MARX’S SKIN
Part I: The Senses under
Industrial and Consumer Capitalism
Part II:
The Melanesian Mode of Domestication
Part III:
The Material Body of the Commodity
Part IV: A Sensory
Biography of Karl Marx
INTRODUCTION
The production of reading guides
to the work of Karl Marx has become an industry unto itself over the
years, with some of the finer titles including For Marx (Althusser
1969) and Reading Marx Writing (Kempel 1995). This chapter proposes
not another reading but a sensing of Marx's life and works, keyed to
the play of the senses in Marx's writings and personal circumstances.
It traces the origin of some of
his most critical insights into the life of the senses under capitalism
to the works of the materialist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach and the
utopianist Charles Fourier. It then goes on to document the "transcendence
of sensuality" in Marx's mature works on the capitalist mode of
production and exchange, where the senses, like the material bodies
of the commodities Marx ponders, appear to transform into ghosts of
themselves.
The
chapter proceeds by tacking "diathetically" between Marx's
analysis of "the social circulation of matter" (money and
commodities) in mid-nineteenth century industrial capitalism and the
reception of transnational commodities and consumer capitalism in modern
day Papua New Guinea. This procedure, by virtue of its historical and
cross-cultural focus, throws into sharp relief the lacuna and hidden
assumptions in Marx's analysis.1
Three
conclusions emerge. First, Marx never challenged the sensory staus quo,
whereas without sensory transformation there can be no social transformation,
as Fourier and Feuerbach illustrated so well. Second, Marx sacrificed
the senses on the altar of science, and to that extent committed no
less an abstraction of sensory value (or infraction of human sensibility)
than the system he critiqued. Third, by analyzing commodities exclusively
in terms of their use- and exchange-value, Marx elided what could be
called their sign-value -- namely, the sensuous contrasts which set
one commodity off from another and give expression to cultural categories
as well as express differences in social location. Recognizing sign-value,
conversely, opens the way for a full-bodied, multisensory theory of
the commodity and of consumption.
PART I: THE SENSES
UNDER INDUSTRIAL AND CONSUMER CAPITALISM
Sensory Deprivation and Industrial
Capitalism
There
are few more dramatic ruptures in the history of Western thought than
Marx's apparent break with the idealist tradition of German philosophy
(Synnott 1991). "[M]an is affirmed in the objective world not only
in the act of thinking, but with all his senses" proclaimed
the young Marx in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
(Marx). Whereas Hegel had interpreted world history in terms of the
progressive unfolding of Spirit, Marx held that "the forming
of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world
down to the present." He was inspired to accord such primacy to
the senses by the writings of the materialist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach.
In his doctrine of sense perception, Feuerbach argued that it is not
only nature or external objects that are experienced by the senses but
"Man, too, is given to himself only through the senses;
he is an object for himself only as an object of the senses" (Feuerbach).2
Marx's
portrayal of the state of the senses in nineteenth century bourgeois
society was in turn influenced by the writings of the utopianist Charles
Fourier. Fourier (1851) believed that societies could be judged according
to how well they gratified and developed the senses of their members.
He argued that the senses were debased by the civilization of his day,
in which most people were unable to afford any sensory refinements and
in which all people, no matter their rank, were continually confronted
with disagreeable sensory impressions, such as the stench and din of
the streets. Furthermore, even if sensory pleasures were to be made
more available, most people would be unable to appreciate them as their
senses remained brutish and undeveloped. These sensory ills, according
to Fourier, were the result of a society obsessed with the accumulation
of personal wealth to the detriment of the general well-being.
There
are numerous echoes of Fourier in Marx's discussion of the condition
of the proletariat in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.
For example, Marx describes how the senses of the worker, living amidst
"the sewage of civilization," are deformed until he
loses all notion of sensory refinement and "no longer knows any
need ... but the need to eat" . Marx returned to this theme
of the stripping of the senses in Capital, where he described
the conditions of factory work:
Every organ of sense is
injured in an equal degree by artificial elevation of temperature, by
the dust-laden atmosphere, by the deafening noise, not to mention danger
to life and limb among the thickly crowded machinery, which, with the
regularity of the seasons, issues its list of the killed and the wounded
in the industrial battle ... Is Fourier wrong when he calls factories
`tempered bagnos'? (Marx)
The
sensory deprivation of the proletariat was to be expected, given the
grueling conditions of factory work, but Marx insisted that not even
among the bourgeoisie are the senses fulfilled. All of the capitalist's
senses are ultimately fixed on one object -- money; and while the enjoyment
of wealth is one of the supreme goods of capitalism, even better is
sacrificng pleasure in order to accumulate more wealth. "The less
you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theater, the dance
hall, the public-house; the less you ... sing, paint, fence, etc., the
more you save -- the greater becomes your treasure which
neither moths nor dust will devour -- your capital"..
Developing
Fourier's diagnosis, Marx laid the blame for the alienation of the senses
in capitalist society on the dehumanizing demands of private property,
and envisioned a world in which "the transcendence of private property
[would entail] the complete emancipation of all human senses
and qualities". Only through the negation of the demeaning and
oppressive tyranny of capital could humankind's "species being"
come into its own.
Only through the objectively
unfolded richness of man's essential being is the richness of subjective
human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form -- in
short senses capable of human gratifications, senses confirming
themselves as essential powers of man) either cultivated or brought
into being (Marx).
In
the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels heralded the collapse
of the capitalist economic order. The portents of this dissolution included,
among other things: the concentration of the proletariat in ever greater
masses, the increasingly agitated character of all social relations
due to the constant revolutionizing of the instruments of production,
and the reduction of personal worth to commodity status. In short, all
of the contradictions of bourgeois society had become manifest on its
surface, and the illusion of society could no longer hold.
Reading
the Communist Manifesto now, from the standpoint of the present
world economic order (when the capitalist system seems more firmly entrenched
than ever), what most stands out about this text is how accurately (if
unwittingly) Marx and Engels foretold the future of capitalism,
rather than its demise. For example, Marx and Engels wrote:
The bourgeoisie has through
its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character
to production and consumption in every country. ... In place of the
old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new
wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands
and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency
we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of
nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The
intellectual creations of individual nations become common property.
... The bourgeoise, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production,
by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even
the most barbarian, nations into civilization (Marx and Engels)
This passage encapsulates a remarkably
prescient description of the phenomenon which has in recent years come
to be known as "globalization" (Featherstone). The fine food
halls of Europe and America filled with produce "from distant lands
and climes" (see e.g. Bell and Valentine; James), the global flow
of capital (and people) which has resulted in the "universal interdependence
of nations" (see e.g. Robbins), the Hollywood movies and other
elements of American popular culture that have become the "common
property" (or transcultural patrimony) of everybody from Chile
to Katmandhu (see e.g. Dorfman; Iyer; Appadurai) all speak to the truth
of this passage. Summing up their vision of globalization as cultural
homogenization, Marx and Engels wrote: "In one word, [the bourgeoisie]
creates a world after its own image."
Nevertheless, the apparent flash
of insight that this passage contains must not be allowed to distract
attention from the limitations of Marx's analysis of capitalism's laws
of motion. Marx's gaze always remained centered on the factory and the
stock market, and while he may have succeeded at exposing the secrets
of the capitalist mode of production through his penetrating analysis
of the labor process (on which more later), he neglected an equally
salient development -- namely, the presentation of commodities
in the department stores and world exhibitions that sprang up in the
mid-nineteenth century (Bowlby; Cummings and Lewandowska). The birth
of these "palaces of consumption" heralded a transformation
in the nature of capitalism with far-reaching implications -- the transformation
from industrial capitalism (as Marx knew it) to the consumer capitalism
of today. For capitalism does not work by the extraction of the labor
power and value of the worker alone, it also works by generating consumer
desires of all sorts in all people, including the worker (Galbraith).
Sensory Stimulation and Consumer
Capitalism
It
has fallen to others working within a materialist framework to theorize
the on-going history of sensory and social relations under capitalism
-- that is, to theorize capitalism as a mode of presentation as well
as production, and as a mode of consumption as well as exchange. Walter
Benjamin, Rémy
Saisselin and Stuart Ewen have each contributed to this theoretical
project, and their respective views on the organization of the sensorium
in consumer culture will be considered below.
The
growing social importance of consumption in the nineteenth century was
evident in the new venue for shopping, the department store. With its
theatrical lighting, enticing window displays and its floor after floor
of entrancing merchandise -- "each separate counter ... a show
place of dazzling interest and attraction" (Dreiser cited in Saisselin)
-- the department store presented a fabulous spectacle of consumer plenty
and accessibility. Previously, goods had been kept behind counters and
it was presumed that a customer would enter a shop with the purpose
to buy. In the department store, by contrast, goods were largely out
in the open and anyone could enter simply with the purpose of having
a look. The expectation was that the display of goods in such abundance
would prove so seductive that even those who were "just looking"
would be lured into buying, particularly given the atmosphere of pleasurable
self-indulgence that prevailed. In his novel Sister Carrie Theodore
Dreiser described the bewitching effect of the department store displays
on a potential customer:
Fine clothes ... spoke
tenderly and Jesuitically for themselves. When she came within earshot
of their pleading, desire in her bent a willing ear. ... "My dear,"
said the lace collar ... "I fit you beautifully; don't give me
up" (cited in Saisselin).
The
department store thus appeared on the scene as an enormous candy store
with a cornucopia of goodies to satisfy the taste of the bourgeoisie
for fashionable but affordable style. It was able to do so thanks to
advances in mass production -- specifically, the mechanical reproduction
of styled or imitation goods. Mass production brought previously exclusive
luxury items within the reach of the bourgeoisie, and even the working
class. As Walter Benjamin noted with regard to art, what such imitation
goods lose in authenticity they gain in mobility: "fine" art,
"fine" furniture, "fine" clothes can now go anywhere
and everywhere as mass production finds its perfect match in mass consumption.
The
counterpart to the (often female) shopper in the new consumer palaces
was the flâneur, the voyeuristic idler who treated
the whole city as though it were a department store, a variegated spectacle
of goods to be viewed and occasionally sampled (Benjamin; Tester).3
"The prime requisite of an expert flâneur," according to the American
novelist Henry James, was "the simple, sensuous, confident relish
of pleasure" (cited in Saisselin). Yet, as a suitable admirer of
the new society of spectacle, the flâneur found his primary sensory pleasure
simply in watching, the watching which in a visualist age would increasingly
seem to offer a total sensory experience in itself. In his study of
the aesthetics of nineteenth-century consumption, Rémy Saisselin writes: "The flâneur
[was] a conscious observer for whom the word boredom had become
meaningless: he animated all he saw; admired all he perceived. He strolled,
observed, watched, espied ...."
As
Saisselin goes on to point out in The Bourgeois and the Bibelot,
the phenonemon of the flâneur went hand in hand with that of
the photographer, both aesthetic observers, insiders and outsiders at
once, both constantly skimming the surfaces of urban life for their
rich bounty of visual impressions. The photographer, however, was equipped
with the technological means to fix visual impressions on paper, turning
the images themselves into objects of display and desire. The mass production
of images which occurred in the 1800s thus complemented the mass production
of styled goods or imitations. With this proliferation of images and
imitations appearance increasingly came to overshadow -- and even obliterate
-- substance (Ewen; Boorstin).
In
an essay on photography published in 1859, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote:
Every conceivable object
of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt
all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt cattle in South
America, for their skins and leave the carcasses as of little worth
(cited in Ewen)
The analogy to hunting here is significant
as it indicates that the photographic reproduction of the world is not
a passive multiplication of images but an active appropriation of all
"curious, beautiful, grand objects." The notion of the "carcasses"
of objects being left behind "as of little worth" once their
photograph was taken points to a state of affairs in which photographic
(and shortly, cinematic) imagery would become more powerful and influential
than objects themselves. In All Consuming Images Stuart Ewen
states that Holmes correctly "laid out the contours by which the
phenomenon of style operates in the world today." Style
deals exclusively in surface impressions, hence the "right look"
becomes all important.
If
the primary sensory mode of consumer culture was (and remains) that
of visual display, however, the non-visual senses were not left to one
side. As Ewen notes, the sense of touch was also appropriated by marketers
as a crucial medium of sensory persuasion. Thus, in a 1930s book entitled
Consumer Engineering, the business professors Sheldon and Arens
write:
Manufacturing an object
that delights this [tactile] sense is something that you do but don't
talk about. Almost everything which is bought is handled. After the
eye, the hand is the first censor to pass on acceptance, and if the
hand's judgement is unfavorable, the most attractive object will not
gain the popularity it deserves. On the other hand, merchandise designed
to be pleasing to the hand wins an approval that may never register
in the mind, but which will determine additional purchases. ... Make
it snuggle in the palm (Sheldon and Arens).
Consumer
capitalism, in fact, would make it its business to engage as many senses
as possible in its seduction of the consumer. The "right look"
must, depending on the kind of product being sold, be reinforced by
the right feel, the right scent, the right sound and the right taste.
This multisensory marketing, or "technocracy of sensuality"
as Wolfgang Haug dubbed it, would reach its height in the late twentieth
century with artifical scents added to a range of products from cars
to crayons, and with muzak and fragrances wafting though the plushly-carpeted
aisles of department stores and boutiques, creating a state of hyperaesthesia
in the consumer (Classen, Howes and Synnott).
The
hypersensuality of the contemporary marketplace has been theorized by
a new generation of business professors. In an article entitled "Welcome
to the Experience Economy" published in the Harvard Business
Review, Joseph Pine II and James Gilmore assert that forward-thinking
companies no longer produce goods or supply services, but instead use
services as the stage and goods as props for creating "experiences"
that are as stimulating for the consumer as they are memorable. The
authors identify a series of "experience-design principles"
which include: Theme the experience (e.g. "eatertainment"
restaurants such as Planet Hollywood or the Rainforest Cafe); Mix
in memorabilia (e.g. an official T-shirt for a rock concert); and,
above all, Engage all five senses:
The more senses an experience
engages, the more effective and memorable it can be. Smart shoeshine
operators augment the smell of polish with crisp snaps of the cloth,
scents and sounds that don't make the shoes any shinier but do make
the experience more engaging. ... Similarly, grocery stores pipe bakery
smells into the aisles, and some use light and sound to simulate thunderstorms
when misting their produce.
The mist at the Rainforest
Cafe appeals serially to all five senses. It is first apparent as a
sound: Sss-sss-zzz. Then you see the mist arising from the rocks and
feel it soft and cool against your skin. Finally, you smell its tropical
essence, and you taste (or imagine that you do) its freshness. What
you can't be is unaffected by the mist (Pine and Gilmore).
Capitalism has evidently come a long
way since the days when production was the key value and the reproduction
of capital seemingly depended on stripping the senses of the laborer
and curbing those of the bourgeoisie. Now the focus appears to be on
seducing the senses of the consumer in the interests of valorizing capital.
This seachange is perhaps best symbolized by the way in which abandoned
factories in the city core are increasingly being refitted to house
amusement palaces and luxury condominiums.
PART II: THE
MELANESIAN MODE OF DOMESTICATION
Entering the Capitalist World of
Goods
The
introduction of consumer products and lifestyles has provoked significant
transformations in the indigenous social and sensory orders of Papua
New Guinea. For one thing, gift exchange forms the basis of most "traditional"
economic orders in Melanesia. The new consumer products, however, can
only be acquired through commodity exchange (at least in the first instance).
Describing the difference between gift exchange and commodity exchange,
Chris Gregory writes:4
Commodity exchange is
an exchange of alienable objects between people who are in a state of
reciprocal independence that establishes a quantitative relationship
between the objects transacted, whereas gift exchange is an exchange
of inalienable objects between people who are in a state of reciprocal
dependence that establishes a qualitative relationship between the subjects
transacting.
A
good example of a product which is strategically employed to create
"a state of reciprocal dependence" is the bilum or
string bag, which is used extensively throughout Papua New Guinea. Maureen
MacKenzie has studied the role of the bilum among the Telefol, a Mountain
Ok people of central New Guinea, where girls symbolically grow into
womanhood by learning to make bilums. MacKenzie reports that the bilum
represents the nurturing life-giving capacities of the woman who made
it. When a Telefol woman gives a string bag she has made as a gift,
it is with the purpose of establishing or confirming a reciprocal relationship
with some other person by giving something of herself. Thus, an adolescent
girl will give a small bilum to a male youth as a sign of her interest
in him. If the youth accepts the gift he agrees to enter into a relationship
with the girl and must respond by giving her a gift in return, such
as an armband. Presented as gifts to friends and relatives, the bilum
is at once extremely useful in a practical sense -- "It is like
our car and our workshop," MacKenzie was told -- and the means
of uniting the members of a community in a web of relationships. By
making and giving away string bags women symbolically weave the community
together in a social bilum, which is at once nourishing and protective.
Many
Papua New Guineans' first experience with Western commodities and commodity
exchange came in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth
centuries. It was during this period that contact with Westerners (administrators,
missionaries, prospectors for oil and gold, coffee and copra exporters)
intensified, albeit unevenly due to the rugged geography of the country.
Westerners were perceived as having unlimited access to "cargo"
or manufactured goods. According to reports, their interest in such
commodities led some Papua New Guineans and other Melanesians to develop
elaborate "cargo cults" (Worsley). These cults centered on
ritual practices -- such as building mock jetties or airstrips, constructing
mock storehouse or temples (modelled after mission churches), erecting
flagpoles, and writing "letters" -- intended to attract a
cargo of Western goods to the cult participants.
The
avid desire for Western products which these cults expressed might seem
to indicate that Papua New Guineans were primed for entry into a capitalist
economy, but the reality was more complex.5 The private property
regime of the whites puzzled many Papua New Guineans. As Kenelm Burridge
relates, in Tangu the presence of whites was explained by reference
to a myth of two brothers. The clever brother, who was the ancestor
of the whites, was "well endowed with brains, ability and inventiveness,
whilst the other was dull and could only copy" as a result of some
"sin" he committed in the mythic past (Burridge). Nevertheless,
one interpretation of the myth held that, "since the two men were
in fact brothers, and brothers normally shared their assets, white men
would come round to sharing their goods, privileges and capacities with
black men"; and, if they did not, they should be made to withdraw
from Papua New Guinea (Burridge).
In
Tangu, a series of prophets arose who prescribed various ritual procedures
(such as donning European clothes, undergoing baptism and destroying
crops) which, the cult members were assured, would bring about either
the desired pooling of assets in accordance with the moral norms of
brotherhood, or the expulsion of the whites. In a further twist, it
was held that the ultimate source of these attractive new goods was
not the whites at all, but the Papua New Guineans' own ancestors, who
wanted to bestow them on their descendants.
Creating the Generic Consumer
Fast
forward to the twilight of the twentieth century and it appears that
Papua New Guinea has gone the way of most societies in the world today,
and is developing into a Western style consumer society. Port Moresby,
the national capital, is a sprawling metropolis with numerous distractions
from beer halls to beaches. Clothes and other merchandise from around
the world are on display in the windows of the stores in the Waigani
shopping district of Port Moresby. A good number of these products are
imitation Western goods from China, so their prices are relatively low.
There are department stores in most of the provincial capitals as well,
such as Wewak in East Sepik Province or Alotau in Milne Bay, and these
emporia serve as more local entrées to the capitalist world of goods.
Men
and women from the "grass roots" or "bush," as the
hinterlands are called, flock to Port Moresby, or the provincial capitals
and other towns, as well as to the mines and plantations, where they
work for wages. Due to a pattern of circular migration, these same men
and women normally return to their native hamlets after a spell, bringing
new consumer values and goods with them. Some return migrants will use
their savings to try to break into the import business by opening a
tradestore. Such stores typically consist of a one-room shack with sparsely
stocked shelves of packaged goods, and a Trukai rice, Benson and Hedges
or other brand-name sign outside. Tradestores now have an ubiquitous
presence in Papua New Guinea. Michael O'Hanlon describes them as "raw
intrusions of commercial morality into a pastoral landscape." Many
such ventures fail, however, due to the overwhelming demands of kin
(wantoks) for material assistance. Mission-run tradestores tend
to do better because they are purposely staffed by outsiders.
In
addition to the tradestores, travelling vendors visit remote villages
with a range of exotic wares: peanut butter, mosquito repellent, laundry
detergent, rice (already a staple for many). These vendors will put
on shows to convince prospective consumers of the value of their goods.6
In one skit, an actor mimes disgust at the smell of his own shirt, followed
by delight at its scent after it has been washed with detergent to remove
any trace of body odor. In another such skit, a schoolboy wails in protest
at being subjected to a meal of taro for the fifth straight day. His
howls are silenced when his mother produces a bag of Trukai rice; the
advantages of the product are extolled (it is the boy's real favourite
-- not taro -- has lots of vitamins and will make him grow big); and,
the youth goes on to boast that he can carry his mother and his father
on his biceps, thanks to Trukai turning him into a muscleman. The general
aim of these shows seems to be to induce or accentuate a dissatisfaction
with the status quo which can only be relieved by the consumption of
the goods for sale. The appeal in most cases is made directly to the
audience's senses -- peanut butter tastes good, rice makes you strong,
laundry detergent gives your clothes a pleasing smell.
The
techniques of the travelling vendors can also be found in the burgeoning
domain of mass media advertising. Thus, a newspaper ad for Pepsi-Cola
shows a row of young, female Papua New Guinean dancers in traditional
attire blissfully downing cans and bottles of Pepsi, as though this
synchronized act were one more, and perhaps the best, part of their
performance (Foster). Companies marketing products in Papua New Guinea,
in fact, are urged to consider "the natives" as potential
consumers. One ad directed at generating more advertising revenue for
the newspaper Wantok, displays a man in stereotypical native
dress -- grass skirt, feather headdress, bone through the nose -- carrying
a brief case bulging with money. The text asserts that: "he SHOPS
at major department stores, buys different FOODS, likes SOFT DRINKS,
enjoys SMOKING CIGARETTES, has a family to feed and CLOTHE," and
so on (Foster). The idea is clearly that members of traditional Papua
New Guinean societies should not be presumed to be outside the market
economy, they have money to spend and lots of consumer desires to be
satisfied.
These
mass marketing techniques seem to be aimed at reducing local differences
and creating a generic consumer with common tastes. Thus Pepsi is advertised
as "The Choice of All Papua New Guineans." While encouraged
to participate in a new national identity through sharing common consumer
products, Papua New Guineans are also invited to define themselves not
as members of communities bound by webs of social relations and cultural
traditions, but as autonomous individuals making personal "lifestyle"
choices. Therefore, even though Pepsi may be the drink of "All
Papua New Guineans", this situation is presented as the result
of personal "Choice" (Foster; Gewertz and Errington)
In
a similar way, the indigenous musical traditions of Papua New Guinea,
such as that of the Kaluli (Feld), with their polyrhythmic complexity
and decided preference for interlock, overlap and alternation of vocal
parts (to the exclusion of unison), are gradually being drowned out
by commercial audio cassete tapes and compact discs produced in recording
studios in towns along the coast. A group such as Kales out of Madang
sings in monotonous unison to a mechanical beat and the twang of acoustic
guitars -- but their imitation Australian stringband music sells.
Melanesian Mode of Domestication
At
first glance, it appears that traditional Melanesian practices and products
are disappearing under a blanket of consumer goods and values, and that
the sensory models described in earlier chapters will soon be replaced
by a taste for Pepsi and an ear for stringband music. Yet when one examines
the ways in which mainstream consumer goods are actually employed by
Papua New Guineans a somewhat different picture emerges, one in which
consumers are at times able to incorporate new products into traditional
lifestyles. A telling example here is that of Johnson & Johnson's
Baby Powder as analyzed by John Liep in his fascinating study of the
recontextualization of this particular consumer item in different parts
of Papua New Guinea. While aware of the conventional uses of baby powder,
Papua New Guineans have accorded it particular local uses, ranging from
purifying corpses and mourners, to asperging the heads of dancers and
singers, to serving as body decor. In one instance from the Trobriand
Islands, female mourners, dressed in black and forbidden to bathe, mark
the end of their mourning period by being ritually dressed in colourful
clothes, rubbed with coconut oil and sprinkled with Johnson's Baby Powder.
In
some of these cases baby powder is being used in place of a traditional
substance. In the Western Highlands, for example, baby powder provides
an alternative to traditional clays for body decoration. Among the Mekeo
of Central Province Johnson's Baby Powder is sprinkled over dancers
in place of crushed sea shell powder, and is itself now being replaced
by Mum 21 deodorant, presumably also in powder form (Liep). Thus, new
commodities do not necessarily have to support new consumer values,
they may also be incorporated into traditional lifestyles.
In
his analysis of the unconventional uses of baby powder in the Massim
region, Liep finds an association with the Massim version of a widespread
trickster myth. In this myth, Kasabwaibwaileta (the trickster) fools
people by wearing the malodorous, wrinkled, diseased skin of an old
man. He later casts off this ugly covering to reveal himself as a youth
with smooth, bright, light skin. The smooth, white, bright, fragrant
baby bowder seems to possess a similar transformative significance.
Applied to corpses it purifies and counters the harshness of death and
decay. Applied to mourners it transforms darkness and uncleanliness
into brightness and fragrance. The sensory symbolism of baby powder
in the Massism is hence in keeping with the traditional sensory model
of the region with its emphasis on the "expansion outward"
of the individual, as discussed in chapter 3. Furthermore, the fact
that baby powder is a product created primarily for babies creates an
association between baby powder and youthfulness. The ritual use of
baby powder implies a symbolic rebirth, as when in the myth Kasabwaibwaileta
magically transforms from an old man into a young one, or as when mourners
leave the sphere of the dead and return to the world of the living.
These
examples of local Melanesian appropriations and transformations -- or
"domestications" -- of the meanings and uses of transnational
commodities could be multiplied. For example, Rena Lederman records
of her experience among the Mendi of the Southern Highlands:
The Mendi we know do not
see [consumer] objects in the same way as we see them: their purposes
supplied for us ... In our objects, they perceive multiple possibilities
for satisfying needs the manufacturers never imagined. ... They use
safety pins as earrings in place of blades of grass and combs made out
of umbrella spokes instead of bamboo ... women we know reuse the plastic
fibres of rice bags, rolling them into twine with which to make traditional
netbags (Lederman)
In another telling example, Michael
O'Hanlon records how beer has come to symbolize modernity for many,
yet is consumed in ways identical to the ritual consumption of pork
fat, and carries many of the same symbolic connotations as fat (such
as promoting growth and fertility) in the context of the Wahgi Pig Festival
(O'Hanlon). These examples challenge the idea that the bourgeoisie is
recreating "a world after its own image," as Marx and Engels
would have it, by calling into question the assumed link between globalization
and cultural homogenization (Howes; Classen and Howes).
Interestingly,
money itself has been appropriated by some Papua New Guineans, not just
as a neutral medium of exchange, or means of acquiring commodities,
but as one more curious new object to be incorporated into local cultural
practices and discourses (Akin and Robbins 1999). The national government
has taken pains to impress upon its citizens that the national currency
has replaced traditional forms of "money," such as shells.
"In this country, metal coins and paper notes are replacing things
such as shells, clay pots, feathers and pigs, which earlier were used
to buy things which men and women needed" (quoted in Foster). As
a visual reminder of this transition the bills of Papua New Guinea are
illustrated with such traditional wealth objects as shells, pots and
pigs -- and the basic unit of currency is called "kina," which
means shell money in the Melpa language. Government publications, however,
stress that money is not really a material object, like a shell, but
is rather a symbol of "the value of the work or goods which people
bring into existence by their efforts" (quoted in Foster).
Notwithstanding,
money in the form of coins and bills is inescapably material and it
is evaluated and employed in terms of its materiality by many Papua
New Guinean peoples. Michael Nihill reports that the Anganen of the
Southern Highlands liken twenty kina notes to pearlshells. The red notes
are deemed to ressemble pearlshells which are "invigorated"
by being polished with red ochre by Anganen men. By extension they also
resemble vigorous, decorated male bodies. Thus Nihil writes: "brilliant
body decoration, bright red pearlshells, and crisp, pristine 20-kina
notes are all of inherent merit and beauty." In effect, therefore,
the new bills have taken on the role of objects of aesthetic and cultural
value, similar to the shells they were meant to replace.
If
new products, and even the money with which they are purchased, can
be accomodated within traditional sensory and symbolic orders, these
new products also seem to be showing a tendency to occupy the more postively-valued
positions of those orders. Thus consumer goods are often presented and
seen as being neater and cleaner than traditional goods. One of the
desirable qualities of Johnson's baby powder is that it comes in a smooth,
neat plastic container, seemingly free of any of the mess and fuss of
production. Similarly, PK chewing gum is promoted as a clean, fresh
alternative to the widespread practice of chewing and spitting "messy,
unhealthy" betel nut. In one government-sponsored ad, a picture
of smiling boys chewing PK is juxtaposed with an image of the cancerous
mouth which allegedly results from chewing betel nut (see Foster)..
From this perspective, where traditional goods disgust by being disorderly,
crude and subject to decay, modern commodities please by being self-contained,
smooth and clean: forever fresh and new. One sees here again the image
of the trickster throwing off his old, diseased skin to reveal a shining,
clean new self underneath; and now the old skin represents old, messy,
decaying traditional goods and the new self all the attractive, pristine
products that shine on the shelves of the tradestores.
Paper
and coin currencies are themselves promoted as neater and cleaner than
the old forms of wealth. Unlike a pig, money is said to be easy to exchange
at a store "for a radio set or a guitar"; and, as a booklet
produced by the Reserve Bank of Australia further explains: "Money
does not decay or go bad like such things as taro, sugar and tobacco.
... Even when notes become soiled and worn, they can always be exchanged
at a bank for clean fresh ones" (quoted in Foster). By this very
comparison, of course, money seems to become one more, if eminently
superior, material good in lieu of an abstract medium of exchange.
The
processes by which consumer products are incorporated into New Guinean
societies draws attention to the fact that the introduction of such
products does not necessarily mean that a Western-style consumer culture
will supplant local traditions, and that a visualist emphasis on display
will supplant local sensory orders. Rather, the new products may appeal
to the extent to which they can fit into or complement existing sensory
and social beliefs and practices. Instead of consumer culture replacing
traditional ways of life, traditional ways of life may subsume consumer
culture. Thus baby powder may not imply a whole new regime of baby care
so much as it suggests an alternative means of ritual purification,
and money need not be conceptualized as an abstract symbol of wealth
but rather as a cleaner, more portable pig.
However,
if consumer products do indeed come to seem more generally pleasing
and desirable than local products, then a dependence on a market economy
is produced which will inevitably alter the traditional links between
sensory relations and social relations in New Guinea. A bag purchased
in a store may apparently have all of the desired sensory attributes
of a bilum and more. For example, one bilum-maker interviewed by MacKenzie
was proud at having woven a bag so neatly that people thought it had
been made by a machine.7 Still it will not bring with it
crucial traces of and ties to the person who produced it.
PART III: THE MATERIAL
BODY OF THE COMMODITY
On the "Transcendence of Sensuousness"
in Capitalist Exchange
According
to Marx's analysis in Capital, every commodity "may be looked
at from the points of view of quality and quantity" (Marx). In
its qualitative aspect, a commodity is "an assemblage of many properties,"
both natural and human-added, that satisfies a particular need or want,
as in the way a coat satisfies the need for warmth (or a bilum the need
for a carrying device). The material properties of the commodity, and
the labor expended in its creation, constitute its use-value. The quantitative
aspect of a commodity emerges only when it is exchanged for some other
commodity of an equal magnitude of value. This exchange relation constitutes
its exchange-value, but the latter has nothing to do with its physical
form. "The value of commodities is the very opposite of the coarse
materiality of their substance, not an atom of matter enters into its
composition" (Marx). Commodities "as values" thus possess
a "phantom-like objectivity." This "ghostly" or
"supersensible" character of commodities "as values"
is due to the process of abstraction by which they become substitutable
one for another in the "interminable series of value equations"
which make up the capitalist value system. Marx gives the following
hypothetical by way of illustration:
20 yards of linen = 1
coat or = 10 lbs. tea or = 40 lbs. coffee or = 1 quarter corn or = 2
ounces gold or = ½ ton iron or = &c. (1954: 68)
How could the actual material properties,
or actual individual labor that went into the production of any of these
commodities have any influence on their substitutability for each other
in this value chain? Their materiality makes them incommensurable, whereas
the fact of their exchangeability homogenizes them all through introducing
"something common," a "third term" capable of expressing
their value. The "third term" is not, as one might think,
money, According to Marx, what underwrites all of these substitutions
is the fact that commodities are ultimately "congelation[s] of
undifferentiated human labour" in different magnitudes.
It
cannot be too strongly emphasized that it is not the quality or individual
character of the labor-time that goes into a commodity that matters
to its exchange-value, but only the duration of that labor-time, and
not the actual duration, but only the "socially necessary"
or general average labor-time required for the production of the type
of commodity in question (Marx). The abstraction that characterizes
a commodity's exchange-value is thus, in the final analysis, grounded
in social convention, in "averages" -- not that this makes
its value any less an abstraction. The same goes for the currencies
and weights in terms of which magnitudes of value (i.e. prices) are
expressed, and for the manner in which commodities appear to move relative
to each other on the stock exchange. In the latter case, according to
Marx, the social relations between individual producers come to appear
as relations between the commodities themselves.
The
phantasmagoric or spectral character of Marx's account of capitalist
exchange value is well brought out in the following quotation from Thomas
Keenan:
What remains after the
radical reduction of difference, after the vanishing of all "atoms"
of use value or [individual] productive labor? Its name is ghost,
gespenstige Gegenstandlichkeit, spectral, haunting, surviving objectivity.
... In the rigor of the abstraction [by which commodities become "values"],
only ghosts survive. The point is to exchange them ... Because they
resemble one another, as all ghosts do, having no phenomenal or sensible
features by which to distinguish "themselves," the operation
of which they are the remnant can finally occur. Thanks to their resemblance,
the conditions of exchange are met -- the very exchange that leaves
them, atomless, behind .
There is some question as to the
truth-value of Marx's analysis of commodities from only two perspectives
(i.e. use-value and exchange-value), and his exclusive reliance on a
labour theory of value to account for the magnitudes in which things
are exchanged. For example, Maureen MacKenzie argues that the Telefol
"do not share the same principles of value determination as Marx."
A bilum, for example, is valued
not simply because it
crystallizes productive energy in a measurable amount. Rather it embodies
the endeavour of a particular woman, and objectifies her relationship
with whomever she has made that bilum for. ... Where labour is considered,
it is not its duration but quality that is important (MacKenzie).
Marx would probably have had little
difficulty dispensing with this objection. Telefol society, he would
have noted, belongs with those other
ancient social organisms
of production [which] are, as compared to bourgeois society, extremely
simple and transparent ... [in that they are] founded either on the
immature development of man individually, who has not yet severed the
umbilical cord that unites him with his fellowmen in a primitive tribal
community, or [as in the Asiatic mode of production] upon direct relations
of subjection (Marx).
In other words, the bonds between
persons and between persons and things in pre-capitalist societies are
not subject to the same abstraction that one finds in capitalist society,
where the presumed equality (i.e. interchangeability) of commodities
as of persons rules exchange. Furthermore, it is not the gift relation
but the wage relation (which is actually the guise behind which "surplus
value" is extracted from the labor process) that is the defining
relation of capitalist society.
Commodities as Bundles of Sensory
and Social Relations
In
order to advance our analysis, we must therefore set aside particularist
objections like those of MacKenzie, at least for the time being, and
examine Marx's account of value determination in relation to capitalist
society itself. Questions of truth-value persist nonetheless. To begin
with, for Marx "objectification" (viz. the end product of
the labour process) could mean only one thing -- alienation (Dan). However,
as recent research in the anthropology of consumption has revealed,
goods also "objectify" the symbolic order of society. According
to Grant McCracken,
One of the most important
ways in which cultural categories are substantiated is through the material
objects of a culture .... [Objects are] created according to the blueprint
of culture and to this extent they make the categories of the blueprint
material ... .
Thus, commodities do not only conceal
the social relations of their production, as Marx would have it. The
system of objects also constitutes a framework in terms of which class
and other social distinctions can be and are expressed through
consumption -- that is, through the "assemblages" different
consumers construct by selecting some goods and not others as expressive
of their identity and sense of social location.8
What
is more, it is by virtue of their material, sensuous characteristics
that goods are able to express social relations. Marshall Sahlins gives
the example of how gender differences are articulated in the North American
clothing system:
The masculine fabric is
relatively coarse and stiff, usually heavier, the feminine soft and
fine; apart from the neutral white, masculine colors are darker, feminine
light or pastel. The line in men's clothing is square, with angles and
corners; women's dress emphasizes the curved, the rounded, the flowing
and the fluffy. Such elements of line, texture, and the like are the
minimal constituents, the objective contrasts which convey social meaning
(Sahlins).
Sahlins' objection to Marx's account
of value determination consists in this: "Conceiving the creation
and movement of goods solely from their pecuniary quantities (exchange-value),
one ignores the cultural code of concrete properties governing ... what
is in fact produced" (Sahlins). Conversely, by assuming "that
use-values transparently serve human needs, that is, by virtue of their
evident properties, [Marx] gave away the meaningful relations between
men and objects essential to the comprehension of production in any
historical form" (Sahlins).
The
sensory and social relations embodied in commodities are constitutive
of what could be called their sign-value. The sensuous contrasts and
relations which a given object bodies forth serve to set it off from
other objects belonging to the same cultural category, and so empower
it to signify the social characteristics or "lifestyle" of
its consumer. It will be appreciated how Marx's value chains (e.g. 20
yards of linen = 1 coat or = 10 lbs. tea, etc.), which were intended
to dazzle the reader by accentuating the heterogeneity of use-values
and the homogeneity of exchange-values, occlude the sign-value of commodities.
Marx's value chains focus on equivalencies across different categories
of goods and ignore the play of difference within any given category.
Marx never compares the cut or texture of two coats, for example. Only
1 coat = 10 lbs. tea or = ½ ton iron, etc. To the extent that it ignores
the differences in the similarities (or use-value) to concentrate on
the similarities in the differences (or exchange-value), Marx's theory
of value determination is therefore incomplete. Significantly, these
two dimensions are actually fused in the constitution of the sign-value
of the commodity, as we have just seen.
Two
preliminary conclusions/critiques can be drawn. First, had Marx not
been so preoccupied with exposing the social relations he took to be
concealed in and by the commodity-form, he might have been more appreciative
of the numerous ways in which commodities are everywhere appropriated
to express relations of solidarity or individuation between persons.
Second, had Marx not taken such a reductionistic view of the usefulness
of objects, he might have been more appreciative of the complex ways
in which their sensuous characteristics may be coded culturally.
A
third line of critique has to do with the dim view Marx took of consumption.
Thus, in "Money, or the Circulation of Commodities" (chapter
3 of Capital), Marx invites us to accompany the owner of some
commodity to "the scene of action, the market." There we watch
as "the social circulation of matter" unfolds (i.e. the conversion
of commodity x into money and the re-conversion of the money
into commodity y). "When once a commodity has found a resting
place, where it can serve as a use-value," Marx writes, "it
falls out of the sphere of exchange into that of consumption. But the
former sphere alone interests us at present" -- as indeed it does
throughout Capital. Why? Because "So far as [a commodity]
is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it" (Marx).
By its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, that is all.
Marx
was wrong to treat the sphere of consumption as a "resting-place."
It is no less a "scene of action" than the market or the factory
floor. Indeed, it has become a commonplace of contemporary approaches
to the study of consumer action that:9
consumption needs to be
seen as a production in that as consumers appropriate goods ... there
is a "making" through their particular ways of using or making
sense of them. ... [Attention is drawn to] the "ways of using"
objects, ... which adapt them from the intentions which might have been
behind previous productions (Dant)
We have already seen abundant evidence
of this in our discussion of the Melanesian mode of domestication.
Marx's
obliviousness with respect to the social significance of the sphere
of consumption was directly linked to his elevation, in classic nineteenth
century fashion, of the sphere of production. "Marx focussed on
work as a primary source of meaning, dignity and self-development for
modern man" (Berman). This presumption remains prevalent today,
with the result that all the creativity evidenced by Papua New Guineans
in their domestication of transnational commodities would count for
nothing in the eyes of latter day Marxists. As for Marx himself, he
would have regarded the importance of sensory signifiers and history
of cargo cults in Melanesia as explicable in terms of Melanesian religion
being a "primitive," "fetishistic" religion -- that
is, "a religion of sensuous desire" (see Pietz; Pels).
Primitve
fetishism had its counterpart in bourgeois society, according to Marx,
but in the latter it is no longer idols which are revered but commodities.
Bourgeois society being several social steps up from primitive society,
however, the bourgeoisie is supposed to revere commodities as abstractions
rather than as sensuous objects, as exchange-values rather than as use-values.
(The famous section in Capital on "The Fetishism of Commodities"
is best read as Marx calling upon his contemporaries to come to their
reason, and not, as it were, their senses.) In fact, at the moment in
which a commodity becomes an object of exchange, for Marx, "all
sensuous characteristics are extinguished", and it becomes a "supersensible"
item in an accounting ledger or on a stock market exchange (see Keenan).
Ironically,
therefore, given his understanding of fetishism as a "religion
of sensuous desire," Marx did not perceive how in captitalist society
it might also take the form of a cult of sensuous desire in which commodities
are not just utilitarian articles or suprasensible items of exchange,
nor "mistakenly" perceived as self-moving, but rather potent
bundles of sensory symbolism and social relations. As noted previously,
the industrial capitalism that reigned during Marx's time foregrounded
production and free market exchange, just as it privileged a utilitarian
attitude toward the value of commodities. These processes and attitudes
tend to marginalize the more sensuous or aesthetic characteristics of
the commodity. Now, however, the processes of consumption appear to
drive the forces of production (Bradley and Nolan; Parr) and "sense
appeal" has become an essential attribute of commodities. It could
indeed be argued that our current interest in sensory values is an offshoot
of twentieth-century consumer capitalism in which self-indulgence and
sensory satisfaction have replaced self-discipline and sensory deprivation
as guiding social principles. In the consumer society the most semingly
utilarian of objects, from paper clips to lemon squeezers, come in a
variety of colors and patterns to entice consumers and offer an illusion
at least of personal choice.
While
consumer capitalism is undoubtedly bent on seducing the senses of the
consumer through its marketing techniques, packaging and products, the
consumer need not be passive in her or his response. It is not just
"primitive" Papua New Guineans who in their "ignorance"
invent new uses for consumer products, using baby powder to purify the
dead or lipstick to paint facial designs. As intimated previously, Western
consumers may also make creative uses of products in ways never imagined
by their manufacturers. The drink Kool-Aid, an icon of the mid-twentieth
century middle-class family, is used as a flamboyant hair dye by youths
intent on challenging the staid norms of that era. Barbie and Ken dolls,
intended to socialize girls into conventional gender roles, are collected
and displayed as cult icons by the American gay community. In these
cases certain "appealing" sensory and social attributes of
commodities are creatively appropriated by consumers to elicit a new
set of symbolic meanings. For example, the bright colors of Kool-Aid
drinks, which are meant to signify tastiness and an endearing childish
delight in gaudy hues, instead signify social rebellion, aesthetic freedom
and faddish trendiness when they appear on the heads of yound men and
women. As in Papua New Guinea, Western consumers may appropriate commodities
for their own ends and even use them to challenge the system that produced
them (though ultimately perhaps supporting it).
When
Marx described the bourgeoisie as being alienated from their senses
under capitalism he could not have forseen all the new forms in which
the senses would return to the bourgeoisie in future phases of capitalism.
Nor could Marx, as a result of his progressive renunciation of the Feuerbachian
doctrine of "sense-certainty" (on which more in the next section),
have appreciated the ways in which the sensory signs of commodities
can encode crucial social values. True to the conventional Western division
of body and mind, Marx imagined the impending communist utopia to be
a place where one could engage in the simple physical labors of fishing
or cattle-rearing during the day and in complex critical analysis at
night (see Marx and Engels). Marx did not realize, as his one-time mentor
Fourier did, as the peoples of Papua New Guinea do, and as twenty-first
century consumers increasingly do, that the life of the senses is not
separate from the life of the mind and that procuring and consuming
food and other commodities can themselves be a form of critical analysis.
PART IV: A
SENSORY BIOGRAPHY OF KARL MARX
The Spectre of the Senses in Marx
Louis
Althusser has argued that an "epistemological break" occurs
in the development of Marx's thought in 1845, which separates the "ideological
problematic" of Marx's early work, such as the Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, from the "scientific problematic"
of Marx's mature works, most notably Capital, which was published
in 1867. In what follows, we shall come to discern how, as part of this
epistemological break, Marx distanced himself from sensory concerns
and considerations.
Marx's
early work shows considerable insight into the social and historical
construction of the senses. In The German Ideology, for example,
Marx writes that "the sensuous world ... is, not a thing given
direct from all eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of
industry and of the state of society ... in the sense that it is a historical
product" (Marx and Engels). Marx arrives at this insight by way
of critiquing Feuerbach for identifying reality with sensation and ignoring
the social factors involved in the creation of any particular sensory
world. Thus, when Feuerbach tells us that we may find certainty by looking
at a cherry tree, Marx retorts that:
The cherry-tree, like
almost all fruit-trees was, as is well known, transplanted by commerce
into our zone, and therefore only by this action of a definite
society in a definite age [it has become "sensuous certainty"
for Feuerbach] (Marx and Engels).
Marx would have been guided to this
conclusion by his reading of Fourier, who was highly sensitive to the
effects of commerce on the "sensescape".
By
integrating Feuerbach's philosophical notion of the senses as ways of
knowing with Fourier's political and economic analysis of the social
role of the senses (as discussed in a previous section), Marx's early
work seemed to promise that the senses would occupy the same prominence
in Marxist theory as they had in the work of Fourier and Feuerbach.
In Marx's later work, however, the senses seem to wither away and to
retain only a phantasmal presence. What alienated Marx from his senses?
One
answer is that Marx did not feel comfortable with the intense sensuality
of Fourier and Feuerbach's philosophy. As has often been pointed out,
Marx was a bourgeois moralist (for all his attacks on bourgeois society)
and had elevated notions of human fulfillment (see Wheen ), whence his
inability to stomach either the apparent sensory libertinism of Fourier,
with its utopian amatory revels, or the apparent sensory reductionism
of Feuerbach, with its championing of food as the essence of life. Marx
himself was "properly vague and philosophical when he depicted
man's relationship to the sensate world of objects, human and natural"
(Manuel).
Similarly
to most nineteenth century thinkers (including the anthropologists discussed
in chapter one of this book), Marx ranked taste, touch and smell as
"primitive" senses in comparison to the more "civilized"
senses of sight and hearing. His work, indeed, suggests that the hoped-for
revolution (i.e. the coming-to-be of socialist society) will involve
an elevation from the "lower" senses -- the physical realm
of the worker who "only feels himself freely active in his animal
functions -- eating, drinking, procreating" (Marx) -- to the "higher"
senses of sight and hearing -- "a musical ear, an eye for beauty
of form" (Marx) -- and then beyond, to "criticiz[ing]"
(Marx and Engels) and the abstract world of thought.
While
dreaming of a social revolution, Marx was evidently not ready for a
sensory revolution. Not so Fourier, who turned the conventional Western
hierarchy of the senses on its head by rating taste and touch as the
highest senses. For Fourier the interest of the working classes in "eating,
drinking, procreating" was not so much evidence of their degradation
as it was of the physical and social primacy of taste and touch. Fourier's
utopia, Harmony, is consequently rich in satisfactions for these two
favoured senses. These satisfactions, however, are not all of an immediate
physical nature. Fourier held that taste and touch could provide the
basis for valuable intellectual stimulation and development. Thus in
Harmony, for example, the "gastrosopher," or gustatory savant,
replaces the European philosopher, to, in Fourier's opinion, the benefit
of all (Classen).
While
more staid than Fourier in his sensory imaginary, Feuerbach also had
a high regard for the "lower" senses, and particularly for
taste. His best-known phrase, in fact, is "Man is what he eats",
and he meant this not only in a physiological sense but in a social
sense: "Human fare is the foundation of human culture and disposition"
(cited in Hook). In Principles of the Philosophy of the Future,
Feuerbach further held that "even the lowest senses, smell and
taste, [can] elevate themselves in man to intellectual and scientific
acts". Indeed, Feuerbach, in words reminiscent of Fourier, calls
philosophers fools "who fail to see that your teeth have long ago
cracked the nut upon which you are still breaking your heads" (cited
in Hook). For Feuerbach, "food is the beginning of wisdom."
However, from a conventional standpoint, and one which Marx apparently
held too, Feuerbach's, like Fourier's, enthusiasm for the "lower"
senses constituted "`degenerate' sensationalism" and the least
enlightening aspect of his philosophy (see Hook).10
Marx's
marginalization of the senses in his theory of capitalist exchange might
well have been reinforced by his own personal circumstances. For example,
Marx continually strove to rise above the often pressing need to feed,
clothe and house himself and his family and concentrate on the intellectual
pursuits he valued so highly (Stallybrass 1998). Even more distressing,
in later life Marx constantly suffered from malodorous, disfiguring
boils or carbuncles which errupted all over his body causing him great
mental and physical anguish.
He was confronted
three or four times a day with the dreadful evidence of physical corruption.
The appalling odors, the red sores, the swelling and the pus were all
revealed when the bandages were removed, and there seemed to be no way
of keeping them under control (Payne).
Marx's letters repeatedly convey
his disgust at being at the mercy of a diseased, repulsive body which
prevents him from pursuing his researches and writings (see Padover;
Payne).11 One of the treatments prescribed for his boils,
indeed, was to abstain from intellectual labor (Manuel).
Significantly,
Marx's epidermal ailments occur in the "scientific" phase
of his work in which the body and the senses are largely left behind
as subjects for theoretical elaboration. "He wrote the last few
pages of Volume One [of Capital] standing at his desk when an
eruption of boils around the rump made sitting too painful" (Wheen).
It would not be surprising, under these circumstances, for Marx to harbor
a distaste, and even an enmity, for his body, and for corporeality in
general.
Ultimately,
however, the primary reason for Marx's refusal to engage with the senses
in his later work is his growing desire to appear scientific (and therefore
suitably "disembodied"). Sensory qualities tended to be dismissed
by the science of his day -- in which Marx was widely read -- as unimportant
and subjective compared to such quantifiable characteristics as measure
and weight. The result was a world which Alfred North Whitehead has
described as "a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless;
merely the hurrying of material" (cited in Classen). The notion
governing this scientific transcendence of sensoriality was that underlying
principles must needs be abstracted from sensory appearances. When Marx
begins to think of his economic theories as constituting a science (in
Capital he presents himself as the founder of a new science) he
takes on some of the incorporeal language and attitudes of the scientist.
Indeed, Marx, has been described as "possessed by analogies to
the physical sciences" (Manuel).
One
lacuna which results from Marx's transcendence of sensuality is that,
unlike Fourier, he is never able or willing to present a concrete vision
of the utopia which will result from his economic reforms. (As noted
previously, in The German Ideology he briefly posits "a
pastoral realm of freedom in which socialist man may be able to hunt,
fish, and criticize as he pleases" (Kempel; Marx and Engels), but
this sketch is nowhere developed further.) Another is that, as we have
seen, Marx passes over the fact that the sensuous properties of commodities
are the medium through which cultural codes are expressed. This omission
is all the more glaring in light of Marx's insistence on the importance
of practice as a means of changing social reality and his earlier criticism
of Feuerbach as concerned with "sensory thinking" to the neglect
of "sensibility as a practical... activity" and sensory objects
as socially mediated (see Hook). In fact, Marx's characterization of
the use-value of commodities as "transparent," means that
one can pass right through all of the sensory signs which may be encoded
in them.12 The mystery, for Marx, does not reside in the
ways an object is used or experienced -- "so far as it is a value
in use there is nothing mysterious about it" (Marx) -- only in
what happens when it is exchanged. And at that point, according to Marx,
the commodity strips off its sensuous form to become only an atomless
ghost (Keenan): "As use-values, commodities are, above all, of
different qualities, but as exchange-values they are merely different
quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use-value"
(Marx). Marx is never quite able to present commodities as completely
disembodied, however. Even in their ghostly form Marx describes them
as offering phantasmal seductions -- they cast "wooing glances"
(at money) -- and spectral warnings -- they admonish consumers not to
mistake them as use-values (Marx 1954).
Significantly,
the one sensory field which Marx assiduously mines for examples and
metaphors in his scientific -- or quantity over quality -- phase is
that of sight. Marx's visual references are due in part to the close
association of sight with reason and science. While he uses visual metaphors
to refer to intellectual clarity, however, the characteristic of sight
which most attracts Marx is its capacity to distort and deceive, to
turn things upside down and create mirror images. This illusory quality
of sight enables him to make analogies to social and economic processes
which he believes also deceive our understanding through false appearances.
Thus, for example, in The German Ideology he writes:
If in all ideology
men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura,
this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process
as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process
(Marx and Engels).
In Capital references
to visual delusions are multiplied and we enter a world of "false
semblances" and "mirrors," with only Marx to guide us
to the truth which shines behind the mask of appearances (Wheen). "Scientific
truth is always paradox," Marx states, "if judged by everyday
experience, which catches only the delusive nature of things" (cited
in Wheen ).
In
his later work, therefore, Marx rejects the sensory certainty of Feuerbach
and replaces it with scientific certainty. Whereas Feuerbach tells us
we may find certainty by looking at a cherry tree (and, later in his
philosophical development, by eating the cherries), Marx tells us that
sensory experience is illusory, but that the scientific laws which underlie
it, the laws of dialectical materialism, are not. In Capital,
therefore, the senses become ghosts which remind us of the spectral
world of appearances but do not obstruct our penetration of the underlying
economic realities, according to Marx.
Finally,
the rapidity with which Marx strips commodities of their sensuous form
in order to discuss them as pure exchange values may reflect a personal
desire to shed his own "false" carbuncled skin in order to
reveal the powerful force of his intellect. However, even Marx's skin
takes on a spectral role in relation to his work. He describes his physical
ailments as having influenced his writing and Engels points to certain
passages in Capital where Marx's "carbuncles have left their
mark" (cited in Wheen). Thus ghostly traces of Marx's own problematic
physical form are left on his "scientific" exposition of the
forces of the market (contrary to Derrida 1994). "At all events,"
Marx commented to Engels, "I hope the bourgeoisie will remember
my carbuncles to their dying day" (cited in Wheen).
* The final version of this
essay appears as Chapter 8 of Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses
in Culture and Social Theory (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Press, 2003). Please see that chapter for figures, references and bibliography,
and please only cite the published version of this essay.
