What in the hell …

It’s/they’re a dumb joke. Their name is a dumb joke, I mean. They are themselves quite sincere. Or rather, I am quite sincere in posing them.

A smarter joke would have been Qwfwq, in reference to the short story collections Cosmicomics and T Zero, one or the other of which, I forget which, contains a story set before the big bang (awfully crowded all living at one point), a story set wherein three people fall through infinite space along parallel lines wondering if they will eventually cross, and a beautiful story about harvesting cheese on the moon before the moon moved out to its current distant orbit. I couldn’t think of what Qwfwq might stand for. But I digress. What follows is my contribution to the interweb Spivak fest, titled “Questions on and responses to Spivak’s essay.” I held off putting it here for a minute. The LS release was a sort of white label special on custom color vinyl. I found the discussion of this post at LS quite helpful as well, must look back over it when I get time. The text below is unchanged from the version that appears at LS.

Also, for the record, my categories list is increasingly inadequate. Many of them are terms I meant to think about, ask myself and the books I read questions about, when I set up this blog. I’ve done that in varying amounts and with varying degrees of success. I also wanted to use the categories to try and identify resonances with or across different concepts. I’m not sure that’s really worked. There are a number of things that don’t fit well into these categories, suggesting an overhaul or at least an addition of some new is in order. One of these days I’ll do that. In any case, I bring this up because I’ve put this post under the category ‘intellectuals’. I do this because Spivak is an intellectual if anyone is. I worry this will seem like I’ve consigned the Spivak piece to being merely a matter of intellectuals, rather than ascribing it to the philosophical matters of, say, time, or the political matters of communism. Not my intent. I’m not sure what to do with Spivak’s piece, and as part of that, I’m not sure how to fit her into this blog’s limited classificatory grid. Basta.

First off, thanks to Jon and the Long Sundayista crew for holding this symposium. This is not a text I would have otherwise read. I look forward to reading the other contributions in order to understand it better.

Second off, while I’m glad to have read it and grateful for the opportunity to participate in the symposium, it is unfortunately the case that I’m not sure what to do with this text. Much of the idiom and at least one of the major writers it references - Derrida - is very unfamiliar to me. I also find some of the philosophical uses of Marx in the essay bring out a proprietorial response on my part. I’d like to claim that it’s because I prefer treatments of Marx to stick closer to the letters of blood and fire in which the history of capitalism is written, but that would be dishonest. I like a lot of abstract treatments of Marx. I don’t know what it is about this text that doesn’t click for me, maybe it’s just that I don’t really understand chunks of it. Hopefully some of you lot can and will help sort me out.

In any case, below is what I have to contribute to the symposium on Spivak’s “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value.” I have organized my contribution into three categories. There are two items under each category. I have numbered these items according to category.

The three categories in my contribution, in order of appearance, are:
- Questions that are nothing more than questions (QTANMTQ)
- Questions that are maybe a bit snarky and which are just as much comments as they are questions (QTAMABSAWAJAMCATAQ)
- Responses (R)

QTANMTQ #1. To begin, I would love for someone to explain to me what the phrase “predication of the subject” means (p73). Does this mean simply ‘identification of the subject’? Does it mean the determination of the predicates or of additional predicates of an already subject? Or something else?

QTANMTQ #2. What does Spivak mean when she writes of “the embarrassment of the final economic determinant” (p74)? Does this mean something like “embarrassingly - because perhaps out of fashion - we hold to the idea that the economic is determining in the last instance”? Or instead “how embarrassing it is to have - or that some have - believed the economic was determining of all else”?

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QTAMABSAWAJAMCATAQ #1. Why does Spivak write that with telecommunications “circulation time attains the apparent instantaneity of thought” (p84, and a similar formulation on p82, “of Mind [and more]”)? Does this do any work in her argument? Sorry to be pedantic and overly literal, but this sounds silly to me. Circulation doesn’t achieve the speed of thought. Some circulation attains the speed of, say, a mouse click which enacts the sending of electronic information elsewhere at (I think) the speed of light. This is not instantaneous. It may be apparently instantaneous to some, but I don’t see why one would want to prop up that appearance. This kind of treatment seems to me to give more power to informationalized/telecommunications sectors of capital (which, as Spivak happily notes on p84 is not all of capitalism) than already they have. It also papers over a number of contending factors involved in the determination of the speed of operation of telecommunications capital. (For example. the speed of a mouse click may be slower at times - when hung over, or angry at a supervisor, or at the end of long work day, or during a deliberately organized slowdown - and faster at others, like when one’s job is on the line or there is a productivity bonus.)

QTAMABSAWAJAMCATAQ #2. Spivak writes (p78) that money “is posited through a process of separation from its own being as a commodity exchangeable for itself.” This sounds like the standard Marx(ist) story of the origin of money. But I don’t know what the “for itself” could mean. To my mind, the commodity - that is, its use-value - is always for (or, relative to) defined in terms of (the use to be made of it) some end of some person or group. All I can think of is that the “for itself” means some substantive use value that is proper to the commodity, something which the commodity is suited for. I don’t think that’s what Spivak means - I hope not, at least, as that strikes me as wrongheaded. Perhaps she means that the commodity that plays the roll of money is generally desired for its roll as (or, in that it is) the bearer of the money function. So, a dollar bill could be useful for snorting cocaine, for serving as kindling to start a house on fire, for scrawling a secret message upon, etc. But generally - and insofar as it is money - it is not desired for these uses. Is that what Spivak means? I hope so. I don’t see why this use as being money, though, should be thought of as not a part of the set that is the use value of the dollar bill. This is a use value that all commodities have (qua commodities).

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R #1. Spivak writes on p79 of a time when “capital is fully developed,” defined as “the structural moment when the process of extraction, appropriation, and realization of surplus-value begins to operate with no extra-economic coercions”. It’s a shame that “fully developed” and extra-economic vs economic do not undergo critical (deconstructive?) treatment in Spivak’s hands, as they are concepts that could use such a treatment. The maintenance of capital never occurs, at least not for any significant length of time, without resort to so-called extra-economic force.

One could quibble over labor law, public health, housing policy, and many other factors, but I think the numerous historical examples of military, police, and private vigilante use of force against strikes and slowdowns demonstrate quite clearly that capitalism does not exist without the so-called extra-economic. The determination of some things as economic and others as not is what Carl Schmitt (in The Concept of the Political) called a depoliticalization. That is, it is an operation which decides what is and is not political, an operation with powerful political effects. The passages in Marx on primitive accumulation, which Spivak briefly discusses, demonstrate this. Primitive accumulation was the process which produced a situation wherein people had a relative lack of access to a large enough quantity of use values they wanted and needed such that they had little other option than to enter “freely” into the market as sellers of the commodity labor power. This process only occurred with massive extra-economic force, as Spivak recognizes. This process is also continually repeated over time - because wants and needs and use values are politically conditioned over history - such that primitive accumulation is, in effect, a presupposition of the logic of capital that capital must periodically reposit or re-enact.

R #2. I don’t know what Spivak means when she says that use value “is both outside and inside the system of value-determinations” (p80). She specifies that use value is “outside of the circuit of exchange”. I don’t know what she means here either, and I like neither formulation. I would like to quibble with Spivak on use-value. I may well be quibbling with Marx here, though I’m not sure this is so.

My own understanding of use value comes from how I read the opening bits of v1 of Capital. (For the record, this is not the hoary ‘recourse to the founder’ marxological power play, it’s just where I get the terms. I may be misreading Marx, or these passages may be inadequate passages, or whatever. I only reference the passages because that’s where I find them. I make this specification because I find “what Marx really meant” and competitions of who best knows Marx errata both quite tedious, and if my piece is to be found tedious I would like it be a deserved tediousness.) In the opening of v1 of Capital Marx says that a use value is the quality of satisfying a need or want. This is any need or want as such, whether of “the fancy or the belly.” To my mind, this is not a very philosophically interesting issue and I don’t understand when people have strong opinions or philosophical points to make about use value. As I understand the term, use value simply means the capacity of (any) stuff to have (any) things (whatsoever) done to it. This implies a minimal concept of ‘use’ as well, of course, defined as “doing things with stuff.” These doesn’t seem to me to be much of interest to say about use value (or, perhaps it would be better to say use values). Any use of any stuff for anything proves that stuff has a use value (ie, a capacity to be used) relative to that use.

In that regard, it seems to me a mistake, or just a strange turn of phrase, to describe use value as being inside or outside of exchange (or neither or, as Spivak puts it, both). The act of exchanging an object proves that objects have a use value such that they can be used for exchange. All commodities have the use value of being money, though only a very few at any given time will actually be used for that function. It strikes me as better simply to say that some use values are within exchange and others are not, some are within capitalism and some are not. (Just as some nitrogen molecules and some sentences are and some are not within exchange and within capitalism.)

Spivak writes “use-value is in play when a human being produces and uses up the product immediately.” (p75.) This doesn’t make sense to me. This may well be a use of the term ‘use-value’ that Marx used. Regardless, it is a formulation I would advocate for voting off the island, were we to play Conceptual Survivor. It sets overly narrow limits (and without an argument for doing so) on the concepts “use” and “use value.” Hoarding and exchanging are uses, as are eating, burning, bludgeoning-with, worshipping, and any number of other activities. Other uses are policing the working class, helping (re)impose the conditions within which people have to sell their labor power, and making surplus value (this is the use value of the commodity labor power for capitalists: to produces more wealth than the price of purchase for it, at the general or average level of aggregate social production).