English Texts

outing through French, ‘fétiche’, literally, ‘bewitchment’.
The etymological evolution of the term seems to
confirm the accusations against the French thinkers,
and so Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida would all appear
to be bewitched. But what interests us about that
philological drift is not to emulate the phantasmagoria
of Spectres of Marx or The state of the debt, the work
of mourning, and the New International by Jacques
Derrida; rather the opposite, the deep materialist
subtraction through which Marx dragged those artists
in the enterprise of trying to narrate Capital in images.
It was obvious, and Derrida himself pointed it out, that
the fetishist character of the commodity is heightened
in the world of art as nowhere else, even the world
of religion. It may have been that context which, in
the arts, followed the logic of late capitalism, which led
to an interest in the ‘fetish’ as something ‘made by
the hand of man’. And it was in that logical order, in
that materialist design, where those artists wanted
to set their readings of Capital, since the mystical
character of the commodity was already tremendously
familiar to them. The excursions which analyses of
Marx make around Robinson Crusoe have a curious
echo in Coetzee’s Foe, in the sense of turning all the
commodities Robinson needs to survive into language
and in the sense in which Susan Barton, the narrator
of the shipwreck, makes us see the deep material need
language attains in this story. We must remember
that the chapter of Marx we are highlighting was not
included in Capital until the second edition and that
it was written as a deep reflection on that nature of
twofold relations between labour and commodity. Lastly,
the parameter Marx manages to explain to us relates
‘commodities made by the hand of man’ and the
production of language itself: ‘The mystical character
of commodities does not originate, therefore, in their
use value. Just as little does it proceed from the nature
of the determining factors of value. For, in the first place,
however varied the useful kinds of labour, or productive
activities, may be, it is a physiological fact that they
are functions of the human organism, and that each
such function, whatever may be its nature or form,
is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves,
muscles, etc. Secondly, with regard to that which forms
the ground-work for the quantitative determination
of value, namely, the duration of that expenditure, or
the quantity of labour, it is quite clear that there is a
palpable difference between its quantity and quality.
In all states of society, the labour time that it costs to
produce the means of subsistence, must necessarily be
an object of interest to mankind, though not of equal
interest in different stages of development. And lastly,
from the moment that men in any way work for one
another, their labour assumes a social form.’ Duration
and quantity of labour valued through social exchange,
Marx continues on, and it is in those very laws of social
exchange – the laws of communication – where the
twofold character of the commodity will appear, its use
or use value as it is usually called, and its exchange
value, or strictly speaking the meaning the value has
for itself. And so Robinson saves from the shipwreck
‘the watch, book, ink and pen, and, like a good
Englishman, begins to keep an account of himself.’
In other words, he starts to write, for all the prosaic
Marx rightly situates those activities at the dawn of
capitalism. And so there could be no other reason
for the fact that today we think that language and
communication are the main objects of labour in late
capitalism.
Before pursuing this line, a word of warning. Marx
functions here, in this story, as one more character
in the narrative, just as he appears in Dr. Pasavento
by Enrique Vila-Matas, the inhabitant of a ranch
which conjures up some kind of phantasms, a link
between the different modes the story has of producing
itself. The point is not to establish any type of communion
with Marxism, similar to the kind Marx indicated
about Christianity as that form of capitalism where
the fetishist character of the commodity is given pride
of place. In that sense, the iconoclastic way in which
Marxism dismantles the added, religious, mystical,
fetishist value of the commodity as typical of a Christian
ideology would fully focus the intention, the originality
of these lines. The point therefore is to make ourselves
understand through Marx – rather through a file from
F.X. Archive that takes Capital as the theme of a
series of works of art – and not to try, from these modest
pages, to explain any kind of Marxism.
What we are trying to locate are the tools that led
those film directors – Eisenstein, Debord, Mercado –
to tackle Capital. Of the last two we might say that they
were familiar with Guy Debord’s The Society of the
Spectacle and had studied Eisenstein’s attempts to
bring Capital to the screen, finding in the French artist’s
film a kind of reconciliation between the documentary
attempts of Vertov, Kulechov, the FEKS and Eisenstein
himself, so reviled by the situationists themselves.
As for Guy Debord, we have already said that, for a
change, the public presentation of his project to adapt
his work The Society of the Spectacle for the screen
was done at the cost of Eisenstein’s failed attempt: ‘We
know that Eisenstein wanted to film Capital. We may
then wonder, given that director’s formal conceptions
and political submission, if his film would have been
faithful to Marx’s text. But for our part we have no doubt
that we would do it better. For example, as soon as it
is feasible, Guy Debord will make a film adaptation
of The Society of the Spectacle, which will certainly not
be inferior to the book.’ Before that, René Viénet had
marked out the advertising ancestry of the film by
establishing its genealogy, from Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or
to American B-movies by way of Orson Welles’ Citizen
Kane, in the business of commercial cinema, the
advertisers’ absolute, and emphasising the Soviet filmmaker’s
attempt: ‘Advertising film, at the service of
commerce and spectacle – that is the least that can
be said of it – but free from those media has laid the
bases of what Eisenstein glimpsed when he was talking
about filming A Critique of Political Economy or German
Ideology.’ We therefore understand that The Society
of the Spectacle is Debord’s attempt to crown
Eisenstein’s project by making a reading of Capital
mixed with Luckács. More than that, we would venture
to say that the project to crown Eisenstein’s attempt
precedes the writing of the book The Society of the
Spectacle, which would finally emerge as a perfect
script for the future film. Moreover, the situationists
knew that in 1930 Eisenstein had answered them:
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