Category: art

Both production and circulation are essential to capitalism: as Marx puts it, “Circulation is just as necessary as is production itself.”
Production is the “hidden abode” of value, the often-invisible employment relation in which labor receives a wage in exchange for pouring its power into the making of commodities; circulation is the unhidden, manifest abode of value, the exchange sphere where “an immense collection of commodities” emanates value.

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Labor makes things useful, while exchange and its hypostasis in the concept of value and the medium of money is the activity that generates value qua value. This is why, for Marx , value as such only becomes the ruling idea in a society of widespread commoditization. Barter economies have concepts of “need” and of “use,” while commodity economies, where production is undertaken for the purpose of exchange and accumulation, have concepts of “value.”

Immediacy, Anna Kornbluh

Kornbluh, in Parapraxis, on Freud’s death drive as not a program that can explain ecocidal climate change (Carbon capitalist autocracy, a highly specific and contingent mode of resource management and power monopoly, is the cause.), but speculative, creative, with “the will to create from zero, to begin again . . . to make a fresh start.” (Lacan) [It] persists,” in “the bourgeoning of creativity . . . [leading] beyond survival to something more life affirming.” (Mari Ruti)

To read: The Order of Forms (U Chicago, 2019)

In literary studies today, debates about the purpose of literary criticism and about the place of formalism within it continue to simmer across periods and approaches. Anna Kornbluh contributes to—and substantially shifts—that conversation in The Order of Forms by offering an exciting new category, political formalism, which she articulates through the co-emergence of aesthetic and mathematical formalisms in the nineteenth century. Within this framework, criticism can be understood as more affirmative and constructive, articulating commitments to aesthetic expression and social collectivity.

Kornbluh offers a powerful argument that political formalism, by valuing forms of sociability like the city and the state in and of themselves, provides a better understanding of literary form and its political possibilities than approaches that view form as a constraint. To make this argument, she takes up the case of literary realism, showing how novels by Dickens, Brontë, Hardy, and Carroll engage mathematical formalism as part of their political imagining. Realism, she shows, is best understood as an exercise in social modeling—more like formalist mathematics than social documentation. By modeling society, the realist novel focuses on what it considers the most elementary features of social relations and generates unique political insights. Proposing both this new theory of realism and the idea of political formalism, this inspired, eye-opening book will have far-reaching implications in literary studies.