Marx's [[style]] and [[dialectics|dialectic]] emphasize the world of forms and apperances. He doesn't always discuss the world as it is; he discusses the world _as it appears to be_ (...and then he unpacks why it appears that way). Indeed, Marx's dialectical method is arguably an analysis of the dance between appearance and essence. In his [[A Companion to Marx's Capital (2010)]], right at the very beginning, [[David Harvey]] points out Marx's emphasis on "appearances": > “The commodity is Marx's a priori beginning point. "The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails:' he says, "appears as an (immense collection of commodities'; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity" (125). ==But notice something about the language. ('Appears' occurs twice in the passage, and, plainly, 'appears' is not the same as 'is.'' The choice of this word—and watch out for it, because Marx makes frequent use of it throughout Capital—signals that something else is going on beneath the surface appearance.== We are immediately invited to think about what this might be. Notice also that Marx is exclusively concerned with the capitalist mode of production. He is not concerned with ancient modes of production, socialist modes of production or even hybrid modes of production, but with a capitalist mode of production in a pretty pure form. It is always important to remember this in what follows” (1) ### Why does Marx do this? A lot of times the problem is that the "things" you see are abstracted from a larger process. This is also why [[Marx's style and dialectic emphasizes flux, change and process]]. An important example Marx gives is the myth of Cacus (vis a vis [[Martin Luther]]) in a footnote. Cacus leads a bunch of oxen into a cave __backwards__, so when people go looking for the oxen and see only the footprints, they misunderstand what's really going on. They think the oxen came __from__ the cave—not that the oxen went __into__ it. Martin Luther compares this to usurers, who make the world think they produced the oxen, when in reality, they're the ones who ate the oxen. You can see how Marx would pick up on capitalists doing the same thing. They're sucking up [[surplus value]], all the while thinking that they're the ones producing it. > “Usury is a great huge monster, like a werewolf, who lays waste all, more than any Cacus, Gerion or Antus. And yet decks himself out, and would be thought pious, so that people may not see where the oxen have gone, that he drags backwards into his den. But Hercules shall hear the cry of the oxen and of his prisoners, and shall seek Cacus even in cliffs and among rocks, and shall set the oxen loose again from the villain. For Cacus means the villain that is a pious usurer, and steals, robs, eats everything. And will not own that he has done it, ==and thinks no one will find him out, because the oxen, drawn backwards into his den, make it seem, from their foot-prints, that they have been let out. So the usurer would deceive the world, as though he were of use and gave the world oxen, which he, however, rends, and eats all alone==... And since we break on the wheel, and behead highwaymen, murderers and housebreakers, how much more ought we to break on the wheel and kill.... hunt down, curse and behead all usurers.” (Martin Luther, l. c.)” ([pp. 428-429](x-devonthink-item://7B52D4BB-2E83-477C-A080-1148E1A3EEFF?page=428)) [[Bertell Ollman]] explains as follows: > “If the owners of the oxen had taken a methodology course at an American university, they might have counted the footprints, measured the depth of each step, and run the results through a computer—but they would have arrived at the same wrong conclusion. ==The problem here arises from the fact that reality is more than appearances and that focusing exclusively on appearances, on the evidence that strikes us immediately and directly, can be extremely misleading==. How typical is the error found in this example? According to Marx, rather than the exception, this is how most people in our society understand the world. Basing themselves on what they see, hear, and bump into in their immediate surroundings—on footprints of various kinds—they arrive at conclusions that are in many cases the exact opposite of the truth. Most of the distortions associated with bourgeois [[ideology]] are of this kind” ([[Dance of the Dialectic (2003)|Dance]], p. 13) ### A prime example of this mistake: commodity fetishism The mistake Ollman describes above is of course related to [[commodity fetishism]]: > "There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things" ([[Capital (1867; 1887)|Capital]], p. 48) A commodity _appears_ to be one thing... but it's actually something different. However, as [[Slavoj Žižek]] points out, *the key is not just to find out what's really going on* "behind" the appearance or something like that. Marx is interested not **_just_** in "what's really there" behind or beyond the surface form; instead, he's interested in why the surface form *takes* that particular form in the first place. > "But as Marx points out, there is a certain ‘yet’: ==**the unmasking of the secret is not sufficient**. Classical bourgeois political economy has already discovered the ‘secret’ of the commodity-form==; its limit is that it is not able to disengage itself from this fascination in the secret hidden behind the commodity-form – that its attention is captivated by labour as the true source of wealth. In other words, classical political economy is interested only in contents concealed behind the commodity-form, ==which is why it cannot explain the true secret, **__not__ the secret behind the form** but the **secret of this form itself**==. In spite of its quite correct explanation of the ‘secret of the magnitude of value’, the commodity remains for classical political economy a mysterious, enigmatic thing – it is the same as with the dream: even after we have explained its hidden meaning, its latent thought, the dream remains an enigmatic phenomenon; what is not yet explained is simply its form, the process by means of which the hidden meaning disguised itself in such a form." ([[The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)|Sublime]], p. 8; my bold) Žižek's answer for why the secret takes that particular form is basically "[[Real (Lacanian)|the Real]]." Similar to [[Fredric Jameson|Fredric Jameson's]] "absent cause," this is a hidden or invisibly property that holds or structures the elements together. Žižek's [[Reality of the Virtual]] video sums this up nicely. The most "real" version of the Lacanian Real is precisely the virtual Real: > Let us think about attractors in mathematics, or in physics. For example, you have small pieces of iron and you throw them around a magnetic field. They are dispersed following a certain shape, infinitely approaching this shape, but this shape, of course, is not existing it itself. It's just something that you can abstract, isolate from the dispersion of the small pieces of the iron. That's the idea of Virtual Real. It's a shape, this is the Real of this field, but it's not -- ==it doesn't exist in itself. It's just an abstract form which structures the disposition of the actually existing elements around it==. This is why the dialectic is not just one thing or just its antithesis. The dialectic is about what *structures* that antithesis — that tension, that contradiction — in the first place. What causes the hidden essence to take the form of that surface appearance?