(political economy). Furthermore, according to Marx, this signifier is charac-
terized by reification, in much the same way that Hell constitutes a clotting
of the normal circulation of providential meaning within creation. Within
political economy, relations are “hidden by a thingly veil” (1970:34). This is
necessary, claims Marx, for – turning a Hegelianism to very un-Hegelian pur-
poses – “Reflection only begins post festum”:
The forms which stamp products as commodities and which are therefore
the preliminary requirements for the circulation of commodities, already
possess the fixed quality of natural forms of social life before man seeks to
give an account, not of their historical character, for in his eyes they are
immutable, but of their content and meaning. Consequently, it was solely
the analysis of the prices of commodities which led to the determination of
the magnitude of value, and solely the common expression of all commo-
dities in money which led to the establishment of their character as values.
It is however precisely this finished form of the world of commodities – the
money form – which conceals the social character of private labor and the
social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations
appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them
plainly. (1976:168–9)That Minerva only flies at dusk means science only encounters things it takes
for dead. These corpses it inters within itself as its categories. In the same
way that Hell seals off its inhabitants from vivifying contact with God, lock-
ing their souls in bodily death, so too does political economy preserve social
relations in a state of reification, severed from the historical forces that cre-
ated them, maintain them, and will transform them anew. By addressing his
critique to these reified categories, Marx ironically doubles political econ-
omy’s own characteristic method, speaking not of his actual, historical and
material concern, but rather of its icon, giving us only signs of signs.^21 As
irony, Marx’s critique presents readers with commodities, money, capital, and
labor, “personifications of economic relations” (1976:179), speaking and danc-
ing, falling in love and going to market, bleeding and sucking blood. But
these “characters” are only stand-ins, symbols, not the actual objects of his
54 • William Clare Roberts
(^21) Marx’s irony has been suggested before by John Seery (1990), Robert Paul Wolff
(1988), and Dominick LaCapra (1983), all for slightly different reasons. Only Wolff has
attempted to extend an ironic reading into Capitalitself, but even he sees this irony
as appropriate only to the sphere of circulation.