Birth, dates ...

With some prefatory remarks conveniently out of the way, and since it is the occasion of Marx’s birthday, a pastiche on origins, emergence, dates and anniversaries:  

1. The chance birth of Citizen Linen

Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem. – Virgil, Aeneid.

In Capital, Marx says that linen, as a commodity, is a citizen of the world of commodities. Its particular quality as linen is, therefore, “a matter of indifference,” just as the figure of the citizen is premised on the public indifference in which it circulates. And yet, of this formal citizen-like indifference — of the world of commodities as that of world market, or the emergence of the world as market — he wrote:

A great deal of capital, which appears today in the United States without any birth-certificate, was yesterday, in England, the capitalized blood of children. […] Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage-earners in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.

Tantae molis erat, to establish the ‘eternal laws of Nature’ of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between labourers and conditions of labour, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage-labourers, into ‘free labouring poor,’ that artificial product of modern society. If money, according to [Marie] Augier, ’comes into the world wide a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.

* {Velvet soap ad from Punch Magazine, Melbourne AU, 1901.  Caption reads: 'No use cryin', cos dat feller Barton says dis mus be a white Australia'.}

In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, henceforth republished in the Grundrisse collection, Marx’s makes some brief notations on historiography that will be overtaken in Capital by the overt form which those volumes take, that is, by the critique of political economy, but which are nevertheless recalled by the aforementioned turn of phrase: “Tantae molis erat, to establish the ‘eternal laws of Nature’ of the capitalist mode of production.”

This conception appears as necessary development. But legitimation of chance. How. (Of freedom also, among other things.) (Influence of means of communication. World history has not always existed; history as world history a result.

In the first quote, Marx’s transposes the phrase “the capitalist mode of production” for that of Virgil’s “the Roman race”. Virgil’s “Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem” translates as “What a lot of work it was to found the Roman race”.  That is, the capitalist mode of production assumes the characteristics of ‘race’, it appears as a necessary, naturalised  development, law-like, eternal, biological.

To emphasise these aspects is, for me, is to insist on three things. First, as Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari and others will argue, and each in their way, the birth of capitalism is a ‘singularity’. The chance encounter between the man with money and those stripped of any means to live ‘might not have taken place’ and, more emphatically, might not have ‘taken hold’. Secondly, the conditions by which it does ‘take hold’ are inseperable from the proliferation of borders, of nation-states, throughout the previous two centuries, their prevalence as onto-political template. And, fourth, there is no sense in which the stabilisation of capitalism might be separated, politically or analytically, from racism and sexism – and inasmuch as these constitute two, great interlocking modes by which inequalities are naturalised in an egalitarian system - as this stabilisation or its management comes to assume the form of an oscillation between chance and necessity, or between the ostensible contractual freedoms of wage labour and the slavery of a purportedly pre-capitalist time.

That is, contrary to the assumptions that the appearance of racism and/or sexism is an anachronism or that it might be explained as an unusual instrument of an otherwise empty or indifferent expansion:

The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable. – Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

2. The state of emergencye of the world

… World history has not always existed; history as world history a result.

The importance of Benjamin’s argument and experience is not simply his critique of a destinal conviction that, confronted with the terror of the state of emergency, was only capable of evincing stupefaction or acquiescence. Nor is it crucial to point out Benjamin’s idealism, which is more than apparent. What needs to be emphasised here is the phrase “we are experiencing”. A question, then, of sense – in every way it is possible to understand this word and beyond any separation between thought and matter. In that simple phrase rests the key to understanding how it becomes possible to characterise the current time, ‘our time’, as that of a global civil war – and how, in doing so, it might be possible to reconsider an exodus from it that is something other than the reterritorialising consolation of the ‘exit strategy’ for some. (extract from)

That the trauma of New Orleans consisted, for so many, in the ‘This couldn’t be happening here or now, here and now, in this place’ is certainly an index of the extent to which a geopolitically partitioned understanding of the emergency remains. Levinas argued that trauma is an encounter with the other and an opening toward the ethical. That insight might be shifted from its philosophic register to suggest that such traumatic moments are also the manifestation of the world, both the cracks of the world and the possibility of an opening toward it. How, therefore, might it be possible to avoid a reiteration of the exception that attends the sovereign decision in the very attempt to take leave of the state of emergency? Put another way: how might it be possible to share the experience of the emergency that is the world—of the emergence of the world against its biopolitical fracture—that is not also the reinscription of a universal measure? (extract from)

We cannot know. {This would assume that who or what ‘we’ is might be already given, that the relationships have already been tied, or that the question here is an epistemological one that proceeds from the former.}

But swerving with Lucretius, and against Linenism, another world/war is possible.

3. The turn of the anniversary - May 1st May 5th

In his notes on Epicurean philosophy, written in 1839, and speaking of Lucretius in particular, Marx underlines: “Without this clinamen atomi there would be neither ‘offensus natus, nec plaga creata’.”   That is, without the swerve of atoms, neither meeting nor collision would be possible. And Nancy will add in The Inoperative Community, pronouncing the sense of ‘atom’ as synonym for the individual: “one cannot make a world with simple atoms. There has to be a clinamen.”

A date: always a turning-about, a volte-face, una volta, a revolt, or a revolution. – Derrida, “Shibboleth”.

The meridian, the circumvention, the anniversary, the ring, the cut and the clinamen. In marking the date of Marx’s birthday, one is inclined to also mark the difference in time zones, the turnings - the revolutions - of the world.

Happy birthday, Karl!

March 5th, 2006.
Orig uploaded 8:53pm,
Melbourne, AU.
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* Barton was the first Prime Minister of Australia, presiding over the first federal parliament whose first piece of legislation in 1901 was the 'White Australia' policy.

[xposted]