Reading Capital Volume 1 with David Harvey

This summer a group of fellow graduate students decided to read Karl Marx's Capital Volume 1 together in a weekly reading group. This follows from last summer's illuminating reading of selections from Louis Althusser's works including Lenin & Philosophy, Reading Capital, (the late) Philosophy of the Encounter, and For Marx. We have been reading about a hundred pages a week (approximately 3-6 chapters depending on their length), with significant set-backs due to vacations.

An additional resource emerged with David Harvey, author of the famous The Condition of Postmodernity and most recently A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism internet videos lecturing for a class devoted to the volume here.

The first video does an excellent job introducing readers to the different and competing disciplines at work in Capital--philosophy, classical economic theory, utopian socialist traditions of the moment etc. Additionally, Harvey notes the importance through the videos of the different levels at which Marx is working with capital, e.g. the first chapter on the commodity is not historical (as it seems at first), but traces the logic of the commodity as if it's (and its eventual abstraction into money form) could be temporally separated into distinct historical moments. One of the more interesting aspects that Harvey acknowledges is that Marx's "dissertation" in philosophy was a work on Epicurus, one of the founders of atomist theory. Atomism posited the emergence of the universe as following from the accidental collision of the building blocks (atoms) of solid bodies. This is worth noting for those who see Althusser's later work considering the "encounter" as somehow a break with or tangential to the Marxist tradition. If we want to follow up on these physicalist accounts of history and the development of social groupings or political bodies, considering, what Patricia Clough, calls Marx's "thermodynamic" account of class struggle is paramount (for her this kind of means a move to Deleuze and Foucault).



The third video just on the third chapter of Capital, Harvey emphasizes the importance of money in Marx's system, as not only the height of the development of the commodity, but the logic of the commodity that divorces it from the value of its substance (e.g. gold). Harvey does an excellent job throughout these video's debunking, what I find, to be an excess of cultural studies with its overemphasis (partially due to the Frankfurt School) on the commodity fetish. For him this is something Marx sets up in order to be deconstructed. This line of reasoning would tend to support Althusser's suggestion (in a footnote of "Marxism & Humanism") that the discussion of commodity fetishism and reification so emphasized by Adorno, Horkheimer, etc. is actually a misunderstanding of Marx's purposes in discussing these topics. Although, Harvey works hard to deemphasize the allusive aspects of Marx's, at times, quite literary language, it works to support a general interrogation of certain social/cultural theorists' and practitioners' failure to read past chapter 1. I find his critique amusing, and useful if at times a little vulgar.



Besides being a lucid and analytic explicator of the significance of Capital, Harvey himself is interested in the continuing importance of political-economy in explicating deep social changes under the regime of what he calls "flexible accumulation."

Two Modes of Lollypop

Kalup Linzy and Shaun Leonardo lip sync to the Hunter and Jenkins tune, which was banned from the radio in the 1930s. Even though completed in 2006, it appears, in the present context, as a premature reply to Lil Wayne's 2008 "Lollipop," which despite its catchy track and at times interesting visual effects, largely invests in gratuitous hip-hop video cliches (shots of a huge limo filled with eager ladies, and opening shots in an incredibly expensive hotel) and uses too much vocal vocoder.*



The predominance of voice distorting technologies along with the rise of explicitly 1990s house beats on hip-hop makes me pause at the increasing techno-ification of billboard hip-hop in general. Is this the sign of its imminent death as per the NAS's most recent album? or the increasing emphasis on hook driven singles as opposed to talented lyricism?


*Then again, I have "Lollipop" on my iTunes queue.

Qualifying Exam Logics, 1st attempt

So the PhD program I attend in Literary & Cultural Studies requires that after coursework has been completed (roughly 2-3 years into the program, depending on whether or not you have a masters degree) you must complete a qualifying exams in order to continue onto the dissertation stage of your PhD. This involves not only choosing a nation and a period (e.g. 17th century British, 20th century American, etc.) but also compiling three lists upon which you will be examined after 12 months of reading. These lists include your primary texts (novels, poetry, drama, memoirs, short stories, radio broadcasts, films, etc.), secondary texts (criticism and histories, although the status of this list is largely uncertain, dare I say "liminal"), and an approach list (postcolonial theory, feminist/queer theory, Marxism/cultural materialism, Cultural Sociology, etc.).

The fact that our department requires that we come up with the lists is somewhat unusual in our field where often lists are just handed to students depending on their interests. While our approach has the benefit of tailoring our lists so that their cohere is not a problem, i.e. when the approach is feminist theory then the primary texts may largely treat upon issues that are germane to such theories, etc., it also has the effect of producing a distinct and sometimes profound sense of indirection for those compiling their lists and in the reading process in general.

I am at the early stages of compiling lists. Initially my advisor suggested that I consider looking into Latino Lit. in the U.S. in order to specialize for the purposes of marketing myself once I have completed my PhD. Moreover, I would have the benefit of being a "native informant" on the subject as a first generation immigrant myself. Although, I have read very little U.S. Latino Lit. my initial fears were that a great deal of this literature would somehow be the horrors of hybrity and alterity as embodied in the work of the late Gloria Anzaldua's works. However, I decided to give it a deeper look as a final semester of course work reignited my interest in the types of questions that literature poses to the social and political.

I actually discovered some very interesting possibilities with regard to the canon of Latin American Literature in the United States: there is a strong class critique throughout as well as a focus on urbanity. Cubano Jose Marti (I believe one of the founders of the Cuban Communist Party), for example, spent some time as a journalist in New York City writing critiques at the turn of the century about American imperial power. However, the questions posed by Marti and others get displaced with the discussion of hybrity and the emphasis on subaltern subjectivities, political ontologies, "otherness,"etc. I have to admit that I initially found these discussions to be rather compelling when I was an undergraduate, but my two years in Portland Oregon's anarchist political scene and my first three years of graduate education has moved me toward much more vulgar versions of Marxism--class isn't as central as a politico-economic critique, the relationship of base/superstructure, materiality, and the problem of the totality. So my first inclination (which will most likely change) is to think about these celebrations of subjectivity as the rise of the neo-liberal subject, as the 1990s coincides with the rise of the There Is No Alternative (TINA) mentality. I hope to read Cold-War American Literature (both Latino and Gringo) through the present in order to explain this cultural metamorphosis.

This shift is what interests me more than the literature itself. My ultimate interests are the ways in which Globalization represents a profound shift in notions like the autonomy of culture, the relationship of superstructure to base, and the universal situation it demands and produces.

The Internet is Pornography

Rapidly Expanding Porn Star

Francois Sagat, French-Slovenian porn celebrity engaging in a narcissistic youtube piece. But he is all that is unholy about hot.

Juvenilization of Political Critique

There are countless attempts to introduce agitprop media onto the internet for wider distribution. This sometimes based on the rather naive notion that to place something on the internet is to literally make it available to all.* I have recently become acquainted with two instances of this as phenomenon which involve cartoon cats and puppets discussing neo-liberalism. These clips below are two rather clever instances of these efforts.

Neoliberalism (as per Hardt & Negri), w/ Boing Boing TV


The Pinky Show, on Illegal Immigration



Certainly they are only cursorily aimed at children and perhaps the cartoon and puppetry at work in these pieces is aimed a kind of low-budget production with some aesthetic effect--to inject seemingly subversive material in the inauspicious trappings of children's programming. Moreover, there is clearly a history of radical comics, cartooning, and puppetry (as Art & Revolution and Bread & Puppets will remind). However, I wonder if the overall aesthetic suggests the pursuit of some ideal addressee for the didactic--the juvenilized viewer addressed as if approaching the hermeneutic situation without prejudices. Along with the double function of introducing uncomplicated versions of leftist argumentation, I wonder if we do not also accrue an addressee whose image can only be a child. Might we read these as representative of some crisis for the left in the West smacking of Takashi Murakami's claims that the infantile obsession in Japanese culture emerges from an experience of national "castration" by the United States? As if leftist critiques in the faces of the radical restructuring of global capitalism and le pensee unique (aka TINA) can only emerge from the mouths of anthropomorphic kittens and sock puppets.

* which already assumes too much, as if search engines were without heirarchization or algorithmic meddling with results. As is the common assumption of college freshmen, still in love with twitter and facebook. Not to mention the radical global inequalities the underpin internet access in the first place despite misguided efforts to produce crank-powered lap-tops for the Third World.

A Book Not From the Exam List

Miracle of the Rose by Jean Genet

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Probably my least favorite of the Genet's novels. Although this may have had to do with the dated translation of slang, I found the trajectory of the plot to be a little unsatisfying. This novel mingles the exaltation and abjection in which the narrator revels of the men of Founterevault prison and the boys of the juvenile correctional colony, Mettray.



May have been the inspiration for one of three episodes in Todd Haynes' film Poison.


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