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In Capital, Karl Marx goes behind the scenes of everyday life to uncover the forces and contradictions that underly the appearance of reality. Marx's project is to understand how a capitalist mode of production works. To understand all the complexity that exists under capitalism, Marx develops a method that David Harvey describes as his method of descent. According to Harvey, Marx's method in Capital is to descend “beneath the surface appearance of particular events to the ruling abstractions underneath... It entails viewing any particular event set as an internalization of fundamental underlying guiding forces. The task of enquiry is to identify these underlying forces by critical analysis and detailed inspection of the individual instance.” In Capital, Marx starts with a seemingly ordinary, everyday object, the commodity, and descends beneath its surface to reveal the forces and contradictions of society that get internalized in it. For the next thousand pages, Marx expands from the internal contradictions found in the commodity to describe the entire capitalist mode of production. While Marx pioneered this method of descent to understand capitalism, Freud uses a similar method to develop his theories on the human subconscious. In the realm of modernist aesthetics, James Joyce also uses the method of descent in his book Ulysses, as he chronicles the passage of Leopold Bloom through Dublin during an ordinary day, 16 June 1904. Beneath the surface of this seemingly banal, modern day, an epic journey emerges comparable to the heroic adventures of classical antiquity, namely that of Homer's Odysseus. Famously, one of the literary methods that Joyce develops to represent the experience of daily life is stream-ofconsciousness, a technique that seems as much inspired by newly emerging theories of the subconscious as aesthetic innovations such as cubism and montage. The horizontal narrative of Bloom's day is interrupted by vertical plunges into the mental space of the characters. In Ulysses, we see depicted in the minds of Bloom and others, chains of associations that show the mental links from, say, “a bowl of soup to the British vessels sunk by England.” When Eisenstein had the idea to film Capital, he thought that the literary methods found in Joyce's Ulysses would be helpful for his project. According to Fredric Jameson, what Eisenstein had in mind here is “something like a Marxian version of Freudian free association—the chain of hidden links that leads us from the surface of everyday life and experience to the very sources of production itself. As in Freud, this is a vertical plunge downward into the ontological abyss, what he called 'the navel of the dream'; it interrupts the banal horizontal narrative and stages an associative cluster charged with affect.” Eisenstein's idea was use the structure of Ulysses, a 'day in the life' narrative interrupted by stream-of-consciousness, together with his theories of montage to depict a narrative film version of Capital. Alexander Kluge's latest film, News From Ideological Antiquity: Marx-Eisenstein-Capital, begins with Eisenstein's ambitious but unrealized plan to combine Capital and Ulysses. For over nine hours, the film expands in concentric circles as Kluge, his guests, interlocutors and monologists make associative links on a range of topics that starts from a filmic discussion of Eisenstein's notes. Kluge's film is divided into three parts: I. Marx and Eisenstein in the Same House; II. All Things are Bewitched People; III. Paradoxes of Exchange Society. At several points in the film we get a sense of what Eisenstein had in mind with his project. In one scene, we see that a “pot of soup has become a water kettle, boiling away and whistling: the image recurs at several moments in the exposition (Eisenstein’s notes projected in graphics on the intertitles), in such a way that this plain object is ‘abstracted’ into the very symbol of energy. It boils impatiently, vehemently it demands to be used, to be harnessed, it is either the whistling signal for work, for work stoppage, for strikes, or else the motor-power of a whole factory, a machine for future production ...” (Frederic Jameson in the New Left Review, July/August 2009). By insistence and repetition this banal object, a commodity, transforms into a larger-than-life symbol, and we start to get a sense of the full range of cognitive and material links this commodity has to the web of life that surrounds it. Marty Kirchner, 2010