The Story // The Argument

I think Ben's last longer post is really intriguing, especially since I've been reading the Eighteenth Brumaire on the side. Some quick questions before a longer post this weekend.

* If he's telling a story, is Marx doing "serious" history, developing a typological narrative of modern exchange, which [as I think you're suggesting, Ben] lays waste to its precursors as it moves forward?

* Or is he proceeding from first principles--like Hobbes in Leviathan--and writing an implicit polemic [raising and devastating arguments without stooping to the naming of names], while mitigating his broadside by allowing it to take the structure of a story?

* Or is he after something in between linear storytelling and arborescent argumentation?

The Socius

Adorno, Prisms, in the essay "Cultural Criticism and Society":

The notion of the free expression of opinion, indeed, that of intellectual freedom itself in bourgeois society, upon which cultural criticism is founded, has its own dialectic. For while the mind extricated itself from a theological-feudal tutelage, it has fallen increasingly under the sway of the status quo. This regimentation, the result of the progressive societalization of all human relations, did not simply confront the mind from without; it immigrated into its immanent consistency. It imposes itself as relentlessly on the autonomous mind as heteronomous orders were formerly imposed on the mind which was bound. Not only does the mind mold itself for the sake of its marketability, and thus reproduce the socially prevalent categories. Rather, it grows to resemble ever more closely the status quo even where it subjectively refrains from making a commodity of itself. The network of the whole is drawn ever tighter, modelled after the act of exchange. [20-21]

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Deleuze and Guattari, from Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus, in the section "The Body without Organs":

The forms of social production, like those of desiring-production, involve an unengendered nonproductive attitude, an element of antiproduction coupled with the process, a full body that functions as a socius. This socius may be the body of the earth, that of the tyrant, or capital. This is the body that Marx is referring to when he says that it is not the product of labor, but rather appears as its natural or divine presupposition. In fact, it does not restrict itself merely to opposing productive forces in and of themselves. It falls back on all production, constituting a surface over which the forces and agents of production are distributed. . ." [10]