this struggle ended in failure.
The theoretical work of the New Left which emerged in the late 1950s can be divided into three general trends, all derived from the work of Marx. The first turned towards the early Marx and the theory of alienation, represented most clearly by the literary critic and poet Yoshimoto Taka’aki (1924–2012). The second, what we might call the reconstruction of historical materialism through a re-reading that attempted to overcome the early Marx, was best represented in the figure of the philosopher Hiromatsu Wataru (1933–1994). The third, which sought to rediscover Marx’s specificity in the text of Capital, can be represented by the political economist Uno Kōzō (1897–1977).
I was influenced by all three of these figures. For example, what drew me to literary criticism in the first place was the influence of Yoshimoto Taka’aki. On the one hand, what led me to reject the theoretical work of the early Marx on which Yoshimoto had relied so much, was precisely the influence of Hiromatsu Wataru. He provided textual proof that Engels had pre-empted the process that Althusser, for instance, referred to as Marx’s ‘epistemological break’. Yet, on the other hand, the greatest influence on me by far came from Uno Kōzō’s theoretical work in political economy.
In Uno’s conception, while Capital constituted the ‘guiding thread’ of historical materialism, it was written with a differing perspective and methodological orientation. Historical materialism views the history of social formations from the economic base of modes of production (forces of production and relations of production). In contrast, Capital explicates the capitalist economic system by beginning from commodity exchange and disclosing the process by which it comes to compose and regulate the relations of production as capital. Although these two modes of thinking are heterogeneous to each other, the majority of Marxist theorists ignored the clear differential between them and tried to somehow produce an articulation between these two perspectives. Uno Kōzō, however, rigorously distinguished them, insisting on Capital as ‘science’ and historical materialism as ‘ideology’, although this ideology remained necessary as a ‘guiding thread’.
Moreover, Uno’s reading of Capital itself was creative and original. In general, Capital was treated as a text in which the labour theory of value had been inherited from the classical political economy of Smith and Ricardo, but for Uno, Capital focused on exchange rather than production, and, in this sense, he emphasized precisely that capital itself was, in essence, merchant capital. I agreed with Uno’s thought, and soon entered the economics department of the University of Tokyo. Although Uno himself had already retired by this point, I encountered there numerous professors who belonged to the Uno School. But, before long, I lost interest in economics; after graduating, I turned towards literature and became a critic. Nevertheless, I certainly had not lost my interest in Marx’s Capital, rather, I was simply uninterested in treating it as an economist.
From my perspective, I saw the capitalist economy as disclosed in Capital not as something material but as an ideal superstructure founded on credit, something born not from the sphere of production but rather from the enigma of exchange. Marx famously stated that exchange began from the interval or intercourse between one community and another. But, in such circumstances, where does this ‘power’ that seems to secure and guarantee exchange with an unknown, uncanny other come from? Marx discovered it in the form of the fetish that adheres to things. In this sense, I understood Capital as a work depicting the process by which the fetish (commodity) develops into Mammon (capital) – but to read Capital in this way was impossible within the sphere of economics proper, and equally impossible within the field of philosophy.
Marx writes: ‘A commodity seems at first glance to be a self-evident, trivial thing. The analysis of it yields the insight that it is a very vexatious thing, full of metaphysical subtlety and theological perversities.’1 In other words, Capital itself is not a text that simply treats metaphysical or theological questions, but one that attempts to draw them out from within this ‘self-evident, trivial thing’ called the commodity. I believed that, in order to theorize this precise problem, it was only possible do so within literary criticism. However, I only began this project in 1973, after I had already published two earlier books as a literary critic. And there was another reason that I specifically wrote a text on Marx at that particular time: it was the very moment at which the New Left movements of the end of the 1960s had failed, and the voices that loudly proclaimed the ‘end of Marxism’ were becoming more and more hegemonic. This was not new to me, since similar voices had already been heard at the beginning of the 1960s, precisely the situation within which I began to read Capital voraciously.
Thus, Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility was an attempt to read Capital from the perspective of literary criticism. What I called here ‘the centre of possibility’ indicates a form of meaning or signification that is there despite not being explicitly specified in the text. In other words, it exists more in the ‘margins’ than in the actual ‘centre’, a mode of seeing and reading that I learned from the critical writings of Paul Valéry. But we can also discover this mode in Marx’s own words. For example, in 1858, he writes the following to Ferdinand Lassalle, with regard to his own doctoral dissertation, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature:
I am all the more aware of the difficulties you had to surmount in this work in that about 18 years ago I myself attempted a similar work on a far easier philosopher, Epicurus – namely the portrayal of a complete system from fragments, a system which I am convinced, by the by, was – as with Heraclitus – only implicitly present in his work, not consciously as a system. Even in the case of philosophers who give systematic form to their work, Spinoza for instance, the true inner structure of the system is quite unlike the form in which it was consciously presented by him.2
I tried to conceive of Marx’s ‘system’ in precisely the same way. For example, Capital was written to an extent on the basis of Hegel’s logical system, but its ‘true inner structure’ is ‘quite unlike the form in which it was consciously presented’. I attempted to see the economic problems detailed in Capital from an entirely different viewpoint by trying to theorize commodity exchange from the perspective of linguistic exchange, or communication. At the time, I discovered a form of thought that resembled that of Marx in the theoretical linguistics of Saussure.
In his theory of the value-form at the outset of Capital, Marx grasped the value of the commodity within a relational system of commodities. In the same way, Saussure took language (langue) to be a synchronic, differential system of signifiers: the meaning of one word is determined in relation to words outside it. Just by changing one element within a synchronic system, it becomes an entirely different system. Thus, what we see as the continual diachronic transformation of language is in fact a discontinuous process of transformation from one synchronic system to another. This is more or less the foundational insight of what came to be called ‘structuralism’. However, what struck me above all in the work of Saussure was that he theorized precisely the exchange or communication that takes place in the interval between multiple systems.
For example, Saussure argued that if a word in one system is translated into another system, while its ‘meaning’ might be the same, it will possess a different ‘value’ insofar as its relation to other words will itself differ. From this point I took a set of clues as to the theorization of surplus value. In other words, we might as well say that surplus value constitutes a differential that emerges from the exchange between different systems. Classical political economy described merchant capital as the process of buying cheap and selling dear. However, it is not the case that merchants practise unequal exchange. A thing may be cheap within one synchronic system, and expensive in another. Although each thing itself emerged from equal exchange within each system, a differential between them is born from exchange. We cannot say that the merchants who acquired this differential were unjust or unfair. Generally speaking, this differential was born in the trade between territories remote from each other.
Adam
