater quantity: even if quality could exist alone, it would always be less admirable than a quantity in continual prospect of increase. Marx’s heart beats here: it is not like that of Schiller, who dreams of belonging to a worthy community, of overcoming divisiveness, of rediscovering blades of grass. No: here it is the pride of full “mastery,” mastery over “so-called nature,” and then the moment will also come for humanity to sort out its “own nature.” This is a promise of power, this is the intoxication of the Nothing that moves the machine, an inexhaustible fuel, the unleashing of forces! And even the idea of a process that is an end in itself, which Marx has branded with contempt over hundreds of pages of analysis as being a supreme corruption of the mercantile world—well, even this now seems much more exciting than the “childish,” limited, even if well-meaning, world of antiquity.
This is how Marx continues, after the phrase on “human mastery over the forces of nature”: “[What is wealth if not] the absolute working-out of [man’s] creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e., the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? Where he does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality?” Here we see the reappearance of an old obsession: the unit of measure. But the situation is once again reversed: the ancient world had, indeed, as a point of reference, a human canon, and this would seem to be a utopian condition of society, that it possess within itself a degree of perfection; the modern world, on the other hand, has no real use for perfection: its only unit of measurement is work-time, where work is abstract, an empty unit, devoid of any particular feature, but it is this very unit that enables mankind to produce (and note: not reproduce!) itself to an extent unknown in any other world. It is clear, at this point, which part, which side, Marx chooses: speaking here, almost brutally, is his love of modernity, of its capacity to multiply and enhance itself without a plan, in any direction. For its only purpose is everything: the immediate possession of everything, not just a precept that corresponds to everything. To reach totality, elements can be accumulated anywhere, in attics, cellars, drawing rooms. Good and bad, everything is useful, provided it comes in large quantities. Humanity becomes a vast port where spices and foreign produce arrive. No order is required: the only thing needed is for everything to continue multiplying to saturation point.
And when there’s everything? Then humanistic concerns and sensitivities will reemerge: the man who fishes in the morning and plays his flute in the evening, the “omnilateral” man who proudly refuses to let any of his countless tentacles remain idle. Yet, here again, a nasty surprise is waiting to spoil any image d’Épinal. This total man—as Stirner recognized immediately—far from being the virtuous worker, trained in technical schools and in the factory, was destined to blossom into the total, celestial and infernal monstrosity oscillating between Juliette’s Minski and Dostoyevsky’s Myshkin. All the rest is humanitarian kitsch, closer to Homais than to Fourier (though the two, in fact, are not so far apart).
Elsewhere, however, Marx shows his passion: elsewhere we feel his full transparent fervor: before the demonic nature of the process. It is the process—certainly not its result—that fascinates. The construction of the power of the void. And here the fundamental opposition between the two worlds reemerges. Let us reread the last sentence of the passage quoted above: the totality of development in which man “does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality.” The ultimate opposition is therefore between reproducing and producing. Reproduce is the word that belongs to the world of the canon, dominated by rituals that seek each time to restore an order to the process, to reproduce an order, that of the ṛta, which sustains the cosmos as well as society. Produce is the word that belongs to the world of hegemonic exchange, where it is essential to establish a functional strategy such that the process, as it proceeds, carries with it—come what may—an increase of power. This happens precisely because the direction of production is not determinable and is indeed ignored, whereas all concern is focused primarily on the intensification and expansion of production strategies. And it is only in their evolution that any consequence can be gleaned.
The world of production knows no models and sets itself no limits. For its limit can only be everything. From the maximum fragmentation, caused by the absence of models, it seeks to move toward maximum unity, which is that of an everything fully and immediately possessed—and this claim to totality lingers, like a phantom, over every movement of the process, not least because the lack of totality gives rise to a peculiar angst. That lingering phantom, that temporary remedy, is Kitsch.
(“In bourgeois economics—and in the epoch of production to which it corresponds—this complete working-out of the human content appears as a complete emptying out, this universal objectification as total alienation, and the tearing-down of all limited, one-sided aims as sacrifice of the human end-in-itself to an entirely external end. This is why the childish world of antiquity appears on one side as a superior world. On the other side, it actually is superior wherever one is seeking the closed figure, form, and a set limit. It is satisfaction from a limited standpoint; while the modern gives no satisfaction; or, where it appears satisfied with itself, it is vulgar.” Beware, tread with caution: here, perhaps, we are getting close to one of the grand secrets of kitsch: an art of the limited and of the canonical, of measures tuned to a cosmic order, conceals instead a corrosive, “reckless” movement. “Vulgar” is something that sees the fragment as totality, that rests in the fragment with an expression of satisfaction, firmness, legality: then the simoom of the relentless haine du bourgeois rises up to reap revenge. And yet art has always been accompanied by kitsch! Yes, but, in order to fix its shadow, the process had to expand across the whole planet—the couple embracing in front of the sunset had to make up for the absence of a model. Ancient kitsch suggests an even deeper secret: the guilt inherent in anything whatsoever that becomes image, the reverberation of the violence of giving a name.)
Marx, looking at the origins, wavered between two visions of the earth: as an “extension of the body” of man, or as his “great workshop, the arsenal which furnishes both means and material of labor.” They are the two opposite modes that we continually encounter in thought: on the one hand, the analogical chain of symbolic correspondences by which the earth is enveloped as soon as it is regarded as an “extension of the body” of man (and this is seen from the way in which, despite constant secularization, terms like “heart,” “brain,” “flesh” are still symbolic poles); on the other hand, the dissociation hailed by the Enlightenment, the experimental use of everything, the absence of assumptions: this is the image of the “great workshop.” But Marx’s attention (and his passion) are always directed toward the second pole. He regards the existence of the first as obvious, but clearly finds it too tedious to specify its characteristics: for him it is enough to posit a condition of belonging, both at the beginning and—but here it is more embarrassing—at the end; and to suppose a considerable number of states of separation in all that occurs between these two phases. Marx examines these with tireless, whirling rapture, always referring eloquently to something lost or to be regained. But his eloquence comes to a halt—and he becomes distracted—as soon as the opportunity arises to specify exactly what has been lost, exactly what might be regained. None of this means that Marx has given two incompatible descriptions of the origins of the “earth”: they are, indeed, discordant and contradictory, but have always coexisted in history: one is the latency of the other. Marx displays all his personal acumen in placing them together. This is because the euhemeristic gesture, the severing of correspondences, always operates even where the order of analogies is established. Indeed, that order can be considered as a conciliatory response, a suturing of correspondences, which ritually follows every act of severing.
“Universally developed individuals, whose social relations, as their own communal relations, are hence also subordinated to their own communal control, are no product of nature, but of history. The degree and the universality of the development of wealth where this individuality becomes possible supposes production on the basis of exchange values as a prior condition, whose universality produces not only the alienation of the individual from himself and from others, but also the universality and the comprehensiveness of his relations and capacities. In earlier stages of development the single individual seems to be developed more fully, because he has not yet worked out his relationships in their fullness, or erected them as independent social powers and relations opposite himself. It is as ridiculous to yearn for a return to that primal fullness as it is to believe that with this complete emptiness history has come to a standstill. The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up to its blessed end.” This passage contains a celebration of the metaphysical function of capital that magnificently outstrips all others that we know. No other apologists have Marx’s farsightedness—nor do they dare attribute such evocative power to the activities they are defending. The Universal, this spoiled firstborn of the bourgeois age, is indeed said to be born out of “production on the basis of exchange values”—and from nothing else. Marx disdains the communal relations of all previous phases (even if he is prepared to shed a hypocritical tear for the lost “primal fullness”), since he knows they are fatally limited, bornés. And narrow-mindedness, Borniertheit, for Marx, is the supreme defect, worse than all emptiness: it is the permanent threat, the hostile memory of the ghetto.
“Primal fullness” is not polútropos, it is not “omnilateral,” according to Marx (but is Ulysses “primal,” or not? A question still without an answer). At the other end of history we see—at a time of maximum prosperity—that the essence of the bourgeois individual is certainly universal, but at the same time totally empty, vacuous, hollow, the result of a relentless process of emptying. The anthropological question has to be posed then in these terms: what to do with this “total emptiness,” without resorting to some fatuous appeal to the lost “primal fullness” (and here Marx seeks to dismiss in one sarcastic phrase all reactionary criticism, great and small, of the bourgeoisie)?
At this point the apparatus of dialectics, in all its sham intrusiveness, seems once again enormously helpful. Progress will refill what progress has emptied. People will talk about “universal development of individuals” rather than production ratios. In place of a real emptiness a vacuous expression is thus used which nevertheless matches the feeling of an age that liked more than anything else the rule “do it yourself.” Avoiding certain questions is all that is required, but what if the specific object (the singular thing) stubbornly refuses? And what if the universal is prepared to exist only in conditions of perfect emptiness? Hegel has already performed a masterful sleight of hand around these points. Marx would now repeat it, more abruptly and with far less knowledge of the history of philosophy. And it would be performed again and again, in an ever more brutal way, by unpropitious descendants, itinerant cadres of the Third International or the heirs of some Black Byzantium that breathe the sacrificial fumes of polytechnic schools while waiting to transform their savanna into a bloody murder scene from Roussel, to mark the beginning of a belated entry into History.
(The well-tempered crudeness of this doctrine guarantees the kind of survival that involves a threat to anyone who doesn’t pay homage to it. It is a special kind of programmed crudeness, adjusted according to the circumstances. This concept is certainly crude, but it is procedural, in the double legal and physical sense of the word. It assists the general process of what exists by subjecting it, among other things, to a procès, to a trial. The justice of history, which—if the moment is right—can also become “revolutionary justice,” is a valuable expedient for setting in motion the procedures of practice. The theory not only gave new theoretical dignity to praxis, but it was already praxis in action, and obviously disguised as Science: here the word materialism, with the double sneer—historical and dialectical—of the herm, offered an invaluable service.)
Marx doesn’t always abandon all restraint in his worship of progress. Behind that word can be seen changes of stance. There are moments when he is caught off guard and comes perilously close to establishing a break between the two modes of development, one corrupt (that of capital) and one good (what follows after capital).
Society, based on exchange value, having reached its completeness, is defined as follows: “Each individual possesses social power under the form of a thing [exchange value].” In the next phrase, the revolutionary leap is set down in its simplest terms: “Rob the thing of this social power and you must give it to persons to exercise over persons.” This is perfectly consistent with the view of Louis Dumont: if the prime characteristic of modernity (but there are so many prime characteristics!) was to give preeminence to man’s relationship with things—contrary to what occurred in all other societies, built above all on relationships between humans—then departure from the order of exchange value will also mean a return to the preeminence of the relationship between humans. And here Marx gives one of the many formulations of the stages of society that we will not find in the Marxist-Leninist textbooks. Here in fact, the conceptual articulations clearly emerge:
a: “Relations of personal dependence (entirely spontaneous at the outset) are the first social forms, in which human productive capacity develops only to a slight extent and at isolated points.” Characteristics: “relations of personal dependence,” as a crucial element, regardless of relations with things. And here the dependence is entrusted to what is naturwüchsig, spontaneous—solitary growth, forests and swamps. Development “only to a slight extent”: here, development has a limit, a preestablished extent, and in any event it does not include all exchanges: outside, there are, there may be, other modalities.
b: “Personal independence founded on dependence on things is the second major form, in which a system of general social metabolism, of universal relations, of omnilateral needs and universal capacities is formed for the first time.” The individual is a category that is developed during this phase: “individual” means relations of independence from other subjects. But on one condition: that these relationships coincide with a total dependence on things: “Individuals are subsumed under social production; social production exists outside them as their fate.” This fate that is embodied by the pure existence of things is now called “social production.” It therefore consists of things and their production. Here, in comparison to form a, we see a departure from the provincial context, an expansion of boundaries as far as the universal, total, general, in contrast to the singularity of the individual.
c: “Free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on the subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth, is the third stage.” This time, therefore, there is a further reversal of the relationship between things and people, bringing things (and hence “productivity”) to a state of subordination. And here the noose is tightened: productivity ought to give way to another form of productivity, now described as “universal development of individuals.” But what lies hidden behind this formula for proud freethinkers? Production—the age-old name for this august, sacred development of Humanity—suggests just one path: to treat humanity itself as “human material.” What will the nascent “omnilateral” man be? He will be a parody of Anthropos: a progressive Anthropos, an appalling hybrid between Monsieur Homais and the alchemical Homunculus, produced by the application of one model (that of productivity as indefinite growth) to the ever more “universal” subjects of society. They will be the only subjects that perpetually improve themselves! And we should remember that improvement was the word Adam Smith used to indicate “development.” On this extremely delicate point Marx always promises some explanation, though each time, for some reason or other, it has to be deferred: “(The latter form of association [based on the “appropriation and control of the means of production”] is not arbitrary; it presupposes the development of material and cultural conditions which are not to be examined any further at this point.)” And this is where we remain. But, as always, the negation is revealing: Marx is immediately eager to move away from the word arbitrary for the very reason that it holds the secret of any “new man,” as though he could already glimpse the repellent features of the positive heroes that would be so zealously produced several decades later. And they were certainly not arbitrary, since they served a purpose. But they were built arbitrarily, like things had once been built by the exchange value.
“In order to secure the exchangeability of the commodity, exchangeability itself is set up in opposition to it as an independent commodity.” New spices from the East, from that far point of the East that is the purest and most poisonous West: exchangeability arrives on the market, and quickly changes the whole aspect of reality. That same power that was already active in the “arbitrary nature of the sign,” in the practice of convention, in every gesture of substitution (x stands for y), but which had not yet had the impious presumption to present itself as an independent entity, now asserts itself—and it shows that, instead of letting itself be subsumed and absorbed into the context of the other powers, it can itself subsume them, considering them all to be its partial applications. The master Aristotle had already stated: “In reality everything can be used for exchange.” Certain platitudes lie dormant in history for centuries, but when roused they become gnashing jaws.
“The purely natural material in which no human labor is objectified, to the extent that it is merely a material that exists independently of labor, has no value, since only objectified labor is value; as little value as is possessed by the common elements as such.”
Since the social machine entirely replaces the machine of the stoicheīa toū kósmou, nature itself and its elements (which until then had been the quintessential receptacles of power) have to be totally stripped of their authority and made indifferent to each other since they have “no value,” they are not energized by that primal breath that has now shifted to human labor.
Commodity means something that is additional to immediate use, which implies a destruction of the immediate, but its reutilization in a further process (exchange value is transformed into use-value). Its basis is an improper use of the object, in the same way that metaphor is an improper use of the word. Once the object acquires the secondary character as a commodity, then the essence of the commodity is such that the object turns out to be primarily a commodity, namely exchange value—and only at a given moment (after circulation and purchase) is it an object of use. This is an inversion produced by exchange, but every exchange is based upon it, except where the circulation takes place in the same body. And the body of the community is irreversibly harmed, in the exchange process, by contact with the body of another community. The derived characteristics that strike against the origin, undermine it, sweep it away in their interplay—while still appearing to be derived—are also distant, liminal characteristics (the first exchange is between community and community, on the border), which then strikes back within the community, “with disruptive action.”
The excluded commodity is a commodity that becomes a universal equivalent and therefore adds to its own particular use-value a second kind of use-value, which it now acquires from being a general equivalent. The excluded commodity becomes a desirable object insofar as it is equivalent to the exchange. Apart from particular desires for individual objects, there is a universal desire for exchange: “the commodity singled out as the universal equivalent, is now an object of a universal need arising from the very process of exchange, and it has the same use-value to everybody, viz., that of serving as the depository of exchange value, of being a universal means of exchange.” By the detour of the excluded commodity we have arrived as far as identifying a general object of desire, a measuring unit of use—and this, absurdly, is the universal possibility of exchange. The heart of desire is not an object, but the possibility of exchanging objects.
The whole theology of commodities is a process at the end of which the exchange value is transformed back into use value: this process is the delay—Freud’s Aufschub—that generates the whole phantasmagoria of the commodity, “the separation of purchase and sale.” And this separation is the generic form of schism and duplicity, which “breaks down the limits of the organic social interchange, which are locally rooted and rendered sacred by tradition and foolish sentiment.” It is “the general form taken by the rupture and separation of all elements which in that social interchange were once united.” It is the impossibility of innocence. The same can be said of the word, insofar as it is detached from its correspondence, its kinship, its affinity with what it represents, above all insofar as it is fixed in a simulacrum—writing—which is entirely extraneous to the body, and establishes itself as an incorruptible and independent existence, in the same way as the “money-crystal” does.
Marx is a prisoner of the Enemy he is attacking: his opponent’s body falls on him and suffocates him. Marx has the definitive view of that machine-for-demolishing-limits that he calls capitalism, yet he doesn’t question the limit, only the machine. He wants to design a better machine, which demolishes limits without breaking down, without getting into periodical crisis. Like a great mechanic, he has a fond, passionate understanding of the capitalist machine. With regard to limit, he shares the illusion of that machine. What offended him was not so much the iniquity brought about by capital, but the fact that capital would soon become an obstacle to production, an antiquated and sclerotic form in comparison to the enormity of what is possible. No one has ever dreamed the dream of capital with such faith as Marx developed in his soul. Like the young provincial boy who takes seriously, with despairing gravity, the ways of the big city: that is how Marx looked upon capital. And, feeling much like Rastignac on the hill of Père Lachaise, he let loose on the world something whose output should have been far more limitless than that of that old machine for destroying limits. Capital had become his Madame de Beauséant. She had taught him good manners, she had introduced him to society, but now he saw her as a wizened old woman, faintly ridiculous, her days now over. So instead he turned his gaze to the debutantes of the proletariat.
So far as development is concerned, it can be said in the end that Marx was more capitalist than capital. Shrewd and meticulous, he searched everywhere to trace the limits of that power that breaks down limits. He wanted to reach the point from which he could look at capitalist production as a form that was borné, timid, trapped in itself, and despise it just as capital had despised earlier forms: “(… the most extreme form of alienation … contains in itself, in a still only inverted form, turned on its head, the dissolution of all limited presuppositions of production, and moreover creates and produces the unconditional presuppositions of production, and therewith the full material conditions for the total, universal development of the productive forces of the individual).” This is a voice of vibrant demonism, the urge for unlimited self-creation: having reached perfect dissolution, the absolute expropriation of man, he imagines he can fill the void at last with all that man had never been. Marx’s fury ends up, not in a humanitarian idyll, but in a savage technological hallucination.
Marx jubilant: “[Capital] therefore restricts labor and the creation of value—by an artificial check, as the English express it—and it does so on the same grounds as and to the same extent that it posits surplus labor and surplus value. By its nature, therefore, it posits a barrier to labor and value-creation, in contradiction to its tendency to expand them boundlessly. And in as much as it both posits a barrier specific to itself, and on the other side equally drives over and beyond every barrier, it is the living contradiction.” The enemy is nailed to its limit. But Marx has no wish to consider that the limit exists in nature or in the mind.
“First of all, there is a limit, not inherent to production generally, but to production founded on capital.” From this he deduces that “capital is not, as the economists believe, the absolute form for the development of the forces of production.” But that “absolute form” exists: this is Marx’s dream, as Hilbert’s dream will be complete axiomatization. No Gödel stepped in to put him right.
“We have already seen that the sphere of circulation has a gap in it, through which gold (or silver, or the money material in general) enters as a commodity with a given value.”
The “gap” is self-reflection. Among all objects there is always one that represents the representation of objects. And that single object is enough to compromise the order of all the others that have gone before it.
“A thing can be a use-value without being a value. This is the case whenever its utility to man is not mediated through labor. Air, virgin soil, natural meadows, unplanted forests, etc., fall into this category.” From this paradox, which Marx formulates marginally in Das Kapital, is derived the articulation of a whole world. Let us follow the ceremony: the significant area has been marked out: it is the area of value. We touch its substance, which is labor. We search for its unit of measure, which is work-time (this, so far, is Ricardo). We observe its character, which is abstract labor, sans phrase (a crucial addition by Marx): an empty notion, which serves to seal the system at every point: “la différence est le langage sensible de la ressemblance—difference is the perceivable language of likeness)” (Marcel Schwob). By affirming the uniformity of elements, it eliminates the immeasurable—just as, in Saussure, the arbitrary nature of the sign (en principe) allows language to exist as a system; in the same way that, in Freud, the phallus is the primary signifier that allows exchanges of libido to occur, and to be calculable. In the end, this system based on emptiness reproduces the totality of nature: but this time it is nature that is processed, matured by the alchemical process of production (of commodities, of signs, of ghosts).
The potlatch is based on the impossibility of equal exchange: the exchange has to be unequal. Reciprocity is ruled out, since it is a perpetual deception. Equivalents exist only in the inverted world of initiates, since initiates communicate in a shared epiphany.
Equal exchange is mystical exchange—that of twins, of transparent speech. The machine of capitalism imposes mystical exchange as usual exchange. “Twins have the right, equal word. They have the same value. They are the same thing. The man who sells, the man who buys, they too are the same thing. They are twins.”
The fetishistic character of commodities can be considered in two ways: as a deceptive superstition that persists in the everyday secular world or as a daily opportunity to experience the marvel of the fetish. Marx had the genius to recognize that marvel. But he felt a deep resentment to the marvelous, since he knew it was just the beginning of the terrible. And those exposed to the marvelous are unreliable, are unusable. The slightest gust from the Powers sweeps them away. It is better to put an end to the marvelous in its extreme form, smashing shop windows and devastating their goods. So Marx could offer his gift to a remarkably dull, submissive, and vibrant multitude: he could instruct them how to blow the lock off a world in which every marvel has vanished—or lies dead on the ground, where it is displayed to children as an enemy of the people.