Readings from January, 2023

I was reminded recently by a friend of Keston Sutherland’s “Marx in Jargon,” one of the best essays on Marx’s style I can recommend. Sutherland has an astonishing analysis of the German term gallerte in Marx’s description of abstract labour. Readers should be warned that the essay will probably give nervous fits to those without German language skills…

“The misunderstood idea in Das Kapital is the idea that “abstrakt menschliche Arbeit” is a “bloße Gallerte unterschiedsloser menschlicher Arbeit.” (MEGA II.8: 70) One reason why this idea in Das Kapital has been misunderstood by readers of Capital is that it is not present in Capital. Moore and Aveling translate Marx’s phrase as “human labour in the abstract…a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour.” (MA: 45) Fowkes writes “human labour in the abstract…merely congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour.” (F: 128) These are mistranslations that cannot adequately be described as mere shortcomings in style; as this division of my article will show, they utterly transform the meaning of one of Marx’s most important ideas and the thinking that it makes possible.”¹

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I just finished reading Gary Indiana’s recently published collected essays from 1984-2001 (Fire Seasons) as well as his first novel Horse Crazy and Resentment, the first of his detective trilogy. This prompted me to revisit this essay by Christian Lorentzen in Art Forum. Lorenzen’s essays are wonderful précis, however I think they tend to underplay just how funny and irreverent Indiana is. Take this passage from Resentment, which is Indiana at his most Pynchonian, and also foreshadows Indiana’s broader interest in fame, as charted in his The Schwarzenegger Syndrome: Politics and Celebrity in the Age of Contempt.

The best brief essay on Indiana meanwhile is surely Tobi Haslett’s introduction to Horse Crazy. “AIDS in Horse Crazy,” Haslett writes, “is an assault on intimacy, a kind of hyperbole for how hard it is to connect. But it’s also history—history coming into crashing contact with human life, human weakness. AIDS draws and patrols the line between people; it crumbles the body and poisons love” (8).