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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