Reflections on reading Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (30)

The thirtieth night



The dog offers to the audience four thoughts to go away with.


1)
Every word that has been written exposes itself to the reader’s interpretation. It is said that true interpretations are liberating and lead to consciousness and freedom. It is also suggested that false interpretations are to be restricted by law, however the commandments as laid out ensure that all actions are doubled in their meaning, any choice to do something therefore implying that something else was not done. This is a vigilant purgatory for the people of the book, a purgatory that consists of a death in a life of yearning. Yearning for a primitive past life of first causes, yearning for a money free future, whilst watching for the ghosts that are the price the readers pay for their own eternal vigilance.
All texts are defeated by the reader; but there is no glory in these victories, only the whistling of the wind through the pages of closely argued texts. The hermeneutics of inaction trap the revolutionary moment in a reoccurring past. The future will only arrive when these pages are buried, watered, rotted down and turned into the fertiliser for a thin soil that waits for the seeds of a new beginning.

2)
The love of others is the first casualty of Capitalism. The gift of labour that we give our own families is still the most wonderful act and the family of mankind can still receive this gift, but only in the spirit of true socialism. This is the promise that holds the future in check. This naivety is our most powerful political tactic. The love of others is a fading specter but a specter with a powerful past and the promise of a wholesome future. Its echo in a thousand love songs that drift through the airways, hummed to I-pods, sung to loved ones and lodged deep in the sound brain. Its text in the miles of shelves of romantic novels that sigh beneath their weight; its look the look of a million filmed embraces and squeezed hands in the dark. This is a yearned for reality and as we are led to understand, a reality from outside of perception does not of course exist. As all perception is a construct of the embodied mind and this love a phantom of the universe of Christian thought, it is a love that also lives in the limbs and it will lie in wait to stir our actions like some forgotten Valentine card, left between the pages of an out of date software manual.

3)
The specters speak in tongues, but the spirit is more powerful. A pale rider emerges from the shadows; he reins his horse to a halt. “Long live death!” he cries. “Long live death!” the echoing cry from the barricades. The living speak with the tongues of the dead, the dead speak through the living who dream of soil and earth and fallen leaves.

4)
One day the architecture of commerce will crumble in the face of human kindness. The old sublime will reassert itself over the new, solidity over simulacrum. The days of interpretation are numbered and in this future world the people will listen to the narratives of spirits and ghosts will number themselves amongst the living.

The curtain closes. There is no applause.

Reflections on reading Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (29)

The twenty-ninth night



Lost in the delirium of consumerism Marx plucks out his eyes in a fit of lunacy, he can no longer stand the sight of history’s final events. He claws at his own face in a paroxysm of rage and despair. In his head, the spectres that haunt him and every object he owns are being pulled towards his bleeding sockets. They slip and slide into his head, blooded but not bowed by his crazed and brainsick actions. In his head emancipatory Marxism is now reduced to slavery, the opening of all borders has frozen his followers into indecision and the world is churned in his milky madness.
The curtain now closes on this act of depravity.

There is an interlude while the scene is changed and the muffled sound of furniture being dragged across the stage is heard from behind the curtain.

The curtain rises.

A ventriloquist with speaking table now opens a final act. This act of stagecraft is designed to sooth this audience's nerves, the people are unsettled, their world is being decentred and they crave for entertainment.

The puppeteered table speaks of the past, present and future.

“The thing of the first, the foremost of all spectres is the ghost of labour. The memory of your grandfathers and your fathers in their rolled up sleeves and working boots, digging and shifting and pulling and pushing, grinding and cutting and fishing and killing, each with their shadow doppelganger, digging and shifting and pulling and pushing, grinding and cutting and fishing and killing. These are the ghosts of your past.”

“ The thing of the second; the identification of the place of now.”

The ventriloquist extends his right index finger and points to a spot at the head of the table. The table continues with the speech.

“From the ceiling nineteen feet six and a half inches, from the deck two feet eight inches, from the proscenium arch to the left seventeen feet four inches, from the proscenium arch to the right sixteen feet six inches; located at latitude 51.507741 longitude -0.096845, elevation thirty five feet. These are the instruments of my power, my political legitimacy and my property rights.”

“The thing of the third; the technologies of religion. The rituals of prayer punctuate the days, a mechanical inflection to the promise. The promise of the heroic guerrilla, the promise of Che in all his guises on ten million ‘T’ shirts and student posters, the promise of a vision of future past.”

A dog walks confidently onto the stage and is soon seen licking at the shadow of the table.

The ventriloquist opens a drawer in the table and takes out a map, he unfolds it and sits gazing intently at its contours. The table’s disembodied voice continues.

“This map holds within itself all the dimensions of democracy, it orders the limits of its power, contains the ghosts of its past and produces the simulacrum of the now. However, the time for these depictions will soon be over and we wish a last hurrah to all those sailors who plotted out their early voyages, who sailed to unknown shores to give us views of distant worlds and future possibilities.”

The ventriloquist starts to carefully tear out a shape from the opened out map. Gradually we realise this shape is that of a dog, a dog that has within it roads, and mountains and seas. It is a multi-headed dog that looks both ways and inwards into souls and into consciousness. It is the time for conclusions and endings, for the revealing of the moral of this story and the purpose of its plot.

Reflections on reading Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (28)

The twenty-eighth night

Time clocks, date stamps, clock-in, clock-out, punch cards, swipe cards, flexi-time, hard time, peace time, piece work, war time, serving time, time server, clock watcher, shift worker, time thief, time bandit, time catcher, time rich, time poor, time to start and time to finish; time the sixth sense, understood in our blood and in our hearts.

Marx looks at his watch, “Time is money.” he says to himself.

Tools are extensions of ourselves, the spear extends the arm, the club extends the fist, like a second skin, or abnormal growth, we inhabit them, feeling for their every hurt; a chip off the axe, a nick in the blade, hurts both the wielder and their implement. These early tools were valued as we value life. Their association with us was a deep bond of trust and belief in their ability to come through in difficult times. Nets it was believed would hold and be strong enough to haul in the fish, the spear strong and sharp enough to kill our foe, the axe keen enough to shatter bone and sever sinew. The social bonds between people were mirrored in the bonds they made with their tools. To pass a trusted tool on to another would be a deeply felt gesture. People would identify themselves by and with their tools, a symbiotic relationship eventually developing, and in that relationship we built a model for our relationships with others and the wider world.

The man who has just killed a lion knows his spear’s value. The tribe who have just feasted on fish, understand the value of strong nets. The trust placed on these objects becomes a powerful force beyond the material objectness of the tool, they may develop an aura, a life not unlike their owners, a presence that is spoken to and with, like others of the tribe. This situation can lead to myth. The deep bond of man and tool is central to what it is to be human. The moment this bond is betrayed, a rupture is created. The present rupture between the maker and the merchant is Marx’s worry. He gnaws at it like a dog on a bone. In his own mind he seeks to heal the rift, but in reality only forces it wider apart, this opening valley of the fetish will swallow hordes of his messianic followers. They will lose all sense of reality, speaking in tongues and harboring ghosts as neighbours, rather than speaking to and helping out the people they live next to.

Marx has never really understood use value. He has never fished or hunted, only in words does he fish for souls and hunt the haunted, real value, trusted value is not in silver tongued rhetoric or an academic text, it lies in terror on the bleak mountain side, horror at sea and the dread of starvation as the crops fail; those places and times where limits of our survival are tested and boundaries drawn between the living and the dead are where use is truly valued.

Within the money economy nostalgia is a luxury, trading in nostalgia a decadent delight that many thinkers have been guilty of. The depth of the Capitalist descent is hard for Marx to really understand but in the construction of consumer law, the inverse law of perennial collection, it has opened up for him the doors of Hell and a vision of a doomed future of permanent damnation within the thought screen of commodity. He realises now that each money transaction is a selling of a soul and by now all souls have been sold and only a new revolution, a revolution of the soulless can dig us out of the shameful pit of cynical capital.

Reflections on reading Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (27)

The twenty-seventh night

Marx stands between the moment of becoming and the moment of being, believing he holds a unique position between God and the people. As he watches the muscular surge of crowds below, he realises their potential is electrifying.

Crowd law is the essence. You can smell it in operation. The ontics of the surge, the behaviour of the beast in the packed masses; explained by group psychologists but unstoppable and unpredictable.

The swirl of the crowd is hypnotic, from Marx’s viewpoint behind the parapet the masses are forged into one pinhead textured body. Nothing stands in the way of this creature as it snakes its way through the streets, not Marxism, Capitalism or Religion, this is a creature of the body not the mind. A triumph of instinct over will.

Reflections on reading Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (26)

The Twenty-sixth night

The scene changes and we are in the middle of a Medieval market place. It is hot noisy and full of bustle as hawkers shout and announce their wares, traders raise their voices as they bargain and the buzz of men and women’s murmurs hums throughout the air. Sharp smelling spices cut through the stink of fish stalls, while roasting meats assail the nostrils with a smoky desire. The offer of sweet, sour, bitter, pungent, and salty tastes excites the tongues of the hungry and bright red and yellow silks flutter in the arms of merchants as they flaunt their shimmering cloth. Everywhere deals are being struck and bargains made. Cloth for spices, meat for fish, salt for iron, iron for silk; the metamorphosis of the caterpillar continued as its silk is turned to silver. A dog noses its way beneath the stalls, as it searches for scraps of food, it unexpectedly jumps and yelps; a sharp eyed boy has ambushed the dog and beats it with a stick. This is a place of sensual delight and embodied gratification, where the future is constructed as the tables of finance are built around the market trestles of transaction.

The nine push their way through the throngs of bargain hunters looking for an empty stall, they have decided to set up their own business. After much haggling they are finally given a place on the edge of the market, to their collective disgust all nine are classed as sellers of second hand goods and bric-à-brac. They have had a six foot long trestle table made to their exact requirements. The table has been hand crafted by carpenters, mortise and tenon jointed, sanded smooth and sealed with a rich dark varnish. Their stall is covered with a heavy duty blue and white striped cloth cover that is cut into arrow shapes as it forms a canopy over their heads. Marx has decided that they trade in rhubarb. He has a delicate stomach and can swear to rhubarb’s restorative abilities, he is also very aware of how exotic a West Yorkshire delicacy will be to Middle Eastern traders. Shakespeare is writing his sales pitch, he is determined to forge a brand identity that will help them gain some leverage against the tyranny of the old market traders, Hegel is still traumatised by God’s death and sits quietly at the back, Aristotle and Plato are happy to banter with the customers, while Nietzsche has gone with Christ, Ovid and Kant to penetrate the crowds and set up rumours of their stall by word of mouth and demonstration. Each carries a small supply of rhubarb which they eat with obvious delight and great enjoyment as they spread the good news of its arrival.
A great roar from the many mouths of the people rises as they banter and barter, while barkers and their dogs will bark and butchers brag of belly pork and bacon. Swirls of sound surround the stalls as salesmen sell their souls whilst capital accrues to those who want it most.
The crowds gradually quieten as they become aware that cutting through the market cacophony comes another sound, inhuman in its tone. A table from a market stall has stepped up to an adjoining loggia and is starting to address the people.

“I am a product of my own making, a brain in the wood-grain. My voice may sound of saws and hammered chisels but my heart is full and overflows with sap. Rejoice in the value of my commodification, praise be to the bodiless body, the phantom limb of our resurrection now casts off its former life. As a head of the table I salute you, with my ligneous tissue of xylem I will ignite the fire in your souls. I am your puppet to do with as you may, your captive wood spirit who only desires to please. As I look down upon you all, you may stand at the foot of the table but you are no slaves. I proclaim the new world of capital, I am the lignum vitae of the fetish! I am your freedom! Look down at your ankles and wrists, what are those chains that hold you? Chains of intellectual dogma, chains of philosophy and religion! I am here to break those chains, to free your hearts and give to you the joy of consumption.
You may think I am a mere understudy, that I have moved above my station. But you see these leaves upon my back, I carry them with pride. The sharp pink stems of rhubarb that I bear, a testament to courage; a testament to far off lands of cloudy skies and rain, of men and women of the soil who labour nights and days, to force the rhubarb harvest on and bring the fruit to bear. See my fare; is it not healthy and wholesome. A good tree bears good fruit and is this not good fruit? (43) Am I not therefore good?”

A small, what was unobtrusive, knob for a tiny table drawer has gradually been growing and increasing in length; this abnormal growth is now noticed by the audience. A small boy is the first to respond, “What’s that?” he shouts. He points hesitantly to the drawer's knob. The table ignores his question and continues to preach.

“Am I not your saviour? I bring forth unto you a gift of love, the panacea of your collective illness and the solution to your sorrows. I carry within me the child of economic miracles, an immaculate conception of desire, whose birth was prophesised by holy writ. It is said that all things which have been and are written about Me in the book of the Law of the ancient Prophets must be fulfilled. The new religion of capitalism will replace the old order of intellectual lies. I am a conduit for your souls, I will hold a mass séance of the table, an elevation of the spirit and a transfiguration of the commonwealth into individual profit.”

At this point Marx can stand it no longer he shouts insults at the table and begins to throw rotten tomatoes and cabbages. The others begin in join in, the masses as always eventually catch on and go with the flow. Soon a torrent of abuse and rotten fruit is landing on the table and it is gradually encompassed in a mound of stinking fetid vegetable matter. Invisible beneath the vegetable mountain, the table completes its metamorphosis into a pulpit, now intangible, tasteless, odourless and inaudible, it has become a supernatural entity. As it exits the scene, it leaves no trace behind, , except for the shadow of a silhouette that slips silently, unnoticed down the loggia steps.

43 Rhubarb is in fact a vegetable. The identity of rhubarb is however problematic, and in 1947 a US court ruled it was a fruit.