The Abyss of Representation: Marxism and the Postmodern Sublime

By George Hartley,
Duke University Press, Durham (NC), 2003, pp338 (not illustrated).
Paper $22.95; cloth $69.95
ISBN 0-8223-3114-4; ISBN 0 8223-3127-6 .

Reviewed by Malcolm Miles
University of Plymouth,
The Hoe Centre, Plymouth PL1 2AR, UK

mfmiles@plym.ac.uk

This book contributes to a critique of representation. The book reflects the complexity of its task in its range of references and fusion of material from philosophy, political economy, psycho-analysis, and cultural criticism. It is held together by a chronological organisation of its material in chapters, after a general introduction of its argument, from 'Presentation and Representation: Kant and the Limits of Discursive Understanding', to, inter alia, 'The Speculative Proposition: Hegel and the Drama of Presentation', 'Marx's Key Concept? Althusser and the Darstellung Question', and 'can the Symptom Speak? Hegemony and the Problem of Cultural Representation'.

The list of chapters indicates that readers may be daunted by the prior understanding of concepts the author assumes. Having said that, the writing is lucid. The chapter on Althusser begins with an explanation of Darstellung as understood by Althusser, and why it matters. This follows briefer explanation in earlier chapters. The difference between representation and presentation is an abiding theme, and the twin terms Vorstellung and Darstellung (respectively, from Marx - the former staging, as it were, the latter in particular ways) are taken as a dual pivot. Part of the argument is that the task facing recent and present interpreters of Marx is to un-pack the duality:

"The key is to produce a Marxist language that no longer depends on the vehicle of representation but goes directly to the production of the concept - a concept freed of its ties to the extraneous material of the figure, the stand-in, the proxy term that inevitably distances us from the presentness of the presentation" (p.85).

Whether this can be done is another matter. If critical theory was written in a form of sufficient difficulty to discourage its hijacking by the right, this argument offers difficulties less in that kind of expediency than in a more fundamental concern to articulate ideas in a language beyond that of the structures and institutions which the ideas criticise or seek to overthrow. It is a difficulty not entirely unlike that dealt with by Ernesto Laclau in his work on emancipation - where neither the formation of ideas of a potential future reality within present reality (hence tied to its conceptual structures), nor their revelation as if by grace, at a chasmic distance (hence potentially beyond present comprehension), are satisfactory routes.

So, for whom is this book written? In academic terms I would say a graduate stude4nt readership rather than an undergraduate one. Some familiarity with the basic concepts of Marxism is necessary to find a way through it, as is some understanding of contemporary discourses of identity and culture. In a way, the book appeals to those on the left concerned with re-grouping after the end of the cold war and its transition into the so-called war on terror. When Hartley writes:

"We have a situation that structurally speaking resembles the moment of Revolutionary Terror of the 1790s. That situation is capitalism itself. Capitalism is in its very structure the great destabilizer, the deterritorializer, the abyss of radical negativity. The structure of the production and circulation of surplus value is such that no one moment can remain stable. Capitalism by nature demands the constant revolutionizing of the forces of production and the destabilization of the vicious circle of circulation; it was Marx who over a century ago pointed to this inherently crisis-oriented nature of capitalism." (p.227)

he poses some important questions for radical criticism. This necessarily goes beyond political economy and into broader areas of culture and society - the narratives which spin the social thread, so to speak. He does so, however, in a way which semantically does not go beyond some of the concepts which shape the order of capital: that it is the nature of capitalism to do something implies an essential quality, while some postmodern cultural theory would reject that in favour of, for instance, complexity theory as a more material way of understanding history. Leaving that aside, the critique of capitalism which is at the book's core is likely to appeal mainly to a readership already engaged in such a critique. For those readers the book has much to offer.

Part of what it has to offer will also appeal to graduates and academics in literary criticism who are able to approach texts in a framework of political economy. But an aspect of the book's subtlety is that it also approaches political economy as a literary problem - that is a problem of expression and articulation, the problem of how to say something in a way that does not reproduce what the act of saying seeks to fracture. For example, Hartley begins with a poem - John Ashbery's Syringa (1977). Ashbery writes of the moment of loss when Orpheus realises he is utterly alone on the path winding back from the underworld, and of the Orphic song as attempting "to freeze the moment of loss eternally" as Hartley puts it (p.2). Ashbery sees Orpheus mistaken in thinking Eurydice might still have been there had he not looked back - how could she have been? it is impossible - and Hartley takes this profound insight, itself a critique of the modern interpretation of the myth, as a breakdown of representation: "We go too far, we don't go far enough. Either way, the irruption of this trauma into our Imaginary stabilized existence ... sets representation into its own ultimately self-destroying motion" (pp2-3). To begin with a piece of literature which is as emotive as philosophical gives the book a particular character. It is not that poetry adds wetness to the dryness of political economy; more that in order to understand why the concepts of political economy matter enough to be worth revising in the often difficult way Hartley attempts requires more than rationalisation.