Spivak, Derrida, Marx and the question of value

I'll outline here a basic point that Gayatri Spivak makes about Derrida and Marx in "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value" that does not cease to be relevant even today when thinking about all the concepts we inherit from Derrida--most notably (and was there any other concept he gave us? and was it ever a concept?) differance. We'll see that it is picked up, a decade later, by Bernard Stiegler, for essential reasons. Spivak lays out the point simply, in the strict terms of Marx:

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

-in The Spivak Reader, 119

The distinction she makes between "materialism" and "idealism" is outlined in the first paragraph of that essay and should be recalled:

One of the determinations of the question of value is the predication of the subject. The modern "idealist" predication of the subject is consciousness. Labor-power is a "materialist" predication. Consciousness is not thought, but rather the subject's irredicible intendedness towards the object. Correspondingly, labor power is not work (labor) but rather the irredicible possibility that the subject be more than adequate--super-adequate--to itself, labor-power: "it distinguishes itself [unterscheidet sich] from the ordinary crown of commodities in that its use creates value, and a greater value than it costs itself" (Capital 1, 342).

-in The Spivak Reader, 109.

This is a lot to take in, but let's walk through it: Spivak is extremely careful with the words she uses and each signals a turn in thought that lends itself to our tracing it out.

It is obvious from the first sentence of the second quote (the first sentence of the first paragraph of the essay) that how the subject is predicated is, for Spivak, a way that the question of value can take on a particular valence or tone. In other words, a way the question of value can be asked can be in how the subject is predicated, how it is allowed or not allowed to be: the predication itself asks the question of value, so that what value is will resonate with how a subject is predicated.

Spivak then reproduces a distinction Marx makes in The German Ideology between the predication of consciousness and the predication of labor-power. As Marx says, the former predication "descends from heaven to earth," making "consciousness" into what "determines life" while the latter is involved in a movement of "ascending from earth to heaven," making "life" into what "determines ...consciousness" (The German Ideology, Amherst: Prometheus, 1998, 43). This is the sense in which the first is "idealist" and the second "materialist:" not because one or the other is a particular form of rigorous idealism or materialism but because the first has idealist and the second "materialist premises" (Marx, 43)--thus the quotes she puts around the words. What is "idealist" corresponds to a predication of the subject that presupposes the form of consciousness as primary and the labor power in life secondary, and what is "materialist" corresponds to a predication of the subject that presupposes the form of labor-power in the opposite way. What are these presuppositions, exactly? Nothing other than identity, self-presence in the case of idealism and difference or absence of presence in the case of materialism. This is why Spivak says that labor-power is not labor--not a thing or a present that would be identical to itself, like the conscious "I am"--but a "irreducible possibility:" labor-power is not, because it is only a difference between the subject and its object, what it needs. Thus, "super-adequation:" the converse of Spivak's proposition that the subject is super-adequate to herself according to labor-power is that the subject is that the subject is lacking something or is different than what it needs to be in order to be adequate. For Spivak, labor-power is a predication of the subject as a needing and making subject, a subject that can make more than it needs and, in "being" this ability, always "is" lacking something or needing something that would make it adequate to itself or identical. It is always already more than its identity to itself. If Derrida's consideration of capital "can only lead to 'idealist' analogies," as she says, then we see that Derrida's idealism must stem from presupposing here that consciousness as this self-identity is more primary than labor-power and difference as a predication of the subject.

We'll continue these reflections later... here is the transit they will make: capital presupposing identity in Derrida and escaping the real meaning of surplus-value, or the surplus itself. This "restricted" and not "generalizing" notion--Spivak especially chooses her words carefully here, referring to the distinction between a restricted and general economy--stems from an ambiguity in how differance appears only after or before there is super-adequation, and not precisely at the point of super-adequation itself. In other words, differance "is" not super-adequation, and thus Derrida presupposes that it exists in a completed form--in capital, rather than as labor power. This ambiguity is localized by Stiegler in Technics and Time, when he cannot place differance either before or after phusis with any clarity: does phusis arise from differance or afterwards? And is this a correct understanding of differance on the part of Stiegler--is not this indeterminacy precisely the determinacy of both the either and the or, of the perhaps?