A bird of fire
On the role of dark humor in Marx’s “Capital”
As the chosen people bore in their features the sign that they were the property of Jehovah, so the division of labour brands the manufacturing worker as the property of capital.
—Karl Marx, Capital
In my last essay, I explained that, in their 1972 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari interpret Marx’s dark humor as the passion which fuels Capital, “the source.” This is an unusual way to describe a text—one worth unpacking: what do Deleuze and Guattari mean by this?
Capital is certainly known for its humor and literary style, but that humor is not typically thought of as having a central role in the construction of the text.
Here, I’ll touch on the importance of the role of affects which Deleuze finds in the writing of all great philosophers, and then we’ll take brief look at how that works in Marx’s Capital.
A zigzagging volcanic chain
In 1989, Deleuze wrote a letter to a friend about what makes for a great philosopher. Stating that “I think great philosophers are also great stylists,” Deleuze explains that philosophers need to relate to non-philosophers and that a great work of philosophy does not just contain concepts (“or new ways of thinking”) but also percepts (“or new ways of seeing and hearing”) as well as affects (“or new ways of feeling”), which is the first kind of knowledge.[1]
Concepts don't move only among other concepts (in philosophical understanding), they also move among things and within us: they bring us new percepts and new affects that amount to philosophy's own nonphilosophical understanding. And philosophy requires nonphilosophical understanding just as much as it requires philosophical understanding. That's why philosophy has an essential relation to non-philosophers, and addresses them too. They may even sometimes have a direct understanding of philosophy that doesn't depend on philosophical understanding.[2]
For Deleuze, concepts are inseparably linked with affects and percepts—ways of sensing and ways of feeling, non-philosophical forms of understanding—which ought to be articulated in order to engage with non-philosophers, and even to gain non-philosophical knowledge of philosophy.
For example, we might gain non-philosophically based knowledge of certain concepts (and the receptivity of them) via insights from art, psychoanalysis, or economics.
Deleuze discusses the case of Spinoza, “the most philosophical of philosophers, the purest, in some sense, but also the one who, more than any other, addresses non philosophers and calls forth the most intense nonphilosophical understanding.” Deleuze explains that, on the surface, Spinoza appears to have no style:
He seems, on the face of it, to have no style at all, as we confront the very scholastic Latin of the Ethics. But you have to be careful with people who supposedly “have no style”; as Proust noted, they're often the greatest stylists of all. The Ethics appears at first to be a continuous stream of definitions, propositions, proofs, and corollaries, presenting us with a remarkable development of concepts. An irresistible, uninterrupted river, majestically serene. Yet all the while there are “parentheses” springing up in the guise of scholia, discontinuously, independently, referring to one another, violently erupting to form a zigzagging volcanic chain, as all the passions rumble below in a war of joy pitted against sadness.[3]
Deleuze suggests here that the kind of style Spinoza represents, with affects bursting forth from beneath the surface, combining to form a passionate rupture, is that of the greatest of stylists. And according to Deleuze, it is Spinoza’s style—his particular combination of concepts, affects, and percepts—that makes him so widely and powerfully influential:
absolutely anyone can read Spinoza, and be very moved, or see things quite differently afterward, even if they can hardly understand Spinoza’s concepts. Conversely, a historian of philosophy who understands only Spinoza’s concepts doesn't fully understand him. We need both wings […] just to carry us, philosophers and nonphilosophers, toward the same final point. And it takes all three wings, nothing less, to form a style, a bird of fire.[4]
In short, to bring both philosophers and non-philosophers “toward the same final point,” philosophy must have both philosophical ways of understanding (concepts) and non-philosophical ways (affects or percepts), and when those non-philosophical ways of understanding include both affects and percepts, you may have “a style, a bird of fire.”
I think this sort of stylistic role for affect is relevant for understanding what Deleuze and Guattari mean when they say that Marx’s dark humor is “the source of Capital.”
Capital as a bird of fire
To be clear, Marx is more than a philosopher—in short, he’s also an economist and an historian—but his doctoral training was in philosophy, and there are many concepts at play in his work. Moreover, the method of analysis he invented, historical materialism, is generally understood as a social theory, which of course is relevant to philosophy.
It happens that the passion which fuels Marx’s work is virtually the same as that which fuels Spinoza's. As I explained in my last essay, Deleuze and Guattari understand Marx’s fascination with the composition of capital as pertaining to the same kind of political philosophical concerns which Spinoza had: essentially, why do people struggle for their servitude as if it were their liberation?
Indeed, many of the most remarkable instances of dark humor in Capital come in the way Marx describes relations of domination and exploitation in the personifications of the capitalist system, namely, in the relations between the characters of the worker, the capitalist, and the landowner.
For example:
When Marx describes what it looks like when the capitalist and the worker leave the sphere of commodity exchange:
He who was previously a money-owner strides out in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labor-power follows as his worker. The one smirks self-importantly and is intent on business; the other is timid and holds back, like someone who has brought his own hide to market and now has nothing to expect but — a tanning.[5]
Or when Marx presents the writings of manufacturers and shows that in their view a distinction is made simply between “two sorts of ‘machinery’”
both belong to the capitalist, but one stands in his factory, while the other is housed in cottages outside the factory at night-time and on Sundays. The one is inanimate, the other living.[6]
Or when Marx explains how the revenues of the landowner, as well as the capitalist, are derived from the purposeful productive activity of wage-workers—how the landowner extracts a portion of profit from the capitalist in the form of rent. Marx writes:
land is personified in the landowner, he is the land […] standing up on its hind legs and demanding its share, as an independent power, of the products produced with its aid; so that it is not the land that receives the portion of the product needed to replace and increase its productivity, but instead the landowner who receives a share of this product to be sold off and frittered away.[7]
Depending on the section, Marx, like Spinoza, can appear rather dry on the surface. However, if you persist, Capital, like the Ethics, will reveal itself as "a bird of fire”. When you combine the analysis and economics with the instances of dark humor, you get something that looks a lot like an advanced version of Spinoza’s political philosophical project.
These instances of dark humor are what hint at the revolutionary spirit behind the rigorous economic analysis (and critique of Political Economy), and they affect the reader with a more emotional as well as imagery-based knowledge of the social relations of production under capitalism, bringing the concepts and economic laws together in a way that brings philosophers and non-philosophers, economists and non-economists, toward the same socialist conclusion.
Notes
[1]. Gilles Deleuze, (1995) “Letter to Réda Bensmaïa, on Spinoza,” in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press), 164.
[2]. Ibid.
[3]. Ibid, 165.
[4]. Ibid, 166.
[5]. Karl Marx, (1990) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin), 280.
[6]. Ibid, 722.
[7]. Karl Marx, (1991) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: Vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin). 963.
Oooh, this one gave me new language and concepts I can use to reflect on my own style of communicating. Thank you!