I have seen a cat without a grin, but a grin without a cat? It's the most curious thing I have ever saw in my whole life. Ah, what about the everyday life of the commodity, Marx says to Lewis Carroll. Yes, Marx continues, it would seem absurd--in fact a hypostatization (or a fallacy of misplaced concretenes)--if the grin of a cheshire cat could self subsist. Grins are only supposed to be as real as grinners: abstracted aspects presuppose the objects or events from which they are abstracted. Grins do not jump off the faces of cats but...value jumps out of the body of its commodity in what I call a salto mortale. So the value *aspect* of commodities has a mysterious kind of concreteness or substantiality. Let us look at this more closely... RB
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu May 02 2002 - 00:00:08 EDT