Читать книгу Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility - Kojin Karatani - Страница 9
ОглавлениеPreface to the English Edition
This book is a piece of literary criticism that I originally wrote in 1973 and serialized in a monthly literary periodical. However, the fact that I undertook the present work within the field of criticism was by no means normal or expected within the Japanese situation. Rather, it was probably the first time that such critical work could be published in a literary magazine alongside short stories and serialized novels. Yet, at the same time, it might also be said that this type of work was impossible to publish somewhere else – for example, in specialist journals of philosophy or the social sciences. In that sense, the present work is without question a work of literary criticism.
In Japan, the New Left movement emerged in the second half of the 1950s. We can say that it was influenced by the critique of Stalinism that accompanied the Hungarian revolt, but we can also relate its emergence to the beginnings of the rapid economic growth that was occurring at the same time in Japan. Suddenly a set of circumstances that could not be explained by the theoretical framework of the existing Left had emerged, for example, the phenomena of mass society and consumer society. The New Left movement which prospered alongside this development brought about a loss of authority for the Japan Communist Party (which had been strong until that point), through the nationwide political struggles that accompanied the 1960 revisions to the US–Japan Joint Security Treaty (often abbreviated Anpō). In a sense, what occurred in 1968 in Europe and North America occurred already in Japan at this moment. I entered Tokyo University in the year 1960 and participated in what we called the ‘Anpō Struggle’. However, what made me reflect on the theoretical questions of the Left came later – it came, in fact, after this struggle ended in failure.
The theoretical work of the New Left which emerged in the late 1950s can be divided into three general trends, all derived from the work of Marx. The first turned towards the early Marx and the theory of alienation, represented most clearly by the literary critic and poet Yoshimoto Taka’aki (1924–2012). The second, what we might call the reconstruction of historical materialism through a re-reading that attempted to overcome the early Marx, was best represented in the figure of the philosopher Hiromatsu Wataru (1933–1994). The third, which sought to rediscover Marx’s specificity in the text of Capital, can be represented by the political economist Uno Kōzō (1897–1977).
I was influenced by all three of these figures. For example, what drew me to literary criticism in the first place was the influence of Yoshimoto Taka’aki. On the one hand, what led me to reject the theoretical work of the early Marx on which Yoshimoto had relied so much, was precisely the influence of Hiromatsu Wataru. He provided textual proof that Engels had pre-empted the process that Althusser, for instance, referred to as Marx’s ‘epistemological break’. Yet, on the other hand, the greatest influence on me by far came from Uno Kōzō’s theoretical work in political economy.
In Uno’s conception, while Capital constituted the ‘guiding thread’ of historical materialism, it was written with a differing perspective and methodological orientation. Historical materialism views the history of social formations from the economic base of modes of production (forces of production and relations of production). In contrast, Capital explicates the capitalist economic system by beginning from commodity exchange and disclosing the process by which it comes to compose and regulate the relations of production as capital. Although these two modes of thinking are heterogeneous to each other, the majority of Marxist theorists ignored the clear differential between them and tried to somehow produce an articulation between these two perspectives. Uno Kōzō, however, rigorously distinguished them, insisting on Capital as ‘science’ and historical materialism as ‘ideology’, although this ideology remained necessary as a ‘guiding thread’.
Moreover, Uno’s reading of Capital itself was creative and original. In general, Capital was treated as a text in which the labour theory of value had been inherited from the classical political economy of Smith and Ricardo, but for Uno, Capital focused on exchange rather than production, and, in this sense, he emphasized precisely that capital itself was, in essence, merchant capital. I agreed with Uno’s thought, and soon entered the economics department of the University of Tokyo. Although Uno himself had already retired by this point, I encountered there numerous professors who belonged to the Uno School. But, before long, I lost interest in economics; after graduating, I turned towards literature and became a critic. Nevertheless, I certainly had not lost my interest in Marx’s Capital, rather, I was simply uninterested in treating it as an economist.
From my perspective, I saw the capitalist economy as disclosed in Capital not as something material but as an ideal superstructure founded on credit, something born not from the sphere of production but rather from the enigma of exchange. Marx famously stated that exchange began from the interval or intercourse between one community and another. But, in such circumstances, where does this ‘power’ that seems to secure and guarantee exchange with an unknown, uncanny other come from? Marx discovered it in the form of the fetish that adheres to things. In this sense, I understood Capital as a work depicting the process by which the fetish (commodity) develops into Mammon (capital) – but to read Capital in this way was impossible within the sphere of economics proper, and equally impossible within the field of philosophy.
Marx writes: ‘A commodity seems at first glance to be a self-evident, trivial thing. The analysis of it yields the insight that it is a very vexatious thing, full of metaphysical subtlety and theological perversities.’1 In other words, Capital itself is not a text that simply treats metaphysical or theological questions, but one that attempts to draw them out from within this ‘self-evident, trivial thing’ called the commodity. I believed that, in order to theorize this precise problem, it was only possible do so within literary criticism. However, I only began this project in 1973, after I had already published two earlier books as a literary critic. And there was another reason that I specifically wrote a text on Marx at that particular time: it was the very moment at which the New Left movements of the end of the 1960s had failed, and the voices that loudly proclaimed the ‘end of Marxism’ were becoming more and more hegemonic. This was not new to me, since similar voices had already been heard at the beginning of the 1960s, precisely the situation within which I began to read Capital voraciously.
Thus, Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility was an attempt to read Capital from the perspective of literary criticism. What I called here ‘the centre of possibility’ indicates a form of meaning or signification that is there despite not being explicitly specified in the text. In other words, it exists more in the ‘margins’ than in the actual ‘centre’, a mode of seeing and reading that I learned from the critical writings of Paul Valéry. But we can also discover this mode in Marx’s own words. For example, in 1858, he writes the following to Ferdinand Lassalle, with regard to his own doctoral dissertation, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature:
I am all the more aware of the difficulties you had to surmount in this work in that about 18 years ago I myself attempted a similar work on a far easier philosopher, Epicurus – namely the portrayal of a complete system from fragments, a system which I am convinced, by the by, was – as with Heraclitus – only implicitly present in his work, not consciously as a system. Even in the case of philosophers who give systematic form to their work, Spinoza for instance, the true inner structure of the system is quite unlike the form in which it was consciously presented by him.2
I tried to conceive of Marx’s ‘system’ in precisely the same way. For example, Capital was written to an extent on the basis of Hegel’s logical system, but its ‘true inner structure’ is ‘quite unlike the form in which it was consciously presented’. I attempted to see the economic problems detailed in Capital from an entirely different viewpoint by trying to theorize commodity exchange from the perspective of linguistic exchange, or communication. At the time, I discovered a form of thought that resembled that of Marx in the theoretical linguistics of Saussure.
In his theory of the value-form at the outset of Capital, Marx grasped the value of the commodity within a relational system of commodities. In the same way, Saussure took language (langue) to be a synchronic, differential system of signifiers: the meaning of one word is determined in relation to words outside it. Just by changing one element within a synchronic system, it becomes an entirely different system. Thus, what we see as the continual diachronic transformation of language is in fact a discontinuous process of transformation from one synchronic system to another. This is more or less the foundational insight of what came to be called ‘structuralism’. However, what struck me above all in the work of Saussure was that he theorized precisely the exchange or communication that takes place in the interval between multiple systems.
For example, Saussure argued that if a word in one system is translated into another system, while its ‘meaning’ might be the same, it will possess a different ‘value’ insofar as its relation to other words will itself differ. From this point I took a set of clues as to the theorization of surplus value. In other words, we might as well say that surplus value constitutes a differential that emerges from the exchange between different systems. Classical political economy described merchant capital as the process of buying cheap and selling dear. However, it is not the case that merchants practise unequal exchange. A thing may be cheap within one synchronic system, and expensive in another. Although each thing itself emerged from equal exchange within each system, a differential between them is born from exchange. We cannot say that the merchants who acquired this differential were unjust or unfair. Generally speaking, this differential was born in the trade between territories remote from each other.
Adam Smith criticized merchant capital but endorsed the profits gained from industrial capital, on the basis that they were earned through equal exchange. Yet industrial capital also makes profits from the differential generated through this very ‘equal exchange’ itself. In other words, it gains surplus value from the differential of purchasing labour power in the labour market and selling what the labourer is forced to produce on the open market. Both merchant capital and industrial capital are based on equal exchange. The difference lies in the following point: in the case of merchant capital, the differential comes from the spatial difference between synchronic systems, while in the case of industrial capital, it comes from the temporal differentiation between synchronic systems. It is the differentiation of value systems on the basis of technical innovation, and it is for this reason that industrial capital leads towards ceaseless technical development. Obviously, capital is indifferent to the diverse ways it can gain surplus value and thereby increase itself; this is precisely why capital itself is essentially merchant capital, and why Marx is able to define the accumulation of capital with the general M–C–M′ formula.
I came to the above understanding through the various hints I took from Saussurean linguistics. But what I later recognized is that there was a basis beyond mere analogy for the introduction of Saussure into the reading of Capital that I undertook in the present work. Saussure himself began to conceive of synchronic systems in language by means of the analogy with economics, and specifically with the general equilibrium theory of the Swiss economist Léon Walras. Walras rejected the classical labour theory of value, conceiving of value from the perspective of marginal utility, in other words, the theory of the neoclassical school. This appears, at first glance, to be in direct opposition to Capital, but it is not at all the case. As Volume 3 demonstrates, Marx conceived of prices of production separately from labour values, and in his theory of rent posited the importance of marginal costs, following Ricardo, in opposition to the theory of equilibrium of classical political economy. In terms of the theory of rent, Ricardo clearly belonged to classical political economy, but, in contrast to the classical school’s concept of ‘equilibrium’, he brought in the concept of the ‘marginal’. There is an important relation here as well to Marx’s work of the 1870s and after on questions of differential calculus (see the Mathematical Manuscripts).3 In this sense, at the same historical moment, Marx shared a certain problématique with Menger, Walras, and the ‘Marginal Revolution’.
To put it in terms of economics, Saussure’s thought not only overcame that of the classical school, but also that of the neoclassical. He did not just develop the notion of synchronic systems as a concept; he attempted to theorize the exchange (communication) between differing systems. In turn, Marx’s critique of political economy also implies not only a critique of classical political economy, but of the neoclassical school as well. In my view, this is precisely because Marx attempted to think the problems of a capitalist economy from the standpoint of exchange.
Since the original publication of Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility in 1973, I have attempted to fundamentally rethink the theoretical problem, in the broadest sense, of the exchange or communication with the other. This theoretical project passed from linguistics itself to the logical foundations of mathematics, and then to my philosophical Investigations.4 During this period, I did not really deal with or theoretically treat the work of Marx. When I started to work on Marx again, it was the beginning of the 1990s: the Soviet Union had imploded, and the US–Soviet Cold War period had come to an end. Around the world, there were loud proclamations about ‘the end of history’ and ‘the end of Marxism’. In the years to follow, historical materialism was not refuted, but it lost its authority. If we consider this, we might say that the moment when I began to write about Marx initially (1973) was precisely a moment of Marxism’s downfall, and the 1990s were much the same.
For historical materialism, the forces of production and the relations of production constitute the base, which determines the ideational-political superstructure. However, in this type of economic determinism, there is no genuine scope to elucidate the ‘superstructural’ role of the state, of religion, and so forth. The state or religion, however, possess a power or force that can be neither explained nor resolved by means of the economic base. Here, no matter how much the economic base is taken to be determinant for the ideational-political superstructure, it comes to be generally recognized as possessing a relative autonomy. Yet, as soon as we admit this, the economic base’s determining function is perhaps not negated, but certainly disappears as a point of emphasis. Thus, in some sense, the conception of the economic base has been in reality totally forgotten.
Right at the moment of the 1990s, I again took up the questions of historical materialism. I attempted to discover the ‘economic base’ of the historical social formation not in the sphere of production, but in exchange. In this sense, exchange is not something secondary to or derivative of production, but rather its prior condition of possibility. Already, in Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility, I had theorized this expanded conception of exchange. However, even if the book touched on the realm of linguistics, I did not go beyond a thinking of the economic in its narrow sense. It was in the 1990s that I first came to locate the problem of exchange in matters that are not usually considered to be forms of exchange themselves.
Marcel Mauss saw in the exchange of gifts and reciprocity the basis of clan society. I referred to this as ‘mode of exchange A’, the introduction of the power that constructs community. Similarly, I theorized the formation of the state in terms of voluntary surrender and protection, or taxation and redistribution, what I called mode of exchange B. This is precisely where the state’s power – different from military force – comes from. And I referred to the sphere of ordinary commodity exchange as mode of exchange C, in a sense, the origin of the power of money.
To these three modes, we can add mode of exchange D, which attempts to sublate the others, like the power of God, which manifested in the form of universal religion in the age of the ancient empires. D is local, something that always remained within the later social formation; in the second half of the nineteenth century, it appeared in our world as communism. In his later years, Marx stressed the importance of Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society, arguing that communism was nothing other than ‘the return of modern society to a higher form of the most archaic type – collective production and appropriation’.5 To rephrase it, mode of exchange D is the return of mode of exchange A ‘in a higher form’.
Historically speaking, the social formation is the articulation of multiple modes of exchange. In primitive society, mode of exchange A is dominant. What we must be careful to point out is that, even at this stage, modes of exchange B and C already exist in nascent form. If B becomes dominant, the state is formed. In such a moment, however, A is not eliminated, but continues to exist in the form of the agrarian community subjugated by the force of the state and the landowner. On the other hand, C is expanded by means of the development of B. In other words, at the stage of the formation of multiple territorial states, the money economy emerged. In the ancient world empires, A and C are combined under the dominance of B.
Mode of exchange C rose to prominence in the social formation with the appearance of industrial capital, and this is precisely the process Marx sought to explicate in Capital. However, from the perspective of modes of exchange, we need to be careful to emphasize that, when industrial capital emerged, it also caused a transformation of the social formation as a whole, and as a combination of all of the modes of exchange. That is, A and B did not diminish, but were altered in form by the dominance of C. B took the form of the bourgeois state, while A formed the ‘imagined community’ of the nation. To put it simply in my terms, this constituted the triadic structure of capital-nation-state.
At the end of the 1990s, I proposed the above mode of analysis in my Transcritique: On Kant and Marx. Once again, I did this by means of a specific way of reading the texts of Marx and Kant, which is to say I took a more or less literary-critical stance, and once again published it for the first time in a literary magazine in serial form. Subsequently I discarded this stance and began a process of systematically constructing my theoretical work as a whole. In fact, I abandoned literary criticism completely. In a sense, you could say that what I have attempted to do since that moment is to reconstruct Capital as a ‘guiding thread’, this time with its economic base not in modes of production, but in modes of exchange. The process culminated in The Structure of World History.6 In the present work, I speak from an understanding that might be seen to differ from that of Marx. But I would rather think that in fact, what I discovered there was precisely ‘the centre of possibility’ in Marx.
Tokyo, April 2019
