HE CAN POINT TO BUT NOT BE COMMUNIST or BLACK SEMIOTICS 100216

BLACK SEMIOTICS 100216

'.... The commodity whose speech sounds embodies the critique of value, of private property, of the sign. Such embodiment is also bound to the (critique of) reading and writing, oft conceived by clowns and intellectuals as the natural attributes of whoever would hope to be known as human.

In the meantime, every approach to Marx’s example must move through the ongoing event that anticipates it, the real event of the commodity’s speech, itself broken by the irreducible materiality – the broken and irreducible maternity –of the commodity’s scream. 

Imagine a recording of the (real) example that anticipates the (impossible) example; imagine that recording as the graphic reproduction of a scene of instruction, one always already cut by its own repression; imagine what cuts and anticipates Marx, remembering that the object resists, the commodity shrieks, the audience participates. 

Then you can say that Marx is prodigal; that in his formulations; that in his very formulations regarding Man’s arrival at his essence, he has yet to come to himself, to come upon himself, to invent himself anew. 

This nonarrival is at least in part an ongoing concealment internal to a project structured by an attunement to the revealed secret. What remains secret in Marx could be thought as or in terms of race, or sex or gender, of the differences these terms mark, form and reify. But we can also say that the unrevealed secret is a recrudescence of an already existing notion of the private (or more properly, of the proper) that operates within the constellation of self-possession, capacity, subjectivity and speech.

HE CAN POINT TO BUT NOT BE COMMUNIST.

What does the dispropriative event have to do with communism?

What’s the revolutionary force of the sensuality that emerges from the sonic event Marx subjunctively produces without sensually discovering?

To ask this is to think what’s at stake in the music: the universalization or socialization of the surplus, the generative force of a venerable phonic propulsion, the ontological and historical priority of resistance to power and objection to subjection, the old new-thing, the freedom that animates black performances.

This is all meant to begin some thinking of the possibility that the Marxian formulation of sociality-in-exchange is grounded in a notion of the proper that is disrupted by the essential impropriety of the ( EXCHANGE-) value that precedes exchange.

Part of the project this drive animates is the improvisation through the opposition of spirit and matter that is instantiated when the object, the commodity, sounds. Marx’s counterfactual (“if the commodity could speak it would say…) is broken by a commodity and by the trace of a subjectivity structure born in objection that he neither realizes nor anticipates. There is something more here that alienation and fetishization that works, with regards to Marx, as a prefigurative critique.

 However according to Ferdinand de Saussure, and in extension to Marx analytic, the value of the sign is arbitrary, conventional, differential, neither intrinsic nor iconic, not reducible to but rather only discernible in the reduction of the phonic substance….'

FRED MOTEN IN THE CUT / IN THE BREAK 
IN SEARCH OF THE ANTERIOR EXCHANGE BEYOND MARX AND SAUSSURE.

Black Semiotics N452

THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE FUTURE 
IN THE PRESENT 
IS BOUND UP 
WITH WHAT IS GIVEN 
IN SOMETHING MARX 
COULD ONLY SUBJUNTIVELY IMAGINE: 
THE COMMODITY WHO SPEAKS.

(the uncut cut in the break of Fred Moten's musico-thinking-sexual-knowledge of meaning)

IF COMMODITIES COULD SPEAK 
THEY WOULD SAY THIS:
OUR USE-VALUE MAY INTEREST MEN
BUT IT DOES NOT BELONG TO US 
AS OBJECTS.
WHAT DOES BELONG TO US AS OBJECTS, HOWEVER, IS OUR VALUE
OUR OWN INTERCOURSE AS COMMODITIES 
PROVES IT.

(the Capital cut)