Entangled exchange: verkehr and rhetorical capitalism

ABSTRACT

This essay develops the concept of verkehr as a site of conversation between Marxian and new materialist theories of rhetoric. Marx and Engels use verkehr, conventionally translated as “intercourse,” to describe a spectrum of processes of economic, military, semantic, and sexual exchange. I place verkehr in conversation with posthumanist philosopher Karen Barad’s concept of entanglement, which describes the processes of intra-active exchange that “produce determinate boundaries and properties of entities” within a larger causal field. I use this conversation between verkehr and entanglement to facilitate a rethinking of being as a field of entangled exchanges, and of capitalism as a set of apparatuses of capture that code semantic and bodily capacities of exchange into systems of surplus value, underwriting the fantasized immortality of some with the exploitation of bodies whose sexual, geographic, racial or class position capital deems fungible. I argue that this conversation between rhetoric and new materialist thought clarifies theses about the materiality of rhetoric (and the possibilities that materiality presents for resistant rhetorics) and expands the possibilities of Marxian critique in the service of the globally feminist, queer, antiracist, and broadly intersectional project advanced by a variety of posthuman rhetorical scholars.

KEYWORDS:

• Capitalism
• posthumanism
• Barad
• Karen
• Marx
• Karl
• Biopolitics
• materialism

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, as well as Joshua Hanan and Chris Gamble for their generous feedback and support.

Notes

1. Moses Hess, “The Essence of Money,” trans. Adam Buick. Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/hess/1845/essence-money.htm (accessed September 20, 2015).

2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology in Collected Works, vol. 5, 1845–1847 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 590n. 11.

3. Diane Davis and Michelle Baliff, “Pushing the Limits of the Anthropos,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 47.4 (2014): 348.

4. See Barbara Biesecker, “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from Within the Thematic of Différance,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 22, no. 2 (1989): 110–30; Diane Davis, Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreigner Relations (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010) and Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013) as well as Michelle Baliff and Diane Davis, eds. Extrahuman Rhetorical Relations: Addressing the Animal, The Object, The Dead and the Divine [Special Issue]. Philosophy and Rhetoric 47, no. 4 (2014).

5. See the work in the preceding footnote, as well as Michelle Baliff, Seduction, Sophistry and the Woman with the Rhetorical Figure (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001); Karma Chavez, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013); Joshua Gunn and Christian Lundberg, “Ouija Board, Are There Any Communications? Agency, Ontotheology and the Death of the Humanist Subject, or Continuing the ARS Conversation,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35, no. 4 (2005): 83–105; John Muckelbauer, The Future of Invention: Rhetoric, Postmodernism and the Problem of Change (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008).

6. Joshua S. Hanan and Catherine Chaput briefly discuss The German Ideology's theory of constituent power within a non-humanist context in “Stating the Exception: Rhetoric and Neoliberal Governance During the Creation and Passage of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008,” Argumentation and Advocacy 50 (2013): 18–33.

7. Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric, 21.

8. Baliff, Seduction, 134.

9. Joshua S. Hanan and Catherine Chaput, “A Rhetoric of Economics Beyond Civic Humanism: Exploring the Political Economy of Rhetoric in the Context of Late Neoliberalism,” Journal of Cultural Economy 8, no. 1 (2014): 18; see also Joshua Hanan, “From Economic Rhetoric to Economic Imaginaries: A Critical Genealogy of Economic Rhetoric in US Communication Studies,” in Communication and the Economy: History Value, and Agency ed. Joshua S. Hanan and Mark Hayward (New York: Peter Lang, 2013), 70.

10. In addition to the work already cited, see Catherine Chaput, “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism: Neoliberalism and the Overdetermination of Affective Energy,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 43, no. 1 (2010): 1–25; Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetorical Materialism: Rhetorical Subject and General Intellect,” in Rhetoric, Materiality and Politics, ed. Barbara Biesecker and John Louis Lucaites (New York: Peter Lang, 2009): 44–66; Matthew S. May, “Orator-Machine: Autonomist Marxism and William D. ‘Big Bill’ Haywood’s Cooper Union Address,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 45, no. 4: 429–451.

11. James Arnt Aune, Rhetoric and Marxism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), 26. For a notable exception to this account, see May, “Orator-Machine,” as well as Matthew Bost and Matthew S. May “The Surplus of the Machine: Trope and History in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 49, no. 1 (2016): 1–25.

12. Greene, “Rhetorical Materialism”; Matthew S. May, Soapbox Rebellion: The Hobo Orator Union and the Free Speech Fights of the Industrial Workers of the World, 1916–1919 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013).

13. For a much more in-depth discussion of the implication of humanism with these aspects of exploitation, see Mel Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.)

14. My use of the term intra-actional encompasses Barad’s discussion of ontological intra-action, which will be fleshed out below, as well as Karma Chavez’ notion of radical interactionality in Queer Migration Politics. Chavez argues that an interactional theory of social change builds on intersectionality by addressing the links between dimensions of oppression rooted in race, class, gender, geography and other aspects of life while highlighting the “mobility and complexity” (58) of these categories and their irreducibility to fixed identities.

15. Dana Cloud, “Change Happens: Materialist Dialectics and Communication Studies,” in Marxism and Communication Studies: The Point is to Change It, ed. Dana Cloud, Steve Macek and Lee Artz (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 53–70. For further discussion of the concept of fidelity, see Dana L. Cloud and Kathleen Eaton Feyh, “Reason in Revolt: Emotional Fidelity and Working Class Standpoint in the Internationale,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 45, no. 4 (2015): 300–323.

16. Greene, “Rhetorical Materialism,” 59–60; Hanan and Chaput, “Stating the Exception”; Michael Calvin McGee, “A Materialist’s Conception of Rhetoric,” in Rhetoric, Materiality and Politics, ed. Barbara Biesecker and John Lucaites (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 17–43.

17. Dana L. Cloud and Joshua Gunn, “W(h)ither Ideology?” Western Journal of Communication 75, no. 4 (2011), 415; Jamie Merchant, “Immanence, Governmentality, Critique: Toward a Recovery of Totality in Rhetorical Theory,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 47, no. 3 (2014): 227–50.

18. Greene, “Rhetorical Materialism.”

19. Barad, Universe, 152.

20. Ibid., 141.

21. Ibid., 234.

22. Ibid., 235.

23. Ibid., 140.

24. Ibid., 88–89.

25. Ibid., 93.

26. Luis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2009), 24–36.

27. See Charles Barbour, The Marx Machine: Politics, Polemics Ideology (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2012), 8; Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?,” in Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, ed. James Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: The New Press, 1998), 218.

28. Bost and May, “Surplus of the Machine.”

29. Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Penguin, 1992), 323.

30. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 55.

31. Ibid., 31–32.

32. Ibid., 32.

33. Ibid., 43.

34. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, ed. R. Pascal (New York: International Publishers, 1939), 10. The Collected Works edition omits this paragraph. All subsequent citations refer to the Collected Works edition of the text. For more on The German Ideology’s complex and fragmentary textual history, see Barbour, Marx Machine and Terrell Carver, The Postmodern Marx (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), esp. Ch. 5.

35. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 44.

36. Ibid., 39.

37. Ibid., 39.

38. Ibid., 33–34.

39. Ibid., 42.

40. Ibid., 42.

41. For two important examples, see Michael Henry Hansell, Animal Architecture (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2005) and John Marzluff and Tony Angell, Gifts of the Crow (New York: Free Press, 2012).

42. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 44.

43. Ibid., 44.

44. Ibid., 44.

45. Ibid., 40.

46. Ibid., 40.

47. The most famous examples include Louis Althusser, The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, ed. François Matheron, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2003) and For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2005) as well as Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan and Maurizio Viano (New York: Autonomia, 1991).

48. Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx (London: Verso, 1995), 30. Balibar places Marx in a line of thinkers of transindividuality that includes Gilles Deleuze, Gilbert Simondon, and Jacques Lacan, among others.

49. Balibar, Philosophy of Marx, 30.

50. Ibid., 30.

51. Barad, Universe, 352.

52. Kojin Karatani, The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange, trans. Michael K. Bordaghs (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 17. For a useful extended elaboration of the ecological perspective of Marx’s work that stays closer to the Marxist tradition, see John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).

53. Ibid., 17.

54. Ibid., 130.

55. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 44.

56. For two other valuable studies of rhetoric’s “general economy”, see George Kennedy, “A Hoot in the Dark: The Evolution of General Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25, no. 1 (1992): 1–21 and Mari Lee Mifsud, Rhetoric and the Gift: Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Contemporary Communication (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2015).

57. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 32.

58. Nick Dyer-Witheford, “The Return of Species-Being,” Historical Materialism 12, no. 4 (2004): 6.

59. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1993), 104.

60. Greene, “Rhetorical Materialism,” 45.

61. Ibid., 45.

62. See A. Kiarina Kordela, Surplus: Lacan, Spinoza (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007), 31 and Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, 201–14.

63. Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts”, 323.

64. Barad, Universe, x.

65. Ibid., 391.

66. Ibid., 398.

67. Ibid., 361.

68. Ibid., 176.

69. Ibid., 177.

70. For a discussion of response-ability as generative of rhetoric that shares some affinities with Barad’s, see Davis, Inessential Solidarity, esp. 103–110.

71. Ibid., 381.

72. Ibid., 381.

73. Ibid., 206.

74. Ibid., 391.

75. Davis, Inessential Solidarity, 113.

76. Thomas Keenan, “The Point is to (Ex)change It: Reading Capital Rhetorically,” in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 173.

77. Barbour, Marx Machine, 31.

78. Ibid., 20.

79. Barad, Universe, 238.

80. Ibid., 239.

81. Ibid., 239.

82. Ibid., 237.

83. Ibid., 243.

84. Ibid.,, 246.

85. Karatani, Structure, 36–37.

86. Ibid., 6.

87. Ibid., 6–7.

88. Ibid., 7.

89. Ibid., 7.

90. Kojin Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money trans. Sabu Kohsu, ed. Michael Sparks (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 173.

91. Ibid., 179.

92. Karatani, Structure, 190.

93. Ibid., 272.

94. Ibid., 229–30.

95. Ibid., 221.

96. Ibid., 128.

97. Ibid., 17.

98. Ibid., 17.

99. Bost and Greene, “Affirming Rhetorical Materialism: Enfolding the Virtual and the Actual,” Western Journal of Communication 75, no. 4 (2011): 442.

100. Angela Mitropoulos, Contract and Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia (New York: Minor Compositions, 2012), 30.

101. Ibid., 31.

102. A. Kiarina Kordela, Being, Time, Bios: Capitalism and Ontology (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2013), 184.

103. Ibid., 186.

104. Ibid., 186.

105. Keenan, “Reading Capital Rhetorically,” 171. For a discussion of this argument specifically vis-à-vis the exploitation of animals, see Nicole Shukin Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

106. See Hanan, “Economic Rhetoric,” and Greene, “Rhetorical Materialism,” as well as “Orator Communist,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 39, no. 1 (2006): 85–95. See also May, “Orator Machine” and Soapbox Rebellion as well as “Spinoza and Class Struggle,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 2 (2009): 204–208, and Bost and May, “Surplus of the Machine.”

107. Barad, Universe, 205.

108. Hanan and Chaput, “Stating the Exception,” 32.

109. Hanan and Chaput, “Stating the Exception,” and Greene, “Rhetoric and Capitalism.” See also Cesare Casarino, “Universalism of the Common,” diacritics 39, no. 4 (2009): 162–76.

110. Chen, Animacies, 237.

111. Barad, Universe, 391.

112. See Chaput, “Rhetorical Circulation.”