Marx was a great ape: he could do Goethe, he could do the Bible, he could do capitalists as well as workers, he could certainly do Hegel — better, he thought, than the legions of Hegel’s other apes. In a sense, he was, at any one moment, Marx-Goethe or Marx-Hegel or Marx-Ricardo. It is true, too, that Jews in German-speaking lands after emancipation — which started around 1750 — were granted, or were condemned to, this kind of mimicry. They observed German law, dressed in culturally appropriate ways, took on modern surnames, spoke the local language. They could be a good German, though always threatening to degrade into the bad Jew. They asserted rights as assimilated Jews while remembering their past as traditional Jews. Freed through the state, they were then beholden to the state. Marx describes this split in “On the Jewish Question” in stark terms. He dubs it “the decomposition of man into Jew and citizen.” Perhaps this is what made mimesis so appealing to Jews in German lands after emancipation. Perhaps this is why some of them became very good at it. Where imitating Germanness, or what counted as Germanness, was a requirement for living, if it could be brought to the level of art, some small share of power could transfer to the imitator, rather than stay with the imitated. This is doubtless the moral of Franz Kafka’s story, “A Report to an Academy.” Although written about fifty years after Capital, it crystalizes the dynamic. In Kafka’s tale, an ape captured in Africa imitates the humans he encounters as a captive on the ship to Europe. In order to remain an ape and still be welcome in their society, he has to imitate them. Later, once he is ensconced in Europe, in order to have a better life in this new kind of captivity, the ape goes onstage. He plays an ape who is aping a human, so that he can remain an ape. The theater allows him to spend his life openly performing his double life. Kafka’s character turns his disadvantage to his advantage, by doubling the double. Doubleness was an escape and a salvation, and also a continuation of the trap, for German-speaking Jews in Middle Europe in the long nineteenth century. Doubling up may have been, in Marx’s world, a Jewish thing, but it was certainly, for Marx, a capitalist thing. Almost everything of importance in Capital looks like one thing but is actually two. You need to be good at two-ness to get it. You need to twist your thinking, fold it, and then unfold it again, to comprehend capital, where doubleness moves into the nature of things. It can feel, at times, like losing your mind. This is because, in everyday thinking, the thing you want to comprehend is supposed to be a single, unified object. This thing I am holding is a book, not a book and an ostrich. And my thought of the book is one thought. The oneness of the object and the oneness of my thought about it are intimately linked. If the object is more than one, doesn’t the thought have to be more than one, too? Am I thinking this is A or thinking this is B? We usually call this uncertainty, or doubt — being of two minds about something. At an extreme, we call it madness. All of this because truth is reported to be one. But what if capitalism has a new shape for truth? What if truth has a new number? What if a repetition compulsion doubles objects and causes problems for thinking? Since in Marx’s world mimetic doubling was marked or coded or experienced as a Jewish technique, it may have also been a metaphor for the rampant doubling carried out by the capital system. Or it could be that his experience with doubleness, as a German-Jew, helped him recognize the wiles of this new socioeconomic system. In Marx’s discourse, the Jew, in his doubleness, sometimes stands in for capital, in its doubleness. “On the inside, commodities are circumcised Jews,” Marx rather startlingly quips in the fourth chapter of the first volume of Capital. This complicated association points to Paul of Tarsus, to his discussion of inward and outward Jews in Romans 2:25–29. Like a Jew, whose one side, the outward adherence to law, is a dispensable shill for his other side, the inner faith in Christ, a commodity may be outwardly shabby but inwardly gold. Marx shows us again and again that any feature of this specific social-economic field is actually two things pushed together. Capital is an outward Jew and an inward Christian. And yet it takes special sleuthing to find this out, since capital’s objects look at first glance like single things, and so a different mode is necessary to render it in the right light. To see things in the capital system, to interpret the system correctly, you need to see double. Section I, “The Commodity and Money,” would be unintelligible if you didn’t open your mind to double-vision. This is because the important objects are made up of two idiosyncratic and mutually antagonistic things that in the development of the system got coupled together. It is much too coarse to reduce this setup to an automatic and unconscious projection of what Marx underwent as a Jew in Germany in his time. Perhaps, minimally, though, we can say that with experience in the kind of double-vision that marginal social groups grow good at, Marx knew a double system when he saw one. We are taught from the beginning of Section I of Volume I that comprehension can no longer mean making a single image or a single sentence. Reading Capital, we can no longer say “this is that.” The book tests readers on their grammar. We should learn to say “this is those;” learn to take a thing in from two perspectives at once, to the point at which it no longer appears as one thing
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence