Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility

by Kōjin Karatani, Gavin Walker (Editor)

Classic study of Marx by Japan's leading critical theoristOriginally published in 1974, Kojin Karatani's Towards the Centre of Possibility has been amongst his most enduring and pioneering works in critical theory. Written at a time when the political sequences of the New Left had collapsed into crisis and violence, with widespread political exhaustion for the competing sectarian visions of Marxism from 1968, Karatani's Marx laid the groundwork for a new reading, unfamiliar to the existing Marxist discourse in Japan at the time. Karatani's Marx takes on insights from semiotics, deconstruction, and the reading of Marx as a literary thinker, treating Capital as an intervention in philosophy that could be read as itself a theory of signs. Marx is unique in this sense, not only because of its importance in post-68 Japanese thought, but also because the heterodox reading of Marx that Karatani debuts in this text, centered on his theory of the value-form, will go on to form the basis of his globally-influential work.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Politics, Japan, Economics, Japanese Literature, Theory

149 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Kōjin Karatani (柄谷 行人 Karatani Kōjin, born August 6, 1941, Amagasaki) is a Japanese philosopher and literary critic.

Karatani was educated at University of Tokyo, where he received a BA in economics and an MA in English literature. The Gunzō Literary Prize, which he received at the age of 27 for an essay on Natsume Sōseki, was his first critical acclaim as a literary critic. While teaching at Hosei University, Tokyo, he wrote extensively about modernity and postmodernity with a particular focus on language, number, and money, concepts that form the subtitle of one of his central books: Architecture as Metaphor.

In 1975, he was invited to Yale University to teach Japanese literature as a visiting professor, where he met Paul de Man and Fredric Jameson and began to work on formalism. Starting from a study of Natsume Sōseki, the variety of the subjects examined by Karatani became so wide that he earned the nickname The Thinking Machine.

Karatani collaborated with novelist Kenji Nakagami, to whom he introduced the works of Faulkner. With Nakagami, he published Kobayashi Hideo o koete (Overcoming Kobayashi Hideo). The title is an ironic reference to “Kindai no chokoku” (Overcoming Modernity), a symposium held in the summer of 1942 at Kyoto Imperial University (now Kyoto University) at which Hideo Kobayashi (whom Karatani and Nakagami did not hold in great esteem) was a participant.

He was also a regular member of ANY, the international architects' conference that was held annually for the last decade of the 20th century and that also published an architectural/philosophical series with Rizzoli under the general heading of Anyone.

Since 1990, Karatani has been regularly teaching at Columbia University as a visiting professor.

Karatani founded the New Associationist Movement (NAM) in Japan in the summer of 2000. NAM was conceived as a counter–capitalist/nation-state association, inspired by the experiment of LETS (Local Exchange Trading Systems, based on non-marketed currency). He was also the co-editor, with Akira Asada, of the Japanese quarterly journal, Hihyōkūkan (Critical Space), until it ended in 2002.

In 2006, Karatani retired from the chair of the International Center for Human Sciences at Kinki University, Osaka, where he had been teaching.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Eoin Conroy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kojin Katarani’s Towards the Centre of Possibility is something of a hybrid book. An analysis of the concept of commodities as they appear in Marx’s Capital, Katarani mixes and applies traditional Marxist economic theory with Saussurean semiotics to a close reading of Marx’s text. It exists at a cross-section of economic theory, linguistics, and literary analysis. It is a wonder why Verso decided to translate such an odd duck of a Marxist text from the 1970s in 2020. The book’s translator, Gavin Walker, brings up the untimeliness of the text in his introduction, but he doesn’t really come to a satisfying justification why we should be reading a book of Marxist economics, which is practically a relic of Marxism before it had its cultural turn many decades ago. It would be fair, at the outset, to consider this an effort from Verso to squeeze blood from the reified stone. With the rising (niche) popularity of Marxist theory in the last few years, it would be fair to see this as an example of Verso pushing out any hoary outdated theory they can to keep the content flowing for as long as the mini-fad lasts. What I found was something quite different. Karatani’s text, despite being from the 1970s, is very refreshing in its weirdness, and it is far more interesting than the usual fair of Verso books about the latest descriptor for twenty-first century capitalism (I think about the possibility of a Covid-Capitalism book and shudder).

I would place Karatani alongside Althusser as a theorist developing a systematic analysis of Post-War capitalism, following the realisation amongst the Marxist school that capitalism was here to stay. There are also some touches of Derrida, along with psychoanalysis by way of Freud and Lacan, but Karatani’s book can simply be described as an application of Saussurean structuralism to Marx’s theory of the commodity. He proposes a reading of Marx whereby the critic displaces the thrust of argument in the text of Capital, and instead reads from the understated aspects of the text to reveal a greater, latent system beneath. It is a reading from the margins towards the centre of possibility. Largely, this involves an uncovering of Marx as a latent semiotician.

Fundamentally, Karatani proposes that the base of society is not the means of production, but rather the means of exchange. Karatani does not see the agrarian fields of feudalism, nor the factories of industrialism, as the core of those particular stages of social formation. Rather, the base for feudalism is the ‘voluntary surrender and protection, or taxation and redistribution’ between the serfs and their lord, and this social formation would go on to be the basis for the nation state. As for industrial or post-industrial capitalism, the mode of exchange is surprisingly simple: money. This provides the foundation for Karatani to read Marx as a critic who observed the ‘relational’ character of political economy and social formation. For instance, he uses this position to deconstruct the aura of money. In industrial/post-industrial society, money appears to be at the core of how the economy functions, as it is money that determines what everything is worth. For Karatani, this is a lie produced from the metaphysics of language. When we wish to signify what something is worth, we may say ‘X Commodity is worth $15’, which signifies that the commodity has an innate sense of worth given to it by money. Karatani proposes that if we were to strip money of this metaphysical aura, we would phrase this valuation as ‘the use-value of Y Commodity signifies the value of Commodity X’. For Katarani, the value of a commodity is determined by its placement in a relational field. The value of a commodity is determined by its contextual field of commodities, rather than determined by money operating as the centre of the economy. Karatani thinks of the economy as something akin to a semiotic field. As Lacan suggested that the unconscious is structured like a language, Karatani suggests that the economy, as the unconscious of social formation, is also structured like a language. Karatani views this semiotics-infused Marx as innate to the text of Capital, that has since been hidden by his interpreters: the historical materialists who have since clouded Marx’s true success as a deconstructionist

Karatani’s fidelity to the text is curious. His process of discovering possibilities through the margins of the text masks any sense of conflict he may have with Marx’s theory. He does not disagree with Marx, he simply finds latent possibilities in his text that surfaces through close reading. I feel what Karatani was ultimately doing through this methodology was trying to distance himself from a traditional dialectical method. He criticises practitioners of historical materialism as abstractors of Marx’s text that have retroactively claimed him for their own methodology (according to Karatani, Marx himself was not a historical materialist). Yet, what is Karatani ultimately doing here? He is applying Saussure to Marx, producing a tension between two theories that brings out the latent Marxist Saussure and Saussurean Marx. What is this if not a dialectical method? At an early point in the book, and in the ending, Karatani proposes that it is when Marx evokes Hegel that he really breaks from Hegel theoretically. When Karatani evokes fidelity to Marx, he also fulfills this paradox. This gets to the crux of the essential strangeness of the book: it is a rigorous, systematic analysis of Marx intentionally built on a lie. Karatani claims fidelity to the text of Capital while also undermining the concept of fidelity as its inverse. I can’t help but feel that this act of critical contortionism is deployed as a mask for the dialectical method. In trying to defy the historical materialists, those misunderstanders of Marx who became the epistemological foundation for Stalinism and other authoritarian Marxists, Karatani constructs a dialecticism without dialectics.

I would not suggest that Toward the Centre of Possibility has any contemporary relevance, but it is an engaging work of criticism which manages to walk a line between dry systemic analysis and aggressively opaque theory toward a centre of possibility.

[Enrique Mora Roás · Rating 4 out of 5]

Decir que he comprendido, en su totalidad, las posibilidades a las que apunta este libro sería una mentira de lo más descarada por mi parte. Me falta lectura directa de textos de Marx para poder empezar a rascar más significados de muchas de las páginas y capítulos de este libro. Es algo que intentaré solucionar pronto. Lo que sí diré es que es interesante en tanto en cuanto a dos cosas:
1. El contexto del academicismo japonés post-68. Karatani supone una ruptura y un comienzo con la Nueva Academia (cercana a la francesa) unido a los desarrollos de la Nueva Izquierda. Unos cambios de debate que se mueven de un salón a otro. Aun así, me parece que lo que se afirma en un principio de que Karatani recupera el marxismo y lo hace más accesible es una sobreestimación (de ahí lo de un salón a otro).
2. El apartado sobre ideología (un campo que sí que conozco mucho mejor que la teoría del valor o la utilización del sistema-dinero como inherente a este) sí que me ha aclarado y ha abierto los ojos a una conceptualización mucho más compleja: más allá de la "falsa conciencia" y describiéndolo como una "verdad intersubjetiva material".

Dificilito, digan lo que digan. Interesante también un rato, pero para la persona que quiera que sea interesante.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really amazing reading of Marx's thought and the money-form through a literary critique (employing semiotics, deconstruction, and some psychoanalysis). I find myself agreeing with a lot of the readings Karatani puts forward; they put into words a lot of what I feel Marx's project has been — a process of reading, in a sense, various texts of philosophy and political economy deconstructively (while still occasionally coming up against the limits of the Hegelian and political economic concepts he employs in such a critique).

This book is a compelling case to think of Marx beyond historical materialism — lots of interesting links to early Jean Baudrillard (ie. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign) and Adorno's notion of immanent critique.

Also short and accessible! So that's a huge plus.

[Elliot · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the swaggest opening sentences I’ve ever seen a book begin with- “To deal with a thinker is to deal with his or her work. This may seem an obvious point, but, in fact, it is not. For example, in order to consider Marx, one should intensively read Capital. But people instead pass through certain external ideologies…and merely read Capital in order to confirm those ideological presuppositions. This is not reading.”

True to form, Karatani’s Marx Towards the Centre of Possibility is an intensive literary and heterodox reading of Marx and Capital that weaves together Marx, Saussure, Freud/Lacan, and Nietzsche, all while looking closely at Marx’s understanding of the value-form/money-form and commodities. Some absolutely fascinating exchangist accounts of value as homologous to Saussure’s understanding of signified/signifier. This is really quite an interesting book, though it would be pretty hard to recommend to anyone who isn’t pretty far down the Marx rabbit hole (seeing as it’s pretty dated- 1974- and honestly pretty jargon heavy). Names like David Harvey and Michael Heinrich come to mind as significantly better places to start. However, at the end of the day Karatani recognizes you simply have to read the man for yourself.

[Peter Harrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've not read any Japanese marxism before, this book shows what I've been missing. It also feels like the deconstructionist contribution to marxist thinking that I've been missing, having found Derrida's engagement with Marx disappointing and his work in general confusing. Whilst working in a similar paradigm, Karatani's work is refreshingly clear and well articulated. His exposition of Marx's law of value as fundamentally relational (any individual value only has meaning in its relation to other values) fits well with how I conceptualise Marx's thinking in general, and reasserts the importance of value in the face of a routine economics view that can't see past the "transformation problem". In this context Karatani's association of this relational structure with how language works and the nature of structuralism is fascinating. A short book, but very much worth reading.

[Patrick Gwillim-Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Karatani has a lovely way of approaching Marx’s text as having problems that Marx himself is not fessing up to, but are central to the logical structure you can get from the text. So one obvious one early on is that Marx’s theory of surplus value breaks down when one approaches the market as a rationalized one where exchange value is produced through the relation of use-values (so, in other words, if you ignore the Italian theorists ideas of coercion and undervaluing of labor in the wage). This leads Karatani to an interesting theory of surplus value as movement between spatially and temporally separate domains of exchange. It is just a shame that Karatani seems afraid of continuing to innovate on these problems of Marx. Instead he wants to continue to introduce problems, in particular the problem of ‘the origin of value/language in general’ which cannot be explained by use-value (signifier) vs exchange-value (sign) dichotomy. This leaves you overall impressed by his reading ability but unimpressed by his own project of Marxism. The overall impression then is that Marx’s text is self-aware of the problems of Marxist theory that it does not address, and that these problems are not resolvable by Karatani as well and perhaps necessitate an abandoning of the terminology of Marx’s texts altogether.

A particular annoyance for me was what little Karatani did to develop his quite interesting theory of surplus value, which reminded me of Anna Tsing’s theory of capital as translation in Mushroom at the End of the World. Karatani claims once merchant capital moving between spatially separate domains of exchange is diminished, the source of surplus value is in the temporal lag between the domain where workers sell their labor and the later domain where the product is sold. Where Karatani’s theory of surplus value really breaks down when it gets to automation and outsourcing.

It is already sort of incoherent as it is unclear whether Karatani is talking about a purely temporal lag (as he claims) or a lag in awareness (which seems more plausible). I think he tries to claim that the workers only exist collectively, and their labor can only be valued collectively, in the form of the product. So you have individual labor sold cheaper before the later product that is sold at higher value than labor was bought (which because of the production line process is greater than the sum of its parts, so the workers encounter their collectivity as the surplus value in the product). However this seems more like an awareness problem, one that Karatani thinks is overcome everytime a product is made (hence labor value can change) but somehow does not think can be overcome prior to the product being made. The workers seem to be in a sort of tweedle-dum and tweedle-dumber satire of continually forgetting that their collective labor, in temporal lag, will produce a new exchange system by which it is undervalued in its present individual sale.

Anyway even if this is the case, automation and outsourcing—particularly when purchased from one company—seems to utterly undercut this. In both cases a single entity, the company, is in charge of the whole sale of labor power, they are immediately aware of the collectivity (unless maybe they are not, which could lead to some interesting questions of how capitalism needs to increase the scale of composition for maintaining surplus value from individual parts that will only encounter their collectivity at a lag—these sort of interesting questions are what Karatani might have explored)

[David Goldman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Karatani provides a nuanced and eclectic reading of Marx. The book is not a general introduction to Marx. Instead, Karatani delivers a way to approach Marx and, indeed, a variety of disciplines, including linguistics. It exists at a cross-section of economic theory, linguistics, and literary analysis.
"To deal with a thinker is to deal with their work. This may seem an obvious point, but it is not. For example, to consider Marx, one should intensively read Capital. But people instead pass through certain external ideologies…and merely read Capital in order to confirm those ideological presuppositions. This is not reading."

One of Karatani's most interesting insights is that there can only be meaning with a more extensive reference system. In "Capital," for example, money is the universal representative of the difference between use value and exchange value, but this presupposes a more extensive system in which money holds value. Karatani deconstructs the traditional causality that classical economists use to explain value, showing how what appears to be the cause is actually the effect of a larger process that is already presupposed.

The book is clearly written and contains less jargon than most critical theories. Still, it does require a working knowledge of Marx and some familiarity with Freud, Kant, and Structuralism. As such, there may be better choices for beginners, and some of the material may be difficult to understand. Nonetheless, the book offers a wealth of insights that will interest anyone looking to gain a deeper understanding of Marx's work.

[Jon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Perhaps because I'm a Left Coaster, my first encounter with Marxism was from another turn around the Pacific Rim, with Makoto Itoh. The reason I mention this is Karatani's book is a reaction to the same mid-century Japanese Marxism as Itoh, who largely goes over the same intellectual history in Value and Crisis: Essays on Marxian Economics in Japan, but from a sharply opposing point of view.

Attempting to read Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 while considering anything else Marx wrote as "external philosophy," Karatani turns many of Marx's concepts on their head. But in so doing, in my opinion, he loses much of what is fundamental. There is a good reason Marx focuses on the labor theory of value, for instance, and casting its dismissal as something logically necessary to "grasp the heart" of Marx's theorizing, I didn't find very convincing.

On the other hand, Karatani presents this book as a work of literary criticism (even if he attempts to walk back that aspect of his work in his 2019 forward), and I think foregrounding this subjective approach makes it easier to digest his speculations. And though Karatani's creative interpretation is a clever and interesting construction, overall I do not think he replaced the value of what he removed. Who can butter their bread with method alone?

[K]

sometimes brilliant, often confusing, sometimes insane in a way I'm not sure I can cosign - I think the overarching point of this book is actually to argue that Marx gestures towards poststructuralism, but maybe doesn't quite get there. it's extremely interesting and the relation Karatani has with Marxism and French Philosophy is it's own dilemma - it feels like he exists somewhere between Althusser and the postmoderns here.

[Eoghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hegel's PdG is the door to Capital's key.

He misreads Nietzsche as a Nietzschean but otherwise its transcendental. Kant you see?

[javor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book. Hard to follow a central line of thought, and at times felt a little post-structuralist for me (or rather, seemed to indicate post-structuralist elements of Marx's thought, which is valuable but sometimes overzealous), but in any case: Karatani thoroughly argues for the centrality of the value-form to the entirety of Marx's Capital. Karatani is a very meticulous dialectician and has an excellent grasp on the relationship between appearance, essence, the value-form, money, capital, and the task of thought that is philosophy. He deconstructs the traditional causality that 'creates' value understood by classical economists and shows how what appears as cause is actually effect, but hides the entire process of its own production such that it is already presupposed. A very accessible work and essential to understanding early Karatani's Marxist direction in order to grasp his later works.