Scholarly Articles by Joshua Clover
Critical Inquiry, 2021
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Amerikastudien/American Studies, 2017
While the terms socialism and communism have often been used interchangeably, Marx offers multipl... more While the terms socialism and communism have often been used interchangeably, Marx offers multiple formulations that clarify their relation. His schematic account sets them as distinct but linked moments on a historical trajectory, with the lower stage of socialism retaining primary bourgeois suppositions but opening onto the higher stage of communism. This model of transition oriented revolutionary thought in the Marxist tradition for at least a century, from 1875 onward. In the present, however, the link between the two stages appears broken, not by ideological differences but for material reasons. These material reasons have to do with changes in class composition at a global level that are driven by capital's declining capacity to absorb labor into the productive process, which undermines the anticapitalist capacities of a working class once thought able to seize the means of production. Consequently the debate no longer concerns the nature of the transition but how to proceed in its absence. This abandonment of transition as a revolutionary axiom is presented both by socialists and communists. The social forms of socialism and communism no longer appear as continuous but as opposed. There is a certain kind of book, a genre let's say, of which Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) provides an exemplary case. The book demonstrates at great length that the social arrangement called capitalism produces growing wealth disparity and does so inexorably. We discover that the motion witnessed by all-wherein the proletariat is increasingly dispossessed, lives broken before the engine of capital-is not simply a historical but a logical certainty , a constitutive feature of capitalism. Misery must broaden and deepen; no other outcome is possible as long as capitalism obtains. Despite its title, the book is at pains to speak to those beyond a Marxist readership. Its famous formula (r > g) refers to the relation between returns on capital and economic growth, eschewing the categories of surplus value and accumulation which Marx develops from his critique of political economy. Piketty's description of economics has the imprimatur that comes from adhering to its disci-pline's bourgeois norms, resisting the peripheralization that comes with heterodox approaches. Moreover, it is precisely Piketty's mathematization, the trappings of orthodox economics and objective truth, that affords an experience of "proof." This renders entirely surreal the gap or decalage or clinamen between the book's what is and its what is to be done. Having completed its grim presentation, the book rounds toward remedy. Confronted with such a brutal exegesis of developments in the realm of necessity, what does the realm of freedom look like for such a book? It turns out that it looks like an unambitious welfare state and some progressive taxation. In short, more capitalism. This despite the fact that capitalism necessarily-oh nevermind.
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New Global Studies, 2020
This article departs from Joshua Clover's historical and theoretical schema that locates riots an... more This article departs from Joshua Clover's historical and theoretical schema that locates riots and strikes within the categories of circulation and production struggles, moving from the categories of capital's reprodction to the reproduction of the proletariat. Here it offers the commune as the exemplary form of the category of reproduction struggle. The commune is understood not as an intentional community of withdrawal but as something like counter-reproduction, able not just to reproduce itself but to strike at capital as an antagonistic force-striking at the vital exposure of an increasingly circulation-centered capitalism. Crucial examples are encampments against extractive capital such as Standing Rock or the ZAD. The article shows how political sovereignty and economic circulation are entirely entangled, pointing to the ways that social movements have looked upon them as separate domains. Therefore, the commune is a process at the crux of the political and the economic, overcoming the tendency to prefer one or the other. Finally, the article discusses the gendered aspect of the sphere of reproduction that makes possible the double confrontation of counter-reproduction .
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Crisis & Critique , 2020
the European Union is understood, in. the first instance, to be a bid toward providing a new cent... more the European Union is understood, in. the first instance, to be a bid toward providing a new center for accumulation on a world scale in the waning of the US-centered cycle. This effort has failed, in ways that have helped helped drive a lurch toward renewed and deadly European ethnonationalism that focuses on borders within and at the frontiers of the Eurozone, and is on the rise both on the right and, in a disturbing development, on the left, identified here as "Fortress Leftism." The EU has been an effective zero-sum economy at least since 2008, funneling value from peripheral states to core. This limits its capacity to absorb immigration in ways conducive to capital. Consequently the pressures on its borders have intensified, a fact complicated by the historically unique situation wherein the internally differentiated superstate with its own core & periphery serves as core for a larger capitalist system. Immigration from the far peripheries arrives not at Europe's core but the lumpenized nations of the europeriphery, with Greece as the example: unable to absorb, compelled to function as Europe's absorption zone. The essay finally argues, reviewing unimplementable Bexit and the ignored Greek oxi vote, that such developments intimate the collapse of the historic left-right spectrum, and of the parliamentary procedures that have accompanied it. From the rubble, the essay argues for a renewed international communism as the only adequate direction.
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Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature
“Value” is a concept structured by confusing relations between its social-ethical and its economi... more “Value” is a concept structured by confusing relations between its social-ethical and its economic meanings (“I agree with your values”; “the sweater is a great value at that price”). The two meanings cannot be kept separate, but the negotiation of their relation has vexed theories of artistic and literary value since at least the rise of the discourse of aesthetics in the 18th century. Early attempts to separate aesthetic value from its economic counterpart involved analogies between what were understood to be different cognitive faculties (reason and emotion, say), and relations among competing claims to political standing (between the bourgeoisie and the sovereign, most of all). Liberal American conversations about literary and economic value after World War II worried over part-whole relations in terms of debates about the value of individual literary works in what seemed to be an ever-expanding multicultural canon. Postwar literary theories of economic and aesthetic value in a more Marxist vein turned to various narratives of the “subsumption” of social life by economic values: sometimes imagining that subsumption as a fatal error on the part of capitalism, since sociability is too unruly finally to organize according to economic principles, or as a terrible victory for a capitalism that had now transformed into something qualitatively different and more sinister, like a “bio-power.” But even these Marxist literary theories tended to ignore contemporary work in history, historical sociology, and critical theory that identified changes in the relation between what had once seemed to be at least notionally separate aesthetic and economic “spheres” not with subsumption per se, but with a crisis in capital’s ways of producing profitable surplus value, and exchangeable use values. Seen from the vantage of this scholarship, it becomes clear that not only do most discourses on the specific value of the aesthetic tend to lean too heavily on spatialized domain models of art and economics (which conceive of them as occupying, in reality or potential, different regions), but also
this persistently demanded separation of art and economics rests in turn on a false distinction between politics and economics. Rethinking the specificity of art and literature without thinking of it as a separate sphere, or as necessarily resistant to capital, is a research project for the coming decades.
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Poetry, particularly the function of the line break to separate line from sentence and syntax fro... more Poetry, particularly the function of the line break to separate line from sentence and syntax from grammar, as a heuristic device to think about the abstraction of political-economic value and its relation to price, initially within the seemingly strange temporality of finance (which seems to price future value in the present) and eventually disclosing that this temporality is true for all forms of valuable commodities—and how this asynchrony of price and value, a necessary feature of capitalist expansion, makes it vulnerable to crisis. Includes discussions of black holes, Black-Scholes, science fiction, the narrative production of retroactive continuity, and Lacan's idea of the "point de capiton," here repurposed as the point de capital.
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A 2500 word summary of Marx's two theories of crisis, cyclical and secular, with a closing attemp... more A 2500 word summary of Marx's two theories of crisis, cyclical and secular, with a closing attempt to demonstrate briefly the unity of the two. From Jean-Baptiste Say to Anwar Shaikh.
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An extended (11,000) word assessment and clarification of the concept of subsumption in Marx as a... more An extended (11,000) word assessment and clarification of the concept of subsumption in Marx as a double-change in productivity that defines and then revolutionizes capitalist labor process, and subsumption's role in critical political economy—particularly the exigencies of surplus value production. The essay begins with a careful view of the concept's initial formulation for and excision from Capital, and its rediscovery and reception in the 1960s. It surveys the flowering of "subsumption narratives" in the postwar era (particularly accounts of new and extended subsumption of life beyond the conventional workplace) as a, varying theories of modernization, b, accounts of the ongoing extension of capital's logic into all sectors of life, c, attempts to understand post-industrial value production (the immaterial or information economy, etc), and d, attempts to periodize capital's historical span. Thinkers here include Adorno, Camatte, Debord, Marcuse, Marxist-Feminists, operaismo and autonomia, Foucault, and Theorie Communiste. Finally, the essay assesses the significance of theories of subsumption to theories of secular crisis.
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This essay draws a distinction between two political economies: one in which labor inputs continu... more This essay draws a distinction between two political economies: one in which labor inputs continue to be absorbed toward surplus value production and are managed by wage discipline, and one one in which absorption is less possible and direct domination accompanies a resource-extractive economy. Identifying absorptive regimes with liberal capitalism and non-absorptive regimes as "coloniality," the essay notes why the lumpenproletariat would be understood to play such different political roles in such different scenaria, reading them through Marx and Fanon respectively. It finally argues that formerly absorptive regimes such as the United States must increasingly operate in neo-colonial modes of direct domination (incarceration being one example) and that in such situations the lumpen and the sorts of political struggle available to them will take on a changed valence— and that we must reunderstand political struggle in turn.
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“Value” is a concept structured by confusing relations between its social-ethical and its economi... more “Value” is a concept structured by confusing relations between its social-ethical and its economic meanings (“I agree with your values”; “the sweater is a great value at that price”). The two meanings cannot be kept separate, but the negotiation of their relation has vexed theories of artistic and literary value since at least the rise of the discourse of aesthetics in the 18th century. Early attempts to separate aesthetic value from its economic counterpart involved analogies between what were understood to be different cognitive faculties (reason and emotion, say), and relations among competing claims to political standing (between the bourgeoisie and the sovereign, most of all). Liberal American conversations about literary and economic value after World War II worried over part-whole relations in terms of debates about the value of individual literary works in what seemed to be an ever-expanding multicultural canon. Postwar literary theories of economic and aesthetic value in a more Marxist vein turned to various narratives of the “subsumption” of social life by economic values: sometimes imagining that subsumption as a fatal error on the part of capitalism, since sociability is too unruly finally to organize according to economic principles, or as a terrible victory for a capitalism that had now transformed into something qualitatively different and more sinister, like a “bio-power.” But even these Marxist literary theories tended to ignore contemporary work in history, historical sociology, and critical theory that identified changes in the relation between what had once seemed to be at least notionally separate aesthetic and economic “spheres” not with subsumption per se, but with a crisis in capital’s ways of producing profitable surplus value, and exchangeable use values. Seen from the vantage of this scholarship, it becomes clear that not only do most discourses on the specific value of the aesthetic tend to lean too heavily on spatialized domain models of art and economics (which conceive of them as occupying, in reality or potential, different regions), but also this persistently demanded separation of art and economics rests in turn on a false distinction between politics and economics. Rethinking the specificity of art and literature without thinking of it as a separate sphere, or as necessarily resistant to capital, is a research project for the coming decades.
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College Literature, 2012
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Journal of Narrative Theory, 2011
... It is indeed the case that Pynchon's narrator, his theoretical mathematicians et al., rh... more ... It is indeed the case that Pynchon's narrator, his theoretical mathematicians et al., rhapsodize over the ... What seems at first upside down eventually finds itself with its feet on the shaky ground ... Narrative is out there somewherebut it is processed into structure before it can appear ...
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We begin with a poem. We are both sometimes poets, so this seems apt. Moreover, poetry has not on... more We begin with a poem. We are both sometimes poets, so this seems apt. Moreover, poetry has not only a thick precapitalist history (in distinction, famously, to the novel, much less the newer media) but a historically privileged relation to representing the Anthropocene: it is at its beginnings often an anthropogenic mode for formalizing and cataloging ecological data such as the sorts of fish, of winds, and so forth. It is such a poem we have chosen: the Hawaiian creation chant of the Kumulipo.
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Poems by Joshua Clover
Vacarme, 2011
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Critical Quarterly, 2010
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Critical Quarterly, 2010
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Critical Quarterly, 2010
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Scholarly Articles by Joshua Clover
this persistently demanded separation of art and economics rests in turn on a false distinction between politics and economics. Rethinking the specificity of art and literature without thinking of it as a separate sphere, or as necessarily resistant to capital, is a research project for the coming decades.
Poems by Joshua Clover
this persistently demanded separation of art and economics rests in turn on a false distinction between politics and economics. Rethinking the specificity of art and literature without thinking of it as a separate sphere, or as necessarily resistant to capital, is a research project for the coming decades.