Marx, Memory, Loss

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Marx, Memory, Loss Ways of Reading Capital Anna McCarthy

When you hold a book in your hands, you are holding a piece of cerebrum in your hands, like Saint Denis himself, who walked for miles carrying his head in his two hands, after he had been beheaded. —Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey You’d lose your head if it weren’t screwed on! —My mother

Some time ago — in the eighties or perhaps the nineties, he’s not sure when — David Harvey left his copy of Karl Marx’s Capital (volume 1) on a plane. That Harvey at first considered the loss catastrophic should come as no surprise. Few living Marxists are as well known for their interpretation of this particular work as he. The catastrophe was not the loss of the book itself. Like any mass-produced commodity, it could be purchased again. What seemed irreplaceable, at least initially, was the palimpsest of marginalia contained within the book’s covers, a record of Harvey’s thinking over the years. Anyone whose work encourages writing on the pages of books can surely relate. Deprived of the sedimentary traces of positions taken, often later revised or reversed, Harvey wondered whether he had lost some core understanding of Marx. However, it turned out that losing the book was an intellectual liberation. Encountering it anew, Harvey found fresh reve lations in the unmarked pages. In 2013, when I interviewed him about his personal copy, he said he was grateful for that early loss, that his habit of notation had obscured his ability to read. In fact, since then Harvey has made a point of replacing his copy Social Text 128 • Vol. 34, No. 3 • September 2016 DOI 10.1215/01642472-3607612 © 2016 Duke University Press

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of the book when the annotations become too much. “I must have gone through six or seven by now,” he said as he stood, hands on hips, surveying his disordered office shelves in search of the current one. It struck me that he was talking about Capital the way a professional basketball player might talk about her Nikes. The only time I detected a measure of wistfulness was when I asked him which edition he had left on the plane all those years ago. “It was the King James Version,” he told me, meaning the original English translation by Samuel Moore and Edward Bibbins Aveling, the only one reviewed and approved by Friedrich Engels.1 Every copy Harvey has owned since that originary loss has been the 1976 Ben Fowkes translation, not out of preference but because the Fowkes was for a long time the only version in print. As this was the one all Harvey’s students owned, he decided to make do. When you offer a yearly reading course on Capital, as Harvey has for much of his career, the physical book becomes a tool. Like all tools, it gradually becomes unusable. But books are a particular kind of tool. In the case of Harvey’s Capital, the tool gets replaced not when it becomes worn down, as in Marx’s classic example of the cotton spindle, but when it has grown so encrusted with raw materials — a nnotations or even, one could say, thoughts — it can no longer serve its purpose. Not all practitioners approach a craft this way. The actor James Stewart always wore the same hat and rode the same horse in westerns. I can’t bear to part with my current copy of Capital, so barnacled with marginalia that it is no longer seaworthy. I learned a great deal from my conversation with Harvey and with other leftists who shared their copies of Capital with me in 2013. Much of what I learned concerned the qualities of this particular title when it is materialized as a thing, as a signifying object often used instrumentally, for storing and handling knowledge, especially in pedagogical situations. 2 This humble aspect of the book as use value turns out to shed some light on the status of automation in the process of mental labor, by capturing those aspects of reading-w ith-pen (pen-assisted reading?) that have already crossed a threshold into the realm of automata, that promise to overcome the temporal barriers of thought. Mental labor — by this I mean, at least provisionally, the half physical, half mental procedure of reading with pen in hand, a generative craft that establishes some kind of connection between the act of reading and the formation of a thought, the mark on the page testifying to the inter action between page and mind. This is quite fetishistic language. As this essay fetishizes the book so affirmatively, and wholeheartedly, I should probably say why. I decided to revive a long-held plan to photograph copies of Capital at a time when 10 6

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mind-clouding medical treatments made scholarly writing a joyless and taxing endeavor. Creativity, on the other hand, flowed in abundance. At the time I was only obscurely aware of mortality’s motivating role. All I knew was that I wanted to document the physicality of books at the moment of their apparent dematerialization. The idea of using Capital as a sample, and of approaching other left- wing academics to see if they would allow me to photograph their copies, had always been there. The rationale was partly the opportunity for political and intellectual insight such a project might ignite. But the choice was also pragmatic. Capital, I reasoned, was a book a lot of academics owned. As it is a work people in the humanities and social sciences often read while getting their doctorates, I knew I would find a lot of annotations. When I started photographing, what came into focus was the highly specific act of reading as it is absorbed into the mental labor process. The intellectual attraction of marginalia was the way they seemed to resist the forces of automation. Machines cannot read marginalia, so they preserve some sense of reading as a worthy craft, a semiartisanal practice of knowledge work. 3 This seemed important because of the way the trade is changing tools: with electronic books, new electronic ways of reading.4 Or not so new. Photographic investigation not only documented the physical book as a use value; it also showed how the mental labor process unfolds in time and space, in a manner inviting comparison with the processes of labor and expropriation analyzed by Marx. I asked about thirty people to share their book with me, but only eight handed over their copies. Most people had the same answer: it was in storage (see fig. 1).5 “It might be in storage in Berkeley,” one individual said, hurrying away. But I couldn’t help doubting him; Berkeley was forty years ago. Now, I am amazed that the request didn’t put more people on guard. When you ask to examine and document people’s marginalia, you are asking for a look into their thinking minds, traces of thoughts in the making. If I had known in advance that most marginalia are unintelligible, I would have been able to reassure them that their thoughts would remain private. The reader of marginalia may understand that a logic exists but Figure 1. Many of the thirty or so people I approached said that their copy of Capital was in storage. Screenshot courtesy of the author

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reconstructing it is as easy as reconstructing a dream from the words someone utters in sleep. As it turned out, several of the copies of Capital that I examined were teaching copies. Having taught the book myself, I sensed my methodology transforming, the photographic document now supplemented with participant observation. The seminar notes inscribed in the pages of other people’s copies of Capital illuminated divergent aspects of teaching copies, books we use as things to think with. Authoritative, communicating objects, teaching copies are everyday fetishes to which those of us in the knowledge trade routinely turn, with a prayer or a wish, as we walk into the seminar room. Books have often been conceptualized as containers of knowledge, but the books instructors use in seminars are knowledge containers of a particular kind. Their pages contain not only Marx’s thoughts (in the case of Capital) but also the enzymatic thoughts of the reader, acting on and with Marx’s thoughts in a synthesis that will be verbalized as knowledge.6 Although teaching notes are of scholarly interest, they generate limited enthusiasm among collectors and aficionados of the art of marginalia. Perhaps this is because such annotations must assume a thoroughly instrumental stance in their approach to the text. Other kinds of inscriptions in books make themselves more readily available for fetish and projection: ones that stage dialogues with the author, for example, or that speak to an implied or actual peer reader. By comparison, teaching notes are humble memory aids. In the parlance of the digital humanities, they are nothing more than navigation tools. In the parlance of the digital inanities — BuzzFeed and the like — t hey are hacks.7 Their instrumental nature not only distinguishes teaching notes from other kinds of marginal annotations; it also allows us to identify in the mental labor process the variable and specific positions reading with a pen occupies in relation to value. Teaching notes exemplify the routine and largely unacknowledged ways we in the knowledge trade assimilate increasingly entrepreneurial values into our productivity. When the academic employed in teaching expends labor time fashioning shortcuts among sections of a book, jotting summational phrases, using pens and sticky notes to give a book (and hopefully a discussion) wings, these are not simply tasks — t hey are a necessary form of self-i nvestment (see fig. 2). A more craft-i nflected term might be support, which seems appropriate. It makes sense to view annotation as a craft. From such a perspective, the logic of marginalia — inaccessible and alien — signals that some portion of their meaning and use, as products of mental labor, will remain inalienable from their authors. This is evident even in cases when, as with Capital, the annotated book happens to be one you have taught. Paging

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Figure 2. The platonic form of the teaching

Figure 3. Teaching copies of Capital are a

copy: José Esteban Muñoz’s Marx- Engels

look into the teaching mind and, in the case

Reader. Photograph courtesy of the

of Josie Saldaña’s, into a mind that comes up

author

with fiendishly difficult discussion questions. Photograph courtesy of the author

Figure 4. Oppose Book Worship is the text in which Mao famously decrees, “No investigation, No right to speak.” Although Mao does not anticipate the possibility that book worship might itself constitute a form of investigation, it is arguably the methodology of this article. Photograph courtesy of the author

through the copy of Capital belonging to a colleague who is a prizewinning teacher, I was amazed and obscurely chastened to see what difficult discussion questions she was raising in relationship to the text (see fig. 3). Like all small moments of professional snooping, suffused with the dark joy of admiration and ressentiment, such reactions can teach us something about ourselves. Despite Mao Tse Tung’s admonitions (see fig. 4), book fetishism holds the key to some of the urges, fears, and desires that

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define the affective realm of knowledge work and can intervene in the labor process itself. 8 The urges that concern me in what follows derive from the labor process as it’s composed at the present moment, as the status of mental labor itself undergoes a profound transformation in its conditions and relations of production. ... As someone who has lived in the world of technology and content for 35 years, I now see that it is content’s turn. The technological “pipes” and “platforms” have been built and in the future they will need content to go over them. The humanities not only breathes a soul into the university, it will also have tremendous commercial value in a future where content is king. —Michael Lynton, president of Sony Pictures I cannot speak enough of this content. —Othello to Desdemona, Othello, 2.1.196

If it sounds a bit extreme to announce that we are all content creators now, it is not hyperbolic to say that workers in every expressive profession — journalism, teaching, commercial art, photography, poetry, music — fi nd themselves at the mercy of a massive reclassification operation, one that relabels writers, designers, composers, performers, image makers, and academics as simply creators of content.9 The word content designates a category of intellectual property that is becoming increasingly distinct in law and in economic practice from what once might have been called an original work.10 Creative workers and knowledge workers are easily absorbed into a casualized, high-y ield, piecework-based cultural economy based on the production of this mysterious mental substance. Thus alienated, the products of their mental labor aggregated and curated, their labor power devalued, freelance practitioners, in their very existence, bolster employers’ power in the labor market. Content, like the screams of terrified children in Pixar’s Monsters, Inc., is conceptualized in precisely measured units. A prepackaged delivery of subprime knowledge, content creates value by turning over quickly. By disappearing, in other words. And yet its consumption is indexed to ever more specific metrics of productivity.11 These shifts in the political economy of creativity were not at the forefront of my mind in 2013 when I leafed through other people’s copies of Capital. But in the intervening years the project evolved. It is clear to me now that although books may be changing form — at least three recently published books bear the title The Last Book — what is happening to them is not exactly a dematerialization, as I first thought. Quite the contrary. Every year we see yet another legion of new titles

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Figure 5. A twenty-first-century publishing boom: books

Figure 6. The streets of the modern city

about the end of books. Photograph courtesy of the

are full of discarded books. Photograph

author

courtesy of the author Figure 7. Books in bulk at Costco. Photograph courtesy of the author

on the subject of the disappearance of the book (see fig. 5). Books seem, if anything, to be undergoing some kind of rematerialization. The traffic in online culture, a continual search for free content, means that it is now harder than ever for books to disappear. A website called Forgotten Books will e-mail you a link to a new one every day.12 Books, in short, remain promiscuously present in our lives. They throng city garbage bins (fig. 6). At Costco, where you can buy the works of a single author in bulk, they take up an acre (fig. 7). You can buy them in bulk online, too, by color (fig. 8). Meanwhile, it is not only in retailing that we see value accruing around the idea of books in bulk. Big data has entered literary analysis, as disci-

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plines in the humanities import quantitative methods for content analysis from sociology, communications, and other areas of the social sciences.13 Advocates of these methodological innovations cite a range of motivations in the present moment, which can range from the exhaustion of critique as a scholarly craft to the overwhelming scale of the archive. As Franco Moretti proposes, if there are too many texts in literary history to justify close readings of a favored few, then let’s see what happens when we ask a machine to read all the books for us.14 Sometimes you get interesting answers, as Moretti’s work demonstrates.15 The probFigure 8. Red books “curated” by a seller on fab.com. lem with a disciplinary poliScreenshot courtesy of the author tics organized around machine reading is that it obscures the myriad ways machine reading has already become normal practice in higher education. It is the tool of plagiarists and the tool of plagiarist hunters, and it is a means of everyday reference searching that has changed the way academics consume, and write for, scholarly publication.16 In other words, we rely on machine reading to help meet and contribute to the demands of the great speedup in creative and knowledge work that accompanies the rise of the content market and is kept going by the treadmill of e-mail and social media. Marx’s concept of socially necessary labor time has never seemed particularly stable where knowledge work and creative labor are concerned. But neither have the rationales for its reduction seemed as commonsensical as they seem today, invoking such divergent phenomena as planned technological obsolescence and the collapse of magazine publishing. Estrangement and concreteness are necessary methods for research and representation in circumstances such as these. ... The accelerating speed-up over the last few years of automation and the application of artificial intelligence to routine services (like airline

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check-ins and supermarket checkouts) appears . . . to be just the beginning. Automation is now identifiable in fields such as higher education instruction and medical diagnostics and the airlines are already experimenting with pilotless planes. —David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism I suspect that valuable arguments lost in books might be found again in essays, which can be read intensively in far less time than a book. In this case, as with every form of scholarship, the success with which we confront the challenge of accumulation depends on our ability to manage the clock time of scholarly reading. —John Guillory, “How Scholars Read”

Clock time is a tricky subject to get clarity on when addressing the politics of mental labor. Taken out of context, how to interpret John Guillory’s statement — whether to see it as symptom of the Great Cultural Speedup, as resistance to it, as an inevitable mode of adaptation — depends on how you understand the first-person plural. Is it the collective we through which a professional discourse of meritocracy legitimizes itself? Is we the collective we of scholars as knowledge workers? Is it the collective we of the management team, of enterprise partnerships, and other three-legged races for impact? It is quite possible that these questions will remain unresolved, short of a personal communication from Guillory. Even then, anything he would say would inevitably generate more reading. This is the thing about knowledge work — its product is ongoing and often unknowable. Ambiguity and contingency are a necessary and peculiar quality of the products of mental labor. The process begins as a unity of the material and the immaterial. But its paradigmatic product, marks on paper, is wholly material. This, Harry Braverman notes, is what led to the theoretical separation of concept and execution in management science.17 The invention of technologies of execution come with a limit, however: the speed of thought. For the knowledge and creative sectors’ laboring subjects, a population that encompasses not only the growing intellectual precariat and the anxious plagiarizing student but also the cultural economy’s massive freelance and unwaged underclass, the desperation manifests in a phantasmal desire for someone to invent a device for automating thought.18 And what a logical dream it is, for today’s self-managing subjects, producers of themselves as entrepreneurial bearers of value, stuck in the assembly-line loop of reading, thinking, teaching, writing as the Great Cultural Speedup rattles along. A used copy of Capital purchased through a textbook retailer gives voice to this hope via the very last annotation in the book, which appears on page 25 of Ernest Mandel’s eighty-one-page Social Text 128

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Figure 9. Neta Alexander’s used copy of Capital came with a dismissive note in the margin of Ernest Mandel’s introduction. Photograph courtesy of the author

introduction (fig. 9): “From here on, it’s repetitive,” the book’s previous owner, or one of them, had written. It is a witless dismissal but a powerful fantasy: a book you don’t have to read all the way through — a TED Talk, in other words.19 So this is the first thing to remember about teaching notes as a kind of academic content, as the silken strand linking the contents of the instructor’s brain to the social context of the seminar and its denizens: they are created to save your neck. This is a context where book skills are crucial, in which authority, a social text hanging delicately from an invisible structure of words and behaviors, cannot be entirely assumed. It is difficult to sustain the sparkling flow of ideas when you spend all your time flipping through pages, searching for a passage as the members of the seminar look on in silence. Hence one of the most common annotations in the teaching copies of Capital I examined was the user-generated subject heading. Figure 10 shows a handwritten header in a copy of Capital belonging to the historian James Livingston. Like Harvey’s lost edition, Livingston’s is also the King James translation, in his case the 1906 edition published in Chicago by Charles H. Kerr and Company. What is there to say about such markings? Not much, was my initial thought. Glass making, it says in the corner of the page, nothing more than a concise description of the topic under discussion in the text adjacent to it. But I did find it odd to see how frequently these summary notations

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appeared at the top of the page throughout Livingston’s book. It occurred to me eventually that this kind of markup would be not just useful but necessary when — as sometimes happens — i nstructor and students are working with different translations. Conveniently, an e-mail printed and tucked inside the book confirmed that Livingston had assigned this section to a graduate reading group in 1999 and that they were Figure 10. A reader-generated subject heading in James using the widely available Livingston’s copy of Capital, volume 1. Photograph Penguin Classics edition of courtesy of the author the Fowkes translation.20 Livingston’s headings are metadata, avant la lettre. They make Marx’s volume available for a machine-like way of reading — or perhaps a better word is navigation — t hat focuses only on the compression code at the top of the page. This code makes the text of Capital “edition agnostic” in the way software can be platform agnostic. It establishes a common vocabulary that will override the divergent vocabularies, and systems of pagination, distinguishing the two translations. As is always the case with compression, there is the risk of loss — t he loss of the flow of conversation, perhaps — but the very act of making the annotations exposes some structures in Marx’s exposition and might also, because of this loss, provoke insight.21 Compare Livingston’s notations with those in figure 11, a page from Harvey’s copy of Marx’s Grundrisse. The annotations seem identical; you might think at first that Harvey, like Livingston, was endeavoring to make two different translations link up. It turns out that this is not the case at all. Harvey, by now so familiar with the text that I imagine it comes up in dreams, wrote these headings to label sections that, at the present juncture at least, he finds uninteresting or irrelevant. You can sort of see this in the rapid handwriting, which conveys a sense of dismissal, of writing off. Seemingly identical, the annotations of Harvey and Livingston result from what are in fact quite distinct mental labor processes, perhaps even distinct relations of production. Harvey’s subject headings are unusual because they operate not as a system of attention capture but rather as a method of attention release. 22 It is a coding practice comparable to the

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Figure 11. A reader-generated subject heading in David Harvey’s copy of Grundrisse. Photograph courtesy of the author

complex coding of the MP3 file, which removes those parts of the recording that the listener is unlikely to miss, allowing the file to be compressed to as little as 12 percent of the original. 23 (Even) more specifically, Harvey’s jotted phrase “Time Chits” launches a machine reading protocol by functioning as a “stop list,” a form of language removal that, notes Daniel Rosenberg, we practice whenever we type a search string into a search form and omit small articles of speech. 116



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The stop list consists of words that computers are taught to ignore while processing data. Its logic, Rosenberg proposes, “is one of the implicit structures of the everyday epistemology of the late twentieth century.”24 Harvey, it is important to note, was drafting a manuscript at the time he noted and dismissed Marx’s thoughts on the time chit as a unit of currency. What he was writing had to do with the money form; what he had to say ends up threading its way through Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, finding its apotheosis on page 245, at the end of a chapter on growth. The different uses underlying Harvey’s and Livingston’s annotations suggest distinctions within instrumental reading as a category of mental labor. On the one hand, there is the instrumentality of reading for teaching purposes; on the other hand, the instrumentality of reading for research. Both create value, but at different rates and at different points in the circuits of expropriation that extract surplus value from mental labor. 25 You could put it another way, too: both Livingston and Harvey instrumentalize their copies of Capital as thinking machines, only they are different kinds of machines. Livingston’s might be compared to a fax machine, its annotations similar to the chirping signal, called a handshake, that fax machines emit when a phone connection is established. Harvey’s annotations compress the book and reduce the information load. Each of these machines does different kinds of thinking. Books are not machines, but an appealingly annihilating idea haunts the comparison: we use machine methods of reading to help us manage the overload on our attention caused by the machines around us that are constantly asking us to read. Appealing, I say, because the signal- canceling noise of the tautology promises relief from the ambient signal anxiety of information-r ich environments. Places such as the lecture theater, for example. After a class session, when students ask what parts will be on the exam, I used to provide them with fairly lengthy answers until I realized that this always caused dismay. Eventually I understood what they were asking: they wanted me to identify for them those sections of the lecture they were free to forget about entirely. This might seem an opening for some kind of elegy for the students of yore, premised, as such elegies usually are, on the idea that our students today are lazier, needier, unmotivated, unintellectual, incurious — a whole grudging scrabble rack full of uns and ins. 26 But why single out our students for such criticism? Does it not, in some dimension, apply to all of us whose work counts as mental labor? Who among us has never dreamed of a shortcut?27 Consider the possible motivations behind the following question, Social Text 128

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posted to a writing forum on the professional networking website Quora: “I want to write a novel, but I don’t have an appealing story idea, skill as a good writer, much free time, tenacity, much imagination, or observational skill necessary to write a good novel. What should I do?”28 You could read this and go into a recitation of all the ways it demonstrates the decline of human creativity, or at the very least a ludicrous naïveté concerning the task of writing for publication. Or you could, equally, see it as part of the strange expansion of creativity as a kind of projective, flexible value applied across many new domains of work. I, however, am more inclined to sympathize than judge. Good for you, I want to say to this novice writer. Good for you, for asking what no doubt many are thinking. Hasn’t the promise of a shortcut always been one of the delusions of apprenticeship? Why not seek the most efficient way to become successful and productive? As for shortcuts in writing, the desire existed long before the Internet, long before they built the new athletic facility and the students changed. The Quora readers who offered efficiency tips to the author of this post were not saying anything Dwight V. Swain wasn’t saying in his 1965 advice manual, Techniques of the Selling Writer. 29 The real problem posed by this hapless Quora user’s question is that it answers itself. It names exactly those aspects of craft that can’t be acquired economically, the things that can’t be summarized as tips and tricks. Craft, regardless of one’s medium or métier, involves the learning of patience, the tolerance of failure, the capacity to be alone, the capacity to concentrate intently, the capacity to evaluate oneself and to evaluate the evaluations of others. It means doing the same thing again and again and again. It means being antisocial, unplugged from social media. It means being able to commit to those aspects of mental labor that look a lot like doing nothing.30 ... The same kind of labour may be productive or unproductive. For example, Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost, was an unproductive worker. On the other hand, the writer who turns out factory-made stuff for his publisher is a productive worker. Milton produced Paradise Lost for the same reason that a silk worm produces silk. It was an activity of his nature. —Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value What if machine composition were not (as it currently appears to be) a marginal phenomenon but was actually central to the history of writing? Or what if it were regarded, not as a kind of fluke (as I suppose it currently tends to be regarded), but rather as the logical outcome of preceding literary-h istorical developments or the realization of the potential of earlier practices? In what different light does the history of poetry, in particular, appear, if viewed from this angle? —Brian McHale, Poetry as Prosthesis

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It is difficult to recall the Before Times, when we were bored out of our skulls because we didn’t have mobile phones and our favorite television shows came on only once a week. Still, try to imagine Harvey and the scene of his originary loss. In the seat pocket of an empty jumbo jet we spy a well-handled copy of Capital, awaiting discovery — a nd presumably disposal — by a ground crew worker or, possibly, the next occupant of Harvey’s seat. Cut to Harvey at home the next morning, rummaging in rising panic through the Baltimore Public Radio tote bag he used as his carryon, shouting over his shoulder: “Has anyone seen my copy of Capital?” The scene could almost be a scene from my life, except instead of Capital the lost object would be my phone, and family members would be offering, perhaps with the hint of a sigh, to ring it from theirs. Harvey could not have anticipated that his loss would prefigure a kind of loss that has, in a strange way, become a routine form of crisis in the digital age any more than he could have dialed the lost book in the hope of hearing it ring. I am referring to the kind of crisis that often begins with a plopping sound, as when an iPhone slips out of a pocket and into a toilet bowl. Harvey lost his copy of Capital in the days before the Internet, but it was a loss comparable to the loss of a smartphone or a jumpdrive — a ny one of the objects we use as containers for the intangible — i n the days before the cloud. In all instances, the property that is lost extends beyond the physical form of the thing itself.31 In the case of a canonical scholarly book such as Capital, the kind everyone must read if they aspire to an academic career of a certain sort, we might say that what has been lost is some portion of the reader’s labor time. Among professional scholars the labor of reading a canonical work like Capital has a dual quality. It is the necessary labor we expend as knowledge workers, the kind who must always be training. Most of the value we realize from this labor is bound to come at a discount, dispensed in forms of professional scrip such as a thank-you in a program note, a line on a CV.32 But where teaching is concerned, the labor to which marginalia attest is also labor that has already realized its value as use value alone. Practitioners in the knowledge trade must invest unremunerated labor time into the process of maintaining mastery over the craft, into retaining status as authorities. The annotated book, like the time chit a hypothetical worker brings to the bank of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, attests to the fact that you have put in the hours. More than that, like the blood-stiffened frock coat of a Victorian surgeon, your battered copy of Capital signifies expertise. Perhaps this is the fundamental reason I can’t get rid of mine (see fig. 12). It remains to be seen whether expertise, know-how, and other forms of mental craft can be automated in knowledge work. Perhaps dematerializing the reading process is the first step: despite all the annotation functionality Social Text 128

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in our reading machines, the rise of e-books is the decline of marginalia as a place of easy reverie. Kindle readers must share their reading habits with Amazon if they want to store their annotations. There is, of course, a great deal more to say about this. Because print marginalia, unlike electronic annotations, can impede the rationalized, algorithmically aerobic flow of texts as content there is no quick place for them in the language of content capitalism. Digital infrastructure captures texts, works, and all their material Figure 12. My copy of Capital, too frail and marked up to elements as modular, recombe useful, too precious to discard. Photograph courtesy binant blocks. This is how of the author typesetters think, or thought, about copy; the way newspaper syndicators think, or thought, about boilerplate; the way the UK Research Excellence Framework thinks about intellectual output; the way compilers of blooper reels think about endless retakes; the way nineteenth-century cotton mill owners thought about the bits of fiber that fall from the loom during the day. The “devil’s dust,” they called it, and had it swept up at closing time, to be compressed into felt.33 Nothing goes to waste. And everything is monetized, or can be. Scholarly epigraphs, historically honored as a safe harbor from copyright, must now be subsumed into the (ultimately electronic) text as discrete chunks that require permission to include. If they were once evidence of the mental labor of the author, the permissions process inverts the evidence so that the author of the epigraph-i ntensive article must defend herself against charges of theft. Marginalia, however, remain different. Unlike the cotton wads of the epigraph, they refuse to compress. They are themselves a form of compression. These and other crafty techniques for automating, in some way, the routines of mental labor are not, in the end, real shortcuts. They cannot automate thinking, only the transmission of thoughts. But they are native ways of thinking that nevertheless make reading compatible with searching, or make it seem that way. 12 0



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... Hier werden alle Verhältnisse umgedreht! (Here all relations become turned around!) —Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt penciled these words in the margins of her English translation of Marx’s Theory of Surplus Value. 34 The passage she marked, the one in which Marx compares Milton to a silkworm, is one that might seem to support The Human Condition’s critique’s of Marx’s treatment of labor as work; perhaps the substance of Arendt’s marginal thought is that Marx’s schema should be inverted. Or perhaps, following a certain Marxian tropology, she is reading this statement as an inversion, an appearance that obscures true conditions. There is no final answer. Conceivably, she is noting that Marx’s usage of the metaphor here conflicts with its appearance in “Wage-L abor and Capital,” written a dozen years earlier. There, Marx writes, “if a silkworm’s object in spinning were to prolong its existence as a caterpillar, it would be a perfect example of a wage worker.”35As most of her annotations are in English, why she wrote in German is also a mystery — was it an effort to address Marx in his native tongue? All these ambiguities compromise the pervasive cultural metaphor of books as containers for content. They remind us to appreciate the bookiness of books in use, of books unplugged from the Internet of Things. And they preserve the mystery of the alienated and amniotic use value in which ideas take shape as markings, of the useless kind of usefulness from which restless intellects must muster their content. Notes My thanks to Lisa Duggan and Tavia Nyong’o for their helpful comments, and to all those who shared their books with me. This research forms part of an ongoing collaboration with Aurora Wallace. 1. Although it is slightly easier to read, the translation by Ben Fowkes introduces a thematic inflection — haunting, phantoms, ghosts — t hat is not in the Moore and Aveling translation or, according to German scholars I have consulted, in Marx’s original. There are obvious consequences when scholars overlook the vicissitudes of translation. See, for example, the discussion of Marx’s concept of “phantom objectivity” in Gordon, Ghostly Matters — a term translated by Fowkes as “phantom-like objectivity” (Capital [(1867) 1990], 128) and by Moore and Aveling as “unsubstantial reality” (Capital [(1867) 1970], 45). 2. On the materiality of books and texts the literature is lengthy, but for some different spins on the pedagogical matter of books in use, see in particular Gundaker, Signs of Diaspora, Diaspora of Signs; Davidson, Revolution and the Word; and Hayles, Writing Machines. 3. For another take on this, see Guillory, “How Scholars Read.”

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4. Hillesund, “Digital Reading Spaces.” 5. In the end, I did not get to see Harvey’s copy of Capital. I spoke to him about the book for about an hour and learned that teaching it to communists is a bore and that the best way to get through the money chapter is to grit your teeth and concentrate. Disconcertingly, I also learned that Harvey sometimes asks doctoral students to bring their copy along when they defend their dissertation proposals, in case he feels like looking at their marginalia. It seems fitting, given the trouble I had tracking him down, that Harvey was unable to locate his copy of Capital. After staring silently at his shelves for several minutes, he said, “I think it’s in Argentina” (interview with the author, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, 3 April 2013). 6. For a good survey of the idea of books as containers for a separable content, see Bhaskar, Content Machine, 180 – 83. 7. On the surge of websites devoted to marginalia, see Grafton, “Scrawled Insults and Epiphanies.” See also Jackson, Marginalia. For a wonderful view of marginalia from a much earlier mode of content production, see Camille, Image on the Edge. For an example of marginalia as a means of instrumentalizing both the physical book and the physical text simultaneously, see Miller, “Functional Underlining.” 8. Mao, Oppose Book Worship. What Mao means by book worship is a mode of argument comparable to what a friend calls “Google search scholarship.” 9. For a prescient analysis, see Huws, “Making of a Cybertariat?” 10. Barlow, introduction. 11. See, for example, the Amazon policy for self-published authors using Kindle Direct Publishing, which tracks the amount a purchaser actually reads and calculates royalties on that basis (kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=AI3QMVN4FMTXJ, accessed 14 March 2015). 12. The other morning it was Clifton Johnson’s Land of Heather, a Scottish travelogue published in 1903. I spent about five minutes looking at it. A more “curated” website is called Neglected Books. 13. On the Cold War origins of content analysis, see Glander, Origins, 176 – 77. 14. Moretti, Distant Reading. 15. Moretti, Bourgeois. On machine reading, see Hayles, Writing Machines. 16. Tinnell, “Grammatization.” For an interesting experiment in applying machine methods in scholarly reading, see Ramsay, Reading Machines. 17. Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capitalism, 218. 18. See Abbott, “Future of Knowing.” Thanks to Kristen Alfaro for bringing this into the seminar. 19. Perhaps unfairly, I lump TED Talks in with other forms of content that serve, in some way or another, as predigested knowledge. How-tos, especially how-to videos, are a cheap form of subcontracted online content, but what is a TED Talk if not a how-to in the Great Ideas tradition — a How-to Think? Like less polished forms of instructional content, TED Talks manufacture and exploit the promise of accelerated learning. 20. The copy I read in graduate school was published by Vintage and had a hospital-g reen cover. Purchased used, it had an uneven fade pattern on the front and a cracked spine that scattered dried glue like dandruff whenever you opened it. 21. This is the interesting space where conceptual art and the digital humanities meet. See Ramsay, Reading Machines, chap. 3. 22. Stiegler, Technics and Time; Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. 23. Sterne, MP3, 2. 24. Rosenberg, “Stop, Words,” 91. See also Abbott, Digital Paper, on the uses

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of a controlled vocabulary. On the practice of discontinuous reading, see Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls.” 25. These distinctions are sharper for some than for others. And they are flexible; Harvey would probably agree that the time chits section of the Grundrisse can be useful for teaching some of the difficult parts of Capital. As a hypothetical example, time chits expose as preposterous the notion of storing labor time via cashier banking, without its conversion into the money form and thence into capital. More basically, the “in progress” status of the Grundrisse, as a collation of Marx’s reading notes and drafts, gives it pedagogical value: it allows us to see Marx thinking things through. 26. My first encounter with this elegiac mode, a reverse Mr. Chips, was in the 1997 essay by Edmundson, “On the Uses of a Liberal Education.” 27. I mean that question literally: I find my own sleep full of dreams involving shortcuts, special passes, golden tickets, that sort of thing. Often these shortcuts get me into trouble. Once in a while they are pure wish fulfillment, such as the time I dreamed I found a bootleg copy of TV Guide in a convenience store on Division Street in Chicago. Contained within its inky newsprint pages were synopses of all future episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. 28. Question posed on 15 February 2015 at www.quora.com/Writing/I-want -to-w rite-a -novel-but-I -dont-h ave-a n-appealing-story-idea-skill-a s-a -good-w riter -much-free-t ime-tenacity-much-i magination-or-observational-skill-needed-to-w rite -a-good-novel-W hat-should-I-do. 29. Honoré de Balzac, arguably the first content creator, was constantly trying to come up with new productivity hacks. See my “How to Be as Productive as Balzac” in this issue. 30. Here is Abbott in Digital Paper, describing and prescribing a practice of “meditative reading” for library researchers: “You read every word, slowly, and allow your mind to resonate freely with the text. You attend to possible allusions, to interesting themes, sometimes even to the sounds of the words. You read a paragraph or two, then look at the wall and reflect. Then perhaps you jot a few notes . . . as ideas drift into your head. . . . You are not aiming to get through something; your aim is simply to stimulate your own thinking. You therefore let the text come apart into shreds of insight and allusion” (135). 31. See Gitelman, Paper Knowledge. 32. Ross, “No-Collar Labour in America’s New Economy.” See also Ross, “Mental Labor Problem.” 33. See the chapter in Capital, volume 1, on the working day, in whatever translation you have access to. Then see Wexler, “(I’m)material Labor in the Digital Age.” Then see Gregg, Work’s Intimacy. That is all. 34. Bard College library has digitized Arendt’s copy, which is available online at www.bard.edu/library/arendt/pdfs/Marx-Surplus.pdf. This annotation appears on page 186. My thanks to Theo McCarthy and Sean Larson for translation help. I highly recommend this copy to readers seeking a digital version, not because of Arendt’s annotations, which are largely unreadable, but because it is a very crisp and easy-to-read digital object. 35. Marx, “Wage-L abor and Capital,” 19. On the ghastly conditions of production in the silk industries of China and Siena, see Bray, Technology and Gender, 248 – 49; Tylus, Siena, 188. Thanks to Rebecca Karl and Jane Tylus for their leads.

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References Abbott, Andrew. 2009. “The Future of Knowing.” Presentation to “Brunch with Books,” University of Chicago, 6 June. Abbott, Andrew. 2014. Digital Paper: A Manual for Research and Writing with Library Materials. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Barlow, John Perry. 2002. Introduction to Content — Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future, by Cory Doctorow. craphound .com/content/intro-by-john-perry-barlow/. Bhaskar, Michael. 2013. The Content Machine: Toward a Theory of Publishing. London: Anthem. Braverman, Harry. (1974) 1998. Labour and Monopoly Capitalism: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: New York University Press. Bray, Francesca. 1997. Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Camille, Michael. 1992. Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art. London: Reaktion. Davidson, Cathy N. 1986. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Edmundson, Mark. 1997. “On the Uses of a Liberal Education: 1. As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students.” Harper’s, September, 39 – 49. Gitelman, Lisa. 2014. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Glander, Timothy. 1999. Origins of Mass Communications Research in the American Cold War. New York: Routledge. Gordon, Avery F. 2008. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Grafton, Anthony. 2015. “Scrawled Insults and Epiphanies.” New York Review of Books, 19 February. www.nybooks.com/daily/2015/02/19/marginalia- i nsults - epiphanies. Gregg, Melissa. 2011. Work’s Intimacy. London: Polity. Guillory, John. 2008. “How Scholars Read.” ADE Bulletin, no. 146: 8 – 17. Gundaker, Grey. 1998. Signs of Diaspora, Diaspora of Signs: Literacies, Creolization, and Vernacular Practice in African America. New York: Oxford University Press. Harvey, David. 2014. Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2002. Writing Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hillesund, Terje. 2010. “Digital Reading Spaces: How Expert Readers Handle Books, the Web, and Electronic Papers.” First Monday: Peer-Reviewed Journal on the Internet 15, no. 4. uncommonculture.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view /2762/2504. Huws, Ursula. 2001. “The Making of a Cybertariat? Virtual Work in a Real World.” Socialist Register 37. socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/5753/0#.VxPM0X qkyVA. Jackson, H. J. 2002. Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Mao Tse Tung. (1930) 1966. Oppose Book Worship. Peking: Foreign Language Press. Marx, Karl. (1839) 1933. Wage-L abor and Capital. Pamphlet. New York: International. Marx, Karl. (1867) 1970. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Bibbins Aveling. London: Lawrence and Wishart. 124



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Marx, Karl. (1867) 1990. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin. Miller, Wesley. 1980. “Functional Underlining: An Essay in Bibliography, Criticism, and Pedagogy.” College English 41, no 5: 575 – 78. Moretti, Franco. 2013. Distant Reading. New York: Verso. Moretti, Franco. 2014. The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature. New York: Verso. Ramsay, Stephen. 2011. Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Rosenberg, Daniel. 2014. “Stop, Words.” Representations, no. 127: 83 – 92. Ross, Andrew. 2000. “The Mental Labor Problem.” Social Text, no. 63: 1 – 31. Ross, Andrew. 2001. “No-Collar Labour in America’s New Economy.” Socialist Register 37: 1 – 31. Stallybrass, Peter. 2002. “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible.” In Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies, edited by Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer, 42 – 79. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Sterne, Jonathan. 2012. MP3: The Biography of a Format. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stiegler, Bernard. 1998. Technics and Time. Vol. 1, The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Stiegler, Bernard. 2010. Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Swain, Dwight V. (1965) 1982. Techniques of the Selling Writer. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Tinnell, John. 2015. “Grammatization: Bernard Stiegler’s Theory of Writing and Technology.” Computers and Composition 37: 132 – 4 6. Tylus, Jane. 2015. Siena: City of Secrets. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wexler, Steven. 2008. “(I’m)material Labor in the Digital Age.” Workplace, no. 15: 1 – 11.

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