Spivak's Theory of Value as 'cooking the books'.

Scatterbrained Spivak published some scattered thoughts on the Question of Value back in '85. Alarmingly it is still being quoted by poor Indian students who think it might actually mean something.

She begins, characteristically enough, with a magisterial sounding non sequitur-

 One of the determinations of the question of value is the predication of the subject.

The value a subject places on an object could be predicated of the subject. Thus one could say, if Adam places of value of £10 on this cake, then 'values this cake at £10 is a predicate of Adam.
However, this tautology doesn't really tell us anything about the question of value. Adam may be wrong to value the cake at £10 because it contains a poison. Equally, it may be wrong for Adam to value objects of any type at all because only if he values nothing will he avoid a Kavka's toxin.

The question of value may be wholly independent of 'the predication of the subject'. Indeed the question may have no value in itself. As a matter of fact, Value theory has ceased to concern Economics. The so called 'paradox of value' is now dismissed as naive.

Still, it may be worthwhile clarifying the Economic background to this question.
Firstly, it should be understood that Value is objective if there is a higher overriding purpose to an activity or resource allocation. The constrained optimum, with respect to that overriding purpose, has a mathematical dual which yields 'shadow prices' of a substantive sort.
  Kantorovitch, the Soviet Economics Nobel Laureate,  once claimed that his method actually calculated 'labour value' though Marx had said such value wouldn't exist under Socialism.
 It is possible, at least theoretically, to use these shadow prices to allocate resources- including labour- in an efficient manner. Notice, that these shadow prices still arise even if no human subject is involved and the optimization problem features only machines or inanimate objects.
Here, clearly, the question of value- though treated rigorously- has no determination in the predication of the subject.

Even if it is not possible to aggregate information efficiently, and thus calculate shadow prices in a substantive matter, under certain special circumstances- no externalities, non convexities, transaction costs, uncertainty etc- there is still an objective determination by the market of the question of value. Here, the preferences of agents, which depend on the utility they derive, have free expression so as to determine market prices. However, even in this case, if there is information asymmetry such that at least one agent knows of a superior outcome for the market, then a correlated equilibrium based on public signals from that agent will determine the price vector.

Where there is no acknowledged higher overriding purpose, nor information asymmetry or other type of market failure, but rather choice can and should be freely made, then and only then is Value subjective or predicatable of a subject. I value having hair on my scalp and might pay for a hair tonic. You may value not having any hair on your head and pay a barber to shave your skull.

Here the subject determines the value of an object or an idea or concept or ethical code or aesthetic practice.

A subject may be constrained to value things in a certain way for strategic or tactical reasons or by reason of some coercive force. One such force might be 'epistemic'- i.e. having to do with what is considered to be knowledge producing or having to follow a stipulated method of arriving at justified true belief. We may go so far as to speak of 'epistemic violence'- if some intersubjective norm is being flagrantly violated in the process. Otherwise we may speak of fraud or chicanery.

Only if there is no acknowledged higher overriding purpose to an activity and if there is no epistemic violence or chicanery is it the case that the predication of the subject can be a determination of value.

Spivak's next non sequitur is the statement-

The modern "idealist" predication of the subject is consciousness.

This is foolish. In modern time it is understood that the subject may have no consciousness at all of their 'revealed preference' arising from their actual behaviour.

Labor-power is a "materialist" predication

Is it? Horsepower is materialist. Labour power isn't because human labour can be used in very many more different ways, What horses can do doesn't change very much. What men can do does.

Hegel had a peculiar theory of predication which stressed spirit or 'mind' as characterising the Subject which was also Reality and this reappeared in Marx as some sort of economic doctrine. This is what Spivak is gesturing at. But the gesture fails because Spivak writes badly. She has made a mockery of both Hegel and Marx both of whom stressed the creativity of the Human Subject as transforming Reality as it maintains itself.

Next, she mangles phenomenology-

Consciousness is not thought, but rather the subject's irreducible intendedness towards the object.

Rubbish! Nobody and nothing has 'irreducibly intendedness' towards any object. Why? Objects are largely interchangeable and some symbolic substitute may serve just as well. For Phenomenology, there is either an eidetic or a dialectic relationship between Subject and Object such that the same transcendental movement can be made as when considering Humanity as central to and transformative of Reality. Spivak's brutalist prose has made a mockery of any such nuance.

Correspondingly, labor-power is not work (labor), but rather the irreducible possibility that the subject be more than adequate - super-adequate- to itself, labor-power: "it distinguishes itself [unterscheidet sich] from the ordinary crowd of commodities in that its use creates value, and a greater value than it costs itself" [Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 342; translation modified].

Spivak has mangled and misstated Marx in a bizarre and idiosyncratic way. Labour-power isn't an impossibility- viz. being super-adequate to itself (i.e. producing more than it is paid) no matter what the wage rate or how the worker happens to be feeling. There is no 'irreducible possibility' that my services to a factory would ever be worth £1,000,000 per hour. Indeed, because I'm a lazy bum, the actual figure would be much less. Yet, Spivak asserts that this utterly mad impossibility is predicated of me as a subject.

 All Marx is saying is that you can buy labour power like you buy wheat or gold. The reason you buy labour power is because you expect to receive a larger benefit than the amount you will expend by way of wages.
If you are a businessman, you will try to squeeze more profit out of your workers.
There is one big difference between labour and things like gold or wheat. Workers have biological needs that must be met for them to work. There is a limit beyond which the Capitalist can't squeeze profit out of the worker.

Marx died a long time ago. He is not modern at all. Like Smith he is a Classical Economist who thought that price ratios must ultimately be determined by the amount of labour expended. He also thought that the price of labour would be related to the cost of labour's ability to reproduce itself. He was wrong.

What happens when Spivak tries to use this wrong type of pre-modern economics to illuminate what she herself values as a teacher of literature?

Before I embark on the generalized project, I will set forth a practical deconstructivist feminist-Marxist position on the question of value in a narrow disciplinary context. The issue of value surfaces in literary criticism with reference to canon-formation.

This is not true. Canon-formation is only important for people who are setting a curriculum. Thus a person who has no liking for literature or aptitude for literary criticism may nevertheless construct a curriculum which specifies a literary canon.
Economic theory explains why an Educational Credential in a wholly worthless subject nevertheless overcomes an 'information asymmetry' problem by functioning as a screening or signalling mechanism.
Spivak comes from India. People were forced to cram some worthless literary canon or the other so as to pass exams and gain lucrative appointments in the bureaucracy.

A literary criticism which genuinely valued literature would not prostitute itself to a Credentialised Academy providing a signalling or screening mechanism for students eager to appropriate bureaucratic or political rents of one description or another.

From this narrowed perspective, the first move is a counter-question: why a canon? What is the ethico-political agenda that operates a canon?

The answer is that a canon is sustained by the fees paid by students or other subventions made on their behalf. The ethico-political agenda of the providers of the money is what is decisive. If that agenda is based on a love for literature and a desire for good literary criticism- one sort of outcome will arise. The subject will attract teachers of high literary quality and will produce students of high literary ability. If not, the market will be adversely selective. Its Professors will write badly and have no appreciation of literature and its students will be mindless sycophants.

By way of a critique of phallogocentrism, the deconstructive impulse attempts to decenter the desire for the canon.

Lovers of literature have no desire for a canon. They want to continually broaden their horizons. The proper practice of literary criticism enables them to find beauty and meaning in what others might disregard.
Similarly, the mathematician who loves mathematics has no desire for a mathematical canon. The swot who wants to become Senior Wrangler so as to get a high paid job may desire a canon. But, experience has shown us, he isn't a mathematician at all. He is a waste of space. Even as a quant, he won't make good. Let him get into some bureaucratic racket or stock market swindle and leave the subject alone.

A critique of phallogocentrism may have a pleasing literary shape. It may involve some alethic felicity of a critical kind. But it wouldn't 'attempt to decenter the desire for the canon'. This is because desire still exists even if it is decentered. Any canon is 'Phallogocentrist' in that the source of what may be seminal has been arbitrarily restricted in advance. Decentring the desire for it only creates more orifices for it to penetrate

Charting the agenda of phallocentrism involves the feminist, that of logocentrism the Marxist interested in patterns of domination.

Did Lenin chart the agenda of logocentrism? Did Mao? What about Castro? They were Marxists who were interested in patterns of domination who succeeded in changing those patterns in their own favour.
Did the Suffragettes 'chart the agenda of phallocentrism'? Was Equal Pay legislation the product of any such nonsense?

Yet for a deconstructive critic it is a truism that a full undoing of the canon-apocrypha opposition, like the undoing of any opposition, is impossible.

There can only be apocrypha, as opposed to Scripture, in a Revealed Religion. If you don't believe in God or the Supernatural, then no canon-apocrypha distinction exists. If you do believe in God or the Supernatural you ought not to want to deconstruct anything.

("The impossibility of a full undoing" is the curious definitive predication of deconstruction.)

So deconstruction is futile. It is a waste of time.

When we feminist Marxists are ourselves moved by a desire for alternative canon-formations, we work with varieties of and variations upon the old standards. Here the critic's obligation seems to be a scrupulous declaration of "interest." 

Okay. Feminist Marxists want to change the curriculum and teach stuff they like. Fair enough. They are free to do so. It appears they are rather stupid and can only proceed by imitating non Feminists and non Marxists- but, fair play to them.

 We cannot avoid a kind of historico-political standard that the "disinterested" academy dismisses as "pathos." That standard emerges, mired in overdeterminations, in answer to the kinds of counter-questions of which the following is an example: What subject-effects were systematically effaced and trained to efface themselves so that a canonic norm might emerge?

Well, we know that various different examining boards at different places and times have constructed a literary canon for Credentialist purposes. In some of these instances, we can interview people involved and find out what 'subject-effects were systematically effaced' or 'were trained to efface themselves' so that such and such change in the canon was made.
There is a passage in Vikram Seth's 'A Suitable Boy' where we see a decision of this sort being made by the English Department of a University in newly independent India.
This isn't exactly earth-shaking stuff- but an entertaining book of some literary merit might come of it. We can imagine the lesbian Professor falling silent when someone mentions Radcliffe Hall and the Catholic Professor looking distressed when someone mentions Joyce.
The trouble is, that sort of genteel drama had lost salience in the Seventies.  The battle had been lost and won.

Since, considered from this perspective, literary canon-formation is seen to work within a much broader network of successful epistemic violence, questions of this kind are asked not only by feminist and Marxist critics, but also by anti-imperialist deconstructivists.

What's that? Anti-imperialist deconstructivists are asking the same question as Feminists and Marxists? Why? In 1985, Imperialism was as dead as the dodo! By contrast, a large section of the globe was Marxist while Feminism had made great strides in the previous two decades.

Such counter-questions and declarations are often seen as constituting the new Marxist (feminist-deconstructivist) point of view on literary value. Since I share the point of view they subtend, I place them on the threshold of my essay as I move into my more generalized (more abstract?) concerns.

So, the 'new Marxist (feminist-deconstructivist) view on literary value is that literature has no value save in some context to do with a canon or a curriculum and there too it has to do with an 'epistemic violence' it is powerless to 'fully undo'.

Spivak, poor thing, was paid to teach Literature- so she couldn't take the obvious road and just quit the subject saying it was worthless.
What road did she take instead?

The first distinction to make, then, is that the point of view above focuses on domination. Concentrating on the desire for the canon, on the complicity with old standards, and on epistemic violence, the practical perspective of the discipline in the narrow sense need do no more than persistently clean up (or muddy) the "idealist" field as it nourishes the question of value.

The dominant leads. It is hegemonic. The subaltern can't lead. It can't even speak according to Spivak. So she has to dominate her field in order to speak. The alternative would be doing something others wanted her to do.
How should she dominate that field? Just by doing nothing 'more than persistently cleaning up or muddying' the field? No. Something more is called for-

Any consideration of the question of value in its "materialist" predication must, however, examine Marx's investigation of exploitation.

Marx says the guy who makes stuff is exploited because he is paid less than the value of what he makes. Marx was talking about goods, not services. He meant the guy who makes the violin is paid less than the value of the violin. A violin player is a different case. Some are paid a lot of money. Some aren't paid at all. This situation doesn't really fit with the labour theory of value. One could say- 'ah! but the good violin player spent many years perfecting his craft!' The problem is that the bad violin player may have done the same thing. Marx could see  no way to equalise labour power in services.

Literature isn't like a violin. Nor is literary criticism nor teaching a literary canon. These things aren't goods, they are services. Marx excludes them from his theory of value and his theory of exploitation. However, this isn't really a big problem. We can imagine the employer pitilessly making the violin player perform for more hours necessary than to cover his wage. We can think of grub street hacks being forced to write potboilers which make a lot of money for the publisher while leaving them a bare margin of subsistence. We can certainly sympathise with an underpaid Teaching assistant having to teach literature, or some impecunious Assistant Professor having to dash off literary theory by the yard in order to secure tenure.

I can imagine young academics in '85 thrilling to this rather oblique but still effective description of their predicament.
I suppose, in those days elderly publishers or professors would say 'Literature's worth can't be measured in money. It is a privilege to write- you shouldn't expect to be paid for it. The same goes for teaching it or theorising about it'.

Spivak, in her brutalist style, is challenging the notion that Literature is something worthwhile in itself- at least for those who teach it. It's just a job and in any job either you are exploited or you cheat your employer. It is as simple as that. So the real question is- how is one to cheat your students- or whoever it is that is paying you- out of a literary education.

Spivak's answer is brazen- the books must be cooked. That's her theory of literary value- Bernie Madoff made the same discovery in another context at about the same time.

On the level of intellectual-historical gossip, the story of Marx's investigation of exploitation is well-known. Around 1857, Marx set out to unpack the concept-phenomenon money in response to the analyses and crisis-managerial suggestions of Frederic Bastiat and Henry Charles Carey, and to the utopian socialist projects endorsed by Proudhon. It is our task to suggest that, by lifting the lid of that seemingly unified concept-phenomenon, Marx uncovered the economic text. Some times it seems that cooking is a better figure than weaving when one speaks of the text, although the latter has etymological sanction. Lifting the lid, Marx discovers that the pot of the economic is forever on the boil. What cooks (in all senses of this enigmatic expression) is Value.

What is this 'intellectual-historical gossip' Spivak refers to? Marx did not 'investigate exploitation'. He was a doctrinaire Ricardian and took pride in  deducing its ubiquity from first principles. He said silly things about Carey not realising that in America it really was true that lower productivity land was used first and so diminishing returns in agriculture did not arise. Marx had lived in France and so his sarcasms directed at Bastiat hit the mark- though we now know he was wrong.

Why is it Spivak's task to say 'Marx lifted the lid off the boiling pot of the Economic in order to discover that it was boiling'? The lid would be rattling and steam escaping in any case. There is no need to lift the lid and risk being scalded.

Spivak doesn't tell us. Why? She is engaged in intellectual fraud. She is 'cooking the books' so as to create the impression she knows from Economics and Philosophy.

It is our task also to suggest that, however avant-gardist it may sound, in this uncovering Value is seen to escape the onto-phenomenological question.

 The onto-phenomenological question has to do with whether something 'out there' has been grasped in the mind. The word did not sound 'avant-gardist' in 1985. It sounded retarded. It was the sort of thing which might have featured in a Monty Python sketch ten years previously.

Why was it Spivak's task to suggest such retarded shite? How did it help 'Marxist Feminists'? All she did is fool a few people more stupid and ignorant than herself.

It is also our task to emphasize that this is not merely asking ourselves to attend once again to the embarrassment of the final economic determinant but that, if the subject has a "materialist" predication, the question of value necessarily receives a textualized answer.

Spivak is pretending that Marx's theory of value is 'textual' and thus can be deconstructed. In other words, her worthless expertise in Derrida's shite grants her salience in interpreting Marx.
How does she do it?
She says 'if the subject has a 'materialist' predication'- which it doesn't because there is no 'man-power' similar to 'horse-power'- then there is a text corresponding to the 'question of value'.  Unfortunately that text would be numerical, not linguistic. Deconstruction has no place.

 There is no Freudian interpretation of a price list. There is no Heideggerian Destruktion of an input-output table.  Nietzche, it is true, was once sodomised by the multiplication table but he couldn't tell anyone about it because by then he was a drooling catatonic.

 Why is Spivak writing this shit? The answer is that some French Professor of French (which he actually knew) had written some typically confused Gallic shite reconciling Marx and Freud and Jerry Lewis. Spivak, as a Feminist, felt obliged to write even stupider shite. How did she manage it?  Goux stuck to discussing actual literary texts- like Piers Plowman. So he was just talking bollocks about literature- which is what Professors are supposed to do. Spivak talks even more ignorant bollocks without linking it to any text. She is saying that the reality that Marxist Feminists confront is completely fictitious. It has about as much salience to the lives of ordinary people as does the text of some medieval poem like Piers Plowman.

 Goux could be said to inject Marxism or Feminism into the study of literature. Spivak says that Marxist Feminism only exists in this sort of tendentious literary theory which nobody bothers with.

Spivak wins. She outdid not just Goux but even Derrida and Deleuze. She has disclosed in an onto-phenomenological manner that their common subject is sheer nonsense.

Let us first deal with the continuist version of Marx's scheme of value. Here is a crude summary: use-value is in play when a human being produces and uses up the product (or uses up the unproduced) immediately. Nonsense! Every good has a use value no matter how acquired. Exchange-value emerges when one thing is substituted for another. Rubbish! I substitute Butter for Margarine. No Exchange Value emerges. Before the emergence of the money-form, exchange-value is ad hoc. Wrong yet again! It is either coercive, conventional or the subject of a bargaining problem.  Surplus-value is created when some value is produced for nothing. Rubbish! A windfall isn't surplus value. Yet even in this continuist version value seems to escape the onto-phenomenological question: what is it (ti esti). How? Either a thing is useful or it isn't. Experience teaches us how useful a thing is for various purposes including exchange and trade. The usual answer- value is the representation of objectified labor- begs the question of usevalue. Not according to your theory. If you bake a cake and eat it- according to you that is usevalue. How is that value not the representation of your objectified labour?  This continuist version is not absent in Marx, and certainly not absent in Engels. It is wholly absent because nobody apart from you has ever had such a stupid theory. The intimations of discontinuity are most noticeably covered over in the move from the seven notebooks now collectively called the Grundrisse to the finished Capital I. Rubbish! There are no 'intimations of discontinuity' because both are poorly reasoned piles of shite. It is a secondary revision of this version that yields the standard of measurement, indeed the calculus that emerges in the move from Capital I to Capital Ill. Where is this standard of measurement? It doesn't exist. Nobody anywhere ever has been able to say what the correct price ratios of commodities should be according to Marx's theory.  Continuity or discontinuity don't matter when the thing itself does not exist. 

Vestiges of the "primary" continuist version linger in Derrida, whose version clearly animates Jean-Joseph Goux's Numismatiques, where most of the supporting evidence is taken from Capital I. Goux was part of the madness of '68 and he wrote the sort of shite people did back then. Marx had a shite theory. So did Freud. So did Lacan. So did Derrida. And, yes, Goux could only write shite because he was drawing on shite. It doesn't matter which particular version of shite he drew upon because it was all shite anyway. Goux's reading, squaring the labor theory of value with the theories of ego-formation and signification in Freud and the early Lacan, is a rather special case of analogizing between consciousness and labor-power. Since my reading might seem superficially to resemble his, I will point at the unexamined presence of continuism in Goux in the next few paragraphs

Basically you're ripping off Goux and then pretending your version is better because you are basing it on a later or earlier version of some shite Marx wrote.
Was anyone taken in by this chicanery?

Goux's study seems ostensibly to issue from the French school of thought that respects discontinuities. Which school is that? Not Althusser's who speaks of an epistemological break between the Hegelian Marx and the Classical Economist. Not Malinvaud's or any other French Leftist Economist. It appears this 'French school of thought' which respects discontinuities (i.e. discovers a non Ricardian Marx) doesn't actually exist.  Derrida gave Numismatiques his endorsement in "White Mythology," itself an important essay in the argument for discontinuity (see Margins of Philosophy 215 and passim). How can this essay be 'an argument for discontinuity' when you tell us that Derrida thought surplus value was 'interest' or 'capital appreciation'? That's just stupid. How important can that essay be if, as you believe, it contains so gross an error? The truth is Derrida doesn't 'endorse Goux but cites him along with Althusser and Balibar in a footnote. Nor does he actually say surplus value is 'interest'. Instead he says that 'metaphysicians' like using coins which have been wholly worn away by usage because they 'systematically prefer such loss-which is to say such unlimited surplus value-in choosing, for example, concepts which are negative in form, ab-solute, in-finite, in-tangible, not-being' In other words, metaphysicians are fucked in the head. Since Derrida shtick is whining about metaphysicians- which is equally fucked in the head- he naturally talks bollocks. These are his offending lines- '
 'We may detect here the double bearing of the French word usure (though Anatole France does not actually use this word), of which we may offer the following accounts, although they remain inseparable: first, obviously, the word means that "wear" of which we have been speaking-erasure by rubbing, or exhaustion, or crumbling; but secondly, it has also the sense of "usury"-the additional product of a certain capital, the process of exchange which, far from losing the stake, would make that original wealth bear fruit, would increase the return from it in the form of income, of higher interest, of a kind of linguistic surplus value'. A coin which is thoroughly worn out isn't a coin because no one can tell which mint issued it or what denomination it represents. It is useless and worthless. Crazy meta physicians in some story by Anatole France (not a smart guy or clear thinker by any means) may be depicted as having some crazy attachment to such worthless dross. Linguistic surplus value means the words they use are sustained by nothing, they are 'cheap talk', but still some spurious 'costly signal' of cogitation could be attributed to them- if you are stupid enough to believe they aint shite and the whole thing isn't an imposture. Derrida, of course, in writing worthless shite about a shite belle lettrist piece by Anatole fucking France is no better than the metaphysicians he is whining about. The whole thing is an imposture- a swindle. It is not the case that Derrida has produced a theory of surplus value in these two throwaway remarks as stupid as all the other throwaway remarks in White Mythologies' pile of shite. Yet, Spivak pretends otherwise. Why? Well, she's got her own Brown Mythology to burnish- turd though it is.  Goux takes the continuist version of the value-schema outlined above as given in Marx, though of course he elaborates upon it somewhat. Within that general continuist framework, then, Goux concentrates upon a unilinear version of the development of the money-form and draws an exact isomorphic analogy (he insists upon this) between it and the Freudian account of the emergence of genital sexuality. So, it seems he was impartially ignorant of both Ricardian theory and Freud's own work. He concentrates next on Marx's perception that the commodity which becomes the universal equivalent must be excluded from the commodity function for that very reason. There is no such 'perception' in Marx. He spoke only of a social act or convention. The commodity function is not changed thereby. The thing still has to be produced.  Gold does not cease to be a commodity which has to be dug out of the ground just because Society adopts a convention that gold will henceforth act as the unit of account and measure of value. Nor does a commodity- say a painting- turn into gold because it is described as being worth ten gold coins. Here the analogy, again, resolutely isomorphic, is with Lacan's account of the emergence of the phallus as transcendental signifier. (For an early succinct account see Jacques Lacan, "The Signification of the Phallus.") Here is the claim: "It is the same genetic process, it is the same principle of discontinuous and progressive structuration which commands the accession to normative sovereignty of gold, the father and the phallus. The phallus is the universal equivalent of subjects; just as gold is the universal equivalent of products" [Goux 77; translation mine]. Why did Goux write this shite after the world had gone of gold? Did he think the francs or dollars he was paid corresponded to bullion in the vaults of the Central Bank? Gold has no 'normative sovereignty'. Nor does the father. Nor does the phallus. Why pretend otherwise? How fucking stupid are you? Goux's establishment of a relationship between Marx and Lacan in terms of gold and the phallus is based on his reading of exchange as mirroring and thus a reading of the origin of Value in the Lacanian "mirror-phase." Which doesn't exist and was in any case plagiarised. Goux does notice that exchange value arises out of superfluity, but the question of use-value he leaves aside, perhaps even as an embarrassment.

Oh dear. Spivak thinks exchange value arises out of superfluity. She does not know that Bengali peasants had to sell a portion of their grain even though they did not have enough to eat. Often this meant that female members of the household died of starvation. Many Bengalis died like this in the big famine of '74. Spivak must have read about in the papers. Perhaps, she thought good old Uncle Sam had fixed the problem. No peasant anywhere had to realize an exchange value save as a result o superfluity. Thus, no big problem remained. Everybody was happy just exchanging things superfluous to themselves. No wonder Spivak thinks 'Marxist Feminists' don't really need to bother with Reality anymore. Their main job is to dump on male literary theorists writing bollocks about some novel by Andre Gide or some medieval English poem.

In the Sixties, the French insisted on buying Gold from the US at the Bretton Woods price. US citizens weren't allowed to own gold at that time. French greed contributed to the collapse of the Bretton Woods system. The whole world had been 'off' gold- even in the notional Bretton Woods sense- for more than a decade when Spivak wrote this.
Similarly, Freudian 'neurosis'- the Oedipus complex and other such shite- had been removed as a diagnostic category from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980, five years before Spivak published this essay. Yet she says

Goux's argument is ingenious, but in the long run it seems to be an exercise in the domestication of Marx's analysis of Value.

How can Goux's argument be 'ingenious' when both the Gold standard and Freudian neurosis had been dismissed as shibboleths? Marxism, it is true, appeared to be going strong- Gorbachev was considered an international statesman superior to Ronald Reagan- but it collapsed five years later in a 'scissors crisis' because the Party gave up direct control of the Economy.

No doubt there are general morphological similarities between centralized sign-formations.

Fiat money may be 'centralised sign-formation'. Specie money isn't. Nor can Freudian shite- like 'penis envy'- be 'centralised.'

But in order to see in those similarities the structural essence of the formations thus analogized, it is necessary to exclude the fields of force that make them heterogeneous, indeed discontinuous.

No. In order to see stupid shite, it is enough to be as stupid as shite. It is not necessary to exclude some imaginary fields of force which are making things heterogenous or discontinuous.

It is to forget that Marx's critique of money is functionally different from Freud's attitude toward genitalism or Lacan's toward the phallus.

D'uh! Marx wasn't pretending to be a Doctor curing an imaginary illness for real money.

It is to exclude those relationships between the ego/phallus and money that are attributive and supportive and not analogical.

Actually, money is attributive and supportive of both the ego and the dick. There may be no analogical relationship here but there is a correlation between having a lot of money and having a big ego and being an almighty dick. Harvey Weinstein wasn't exactly a mendicant you know.

Spivak must mean the opposite of what she has written. Scratch that. She doesn't mean anything at all.

(Inheritance in the male line by way of patronymic legitimacy, indirectly sustaining the complex lines of class-formation, is, for example, an area where the case of the money-form, and that of the ego-form in the dialectic of the phallus, support each other and lend the subject the attributes of class- and gender identity.) But Spivak, under Hindu law post 1955, inherits equally from the father. Did this change her gender? It is also to overlook the fact that Marx is a materialist dialectical thinker when he approaches the seemingly unified concept-phenomenon money.

Marx was a stupid shithead who wrote- 'It is plain that commodities cannot go to market and make exchanges of their own account. We must, therefore, have recourse to their guardians, who are also their owners Commodities are things, and therefore without power of resistance against man. If they are wanting in docility he can use force; in other words, he can take possession of them.'
Wow! That sure is profound! Here we were innocently thinking that wheat went to market by itself and it turns out it can't do so because it is a thing. It has no will of its own. Only the owner of the wheat or its guardian or psychiatric social worker can take it to market. Gee whizz! That Marx sure was a swell 'materialist dialectical thinker' coz he sussed that inanimate objects can't go to market by themselves. 

It is not the unilinear progressive account of the emergence of the money-form (Goux's model) that is Marx's main "discovery."

Aha! So it was Marx's discovery! You falsely accused Goux of overlooking something and then a couple of sentences later say, Goux didn't overlook it all.

It is in the full account of value-formation that the textuality of Marx's argument (rather than the recuperable continuist schema) and the place of use value is demonstrated, and the predication of the subject as labor-power (irreducible structural super-adequationthe subject defined by its capacity to produce more than itself) shows its importance.

There is no full account of value-formation in Marx. That's why we don't know what his theory would predict to be the correct price ratio between shoes and wheat. Something which doesn't exist has no textuality.
A 'recuperable continuist schema' can have a description as a Markov chain and this is what Soviet mathematical economists gave it. That's why the Soviet Union grew so rapidly despite Stalin's bloody-minded bungling.

(To draw an adequate analogy between the emergence of the money-form and the Oedipal scenario is also to conserve the European Marx.

Why? Are Europeans not capable of rejecting the Oedipal scenario in the same manner as the American Psychiatric Association? Are European Marxist Feminists utterly useless?

It is in my political interest to join forces with those Marxists who would rescue Marxism from its European provenance.

Marx was European. To 'rescue Marxism from its European provenance' why not simply say he was Ethiopian and spent his working life in a Calcutta brothel? After all, the only way you can change Marxism's provenance is by telling a lie. So why not this lie rather some other?

It is not surprising that in a later book Goux argues for a kinship between Marx and Freud in terms of their Jewish heritage. This argument may well be cogent, but it should not be seen as clinching the question of the historical differential in the geopolitical situation of Marxism and psychoanalysis.)

No. What would clinch the question is saying Marx was an Ethiopian rent-boy in Ballygunge whereas Freud was a lesbian walrus living in Paraguay. If Literary 'value' means 'cooking the books' why not go the whole hog- or walrus?

Spivak writes in a footnote to this sentence-

The better part of my essay will concern itself with what the question of value becomes when determined by a "materialist" subject-predications such as Marx's (footnote). Spivak is lying. She gives no account whatsoever of a theory of value of a materialist sort.This is a theoretical enterprise requiring a certain level of generality whose particular political implications I have tabulated in passing and in conclusion. There are no political implications at all in this essay. Spivak is just pretending her shite means something but what that something is she can't tell us. Why? It is utterly meaningless. Here it is in my interest to treat the theory-politics opposition as if intact. What 'theory-politics' opposition is Spivak talking about? She wasn't involved in politics. She was an academic as were the people she quotes. They were shite theorists and political nonentities.

(footnote) Any serious consideration of this question must take into account Georg Simmel's monumental Philosophy of Money (trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978)  Why? Simmel was a silly Sociologist who  had zero influence on monetary theory. My differences with Simmel are considerable. Because you are even stupider and an even worse writer. He writes in a brilliantly analogical vein that cannot acknowledge the discontinuity between "idealist"and "materialist" predications.  Why not? Surely, Simmel- a German- could write that sort of shite by the yard? Although he is technically aware of the argument from surplus-value, he is basically interested in value-in-exchange. His anti-socialism is thus directed against a pre-Marxian socialism. His few references to Marx, as the translators note in their admirable introduction, do not betray knowledge of the Marxian text. Yet I have also been deeply influenced by his meditations upon the relationship between money and individualism and upon the beginnings of what Volosinov later called "behavioral ideology"; in a certain way even by his cogitation upon woman as commodity. In these respects, he should be distinguished from both the Engels of the Origin of the Family and the Weber of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Spivak says she is interested in a materialist interpretation of Marx's theory of value. Why does she not examine a Nobel Prize winning Soviet economist's materialist theory of precisely that thing? Why is she mentioning Simmel- who died in 1918? His 'Philosophy of Money' was disproved by the lived-experience of the First World War. The fact is Germany and Japan had only been able to go on Gold thanks to reparations payments from France and China respectively. Thus the 'homogenising' effect of money was made possible by predatory militarism. Simmel, poor booby, lived in a Beidermeier dreamworld. The Frankfurt school's Adorno was chased out of Germany by the bare boobs of his students. Why mention Voloshinov? He disappeared in 1934. Clearly, it was Stalin's theory of language which won that particular battle.

Economics is a materialist theory. The interpretation of an Economic theory is an input-output table or set of matrices denominated in material terms. Marx's theory of Value is an Economic theory. What some German Sociologists or Russian linguist wrote is wholly irrelevant.

Spivak's ignorance of Economics causes her to write-

In comparison to these problems, the problem of winning Marx over to structuralist formalism would be a minor one, were it not that Anglo-U.S. continuist interests tend to lump together all attempts to read Marx in a structuralist way.

Was there a 'structuralist formalism' of Marx's theory of Value? Of course! Debreu was a Bourbakian. No difficulty arose in recasting Kantorovich or Morishima's Marxist theories of value in Arrow-Debreu's formalism. However, by the mid Seventies, the theory had become 'anything goes' because of results from Sonnenschien, Mantel, Debreu, Kirman etc. Still, Chichilnisky & Heard's notion of 'limited arbitrage' defused the resulting scandal. The 'Anglo-US' had plenty of Marxist mathematical economists. They, quite naturally, rejected Althusser because he was a lunatic who wrote nonsense.

The main enemy is here seen to be Althusser. Although I am critical of Althusser in many details of his argument, I would also pay tribute to a certain forgotten Althusser, precisely against the spirit of constructing phantom scapegoats, a personality-cultism in reverse.

He murdered his wife. So naturally Spivak- as a 'Marxist Feminist' feels obliged to pay tribute to him.

Derrida innocently contributes to this by putting Althusser and Goux together in "White Mythology." If one looks up nothing but the references given by Derrida to certain passages in Reading Capital, one sees immediately that Althusser's attempt, for better or for worse, is to read Marx's text through the straining logic of the metaphors in the Marxian text. Goux's continuist reading proceeds by way of certain slippages. I will draw my discussion of Goux to a close by citing only one: It seems unwise to suggest, as Goux does, that because exchange springs up within what is superfluous to a person's use, the exclusion of the universal symbol of value (the moneymaterial) from the commodity function is therefore due to being-in-excess. By the Marxian argument, all value is in excess of use-value. Nonsense! Marx says ' The utility of a thing makes it a use value... they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth. In the form of society we are about to consider, they are, in addition, the material depositories of exchange value.'  There is no 'value in excess of use value'. All value is use value. If a thing is useless, it has no value no matter how much labour went into it. But Value is not therefore excluded. The universal symbol measures this excess (or "deficit,"as Goux correctly notes) and is excluded from the commodity function so that it does not, inconveniently, operate on two registers at once, both measuring and carrying Value. This is not true of specie money. Gold or silver or even bitcoins are costly to produce. Even fiat money has a 'cost'- in terms of inflationary expectations giving rise to a signal-extraction problem- and thus are regulated with reference to price stability. (The only limited analogy here is that the theory of the phallus must exclude its penis-function.) The 'theory of the phallus' is nonsense. It is not an analogy to mathematically rigorous work done by Marxist Economists.  This is to collapse value, exchange-value, surplus value and money by way of an inflation of the concept of excess. There is no notion of 'excess' in Marx or Marxian economic theory. In fact Goux, when he notices Marx's frequent metaphorizations of money as monarch, seems to elide the important differences between value-theory and theories of state formation. There is no difference between value theory and the theory of state formation provided services receive the same treatment as goods. States provide public goods. If they finance those public goods in an incentive compatible manner then the State survives. If not, like Gorbachev's Soviet Union- they go down the pan.

In opening the lid of Money as a seemingly unitary phenomenon, Marx discovers a
forever-seething chain in the pot: Value- Money- Capital. Sheer nonsense! Money isn't a problem for Marxism or Keynesianism or Arrow-Debreu type Value Theory. What is a problem is 'hedging' and 'income effects' which arise from Knightian Uncertainty- but Marx had no intimation about the nature of this problem. Indeed, it isn't any big scandal for the Left because so long as some people are poor or suffer social exclusion there is bound to be some substantive measure that can be taken to overcome that poverty or exclusion. All that matters is taking those measures and then financing them in an incentive compatible manner.

As in Hegel - of course Marx is not always a Hegelian but he seems to be here-those arrows are not irreversible.  Logical schemes are not necessarily identical with chronological ones. But for purposes of philosophical cogitation and revolutionary agitation, the self-determination of the concept capital can be turned backward and forward and every which way. (Perhaps it was the relative ease of the former and the insurmountable difficulties of the latter that led Marx to question philosophical justice) Can 'philosophical cogitation' and 'revolutionary agitation' really turn 'the self determination of the concept Capital' every which way? No. People will recoil from such 'cogitation' and 'agitation'. It will be wholly self-defeating. The thing will turn into a Monty Python sketch watched by 'Dagenham Man' who will then go and vote Tory. Cogitation should clarify and stabilise the concepts it uses. Agitation should involve substantive demands which are incentive compatible and improve allocative and dynamic efficiency. Talking worthless nonsense about 'logophallocentrism' is just a Credentialised Academy's Ponzi scheme which secures rents for careerists whose writing has no 'use value' within the academic field- Literature, in Spivak's case- they are being paid to teach.

 Value representation- Money- transformation- Capital. (My account here is a rough summary of "The Chapter on Money," and section 1 of "The Chapter on Capital" in the Grundrisse.) This chain is "textual" in the general sense on at least two counts

Spivak here gives a footnote-
 Textual criticism of this sort assumes, a) in the narrow sense, that even "theoretical" texts are produced in language, an unwarranted assumption- Physics, like Economics, has 'theoretical texts'- they are not 'produced in language' but have a mathematical representation which may not be computable at all  and, b) that "reality" is a fabrication out of discontinuities and constitutive differences with "origins" and "ends" that are provisional and shifting. A person whose 'reality' is a fabrication is a lunatic. He may murder his wife or pretend to be a psychiatrist. "One no longer has a tripartition between a field of reality, the world, a field of representation, the book, and a field of subjectivity, the author. But an arrangement [agencement] puts in connection certain multiplicities drawn in each of these orders, so much that a book does not have its continuation in the following book nor its object in the world, nor yet its subject in one or more authors" [Deleuze and Guattari, Mille plateaux 34; translation mine]. Which is why Deleuze & Guattari's theories remained wholly inconsequential. Neither Psychiatry nor Economics acknowledges their work as other than shite.

 The two ends are open, and the unified names of the relationships harbor discontinuities. Exigencies of space will not permit elaboration of what is at any rate obvious- from the details of everyday life, through the practical mechanics of crisis-management, to the tough reasonableness of a book like Beyond the Waste Land (eds. Samuel Bowles et al.) -that the self-determination of capital as such is to date open-ended at the start. Bowles & Gintis are respectable Economists whose work actually guides policy- more especially in the voluntary sector. That moment is customarily sealed off in conventional Marxist political economic theory by extending the chain one step: Labor representation Value representation transformation Labor Value Money Capital. Conventional Marxist political economy doesn't seal off anything with a Labour theory of Value anymore than Adam Smith sealed off anything with his Labour theory of Value for Free Market ideologues. In fact, the basic premise of the recent critique of the labor theory of value is predicated on the assumption that, according to Marx, Value represents Labor. This is the same theory as Locke and Smith and Ricardo- viz. that 'intermingling' of labour is what creates Value. Spivak however gives this footnote-

I  refer to this critique at greater length below. Here a brief checklist will suffice: Piero Sraffa, Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (Cambridge: Cambridge. University Press, 1960); Samir Amin, The Law of Value and Historical Materialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978); Diane Elson, ed., Value: The Representation of Labor in Capitalism (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979); lan Steedman, Marx After Sraffa (London: Verso Edition, 1981); lan Steedman, et al., The Value Controversy (London: Verso Edition, 19 If Spivak actually read any of these books why does she think that saying 'Value arises out of Labour power' 'closes off anything'?

Yet the definition of Value in Marx establishes it as not only a representation but also a differential.

Aha! Now we get to the root of Spivak's misology. She thinks Marx said 'Value' is a 'representation'. He did not such thing. He said 'Value' is 'utility' gained at the time the good is consumed. The value of a cake is the pleasure gained by eating it. It is not a representation of the cake that you can look at while your mouth waters.
Furthermore, such value is not a 'differential' nor an 'increment'. It is an event. The point about Sraffa's work is that he showed that the neo-classical theory of Capital suffered from the same aggregation problem as the Marxist Labour theory of Value. However, the advantage was on the side of the Marxists because we can always distinguish a 'worker' from an 'entrepreneur'- because they are differently remunerated- whereas there is no way of telling when a 'capital good' becomes a 'consumer good' and vice versa.

What is represented or represents itself in the commodity-differential is Value: A material object can't 'represent itself'. It has no consciousness. Marx is talking about how things present themselves to us- i.e. how things appear to us. There is no 'representation' going on here at all.  "In the exchange-relation of commodities their exchange-value appeared to us as totally independent of their use-value. But if we abstract their use-value from the product of labor, we obtain their value, as it has just been defined. The common element that represents itself (sich darstellt) in the exchange-relation of the exchange-value of the commodity, is thus value" [Capital 1 128; translation modified].  It is true that market prices are determined by Supply and Demand rather than a Central Planner's decision regarding 'utility'. Marxists believe that the Market will undervalue somethings and overvalue other things in a pathological manner. The broad Left, too, points to these aberrations which may be termed 'market failure'. However, Central Planners too can make equally pathological errors- for example overvaluing guns and undervaluing butter. But, the reason for these errors is not some occult force connected to 'representation' because no such phenomena actually arise. Things don't 'represent themselves'. People may be deluded by a mere appearance. Both Markets and Planners make mistakes for this reason.Marx is writing, then, of a differential representing itself or being represented by an agency ("we") no more fixable than the empty and ad hoc place of the investigator or community of investigators (in the fields of economics, planning, business management).  Marx, whatever his other faults, did not write anything so foolish. He has not used the term 'differential' nor spoken of things 'representing themselves' even through the agency of 'false consciousness'. Some Religious thinkers do believe that objects can have occult powers.  Thus they may differentiate between meat from which blood has not been drained and which thus possesses an occult power to render the consumer bestial and meat which has been sacrificed according to a particular ritual and is thus safe to eat.  There may have been Marxists who ascribed similar occult properties to Coca Cola- as opposed to Pepsi Cola after Nixon succeeded in introducing the latter into Brezhnev's Soviet Union. However, Marxist Economic theory did not subscribe to any such lunacy. Only the continuist urge that I have already described can represent this differential as representing labor, even if "labor" is taken only to imply "as objectified in the commodity." If there is a 'continuist urge' then Utility and Production functions display convexity. 'Memoryless' Markov chains can model the underlying Time series. 

Marxist Economists were well aware of non-convexity as causing market failure and arresting the 'law of equalisation of profits'. They redefined everything in terms of Matrix algebra. Kantorovitch's results are couched in those terms. No doubt there is indeterminacy in the Transition matrix but this does not mean that there is no underlying Markov process. After all, Uncertainty is a feature of the World. Still, since nothing 'represents labour' except its needs and desires for 'use value', there is no great scandal for the Left. All that needs to be done is to identify and prioritize unmet needs and then go ahead and meet those needs in an efficient manner. If there are preference revelation or aggregation problems then Economists should do 'incentive compatible mechanism design' so that those needs are met in a decentralised manner. It can be justly claimed that one passage in Capital I cannot be adduced to bear the burden of an entire argument. No passage in Marx can be adduced to bear upon a wholly spurious argument that things have some occult power to 'represent themselves' while going off on holiday.We must, however, remember that we are dealing here with the definitive passage on Value upon which Marx placed his imprimatur. So, Spivak admits that Marx has already 'definitively' settled the hash of her bogus problem. For ease of argument and calculation, it is precisely the subtle openendedness at the origin of the economic chain or text seen in this passage that Marx must himself sometimes jettison; or, for perspectivizing the argument, must "transform." (For a consideration of the "transformation" problem in this sense, see Richard D. Wolff et al., "Marx's (Not Ricardo's) 'Transformation Problem': A Radical Conceptualization," History of Political Economy 14:4 [1982].) . This is sheer nonsense. The 'Transformation Problem' arises because Marx believed in the law of equalisation of profit. Wolff et al. did read Althusser as a way of muddying neo-Ricardian waters but failed to achieve anything and so they took up more socially useful work. I will presently go on to argue that the complexity of the notion of use-value also problematizes the origin of the chain of value. There is no complexity to use value at all. People use stuff and get utility- that is use value- out of that stuff. That is all. Let us now consider the discontinuities harbored by the unified terms that name the relationships between the individual semantemes on that chain. A semanteme denotes a definite image or idea. What discontinuities can be harboured by 'terms that name the relationships between semantemes'? None unless these 'unified terms' are themselves semantemes. But, the semanteme is always clear and distinct. If 'unified terms' pretending to 'name the relationships' between such semantemes are 'discontinuous' it is because they are stupid or meaningless. Such resident discontinuities also textualize the chain. Spivak believes texts are stupid and meaningless. Why? Because she is paid money to teach texts. She hates her job. She feels she is being exploited. Why else would she be a 'Marxist Feminist'? She pretends that Marxist Economics has a textual, not mathematical, representation. She then pretends that some 'unifying terms' exist which represent Marx's clear and distinct semantemes. Finally she asserts that those 'unifying terms' she has herself invented are meaningless shite. This is easy to do because only she was stupid enough to believe they 'unified' anything.

 First, the relationship named "representation" between Value and Money. This relationship does not exist in Marxist Economics, or, indeed, in conventional Mathematical Economics. Why? Money has no occult power.  Critics like Goux or Marc Shell comment on the developmental narrative entailed by the emergence of the Money-form as the general representer of Value and establish an adequate analogy between this narrative on the one hand and narratives of psycho-sexuality or languageproduction on the other. (See Marc Shell, Money, Language, and Thought: Literary andPhilosophical Economies From the Medieval to the Modern Era. It should be remarked that Shell's narrative account of the history of money is less subtle than Marx's analysis of it.)

Marc Shell did not 'establish an adequate analogy' between any narratives. He is a literary critic entirely ignorant of Mathematics. His 'narrative account' of the history of money is utter shite. That is why Economists don't quote him.

My focus is on Marx's effort to open up the seemingly unified phenomenon of Money through the radical methodology of the dialectic-opening up, in other words, the seemingly positive phenomenon of money through the work of the negative.

Marx made no effort to 'open up' a non existent phenomenon. He repented his Hegelianism and came out as an Anglo-Saxon empiricial economist. Why focus on something which does not exist? In 1985, a large part of the globe was Marxist and featured 'repressed inflation'- i.e. queues, not price changes, signalled excess demand.

At each moment of the three-part perspective, Marx seems to indicate the possibility of an indeterminacy rather than stop at a contradiction, which is the articulative driving force of the dialectical morphology.

Sez you- not the actual Nobel Prize winning Soviet Economists who influenced policy in Marxist countries.

Here is the schema, distilled from the Grundrisse: Position: The money commodity-the precious metal as medium of universal exchange - is posited through a process of separation from its own being as a commodity exchangeable for itself: meaningless Hegelian shite. Gold is not separated from its own being when it is coined. No commodity is exchanged for itself. We don't go to the shop and hand over wheat to buy an equal quantity of wheat.  "From the outset they represent superfluity, the form in which wealth originally appears [urspringlich erscheint]" [Grundrisse 166; translation modified]. Yup! Marx was as stupid as shit. He thought silver- which is a precious metal- is inoxidizable. He is writing nonsense here- but that then he was a careless writer whose brains had been buggered to buggery by Hegelian shite. As it facilitates commodity exchange "the simple fact that the commodity exists doubly, in one aspect as a specific product whose natural form of existence ideally contains (latently contains) its exchange value, and in the other aspect as manifest exchange value (money), in which all connection with the natural form of the product is stripped away again-this double, differentiated existence must develop into a difference" [147]. Laboured nonsense on a par with saying 'commodities can't come to market on their own'.  Marx may not have noticed that silver oxidizes but surely even he could see with his own eyes that the gold sovereigns Engels gave him were gold- not anything 'stripped away from gold's natural form'. When the traffic of exchange is in labor-power as commodity, the model leads not only to difference but to indifference: "In the developed system of exchange . . . the ties of personal dependence, of distinctions, of education, etc. are in fact exploded, ripped up ... ; and individuals seem independent (this is an independence which is at bottom merely an illusion, and it is more correctly called indifference [Gleichg altgkeit- im Sinne der Indifferenz -Marx emphasizes the philosophical quality of indifference]" [163]. Wow! Marx sure was one stupid dude. He didn't notice that distinctions like education didn't get ripped up by the Labour market- they commanded an economic rent. Negation: Within circulation seen as a constantly repeated circle or totality, money is a vanishing moment facilitating the exchange of two commodities. Nonsense. Within 'circulation as a totality', the monetary base is a stock which does not vanish at all. Here its independent positing is seen as "a negative relation to circulation," for, "cut off from all relation to [circulation], it would not be money, but merely a simple natural object" [217]. Marx was writing nonsense. He didn't understand that any contraction in the monetary base would lead to a contraction in 'circulation'- i.e. there would be fewer transactions. This is why Economists avoid reading Marx. Still, one can't get away from the fact that Marxist Economics can be, and on occasion, has been very successful in raising living standards.  In this moment of appearance its positive identity is negated in a more subtle way as well: "If a fake ? were to circulate in the place of a real one, it would render absolutely the same service in circulation as a whole as if it were genuine" [210]. In philosophical language: the self-adequation of the idea, itself contingent upon a negative relationship, here between the idea of money and circulation as totality, works in the service of a functional in-adequation (fake = real).

Okay- this shows why Marx abandoned Hegelian psilosophy and put aside the Grundisse. Fake money does not have the 'same service in circulation' as if it were genuine. Why? Gresham's Law applies. Marx, poor fellow, was reading about Gresham in the British Library when not off his head on drink. 

Negation of negation: Realization, where the actual quantity of money matters and capital accumulation starts. Yet here too the substantive specificity is contradicted (as it is not in unproductive hoarding). For, "to dissolve the things accumulated in individual gratifications is to realize them" [234]. Rubbish! To dissolve something is to lose it- not to realize it.

What Marx in his buffoonish manner says is a childish error- viz. that of thinking money is different from fungible 'near money' or Credit- He writes ' On the other side, as material representative of general wealth, it is realized only by being thrown back into circulation, to disappear in exchange for the singular, particular modes of wealth. This is not true. When money is entrusted to a banker, credit creation occurs. My money is safe and can be withdrawn at any time. I can write cheques on my account which are as good as money. In fact, a new deposit causes the total amount of credit to rise by a multiplier. Less fungible assets- like houses and carriages and so on- too have some measure of liquidity and become the basis of Credit creation. 

Marx, poor fool, was writing old fashioned fustian when he says  'It remains in circulation, as medium of circulation; but for the accumulating individual, it is lost, and this disappearance is the only possible way to secure it as wealth. Where is the disappearance? You put money in the bank and you still have it. You buy Treasury Bills or Consols and you still have it. You buy more or less fungible assets and you retain some measure of liquidity. To dissolve the things accumulated in individual gratifications is to realize them. Individual gratification can be found in purchasing fungible assets. Indeed any asset will have some degree of liquidity. Wealth is about having your cake and eating it too. The wealthier you are the more likely it is that the furniture or paintings or houses you buy will keep their value. 

Marx makes us feel sorry for rich people who have a lot of money to spend when he writes- 'The money may then be again stored up by other individuals, but then the same process begins anew. I can really posit its being for myself only by giving it up as mere being for others. If I want to cling to it, it evaporates in my hand to become a mere phantom of real wealth.' Suppose he'd been rich and bought rather than rented his house. Its value would have gone up. The same would have been true about his furniture and lares et penates. 

 In other words, logical progression to accumulation can only be operated by its own rupture, releasing the commodity from the circuit of capital production into consumption in a simulacrum of use-value. Only if there is no 'fractional reserve banking' or functioning financial markets or system of Credit worth the name. I am suggesting that Marx indicates the possibility of an indeterminacy rather than only a contradiction at each of these three moments constitutive of the chain Value representation Money transtormation Capital. You are suggesting ignorant shite because you don't understand Credit Creation whereas any 16 year old with a GCSE in Econ does. This textualization can be summarized as follows: the utopian socialists seemed to be working on the assumption that money is the root of all evil: a positive origin. Marx applies the dialectic to this root and breaks it up through the work of the negative. Nope. He talks ignorant shite about how like money disappears when you buy a fungible asset- boo hoo! At each step of the dialectic something seems to lead off into the openendedness of textuality: indifference, inadequation, rupture. There is no dialectic here- only an ignorance of GCSE Economics. (Here Derrida's implied critique of the dialectic as organized by the movement of semantemes and by the strategic exclusion of syncategoremes ["White Mythology" 270] would support the conduct of Marx's text.)

Why is this fucked? Marx had to show that stupid utopianism of the 'abolish money!' sort was unworkable because of the purely economic need for a medium of exchange which overcame the 'double coincidence of wants' problem for barter. He may have tried Hegelian methods but, thankfully, recognised that they yielded nonsense. So he wrote a book in the Anglo Saxon empirical tradition- still disfigured, it is true, by his incorrigible stupidity but with less of the scholastic stink of the unreconstructed Teuton. 
But, Marx did care for poor people. He wanted them to have a better life. He may have been as stupid as shit, but his heart was in the right place.
That's why Marxism attracted smart mathematical economists like Slutsky. Stupid literary critics may have written worthless books featuring Marxian terms but they had no influence because their policy recommendations were crazy.

Let us move next to the relationship named "transformation between Money and Capital," a relationship already broached in the previous link. (This is not identical with the "transformation problem" in economics.)

In which case it doesn't exist in Marxist theory because Economic forces alone determine everything else. A 'Transformation problem' which is not Economic is just part of Engelian 'false consciousness'. It may look like a short-cut and some careerists may personally profit from it, but the thing is a chimera.

An important locus of discontinuity here is the so called primitive or originary accumulation.  It is not important at all- it is a 'just so story' of the English empiricist type. Marx's own account emphasizes the discontinuity in comical terms, and then resolves it by invoking a process rather than an origin:  We have seen how money is transformed into capital; how surplus-value is made through capital, and how more capital is made from surplus-value. But the accumulation of capital presupposes surplus-value; surplus-value presupposes capitalist production; capitalist production presupposes the availability of considerable masses of capital and labor-power in the hands of commodity producers. The whole movement, therefore, seems to turn around in a never-ending circle, which we can only get out of by assuming a "primitive" [urspriinglich: originary] accumulation . .. which precedes capitalist accumulation; an accumulation which is not the result of the capitalist mode of production but its point of departure. This primitive accumulation plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. [Capital I 873] Marx's resolution: The capital-relation presupposes a complete separation between the workers and the ownership of the conditions for the realization of their labor .... So-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. [Capital 1 874-75] This method of displacing questions of origin into questions of process is part of Marx's general Hegelian heritage, as witness his early treatment, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, of the question: "Who begot the first man, and nature in general?" [Early Writings 357].

Marx was publishing his masterwork at about the time when America was abolishing slavery and Russia serfdom. Furthermore, he lived in Empirical England- not some Young Hegelian Germany circa '48. He'd have looked a fool if he'd denied that America was more 'advanced' than Europe though it still featured slavery.

When, however, capital is fully developed - the structural moment when the process of extraction, appropriation, and realization of surplus-value begins to operate with no extraeconomic coercions- capital logic emerges to give birth to capital as such. Yes, that's what happens. The logic of something gives birth to something else. That is entirely in keeping with materialist philosophy. This moment does not arise either with the coercive extraction of surplus-value in pre-capitalist modes of production, or with the accumulation of interest capital or merchant's capital (accumulation out of buying cheap and selling dear). Why did the moment not arise? Because some logic or the other hadn't got preggers and so couldn't give birth to it.  The moment, as Marx emphasizes, entails the historical possibility of the definitive predication of the subject as labor-power. Yes! The logic of capital won't open its legs till it sees the 'historical possibility of the definitive predication of the subject as labour power' has occurred. If you say, 'Darling, howsabout a little nookie?', it looks very shocked and outraged. It says 'You beast! Can't you see the definitive predication of the subject as labour-power has not occurred? Don't you understand that if you stick your dick into me I'll get preggers and give birth to 'Capital as such' before the historical possibility of something or other has been properly entailed? Mum was right about you. You just want me for my body.' Indeed, it is possible to suggest that the "freeing" of labor-power may be a description of the social possibility of this predication. Only coz the logic of Capital got preggers. Here the subject is predicated as structurally super-adequate to itself, definitively productive of surplus-labor over necessary labor. Nonsense. Capitalism can arise during a Malthusian crisis. Some workers- those with below subsistence marginal product- perish. Others- with a marginal product above the wage- survive. Just saying 'labour is now free', or passing a law to that effect, won't magically cause any predication of super-adequacy to any subject. And no, before you ask, it won't get the 'logic of Capital' preggers. 

Why is Spivak fixated on this 'materialist predication of the subject as labour'. Does she deny that the slave-owner, or serf-owner could be such a subject? If Marx predicated 'structural super-adequation' to such subjects then they produced the very surplus value they ostentatiously consumed. Marx may have been a particularly unfortunate victim of Hegelian moonshine- but he genuinely wanted to help poor people. That's why he tried to study Economics.

And because it is this necessary possibility of the subject's definitive super-adequation that is the origin of capital as such, Marx makes the extraordinary suggestion that Capital consumes the use-value of labor power.

 Marx said something simple- viz. the worker has probably earned his wage within the first few hours of his working day. The remainder of the time he is making profit for the Entrepreneur and thus increasing the capitalised value of the Enterprise. What is extraordinary about this suggestion? Does Spivak believe that employers did not know they were paying less for their workers than they were getting by selling the finished product?

If the critique of political economy were simply a question of restoring a society of use-value, this would be an aporetic moment.

Spivak doesn't understand that all value is use-value for Marx, for Smith, for Debreu, for everybody- except some religious nutjobs or paranoid people who believe things can have occult powers.
What 'aporetic moment' has Economics every faced in this context? We all decided long ago, that there was an alethic theory of value and any writer who continued to beg the question was bound to end up writing nonsense.

"Scientific socialism" contrasts itself to a "utopian socialism" committed to such a restoration by presupposing labor outside of capital logic or wage-labor. The radical heterogeneity entailed in that presupposition was dealt with only very generally by Marx from the early Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts onwards.

There is no 'radical heterogeneity' here at all. Provided Marx's law of the equalisation of profits is empirically valid, utopian socialism has the same horizon as 'scientific socialism'. In any case, Capitalism will suffer from increasing crises so the proletariat will inevitably be homogenized and univocal.

Indeed, it may perhaps be said that, in revolutionary practice, the "interest" in social justice "unreasonably" introduces the force of illogic into the good use-value fit-philosophical justice- between Capital and Free Labor.

No, it may not be said. Interest in social justice is reasonable.  Revolutionary practice may be misguided but Marxian Revolutionary practice needn't be- at least according to Marxist Economists. Spivak may believe otherwise. Certainly, the 'Sen-Dobb' thesis- which dictates further starving Calcutta's already malnourished workers so as to build 'State Capitalism'- is horribly evil. But that was a pathology of Amartya Sen's- not that of any sane Marxist Economist- like Anwar Shaikh.

If pursued to its logical consequence, revolutionary practice must be persistent because it can carry no theoretico-teleological justification.

Okay- Spivak is saying those Maoists be kray-kray. Fair enough.

It is perhaps not altogether fanciful to call this situation of open-endedness an insertion into textuality.

Provided, by textuality you mean the diary of genocidal lunatic.

The more prudent notion of associated labor in maximized social productivity working according to "those foundations of the forms that are common to all social modes of production" is an alternative that restricts the force of such an insertion [Capital III 1016]. In the continuist romantic anti-capitalist version, it is precisely the place of use-value (and simple exchange or barter based on use-value) that seems to offer the most secure anchor of social "value" in a vague way, even as academic economics reduces use-value to mere physical co-efficients.

Yup. That's what good economists do- they economise on costly inputs so as to produce more utility in aggregate. If they didn't reduce utility to physical co-efficients- like the number of calories, or amount of protein, or specific vitamins- they wouldn't be doing their job. Some, like Amartya Sen, might still get a Nobel as the 'Mother Theresa' of Economics- but their own people will turn against them and deride them as self-seeking careerists who have tried to wreck their own country.

This place can happily accommodate word-processors (of which more later) as well as independent commodity production (hand-sewn leather sandals), our students' complaint that they read literature for pleasure not interpretation, as well as most of our "creative" colleagues' amused contempt for criticism beyond the review, and mainstream critics' hostility to "theory."

What's wrong with word processors? They are a good thing. They reduce the number of trees which have to be chopped down. As for 'hand sewn leather sandals'- they both look good and feel good to wear. Why mention them?

Why are you angry with your students that they 'read for pleasure'? Is literature not meant to be pleasurable? Why not?

Your 'creative colleagues' amused contempt' for you is justified because you write badly and don't understand even the basics of the subject you are pontificating on.

In my reading, on the other hand, it is use-value that puts the entire textual chain of Value into question and thus allows us a glimpse of the possibility that even textualization (which is already an advance upon the control implicit in linguistic or semiotic reductionism) may be no more than a way of holding randomness at bay.

Spivak says things don't have utility. Like Sen- who decided that starving people don't need food, they need 'entitlements'- Spivak thinks that Value does not exist because utility does not exist. Even 'textualisation'- i.e. treating the Economic realm as a book that Derrida can interpret in any way he likes- won't keep 'randomness at bay'. Thus, the commuter buying a train ticket may suddenly turn into a butterfly rather than arrive at his place of work. Wow! Spivak you are blowing my mind!

For use-value, in the classic way of deconstructive levers, is both outside and inside the system of value-determinations (for a discussion of deconstructive "levers," see Derrida, Positions 71).

Nope. Use-value is utility. It is eating a sandwich and feeling full in your tummy. It is not a 'deconstructive lever' because it is not something linguistic.

It is outside because it cannot be measured by the labor theory of value- it is outside of the circuit of exchange: "A thing can be a use-value without being a value" [Capital I 131].

 Marx is speaking of 'free goods'- like clean air and water. We now know that these free goods are in fact scarce which is why there will be a market failure involving polluting industries. The 'social cost' can be stipulated in terms of the labour theory of value by using Kantorovich's 'shadow prices'.

It is, however, not altogether outside the circuit of exchange. Exchange-value, which in some respects is the species-term of Value, is also a superfluity or a parasite of use-value: "This character (of exchange) does not yet dominate production as a whole, but concerns only its superfluity and is hence itself more or less superfluous . . . an accidental enlargement of the sphere of satisfactions, enjoyments .... It therefore takes place only at a few points (originally at the borders of the natural communities, in their contact with strangers" [Grundrisse 204].

Marx changed his mind about this because, clearly, poor people were being exploited despite having no 'superfluity'. Famines in Ireland and Victorian India and, later on, even Tzarist Russia showed this very clearly.

The part-whole relationship is here turned inside out. (Derrida calls this "invagination." See "The Law of Genre," Glyph 7 [1980]. My discussion of "invagination is to be found in Displacement: Derrida and After, ed. Mark Krupnick 186-89.) The parasitic part (exchangevalue) is also the species term of the whole, thus allowing use-value the normative inside place of the host as well as banishing it as that which must be subtracted so that Value can be defined. Further, since one case of use-value can be that of the worker wishing to consume the (affect of the) work itself, that necessary possibility renders indeterminate the "materialist" predication of the subject as labor-power or super-adequation as calibrated and organized by the logic of capital.

But, these considerations are what caused Marx to give up his infatuation with Hegelian Jurisprudence and settle for Anglo Saxon Empirical Economics.
The 'materialist predication' of the subject as labour is wordy nonsense. It is not something Economists bother with. Why? It is meaningless.

In terms of that necessarily possible "special case," this predication can no longer be seen as the excess of surplus labor over socially necessary labor.

 Surplus labour means there is an excess supply of workers at the current wage rate. If this is the subsistence level- then some workers starve. 'Socially necessary labour' means how a given labour force could be most productively employed. It is likely that this would create food and other necessities greatly in excess of that required to feed even unemployed people.

There is a reason good people became Marxists. They believed that there was a better way to order society so that, for example, Bengalis might escape the two terrible famines which occurred during Spivak's own lifetime.

The question of affectively necessary labor brings in the attendant question of desire and thus questions in yet another way the mere philosophical justice of capital logic without necessarily shifting into utopian idealism.

OMG! Bengalis were starving. Why pose 'the attendant question of desire' when it was bleeding obvious that these people desired nutritious food, clean water and medicines to check the outbreak of epidemics?
Spivak, it is true, lived in affluent America where rich people can talk about the ambiguities of desire as opposed to the brute fact of need. Still, she needn't have been so shameless as to pretend that Marxists are as callous as people of that sort.

If a view of affectively necessary labor (as possible within the present state of socialized consumer capitalism) as labor as such is proposed without careful attention to the international division of labor, its fate may be a mere political avant-gardism.

May be? This is worthless careerist, Credentialist, shite not avant-gardism or activism of any stripe. There is no 'international division of labour'. That theory was exploded in the Fifties. What there is, is 'inter-industry trade'.

This, in spite of its sincere evocations of the world economic system, is, I believe, a possible problem with Antonio Negri's theory of zerowork.8 The resistance of the syncategoremes strategically excluded from the system so that the great semantemes can control its morphology (Derrida) can perhaps be related to the heterogeneity of use-value as a private grammar.

 A syncategoreme is merely a logical connective with no meaning of its own. If you exclude logical connectives from a sentence featuring semantemes you don't have a proposition just a bare imagistic juxtaposition. But, in this case, there is no 'system' with a determinable morphology. Why? Logical connectives are necessary to endow a logical form. Use-value is utility. There may be preference revelation problems in measuring it accurately but it still has an objective mathematical representation. 'Use-value as a private grammar' is sheer nonsense. I suppose we can imagine an isolated individual who uses objects to represent words and who evolves a 'private grammar'. However, the utility of the objects used would not be independent of that grammar.

For Derrida, however, capital is generally interest-bearing commercial capital. Hence surplus-value for him is the super-adequation of capital rather than a "materialist" predication of the subject as super-adequate to itself.

Was Derrida so stupid as to think Capital- as a factor of production- was represented by the chrematistics of the Financial Services industry? Did he really think that it was fatcats in tophats who produced all the surplus value in the world? If so, he was well to the right of Milton Friedman!

Neither machines nor bonds create things. Human beings operate machines and use bonds in order to do so. Spivak's Derrida represents some extreme Right Wing view according to which Hedge Fund managers produce everything and thus should run everything.

This restricted notion can only lead to "idealist" analogies between capital and subject, or commodity and subject.

No, it can only lead to some bizarre eugenic argument according to which rich people are a superior species who create everything which is useful.

The concept of socially necessary labor is based on an identification of subsistence and reproduction.

No. In that case Marxism would have a miserabilist horizon- a la Sen-Dobb. Marxists say labour's 'socially necessary' wage is upwardly elastic. In particular, once 'demographic transition' occurs, it can rise continually. Sweden's Rehn-Meidner plan is the classic example. It was based on wage restraint accompanied by 'solidarity' based redistribution eroding traditional and market based wage differentials. No doubt, it had some deficiencies but why dismiss it out of hand? Papandreou was influenced by Meidner & the Amherst School. Sadly, the 'solidarity' aspect of 'ordoliberalism' was not instrumentalized by him to yield what the EU wanted- viz a 'Social Minimum'. Stupid Credentialised 'Marxist' Professors chose to plunge the Greek working class into misery instead of heeding a practical type of Marxism that would have suited the genius of their very talented and hard working people (I mean the ones who weren't civil servants).

Necessary labor is the amount of labor required by the worker to "reproduce" himself in order to remain optimally useful for capital in terms of the current price-structure.

Sez who? Mediner? Bowles? Gintis? Papandreou? Don't be silly. Kruschev said Communist countries would overtake Capitalist countries in terms of standard of living. Samuelson believed there was a good chance this would happen. Why was Spivak writing off Marxism in this manner in 1985? Some people- like AJP Taylor- were comparing Soviet bloc countries, like Hungary, favourably with conditions in Thatcherite Liverpool or Yorkshire.

Now if the dynamics of birth-growth-family-life reproduction is given as much attention as, let us say, the relationship between fixed and variable capitals in their several moments, the "materialist" predication of the subject as labor-power is rendered indeterminate in another way, without therefore being "refuted" by varieties of utopianism and "idealism." This expansion of the textuality of value has often gone unrecognized by feminists as well as mainstream Marxists, when they are caught within hegemonic positivism or orthodox dialectics.

There is no 'textuality of value' in Marxist theory. It is defined as the set of shadow prices associated with the optimal solution, with respect to a given Social Welfare Function or overriding objective, of a wholly determinate mathematical problem.

Chicilnisky is a Feminist and is on the Left. She has no difficulty in recognising any truth about the world. 'Hegemonic positivism' does not exist for reasons she has clarified. Still, 'restricted arbitrage' can go ahead so that poor people are helped to prosper. What is this shite about 'orthodox dialectics'? Who practiced it? It was as dead as a dodo by '85.

One of the most revolutionary suggestions of this thought is that the working class includes the unwaged as well as the waged. I am suggesting that the unwaged under socialized capital has a different status and definition from the unwaged in the peripheral capitalisms. 

Why suggest something which is blindingly obvious? Under 'socialised capital' it is a case of 'to each according to her needs'. Under peripheral capitalism, some poor people either starve or migrate.

They have sometimes tried to close off the expansion, by considering it as an opposition (between Marxism and feminism), or by way of inscribing, in a continuist spirit, the socializing or ideology-forming functions of the family as direct means of producing the worker and thus involved in the circuit of the production of surplus-value for the capitalist. They have also attempted to legitimize domestic labor within capital logic. Most of these positions arise from situational exigencies. My own involvement with them does not permit critical distance, as witness in the last page of this essay. That these closing off gestures are situationally admirable is evident from the practical difficulty of offering alternatives to them.

How is writing worthless self-serving careerist shite 'situationally admirable'? There is only one test- for Marxists or Feminists or Marxist Feminists of what is admirable in a given situation- viz. does it help poor women?
Spivak is stupid and does not know Maths. So she has to 'close off' everything that is useful in Marx so as to write self-regarding shite. But, what good does it do?

Let us consider the final item in the demonstration of the "textuality" of the chain of value.

How can 'textuality' have a 'final item'? Was every word Derrida ever wrote wholly false?

We have remarked that in circulation as totality, or the moment of negation in Marx's reading of money, money is seen as in a negative relation to circulation because, "cut off from all relation to (circulation) it would not be money, but merely a simple natural object."

Marx's reading of money changed. Economists understand why. Take the phrase 'money is seen as in a negative relation to circulation'- what does it mean? Nothing. Money that does not circulate is still a store of value. That's why, under the Gold Standard, Credit Creation of paper money was on the basis of a large multiplier upon holdings of specie.

Circulation as such has the morphological (if not the "actual") power to insert Money back into Nature, and to banish it from the textuality of Value.

What on earth does this mean? Money circulates either as Credit- I.O.U's, promissory notes, bank notes etc- or as specie. IOUs can't be inserted back into Nature as they are purely notional. Bullion can be melted down and used in a variety of ways.

Yet it is also circulation that bestows textuality upon the Money-form.

But if 'the Money-form' has 'textuality' then it is 'indecidable' or endogenous. Thus, it does not matter- it is 'chrematistics' not Economics.  However, Society's Economic problem is decidable exogenously- which is why Marxist countries were able to defeat Fascist countries and hold sway over a large part of the globe at the time when Spivak was writing. Recently, the Chinese have decided to strengthen the Party's control over the means of production. They are doing the opposite of Gorbachev so as to avoid the 'scissors crisis' which brought him down.

Textuality as a structural description indicates the work of differentiation (both plus and minus) that opens up identity-as-adequation.

It does not 'open up' identity-as anything at all. On the contrary, it deconstructs every notion of identity.

Circulation in the following passage does precisely that with the restricted circuit of adequation within the money-form itself: "You may turn and toss an ounce of gold in any way you like, and it will never weigh ten ounces. But here in the process of circulation one ounce practically does weigh ten ounces." Marx describes this phenomenon as the "Dasein" of the coin as "value sign" [Wertzeichen]. "The circulation of money is an outer movement [auBere Bewegung] .... In the friction with all kinds of hands, pouches, pockets, purses ... the coin rubs off .... By being used it gets used up" [A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 108; the translation of "Dasein" as "the work it performs" seems puzzling].

So Marx said something silly because he didn't understand Business. As a matter of fact, coins which are getting 'used up' are returned to the Mint.

If in its first dialectical "moment," circulation has the morphological potential of canceling Money back into Nature, in its third "moment" it is shown to run the risk of being itself sublated into Mind: "The continuity of production presupposes that circulation time has been sublated [aufgehoben]. The nature of capital presupposes that it travels through the different phases of circulation not as it does in the idea-representation [Vorstellung] where one concept turns into the other at the speed of thought [mit Gedankenschnelle], in no time, but rather as situations which are separated in terms of time" [Grundrisse 548; translation modified]. By thus sublating circulation into Mind, production (of Value) as continuous totality would annul Value itself. For Value would not be value if it were not realized in consumption, strictly speaking, outside of the circuit of production. Thus capital, as the most advanced articulation of value "presupposes that it travels through different phases."

Okay, Hegel had buggered with poor old Marx's brain but, at least the fellow repented it. Marxism broke with Hegelian 'Mind'.

All Marx is saying in the passage quoted is that only utility matters. Money and 'Circulation' have no malign occult force.

It is not the case that the liberation of the proletariat is conditional upon some crazy monetary scheme of the sort espoused by nutjobs like Ezra Pound.
Also we don't have to kill Jews because, like, they are usurers by nature and control Opus Dei and the British Royal Family and Lizard People from Planet X.

The scheme is made problematic by the invagination of use-value, as discussed earlier in this essay.

Actually, you did not 'discuss' invagination of use-value. You asserted it baldly without giving any rhyme of reason for doing so. Use-value is just utility. It is a material fact of life. It is not textual at all.

Has circulation time of capital been sublated into the speed of Mind (and more) within telecommunication?

No. Don't be silly.

Has (the labor theory of) Value become obsolete in micro-electronic capitalism?

Of course not. People produce both circuit-boards and the software they run on. Some of those people are horribly exploited. Others have got very very rich through that exploitation.

Let us mark these tantalizing questions here. I shall consider them at greater length below.

No you won't. These are stupid questions and even you can't do anything more stupid than frame these stupid questions.

The consideration of the textuality of Value in Marx, predicated upon the subject as labor-power, does not answer the onto-phenomenological question "What is Value?," although it gives us a sense of the complexity of the mechanics of evaluation and valueformation.

The onto-phenomenological question 'what is value' is answered for Marxism- as well as any half sane Economic theory- by the utility gained when a thing is consumed. Marx does not 'give us a sense of the complexity of the mechanics of evaluation'- if he did, there would be a Marxist equivalent of the Black-Scholes equation.

It shows us that the Value-form in the general sense and in the narrow-the economic sphere as commonly understood being the latter-are irreducibly complicitous.

Rubbish! There is no general sense- apart from the Economic- of the Marxian theory of Value. It is not the case that any Hegelian 'Geist' mediates anything. Vorstellung coincides with Begriff at the moment of consumption when use-value is released as utility.

It implies the vanity of dismissing considerations of the economic as "reductionism."

Thank you! But what else have you been doing?

I have already indicated various proposed formulations that have the effect of neutralizing these suggestions: to find in the development of the money-form an adequate analogy to the psychoanalytic narrative; to see in it an analogy to metaphor or language; to subsume domestic or intellectual labor into a notion of the production of value expanded within capital logic.

All these 'proposed formulations' are utterly foolish. The psychoanalytic narrative is a swindle- charlatans were pretending to treat a disease which doesn't exist. Language isn't Economics- thus if I say- 'eat this cake' and offer you a lump of shit, I am not actually giving you any shit at all. Marxists think 'domestic or intellectual labour' either produces utility or it has zero use-value. No doubt, you can fool a bunch of people for a period by getting them to pay for and claim to derive utility from a worthless product, but- long term- this type of 'false consciousness' will fade away. As with Spivak's own oeuvre, people will see through the cheat.

What narratives of value-formation emerge when consciousness itself is subsumed under the "materialist" predication of the subject?

Crazy ones because ex falso quodlibet 

If consciousness within the "idealist" analogy is seen as necessarily superadequate to itself by way of intentionality, we can chart the emergence of ad hoc universal equivalents that measure the production of value in what we may loosely call "thought."

But you could just as easily measure the production value of the horcruxes of Nicaraguan cats as mediated by David Ickean theories of anal probing.

Like the banishment of the money-commodity from the commodity-function, these equivalents can no longer themselves be treated as "natural examples." (Because these analogies are necessarily loose, one cannot be more specific in that last phrase.) One case of such a universal equivalent is "universal humanity"-both psychological and social-as the touchstone of value in literature and society. It is only half in jest that one would propose that the "credit" of certain "major" literatures is represented by capital-accumulation in terms of the various transformations of this universal equivalent.

Okay. You are saying that the subject you teach is a Credentialist swindle. Fair point. But fewer and fewer people sign up your brand of shite. Moreover, it has had zero political impact. In the short run, yours was a type of 'false consciousness' which allowed you to swindle a few people but, long term, you and your discipline have been judged worthless.

"Pure theory," within the Althusserian model of "theoretical production," may be seen as another case of a universal equivalent.

By whom? Althusser is dismissed as a lunatic.

The relativization of Value as a regression into the narrative stage where any commodity could be "cathected" as the value-form is, to follow Goux's analogy, the Freudian stage of polymorphous perversion, and can be channeled into aesthetics as varied as those of symbolism and post-modernism.

Or, indeed the horcruxes of Nicaraguan cats. Narratives are shite. Anyone paranoid nutjob can tell a story. Life isn't about listening to stories- it's about having to feed yourself while paying off your student loans.

I have already commented on Goux's gloss on the Freudo-Lacanian narrative of the emergence of the phallus-in-the-genital stage as the universal equivalent of value.

Your comment was just an assertion without any logical coherence or prescriptive force. Why do you keep claiming to have already documented something when we can easily check and see you have done no such thing?

Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals gives us two moments of the separation and transformation of an item from within the common circuit of exchange.

He does no such thing. He isn't talking about Economics at all but rather the evolution of moral concepts.

They are worth mentioning because The Genealogy of Morals is Nietzsche's systematic attempt at a "critique of moral values," a "put[ting] in question [in Frage stellen ]" of "the value of these values" [Grundrisse 348; translation modified]. The Nietzschean enterprise is not worked out on what I call a "materialist" subject-predication as labor-power, but rather by way of a critique of the "idealist" subjectpredication as consciousness, through the double determinants of "philology" and "physiology" [Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo 20].

In other words, Nietzche isn't interested in 'the common circuit of exchange' at all. You are simply telling lies.

Because it is a reinscription of the history of value as obliterated and discontinuous semiotic chains-ongoing sign-chains-disconnected references to money (guilt and punishment as systems of exchange), and to the inscription of coins, abound.

Wow! There is literally zero economic content in Nietzche. By contrast, Marxism is an Economic theory. Nietzche was mad. Marx merely a drunkard.

The more crucial moment, the separation of the money-commodity, is touched upon once at the "beginning" and once at the inauguration of the "present," as the separation of the scapegoat and the sublation of that gesture into mercy respectively. That sublation is notoriously the moment of the creditor sacrificing himself for the debtor in the role of God's son in the Christ story [On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo 77, 72]. (Any notions of "beginning" and "present" in Nietzsche are made problematic by the great warning against a successful genealogical method: "All concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated elude definition; only that which has no history is definable" [ibid. 80].)

Spivak was born a Hindu. Does she believe that Christ died for her sins?  If so, perhaps she denoted money to some Televangelist who claimed to be Christ's representative on Earth and thus entitled to a 'tithe' on those who wish to be saved.
If Spivak does not believe this why mention Nietzche?

I think there can be no doubt that it is this separation rather than inscription or coining that is for Marx the philosophically determining moment in the discourse of value.

Even Nietzche wasn't crazy enough to think 'inscription or coining' determined the value of a  sandwich you buy with the loose change in your pocket. All that matters, when it comes to economic value is utility.
It is a separate matter that, for believing Christians who are prepared to emit a 'costly signal' so as to gain the benefits of membership in a separating equilibrium, value may attach to even David Strauss's Christology. But, the test is deeds not words- most Christians want to make the world a better place. That is why they are honoured and valued even by people of a different faith. Pakistan's Mother Theresa is a German doctor specialising in Leprosy. Even the Taliban wouldn't touch a hair on her head.

Attention to Marx's concept-metaphor of the foreign language is interesting here. Often in our discussion of language the word seems to retain a capital "L" even when it is spelled in the lower case or re-written as parole. Using a necessarily pre-critical notion of language, which suggests that in the mother-tongue "word" is inseparable from "reality," Marx makes the highly sophisticated suggestion that the development of the value-form separates "word" and "reality" (signifier and signified), a phenomenon that may be appreciated only in the learning of a foreign language: "To compare money with language is . . . erroneous .... Ideas which have first to be translated out of their mother tongue into a foreign language in order to circulate, in order to become exchangeable, offer a somewhat better analogy; but the analogy then lies not in language, but in the foreignness of language" [Grundrisse 163. If this were a technical discussion where it was necessary to respect the specificity of the vocabulary of linguistics, I would not of course, equate word/reality and signifier/signified.]

Spivak herself quotes Marx as saying there is no 'analogical' or 'metaphoric' relationship between language and linguistic texts and Economic activity. Why can't she understand that this utterly vitiates her program?

It is certainly of interest that, using a necessarily post-monetary notion of Value-in-exchange, which must suggest that "political economy [is] . . concerned with a system of equivalence [systeme d'6quivalence] . .. [between a specific] labor and [a specific] wage [un travail et un salaire]," Saussure shows us that, even in the mother tongue, it is the work of difference that remains originary, that even as it is most "native," language is always already "foreign," that even in its "incorporeal essence," "the linguistic signifier... [is] constituted not by its material substance but only [uniquement] by the differences that separate its acoustic image from all others" [Course in General Linguistics 79, 118-19]. The binary opposition between the economic and the cultural is so deeply entrenched that the full implications of the question of Value posed in terms of the "materialist" predication of the subject are difficult to conceptualize.

Nonsense! There is a binary opposition between Useful Truth and Stupid Lies.  This does not have any implications for the question of Value.  Stupid Lies have no Value.
By contrast, there is no 'binary opposition' between 'the economic and the cultural' because, at the margin, cultural activities use up scarce resources. Thus the Engelian notion of 'false consciousness' gains salience. Stupid Lies can only have a brief salience as part of Credentialised Ponzi Scheme of the sort Spivak is peddling here.

One cannot foresee a teleological moment when these implications are catastrophically productive of a new evaluation.

One can foresee that Stupid Lies will be seen through.

The best one can envisage is the persistent undoing of the opposition, taking into account the fact that, first, the complicity between cultural and economic value-systems is acted out in almost every decision we make; and, secondly, that economic reductionism is, indeed, a very real danger. It is a paradox that capitalist humanism does indeed tacitly make its plans by the "materialist" predication of Value, even as its official ideology offers the discourse of humanism as such; while Marxist cultural studies in the First World cannot ask the question of Value within the "materialist" predication of the subject, since the question would compel one to acknowledge that the text of exploitation might implicate Western cultural studies in the international division of labor.

Sheer nonsense! Spivak is from Bengal. Under the Brits, there was an 'Imperial Preference' based division of labour such that the Irish produced vacuous Celtic shite and the Bengalis produced vacuous Upanishadic shite. But Yeats was a good poet as was Tagore.

Suppose Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak and Leela Gandhi and so on wrote well about good authors or discovered authors new to us who weren't Mahashweta-level shite. Then they'd have earned their keep. Instead they destroyed their subject as an Academic discipline. Western 'cultural studies' means very very stupid snowflakes creating a ruckus on campus and then reneging on their Student Loans.

By contrast, Bengali mathematicians and computer scientists and physicists and so forth, actually produced useful work. They have prospered by it and have also helped India to prosper.

Let us, if somewhat fancifully, invoke the wordprocessor again. It is an extremely convenient and efficient tool for the production of writing. It certainly allows us to produce a much larger quantity of writing in a much shorter time and makes fiddling with it much easier. The "quality" of writing-the "idealist" question of value-as well as the use-value of manual composition-affectively necessary labor-are rendered irrelevant here. (It is of course not to be denied that the word-processor might itself generate affective use-value.) From within the "idealist" camp, one can even say, in the wake of a trend that runs from Professor A. B. Lord to Father Walter J. Ong the following: we were not in on the "inception" of writing, and can copiously deplore the harm it did to the orality of the verbal world; we are, however, present at the inception of telecommunication, and, being completely encompassed by the historical ideology of efficiency, we are unable to reckon with the transformations wrought by the strategic exclusions of the randomness of bricolage operated by programming (see A. B. Lord, The Singer of Tales; Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy). 

It is quite true that the word processor meant that a greater number of worthless theses got rewarded with Academic Credentials. However, the worth of those Credentials declined correspondingly. Now, we have software which can detect plagiarism and, for alethic disciplines, even faked results. Spivakese, however, can now be seamlessly produced by Sokal type nonsense generators. So the 'randomness of her bricolage' is available on tap. Still, only Spivak can parade her own self-importance in a manner that defeats parody. Thus, in her reply to Chibber she speaks of herself in the third person as lecturing some poor people in Birbhum on the subject of her own moral greatness in coming to them without any thought of profit or 'Munafa'. This is wildly funny because she constantly harps on this supposed generosity of hers and has been very well rewarded for it.

These are not the objections that I emphasize. I draw attention, rather, to the fact that, even as circulation time attains the apparent instantaneity of thought (and more), the continuity of production ensured by that attainment of apparent coincidence must be broken up by capital: its means of doing so is to keep the labor reserves in the comprador countries outside of this instantaneity, thus to make sure that multinational investment does not realize itself fully there through assimilation of the working class into consumerist-humanism.

Okay, Spivak was writing in 1985 and may not have understood that the internet could turn a Chinese woman who left her village at the tender age of 16 into a billionaire. Indeed, vast swathes of the Chinese population have been raised up into 'consumerist-humanism' by a Marxist party which focused only on use-value as utility.
'Net neutrality' may be important for 'peripheries'- even within the States- though current thinking is it doesn't matter- but otherwise reduced transaction costs are wholly beneficial for poor people.

1I It is one of the truisms of Capital I that technological inventions open the door to the production of relative rather than absolute surplus-value. [Capital I 643-54. "Absolute surplus-value" is a methodologically irreducible theoretical fiction.] Since the production and realization of relative surplus-value, usually attendant upon technological progress and the socialized growth of consumerism, increase capital expenditure in an indefinite spiral, there is the contradictory drive within capitalism to produce more absolute and less relative surplus-value as part of its crisis management.

What Spivak means is that cutting wages to boost profits is not sustainable. However, it is the exogenous action of the State- implementing minimum wages, property rights in jobs, redistribusting income through Tax & Social Security programs- which enables a virtuous outcome.

In terms of this drive, it is in the "interest" of capital to preserve the comprador theater in a state of relatively primitive labor legislation and environmental regulation.

Why? India has done the opposite so as to protect indigenous Business houses from foreign competition. To this day, an Indian permanent worker of Tata's enjoys far better legal protection than a British worker of that same company. An Indian capitalist has a better chance extracting coal from Canada (Australia is fighting back) than Jharkhand.

Further, since the optimal relationship between fixed and variable capital has been disrupted by the accelerated rate of obsolescence of the former under the rapid progress within telecommunications research and the attendant competition, the comprador theater is also often obliged to accept scrapped and out-of-date machinery from the postindustrialist economies.

Nonsense! The Ambanis used state of the art equipment to dominate their sector. They managed this by paying off the politicians and mobilising a new share-owning bazaari middle class.

To state the problem in the philosophical idiom of this essay: as the subject as super-adequation in labor-power seems to negate itself within telecommunication, a negation of the negation is continually produced by the shifting lines of the international division of labor.

There was no 'negation of labour-power' within telecommunications. Transaction costs went down so poor people got richer.

This is why any critique of the labor theory of value, pointing at the unfeasibility of the theory under post-industrialism, or as a calculus of economic indicators, ignores the dark presence of the Third World.

Utter shite! Singapore was classed as Third World in 1985. Much of China, then, was behind even Socialist India. Look at them now!

12 It is a well-known fact that the worst victims of the recent exacerbation of the international division of labor are women.

Fake news! Comparative studies of Japanese and Indian textile industries showed that unmarried women in the former country benefited from 'the exacerbation of the international division of labour' whereas the condition of poor Indian women went from bad to worse because of paternalistic legislation which forced them out of the formal sector. This problem has got worse, not better, in recent years.

They are the true surplus army of labor in the current conjuncture. In their case, patriarchal social relations contribute to their production as the new focus of super-exploitation (see June Nash and Maria Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, eds., Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor). As I have suggested above, to consider the place of sexual reproduction and the family within those social relations should show the pure (or free) "materialist" predication of the subject to be gender-exclusive. The literary academy emphasizes when necessary that the American tradition at its best is one of individual Adamism and the loosening of frontiers.

They aren't a 'surplus army' at all because they don't exercise a countervailing power over male wage rates in the formal sector.  God knows what Spivak suggested. If it was that women should be allowed to work on the same terms as men- something American feminists did by cleverly siding with African American men- then why not say so in plain words? Why obfuscate the issue with jargon?

In terms of political activism within the academy, this free spirit exercises itself at its best by analyzing and calculating predictable strategic effects of specific measures of resistance: boycotting consumer items, demonstrating against investments in countries with racist domestic politics, uniting against genocidal foreign policy.

All of these varieties of hare-brained activism failed utterly. It was the collapse of Communism which caused America to put pressure on Apartheid South Africa. Pseudo-Marxists like Spivak were completely ignored by Reagan's White House.

Considering the role of telecommunication in entrenching the international division of labor and the oppression of women, this free spirit should subject its unbridled passion for subsidizing computerized information retrieval and theoretical production to the same conscientious scrutiny.

Worthless shite- as subsequent events have made all too clear.

The "freeing" of the subject as super-adequation in labor-power entails an absence of extra-economic coercion.

Sez who? Extra economic coercion exists in America- there is a nexus between a corrupt Judiciary and for-profit prisons. How naive is Spivak?

Because a positivist vision can only recognize the latter, that is to say, domination, within post-industrial cultures like the U.S., telecommunication seems to bring nothing but the promise of infinite liberty for the subject. Economic coercion as exploitation is hidden from sight in "the rest of the world." These sentiments expressed at a public forum drew from a prominent U.S. leftist the derisive remark: "She will deny the workers their capuccino!" I am not in fact suggesting that literary critics should be denied word-processors. My point is that the question of Value in its "materialist" articulation must be asked as the capuccino-drinking worker and the wordprocessing critic actively forget the actual price-in-exploitation of the machine producing coffee and words. This is certainly not required of every literary critic. But if the literary critic in the U.S. today decides to ask the question of Value only within the frame allowed by an unacknow'edged "nationalist" view of "productivity," she cannot be expected to be taken seriously everywhere.

She can't be taken seriously anywhere by people who study Economics or who earn a living in the real world.
What is the point of getting a person who studies literature to ask or answer a question of an essentially mathematical type?

(The real problem is, of course, that she will be taken seriously, and the work of multinational ideology-reproduction will go on.) If my position here is mistaken for an embarrassing economic determinism, the following specification may be made: "There is a short-of and beyond of [economic determinism]. To see to it that the beyond does not become the within is to recognize . . . the need of a communicating pathway (parcours). That pathway has to leave a wake (sillage) in the text. Without that wake or track, abandoned to the simple content of its conclusions, the ultra-transcendental text"-the discourse of textuality in the economic that I have been at pains to explicate and disclose-"will so closely resemble the pre-critical text"- economic determinism-"as to be indistinguishable from it. We must now meditate upon the law of this resemblance" [Derrida, Of Grammatology 61].

Worthless verbiage. Essentially Spivak is saying she has nothing to say but will just go ahead and say it anywaqy because 'multinational ideology-reproduction' must go on. Why does she believe her sabotage of the mathematical machinery of Marxist Value theory is necessary for Reaganite America?

I have done no more in this essay than to encourage such a meditation, to suggest that, following Marx, it is possible to put the economic text "under erasure," to see, that is, the unavoidable and pervasive importance of its operation and yet to question it as a concept of the last resort.

The economic text is mathematical- not linguistic. It can't be 'put under erasure' any more than Quantum Physics can.

(Incidentally, this also emphasizes that putting "under erasure" is as much an affirmative as a negative gesture.) In 1985, Walter Benjamin's famous saying, "there has never been a document of culture which was not at one and the same time a document of barbarism" [Illuminations 256] should be a starting rather than a stopping-point for Marxist axiological investigations.

Why? Gorbachev, poor booby, was being influenced by some stupid American Marxist Historians and Armenian and other Soviet mathematical economists. Someone needed to slap him silly and say 'Oi! Gorby, you big girl's blouse! Get a grip, mate! If the Party surrenders control of the Economy, there will be a second 'scissors' crisis. Communism will collapse!'
Benjamin's apercus were irrelevant. All that mattered was that the Party retained residuary control rights over the Economy. That is proper Marxist 'axiological investigation'.

A "culturalism" that disavows the economic in its global operations cannot get a grip on the concomitant production of barbarism.

How will it pay for its 'global operations' unless it embraces the economic? There is no 'concomitant production of barbarism'. Benjamin was just making a phrase.

If, on the other hand, the suggestion is made that in the long run, through the multinationals, everyone will have word-processors and capuccino (not to mention guns and butter), the evaluating critic must be prepared to enter the debate between Samir Amin and the late Bill Warren, some of the broad strokes of which I have outlined above [see Warren, Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism; Amin, "Expansion or Crisis of Capitalism?]. She must be prepared to admit that the unification churches being projected by the mechanisms of Eurocurrency and "the globalization of markets" (we read it as "global crisis") do not lend much credibility to this uninstructed hope. Perhaps a word on "The Globalization of Markets," an article by Theodore Levitt, Edward W. Carter Professor of Business Administration and head of the marketing area at the Harvard Business School, is in order here. The piece is exemplary of many of the attitudes I have tried to define. Since Professor Levitt writes from the point of view of big business ("people and nations" in the passage cited below) he is not concerned with the active divisiveness of the international division of labor. Here is his theory of the relationship between money and the division of labor, and his theory of money as a unified concept, reached in turn by way of "experience" as a fetishized concept: "Nobody takes scarcity lying down; everyone wants more. This in part explains division of labor and specialization of production. They enable people and nations to optimize their conditions [a deliberately vague word] through trade. The median [sic] is usually money. Experience teaches that money has three special qualities: scarcity, difficulty of acquisition, and transience. People understandably treat it with respect."14 What I have been arguing is that this primitive notion of money must work complicitously with the contemporary sublation of money where it seems to question the "materialistic" predication of the subject; that the post-modern, in spite of all the cant of modernization, reproduces the "pre-modern" on another scene. What you have been arguing is meaningless shite.  A primitive notion of money can't work complicitously with a complex notion of credit (which is the sublation of money) because stupid and ignorant people have primitive notions. They don't have complex notions because they are too stupid and ignorant. In Professor Levitt's article the two views remain in an unresolved and distanced structural parataxis. Only to a primitive mind like Spivak's. Not to anyone else reading that article. To quote: "Today money is simply electronic impulses. With the speed of light [so much for Marx's impossible limit for circulation: speed of thought] it moves effortlessly between distant centers (and even lesser places). A change of ten basic points in the price of a bond causes an instant and massive shift of money from London to Tokyo. The system has profound impact on the way companies operate throughout the world" [Levitt 101]. Okay. We know all that. Where is the parataxis? The perspective here is unifocal and generally uncritically read (if read at all) by literary academics. There is no 'critical reading' of this for literary academia because Levitt was a Business School pundit. I have been trying to explicate not only the parataxis above, but also the exploitation condensed and monumentalized in a seemingly scientific phrase such as "scale efficient conditions" below (incidentally, "value" as used here is the unified continuist version that would be consonant with the Marxian definition of value relieved of its historical, ethical, or philosophical charge): "The most endangered companies in the rapidly-evolving world tend to be those that dominate rather small domestic markets with high value-added products for which there are smaller markets elsewhere. With transportation costs"- the only costs specified -"proportionately low, distant competitors will now enter the now sheltered markets of those companies with goods produced more cheaply under scale efficient conditions" [Levitt 94].

So Levitt didn't reckon on the 'Mittelstand'- after all his subject was more or less bogus- and made a foolish prediction. Actually, high value added small to medium firms would thrive through inter-industry trade while big vertically integrated behemoths would come crashing down.

Scale-efficient has a precise mathematical meaning. Spivak might think Levitt is using jargon in the same way she uses jargon but that isn't the case. Why? Business Schools aren't wholly adversely selective. People like Levitt can't just talk any old shite and expect to drum up business for their Departments.

These "globalizers" also have their human universals: "an ancient motivation - to make one's money go as far as possible. This is universal - not simply a motivation but actually a need" [Levitt 96]. Yet, in an insane parody of the basic paradox of humanistic education, Levitt describes the epistemic violence of the universalizing global market: "The purpose of business is to get and keep a customer. Or, to use Peter Drucker's more refined construction, to create and keep a customer."

Humanistic education- paideia- created a customer who would find value and beauty and inspiration in the liberal arts. Spivak feels this is an 'insane parody' of the true function of her own Department. She thinks her job is to destroy her student's ability to do appreciate literature for its own sake. One way to make this happen is by forcing them to ask stupid questions of themselves which only Economists can properly deal with.

. In terms of the ideological interpellation of the subject as consumer, it is worth remarking that the semiotic field here reproduces capitalist as well as patriarchal social relations faithfully: it cannot do so if it is genuinely semiotic unless Pierce's Law holds in every particular. But, if this were the case, every text would be constructible and immune from deconstruction. "The Customer" (who is male why?) does not know what he wants; "Managers [should not be] confidently wedded to a distorted version of the marketing concept according to which you give the customer what he says he wants." But, since the item under discussion here is an automatic washer, the actual target is, of course, "the homemaker" (who is female sez who?): "Hoover's media message should have been: This is the machine that you, the homemaker, deserve to have to reduce the repetitive heavy daily household burdens, so that you may have more constructive time to spend with your children and your husband. The promotion should also have targeted the husband to give him, preferably in the presence of his wife, a sense of obligation to provide an automatic washer for her even before he bought an automobile for himself. An aggressively low price, combined with heavy promotion of this kind, would have overcome previously expressed preferences for particular features" [98]. There is something like a relation between this ideological reproduction and reinforcement of the international division of labor in the discourse of patriarchal relations in consumerism, and the reproduction and reinforcement of the international division of labor in the discourse of feminist individualism within socialized capital.

But, that sort of sexist shite disappeared a long time ago. By the eighties, manufacturers were gendering consumer durables and even washing powder because market research showed that more and more young men were buying these products.
Spivak is just indulging in 'fluff piece' magazine journalism. She has tarted up her text with some meaningless jargon but, since she is dark skinned and female, intellectual 'affirmative action' demands that she be given a lollipop for effort.

Examine, for instance, the following convincingly innocent and unproblematic evaluation of telecommunication in Ms in light of the axiology suggested by considerations of the "materialist " predication of the subject, which the readers of Ms cannot be expected to know since that magazine too is an ideological apparatus within the social arena under consideration. (Incidentally, it is interesting to see how the time-problematic is reversed within a "narrative" context, how the language of narrative-production in telecommunication seeks to recapture a naive "reality." This is a much longer argument which I hope to develop elsewhere.) "Roberta Williams didn 't know what she wanted to do with her life until she designed her first microcomputer adventure game three years ago. Today, she is one of the leading designers of home computer games and part owner . . of a $20 million business. . . . There is something exciting about the continuous motion in arcade games and to use 'real time' (industry lingo for the continuous action that is programmed into the game) within adventure games." Later in the same issue, speaking of "the search business" for women executives, the magazine uses some symptomatic metaphors. "The process is essentially matchmaking . . . You don't have to have that Dolly [Hello Dolly!] Levi commonsense instinct [read ideology at its strongest] of who-goes-with-whom, and also the diplomacy of Kissinger"[Ms 12:2(August 1983):20, 73]. The relationship between feminist individualism and the military-industrial complex on the one hand, and the problem of anti-sexism within the capitalist enclosure being understood as feminism on the other, is too overdetermined for me to deal with it in more than a footnote. The emergence of an unexamined genitalist axiology of women 's suffering and universal sisterhood is also at issue here. What complicates the situation is the overarching presence of hegemonic masculism.

There we have it. Spivak is a giggling school girl reading shite Magazines and scribbling naughty words- 'unexamined genitalist axiology'- in the margins.

This is how economic reductionism operates.

Nope. Refusal to pay for shite- as opposed to utility- is how economic reductionism operates. Unexamined gentialist axiology can go whistle.

The disavowal of the economic is its tacit and legitimizing collaborator.

So economic reductionism disavows the economic. Why? Because its tacit collaborator is legitimizing it. How? If I say- 'I'm collaborating with X'- this legitimizes X in the eyes of those who think I'm a good man. If my collaboration is only tacit, it can't legitimize X at all. Indeed, I too would be damaged if this collaboration became known. It may be that the Vatican collaborated with Hitler in some tacit manner. This does not legitimize Hitler at all.

In its verdict on "the multinational mind" as opposed to the globalizing mind is to be heard the managerial version of shock at denying the workers of the First World their capuccino: "the multinational mind, warped into circumspection and timidity by years of stumbles and transnational troubles, now rarely challenges existing overseas practices. More often it considers any departure from inherited domestic routines as mindless, disrespectful, or impossible. It is the mind of a bygone day" [Levitt 101; italics mine]. I should like to construct a narrative here using "The Wiring of Wall Street," an article in the New York Times Sunday magazine for October 23, 1983. (I choose New York Times because the broad spectrum that contains the Sunday supplements of newspapers, Scientific American, Psychology Today, as well as the National Enquirer, constitutes part of an ideological apparatus, through which the consumer becomes knowledgeable, the subject of "cultural" explanation. Could one suggest that organs such as the Harvard Business Review are also part of the apparatus, in that through them the investor-manager receives his "ideology"? As I suggest in note 15, feminist individualist consumerism is being appropriated within the same apparatus.) After telecommunication, Wall Street seems to have saved by reconciliation (rather than deconstruction) the binary opposition between the immediate self-proximity of voiceconsciousness and the visible efficiency of writing.

There is no binary opposition between voice and writing for any business purpose. A verbal contract is still a contract. What on earth is Spivak wittering on about?

As Georg Simmel already observes of the stock exchange at the end of the last century, it is the place where the circulation of money can be most speeded up: the "twofold condensation of values into the money form and of monetary transactions into the form of the stock exchange makes it possible for values to be rushed through the greatest number of hands in the shortest possible time" [Simmel 506].

Simmel was wrong. The stock exchange is not the determinant of the velocity of circulation provided Money is exogenous and Monetary policy is sensible. What happens is that arbitrageurs net out their positions with out any additional value being created. Obviously, if mechanism design in financial markets is poor then incentive incompatibility can cause real effects on the Economy. However, this would happen anyway because of Knightian uncertainty.

"The start of a solution of the market's major dilemma, the management of time, appeared in 1972 when the New York Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange, and their member firms organized the Securities Industries Automation Corporation .... Not long ago, the executives kept up with their investments on a monthly or weekly schedule; today, the reporting can be instantaneous because of the computer" ["The Wiring of Wall Street" 47]. It is worth remarking that, even as time is thus being managed on the post-industrial capitalist front, high Marxist theory contests the labor theory of value by bracketing time as a vehicle of change: "No changes in output and ... no changes in the proportions in which different means of production are used by an industry are considered, so that no question arises as to the variation or constancy of returns" [Sraffa, Production of Commodities v].

Dim little Spivak thinks the convention of one period Economies implies 'bracketing time as a vehicle of change'! Sraffa isn't 'high Marxist theory'- he was a neo-Ricardian. Clearly Spivak hasn't read the articles she mentions in her footnotes!

If money then circulates at the speed of consciousness by way of the computer, it at the same time accedes to the visible efficiency of writing. "'We had this amorphous, unorganized, mostly invisible market prior to 1971' says Gordon S. Macklin, president of the [National] Association [of Securities Dealers]" ["Wiring" 73]. This reconciliation of the opposition between consciousness and writing obviously does not "refute" Freud's late proto-deconstructive model of the psyche as the Wunderblok or the mystic writing pad (see Derrida, "Freud and the Scene of Writing," Writing and Difference). If anything, the silicon chip appears to give "a plastic idea" to that pure virtuality, that difference as such which Derrida calls "the work of dead time" [the warning against the formation of a plastic idea is to be found in Freud, The Standard Edition Vol. 4 281: the Derrida passage is in Of Grammatology 68]. But this is not the objection I emphasize here. I point out, rather, that the computer, even as it pushes the frontiers of rationalization, proves unable to achieve bricolage, to produce a program that will use an item for a purpose for which it was not designed.

The Velocity of circulation is given by V in the accounting identity MV= PT. What improved technology does is change T- transaction costs go down so more transactions occur- which may change P (prices). More efficient financial markets may also increase V (velocity of circulation) but in that case measures of M (the monetary base) will also be affected. That is why policy makers target P in relation to nominal GDP (given by MV). It is of the essence of Marxist and other Leftist Economic theories that any stagnation in the real economy (given by T) is itself targeted by substantive programs. If for example, workers are unemployed in a particular area- thus causing lower T in that place- the Govt. should take appropriate action- 'public works', incentives to invest, retraining etc.

Networked Computers weren't supposed to create the Internet. That's not what they were designed for. Still, in 1985, this wasn't clear even to Bill Gates. So let's give Spivak a pass on this.

(This is the celebrated problem of programming a computer to build nests with random materials, as a bird does, that exercises Douglas Hofstadter and others.) And it is well-known that radical proto-deconstructive cultural practice instructs us precisely to work through bricolage, to "reconstellate" cultural items by wrenching them out of their assigned function.

It is well known that 'radical proto-deconstructive cultural practice' has instructed nobody in anything useful. It is a machine that produces garbage no matter what the input. What 'bricolage' is Spivak talking about?

When Walter  Benjamin writes: "What we require of the photographer is the ability to give his picture the caption that wrenches it from modish commerce and gives it a revolutionary use-value [Gebrauschswert]," he is implicitly "bricoling" or tinkering with a continuist notion of usevalue (I need not repeat my earlier argument) even as he recommends bricolage as cultural practice.

No he isn't. He is saying 'oi! photographer, be sure to put a catchy caption of your snapshot of S.S thugs smashing in the heads of people like me'. It was a stupid thing to say. Why? The snapshot of S.S thugs beating Jews made the Nazis more not less popular even in Paris. It reduced 'revolutionary use-value' because revolutionaries ran away. Six years after he gave said this, the French capitulated to Hitler. They only stirred themselves to resist when their conditions of life worsened so much that Resistance became worthwhile.
There is no 'continuist notion' of utility here. There is merely stupidity of a sad sort.  Tucholsky, like Benjamin, committed suicide.

This recommendation can be traced from his earliest theory of allegory as the cathexis (or occupation) of ruins and fragments by the irreducible alterity of time [Benjamin, "The Author as Producer," Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings 230]. This is to be found in DeLeuze and Guattari's bold notion of originarily unworkable machines.

Bold? Yes, if you mean 'as stupid as shit'.

It can be said for Derrida that, by positioning citationality as originary, he has radicalized bricolage as the questioning of all ideologies of adequation and legitimacy.

It can also be said that the Nicaraguan horcrux of my neighbours cat depose-itions Deconstruction's self interrogation as citationary of the eidetic originary of its own pajamas.

16 These positions are now trickling down into a reckoning with the emergent ideological possibilities of the post-modern cultural phenomenon within a post-modern political economy.17 It is not even this possibility of a cultural theoretical practice, which sabotages the radically reconciling text of the post-modern stock exchange, that I emphasize within this narrative. My critique can find an allegorical summary in a passage about the old ticker-tape machine. "A holdover from the storied past is the old stock ticker. Fifteen minutes after trading has commenced, the ticker-a bit of technology that dates back to 1867-has already fallen behind the hectic trading by six minutes. Speed it up to match today's trading volume, and it would be a blur" ["Wiring" 47]. We cannot forget that Capital I is "a bit of technology that dates back to 1867," its date of publication. I have attempted to show that the Marxist historical narrative-"the storied past"- is far from a holdover. When it is expanded to accommodate the epistemic violence of imperialism as crisis-management, including its current displacements, it can allow us to read the text of political economy at large.

But Imperialism disappeared by the time Spivak got to America. Why did nobody tell her? What 'epistemic violence' could Imperialism do once it was dead? How does any sort of violence conduce to 'crisis management'? What bricolage has Spivak's magpie mind hit upon? Who knows? Since it features 'Imperialism' which died long ago, it can't matter very much.

When "speeded up" in this way it does not allow the irreducible rift of the International division of labor to blur. "

But if 'speeding up' doesn't cause anything to 'blur' why make such a song and dance of it?

The Wiring of Wall Street" speaks first of "time management" and next quotes Peter Solomon of Lehman Brothers "offer[ing] an explanation: 'Computers have shown us how to manage risk"' ["Wiring" 47]. The inconvenient and outdated ticker of Marxist theory discloses the excluded word between "time" and "risk" in the management game: crisis.

Sheer nonsense! Capitalist Crisis was taken care off by Demand Management- Keynesian Economics. Marxist theory was relevant to Marxist countries which is why a Soviet economist got a Nobel Prize for contributing to the theory of optimal resource allocation- something Marx's theory of Value was motivated by because it would raise living standards for working people.

With hindsight, we know there was incentive incompatibility in Wall Street such that Knightian uncertainty, which required a 'regret minimizing' calculus, was moronically or mechanically rendered as probabilistic risk.

Let us retrieve the concept-metaphor of the text that we left behind a few pages back. Within this narrative replay of my argument in the previous pages it may be pointed out that, whereas Solomon Brothers, thanks to computers, "earned about $2 million for . . . 15 minutes of work," the entire economic text would not be what it is if it could not write itself as a palimpsest upon another text where a woman in Sri Lanka has to work 2,287 minutes to buy a t-shirt.

Which woman in Sri Lanka worked for 38 hours to buy a t-shirt? She would have been mad to do so. What would she have eaten to sustain herself while doing so? Sri Lankans were better off than Bengalis in 1985. Still, they didn't buy designer t-shirts but made too with cheap blouse pieces.

Presumably, this Sri Lankan woman had access to a computer. If she didn't why does Spivak mention the Solomon Bros who id have access to computers and programmers and systems analysts? She is not comparing like with like.

There is no 'text' here at all. There is no narrative worth the name. This is a stupid and ignorant juxtaposition which defeats its own purpose by straining our credibility too hard.
Why on earth would 'the entire economic text' want to write itself as a palimpsest upon another text? A palimpsest must be beneath another text, not on top of it.

The "post-modern" and "pre-modern" are inscribed together.

Nonsense. Nothing is inscribed. The world is not a text.

It should also be remarked that Simmel argued nearly a hundred years ago that a developed money-form naturally promotes "the individual":

Why should it be remarked? The argument was scarcely original to Simmel. He has zero importance. His subject- Sociology- enjoyed an even lower reputation that the shite Spivak taught.

"if freedom means only obeying one's own laws, then the distance between property and its owner that is made possible by the money form of returns provides a hitherto unheard-of freedom" [Simmel 334].

Really? So if I own a house currently rented out to you by an Agent, can I really come and rape you if such is the law I have promulgated for myself? Nope. Droit de Seigneur is an unheard off freedom under the cash nexus.

The best beneficiary of this "post-modernization" of Wall Street is, predictably, the individual small investor in the United States.

Hilarious! The small investor was enriched by the Reagan bull market! Why did the neo-cons not embrace Spivak?

And the apparently history-transcendent "individual subject" who will "have to hold to the truth of postmodernism ... and have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping" [Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" 92] will be, as long as no attempt is made to specify the post-modern space specific subject-production, no other than a version of this unpromising individual. It is within this framework of crisis-management and regulation, then, that I would propose to pursue the evaluation of the pervasive and tacit gesture that accepts the history of style-formations in Western European canonical literature as the evaluation of style as such.

 Right! So the small investors in America, having gained the 'unheard of freedom' to rape Sri Lankan virgins working for MNC in which they own shares, will have to 'hold to' some meaningless shite so long as 'no attempt is made to specify' some other meaningless shite.

Why does Spivak think attempting something impossible and futile- viz. specifying the post-modern space specific subject-production (which translates as giving a narrative without giving a narrative of how something is produced which can't be produced)- will help the American small investor who must be enjoying his 'unheard of freedom' to rape virgins in Sri Lanka?

I am not recommending varieties of reactive nostalgia such as an unexamined adulation of working class culture, an ostentatious rejection of elitist standards, a devotion to all non Judaeo-Christian mythologies, or the timid evocation of"poetry being written in Nicaragua."

Why not? That's why token Black Women are hired. It's called Diversity, dude. Get with the program. Translate that Mahashweta-shite already!

In fact, the version of historical narrative I am sketching here can be expanded to show that, in such nostalgic evaluative norms as the list above, the history of the epistemic violence of imperialism as crisis-management can still operate.

Even though Imperialism died long ago and Keynesian Demand Management had brought about a 'Great Moderation'.

Regular periodization should rather be seen in its role within the historical normalization required by the world-system of political economy, engaged in the production and realization of Value, the "post-modern" its latest symptom.

So, Spivak is saying 'post-modern' is 'false consciousness'. Fair enough. But what does it have to do with 'periodization'- regular, or otherwise?
In a foot note she explains- The Marx that is useful here is not the philosopher of history, but rather the theoretician of crisis. It is in the sketched theory of crisis that Marx most anticipates the international division of labor, least imposing the normative narrative of modes of production in the world outside Western Europe. Concise accounts of crisis theory, and crisis theory and contemporary imperialism, are to be found in Robert I. Rhodes, ed., Imperialism and Underdevelopment: A Reader (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970). A systematic development of Marx's theory of production, distribution, and circulation into the regulation of crises is to be found in Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation. Peter F. Bell and Harry Cleaver give an account of the development of Marx's own theory of crisis in "Marx's Theory as a Theory of Class Struggle," Research in Political Economy 5(1982).

So Spivak is saying 'Capitalist crisis will lead to neo-Colonialism'. Fair enough. That's an argument which could have been made- more particularly with relation to Reagan's Latin American policies. But could Spivak actually say anything sensible from the Leftist point of view?

Nope- as witness this-

Such evaluations would accommodate the "materialist" articulation of Value within what I described earlier as the practical position of Value in our discipline in the narrow sense, underlining the role of exploitation in understanding domination.

What Spivak is saying is that she, in her 'discipline' -viz. shitting on Literature- is actually part of some global process. She is the tool of Capitalism. She is writing shite because that is her 'materialist' predication as a subject producing an exchange value.
She isn't exploited, she is an exploiter- of post modernism in this case- because she understands 'domination' and is determined to do her part so as to get paid.
Why is she so heartless?
It's because her Marxism is better than that of the bleeding hearts.

 In "Marx's (not Ricardo's) 'Transformation Problem,'" Richard A. Wolff, Bruce Brothers, and Antonino Collari suggest that when "Marx . . . considers a social object in which the processes of circulation constitute effective preconditions for the process of production, ... relevant magnitude must be the price of production of the consumed means of production and not the abstract labor time physically embodied in them" [Wolff et al., "Marx's 'Transformation Problem,'" 574].

Stripped of jargon, the bleeding hearts are saying 'Marx thinks workers should be well paid.' The corollary is that 'solidarity' based income distribution from those who can secure a higher market wage to others is required as part of our socialisation. Rightists may sneer that human beings are selfish and short-sighted and lack a shred of altruism. But empirical economists can point to the practical success of this type of social thinking.

Spivak, however, knows better-

I have so far been arguing, among other things, that to set the labor theory of value aside is to forget the textual and axiological implications of a materialist predication of the subject.

In other words, workers will have no truck with 'solidarity' based fiscal redistribution and erosion of take-home wage differentials. Why? 'Textual' and 'Axiological' implications exist in Marx's work which nobody except her has ever discovered.

The passage I quote, however, seems to be an appropriate description of the perspectival move which provisionally must set that theory aside. As a result of this move, "the equivalence of exchange must be constructed out of the processes specific to competitive capitalism which tend to establish a proportional distribution of unpaid labor time in the form of an average rate of profit on total capital, no longer assumed as in volume 1" ["Marx's'Transformation Problem'" 572; italics mine, and I have conflated three  sentences].

There was no Fiscal machinery to redistribute Income on a solidarity basis in Marx's time. But such a thing had existed in America and Western Europe for many years. Thus what Marx wrote about the Capitalism of his day had no salience for contemporary Marxists or other Leftist in Reagan's America.

Thus the authors situate the specific arena of the labor theory of value but go on to suggest that, since "Marx's focus [was] on class relations as his object of discourse . . simultaneously, however, the concept of value remains crucial to the quantification of prices of production. Price on production, as an absolute magnitude of labor time, can be conceived only as a specific deviation from value" ["Marx's 'Transformation Problem'" 575; italics mine].

Again, stripped of jargon, something simple is being said. Even if the shadow prices for Capital are high relative to Labour, or those for skilled work are high relative to unskilled work, and so even if the entire Labour product is less than is required for a Social Minimum, still, since Man is a social being, people can accept a 'solidarity' cut in take-home pay to benefit their poorer brethren. No doubt, the Rightist will yell- No! It's not economically sustainable!- but, provided resource allocation improves and a virtuous circle is created whereby rising living standards increase productivity then there is only a temporary deviation from a sustainable 'golden path'.

It is true, I am reading this charitably- but why not read these guys charitably? They were genuinely concerned with the poor.

I have not touched the topic of the value-price relationship in these pages. Further, I have questioned the mechanics of limiting the definition of value to the physical embodiment of abstract labor time.

Spivak hasn't touched any Economic topic in these pages. She has mentioned some Economists and then showed her utter ignorance and imbecilic incomprehension of what they have written. To be clear, Marxism- as practiced by Nobel Prize winning Soviet Economists like Kantorovich- does not have any need for Markets. It can solve the optimization problem in a substantive manner such that 'shadow prices' arise which do in fact give a way of defining value as the physical embodiment of abstract labour time. That way may not be computable but then we know that Walrasian solutions, too, are in a higher complexity class.

I would in fact argue that the premises of Capital I are themselves dependent upon a gesture of reduction that may be called a construction [Capital 1 135].

You only argue that because you are stupid. Premises are not dependent upon anything. They are propositions taken as true without any 'gesture of reduction' or suggested means of construction.

Generalizing from Wolff's and his co-authors' position, I would find that Marx's focus on class (mode of production) must be made to accommodate his reach on crisis (world system).

Why? Crisis disappeared in 1940 and was never seen again.

Yet Wolff and his co-authors' perspectival situation of the labor theory of value and concurrent definition of price of production as deviation or differential seem to us admirably just.

Because you don't understand it. Wolff et al are saying- 'hey guys, lets help the poor right away! Their productivity will go up so the thing will pay for itself long run.' This is like Galbraith telling Kennedy to speak, not of the Budget deficit, but the 'full employment Budget Surplus'.

Spivak likes 'deviations' because deviants are cool and subvert the patriarchy and fuck your kids in the ass and then write Cohn Bendit type articles about how little kids really want to be fucked in the ass coz like Marcuse wrote some shite and Bataille wrote some other shite and De Sade was a great moralist and Gilles de Retz the true Liberator of France.

Within the discipline of economics, which must keep any textualized notion of use-value out, it seems crucial to suggest that "Marx ... affirms the interdependence of value and value form ([understood as] price of production), an interdependence which cannot be expressed by treating the relation between the two concepts as merely a functional relation between dependent and independent variables."

 If you want to help poor people now- yup! you've got to say- 'hey, we can pay people more now even if their productivity is low coz there's other stuff we can do- as a matter of 'solidarity' and good housekeeping- which raises everybody's productivity long term. We can- as a Society- pull ourselves up by own bootstraps. Economics does not consist of iron laws. Human beings aren't selfish and evil. It's nice to be nice. Give Hope a Chance!

As I move more conclusively into the enclosure of my own disciplinary discourse, perhaps it might not be inappropriate to suggest that this essay does no more than point at the confused ideological space of some varieties of such an interdependence.

WTF? Spivak's 'disciplinary discourse' is literature. It's about 'paideia'- educating young people to feel social solidarity and dream of a better Society for everybody.

Literature and language are part of our Social being. They can make us feel and act in a manner which our renders our interdependence not a zero-sum Nash equilibrium but a positive-sum virtuous circle featuring co-operative or correlated equilibria.

Good literary theory and good Economics can support each other. Reading Balzac was beneficial to Marx as it is beneficial to us. Why? Our emotions are stirred by the waste that is represented by a poor but talented young person being shut out of the good things in life.

Crap literary theory- like Spivak's- helps nobody. All we learn from her is that some stupid woman in Sri Lanka worked 40 hours just to buy a t-shirt.

I will now appropriate yet another item on the threshold of this essay: the Derridian concept of "interest" as in "scrupulous declaration of interest." Derrida's own understanding of surplus-value as capital-appreciation or interest is, as I have suggested above, restricted.

Because it isn't Derrida's. He was a silly man but not that silly. Surplus value means the employer forcing you to work longer than needed to cover your wage. This only leads to capital appreciation or gives rise to usury if the employer doesn't spend that money on himself. Derrida was a soft Leftist bleeding heart- not a murderous psychopath or preening careerist.

What 'scrupulous declaration of interest' has Spivak made? Her careerism is entirely naked.

I simply wrest it back from that "false" metaphor and "literalize" it.20 If and when we ask and answer the question of value, there seems to be no alternative to declaring one's "interest" in the text of the production of Value. I offer this formula because the problem of "how to relate a critique of'f oundationalism,' which like its object is interminable and may always go astray, to a critique of ideology that allows for at least provisional endings and ends in research and 'political' practice" remains with us [Dominick La Capra, Lecture given at Wesleyan University, 1984]. The early Derrida assured us that "deconstruction falls a prey to its own critique" and went largely unheeded [Of Grammatology 24]. The later Derrida, miming this precaution interminably, has been written off as, at best, a formal experimentalist or, at worst, uninteresting and repetitive. It should be clear from the last few pages that I can endorse Jean-Frangois Lyotard's benevolent "paganism" as an axiological model as little as I can JOrgen Habermas's Europocentric rationalism. 

No. You can only endorse yourself as having discovered all sorts of things about Marxian economics which don't exist and which would render that ideology utterly noxious and mischievous to working people if it did exist.
You yourself wrote on Derrida. It is you who rendered him 'uninteresting and repetitive'. But then you do that to any author who catches your magpie eye.
Why can't you endorse Lyotard? Is it because he refutes the notion that his thesis is axiological? What about Habermas? In what way have you engaged with him?

One of the more interesting solutions offered is Dominick La Capra's "historiography as transference."

How is it interesting? What does it solve? Nothing. Historiography isn't transference- which is the name given to the psychological compulsion to pay a charlatan to treat an imaginary illness of yours.

Yet there, too, there are certain desires to appropriate the workings of the unconscious of which we should beware.

Why? Either desires are conscious or they are themselves unconscious. If they are unconscious how can we beware of them?

For "repetition-displacement of the past into the present" (La Capra's version of transferential historiography) may be too continuist and harmless a version of the transactions in transference.

If it is harmless, so what if it is 'continuist'? Would it be better if it were discontinuous? Why should it not be so? After all, the unconscious is either a decision space characterised by topological dictators- i.e. holes- or it is itself continuist. But, in that case, there is no point to investigating it.

Transference is not a good thing. It is part of a medical fraud.

And it might not be enough simply to say that "it is a useful critical fiction to believe that the texts or phenomena to be interpreted may answer back and even be convincing enough to lead one to change one's mind" [La Capra, History and Criticism 73].

Why not? This is what one does when reading good literature.

Given Lacan's elaborate unfolding of the relationship between transference and the ethical moment, which was fraudulent, because he himself was a charlatan who charged people money for treating a wholly imaginary illness I can do no better here than to reiterate an earlier doubt, expressed not in terms of historiography but rather of literary criticism:

 Nor will the difference between text and person be conveniently effaced by refusing to talk about the psyche, by talking about the text as part of a self-propagating mechanism. Urm... texts are different from people. Refusing to talk about the psyche won't change that. As for talking about the text as part of a self-propagating machine- that's a sign of psychosis. The disjunctive, discontinuous metaphor of the subject, carrying and being carried by its burden of desire, does systematically misguide and constitute the machine of text, carrying and being carried by its burden of "figuration." Or not. A disjunctive, discontinuous metaphor isn't a figure of speech. It is a schizophrenic word-salad. One cannot escape it by dismissing the former as the residue of a productive cut, and valorizing the latter as the only possible concern of a "philosophical" literary criticism. Of course one can escape this nonsensical predicament. Those who do produce good philosophical literary criticism. Those who don't write shite. This opposition too, between subject "metaphor" and text "metaphor," needs to be indefinitely deconstructed rather than hierarchized. OMG! Other people worry about poor relatives back home. Not Spivak. She worries about the needs of metaphors which are wholly meaningless. What a swell 'Marxis Feminist' she is to be sure! [Spivak, "The Letter as Cutting Edge," Literature and Psychoanalysis: Reading Otherwise 225]

Part of the mystery lies, I think, in that Derrida is here trying to make "woman his subject" (his "interest"?) and hint enigmatically at "affirmative deconstruction."

Derrida let you talk stupid shite coz u iz a black woman from a shithole of a country. It was 'affirmative action' of a tokenist and deeply patronizing type. There is no mystery here at all.

As I will soon explain, my notion of interest must take the risk of being related to the deliberative consciousness.

That's a risk?! Believe me, Spivak, no notion of yours risks being related to anything deliberative. You probably write this shite in your sleep.

Over a year after the writing of this essay, at the point of implementing the final editorial suggestions, I begin to realize how astutely Paul de Man had predicted this move from "false" metaphor to "literalization " in the field of political practice. So, that Nazi charlatan made an astute prediction did he? It would take a careful elaboration of de Man's entire complex argument in Allegories of Reading to establish the parallel between my move here and grammar and "figure" in the following definition of textuality: "We call text any entity that can be considered from . . . a double perspective: as a generative, open-ended, non-referential grammatic system and as a figural system closed off by a transcendental system that subverts the grammatical code to which the text owes its existence" [Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading 270; italics mine]. Suffice it here to consolidate the parallel by pointing out that, towards the bottom of the same page, de Man aphoristically describes the necessity of this subversion, this closing off, in the following way: ". .. and if a text does not act, it cannot state what it knows" (italics mine). So, de Man found a way to fool the American Academy into accepting him as some sort of Leftie when the truth was he was a Nazi cunt. You have done something similar. Hooray for you!

] The formula -"scrupulous declaration of interest in the text of the production of Value"- that I offer comes out of the most problematic effect of the sovereign subject, the so-called deliberative consciousness. But you don't demonstrate any ability to deliberate in any manner which doesn't render any auditor not already brain-dead completely unconscious.Thus, there is no guarantee in deconstruction for freezing this imperative into a coercive theoretical universal nor is such a guarantee available to anything at all, though it is of course subject to all the constraints of ethico-logical grounding which apparently consists of nothing but telling stupid, ignorant, lies. The encroachment of the fictive (related, of course, to the textual) upon this operation cannot be appreciated without passing through the seemingly deliberative, which, even in the most self-conscious transferential situation, can, at any rate, only be resisted rather than fully avoided. Why? Because there is no encroachment at all. You are just making all this up. In closing, I will invoke the very threshold, the second paragraph of this essay, where I write: "The 'idealist' and the 'materialist' are both exclusive predications." They are nonsensical predications and thus perfectly compossible in the nonsense world they inhabit. All predications are exclusive and thus operate on the metonymic principle of a part standing for the putative whole: in a nonsense world "As soon as one retains only a predicate of the circle (for example, return to the point of departure, closing off the circuit), its signification is put into the position of a trope, of metonymy if not metaphor" [Derrida, "White Mythology" 264].  So, a figure of speech is just a figure of speech. You aren't really talking about logical predicates at all. In this sense, the "idealist" and the "materialist" predications of the subject are metonyms of the subject. So are the Nicaraguan horcruxes of your neighbour's cat a predication as well as a metonym not just of you but also any subject you shit all over. Writing of the constitution of the subject as such, Lacan writes: "The double-triggered mechanism of metaphor is the very mechanism by which the symptom . . is determined. But those symptoms belonged to an imaginary illness from which quacks made money.  And the enigmas that desire seems to pose for a 'natural philosophy' . . . amount to no other derangement of instinct than that of ... metonymy" So, they didn't matter anyway.["The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious" Ecrits 166-67]. In so far as the two predications are concepts of the subject, they are unacknowledged metaphoric substitute-presentations of the subject. And thus have exactly the same ontological and alethic status as 'Nicaraguan horcruxes of your neighbour's cat'. Between metaphor and metonymy, symptom and desire, the political subject distances itself from the analyst-intransference by declaring an "interest" by way of a "wild" rather than theoretically grounded practice. The political subject picks up its knickers and runs away from the The(rapist). Lest I seem, once again, to be operating on an uncomfortable level of abstraction, let me choose a most non-esoteric source. Here is the McCraw-Hill Dictionary of Modern Economics on the encroachment of the fictive upon the deliberative in the operation of the economic text: Originally the Dow-Jones averages represented the average (arithmetical mean) price of a share of stock in the group. As stocks split, the substitution of issues in the averages, and other factors occurred, however, a formula was devised to compensate for these changes. Although the Dow-Jones averages no longer represent the actual average prices of these stocks in the groups, they still represent the levels and changes in the stock-prices reasonably well. [178]

WTF? How is this 'an encroachment of the fictive'? The Dow Jones is a Schelling focal solution to a coordination problem. It is recalibrated with overlapping consensus re. the underlying statistical techniques in a manner which allows it to retain salience and thus generate a rent. How stupid is Spivak? Bengal exported a lot of good Statisticians to the States in the Fifties and Sixties. Why didn't she ask one of them about this sort of thing before shooting off her mouth?

I say above that "the full implications of the question of Value posed within the 'materialist' predication of the subject cannot yet be realized." I must now admit what many Marxist theoreticians admit today: that in any theoretical formulation, the horizon of full realization must be indefinitely and irreducibly postponed.

Why must you admit it? You are not a Marxist theoretician. You know no Economics. You don't even understand the Dow Jones index. You are an idiot. Don't do any 'theoretical formulation'. Everybody can see you are just a worthless de Man type careeist perpetrating a particularly heartless Credentialised Ponzi scheme by trading on your colour and gender. 'Affirmative deconstruction' indeed!

On that horizon it is not utopia that may be glimpsed [see Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative As A Socially Symbolic Act 103f]. For utopias are historical attempts at topographic descriptions that must become dissimulative if attempts are made to represent them adequately in actual social practice.

Sheer nonsense! Utopias aren't 'topographic descriptions'- they aren't maps of fairy land featuring yellow brick roads and Wizard's castles. It is not the case that you can actually find them in the annals of History. On the contrary, a Utopia is a speculative literary fiction which is tied to Mechanism Design in our own World. Utopias don't become 'dissimulative' if they get Mechanism Design right. Furthermore, no actual social practice would be a 'representation' of them. Why? They have less Kolmogorov complexity than the real world.

The complicity between idealisms and materialisms in the production of theory is better acknowledged, even as one distances oneself from idealism, if one designates this open end by the name of the "apocalyptic tone."

There is no complicity between 'idealisms' and 'materialisms'. These things don't really exist nor do they start plotting with each other.  There is no need to acknowledge nonsensical propositions regarding them or anything else. Apocalypse means 'rending of the veil'. Your writing is just an obfuscation and hilarious misunderstanding of everything.

21 This tone announces the pluralized apocalypse of the practical moment, in our particular case the set or ensemble of ideologycritical, aesthetic-troping, economically-aware performative or operational value-judgment. In other words- worthless verbiage masquerading as Leftie shite with an obsolete Freudian cherry on top. My careful language here should make clear that the practical moment is not a "fulfillment." In the pluralized apocalypse, the body does not rise. Urm... bodies don't rise ever. As a Hindu, you have no need to pretend they do. There is no particular need to see this as the thematics of castration. Spivak- you don't have a dick. You can't be castrated. Why not affirm as its concept-metaphor the performative and operational evaluation of the repeated moves of the body's survival and comfort, historically named woman's work or assigned to domestic labor when it is minimally organized? Why do anything so pointless? Why appropriate the irreducible non-fit between theory and practice (here in the grounding and making of Value judgments) into Oedipus's hobble? Why write this worthless shite? I offer, then, no particular apology for this deliberate attempt to show the difference between pre-critical economism and the role of the economic text in the determination of Value; and, further, to plot some of the "interests" in its foreclosure

You have shown nothing. There is no 'economic text in the determination of Value'. There was just you 'cooking the books' so as to make out you understood Marxism and represented Black Women from very poor countries and thus deserved tokenist plaudits and profits from publishing unreadable shite.