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NEW FROM ROUTLEDGE 2026

'Capital' as Literature: Marx Against Himself



’CAPITAL’ AS LITERATURE: MARX AGAINST HIMSELF


Studies of Marx, particularly of his masterwork Capital (1867), are as a rule tutelary—they attempt to explain him. Even literary readers of Marx, from Raymond Williams to Fredric Jameson, seek to secure Marxist tenets by means of Marxian style. ‘Capital’ as Literature: Marx Against Himself departs from this tradition by reading Capital as literary in its own right rather than as political economy with style as its filigree rather than its focus. Here, Marx emerges in a different light. If literature is writing that calls whatever is settled into question, then Marx's writing is literature, not because of its revolutionary program, but because Marx's rhetoric, particularly its key trope of chiasmus, undoes the coherence of the notions it propounds, especially in Capital. Marx's chiasmatic style turns Capital into a mise en abyme and Marx's enterprise into an example of what it describes rather than its foil or antidote: the structure of capital itself. Capital, like capital, is a self-begetting production machine whose fungibility as a form is one and the same with the money economy it unravels. ‘Capital’ as Literature: Marx Against Himself shows how this irony unfolds and what the implications are for epistemology, cultural studies, and literary criticism.




ALSO FROM ROUTLEDGE 2022

Criticism After Theory from Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf



CRITICISM AFTER THEORY FROM SHAKESPEARE TO VIRIGINIA WOOLF

The argument of this book is a simple one: that criticism after theory is a single movement of thought defined by synthesis and continuity rather than by conflict and change. The most influential figures in criticism since Saussure—Bakhtin, Derrida, and Foucault—are wholly consistent with Saussure's foundational Course in General Linguistics (1916) no matter the traditions of complaint that have followed in Saussure's wake from Bakhtin forward. These complaints vitiate—despite themselves and often hilariously so—the misconceptions that have made cottage industries out of quarrels with Saussurean semiology that are based on notions of Saussure that are incorrect. The materialist criticism dominant today is actually dependent upon on the legacy of a presumably formalist structuralism rather than a step beyond it. New Historicism, postcolonialism, gender studies, environmental criticism, archive studies, even shared and surface reading are, like deconstruction, the by-products of Saussure's structuralism, not its foils. Saussure's sign is sensory and concrete. Language and materiality are not distinct but one and the same—history, society, the psychological subject, even the environment are systems of signs, material archives read and reread by futures that produce the past after the fact. Without Saussure, contemporary criticism would have no identifiable or effective source. The book begins with chapters on Saussure and Derrida, Bakhtin and Shakespeare, and Freud and Foucault followed by chapters on Victorian and American fiction, D.H. Lawrence and modern poetry, Virginia Woolf and Melanie Klein, and the historicist tropology of psychoanalysis. It concludes with a coda in life writing on the author's epileptic disability.




Portuguese translation of THE MYTH OF POPULAR CULTURE (Blackwell Manifestos, 2010) now available from Tinta Negra (Rio de Janeiro, 2015)



OS MITOS DA CULTURA POP: DE DANTE A DYLAN

O renomado crítico cultural americano Perry Meisel detona as noções convencionais sobre a divisão entre “alta” e “baixa” cultura.

O autor transita pela provocante teoria de que a cultura pop experimentou ritmos dialéticos. A hábil análise que o livro apresenta de três tradições culturais duradouras – o romance norte-americano, Hollywood, e o rock inglês e americano – nos leva a um ciclo histórico da cultura pop que tem Dante como ponto de partida e revisita ícones como Wahrol, Melville, Hemingway, Twain, Eisenstein, Benjamin, Scorsese e Sinatra.




THE MYTH OF POPULAR CULTURE: FROM DANTE TO DYLAN

The Myth of Popular Culture discusses the dialectic of "highbrow" and "lowbrow" in popular culture through an examination of literature, film, and popular music. With topics ranging from John Keats to John Ford, the book responds to Adorno's theory that popular culture is not dialectical by showing that it is.

Available as eBooks

COURSE IN GENERAL LINGUISTICS. Trans. Wade Baskin. Co-ed. with Haun Saussy. By Ferdinand de Saussure (Columbia University Press, 2011)

THE MYTH OF POPULAR CULTURE: FROM DANTE TO DYLAN
(Blackwell Manifestos, 2010)

THE LITERARY FREUD (Routledge, 2007)

THE COWBOY AND THE DANDY: CROSSING OVER FROM ROMANTICISM TO ROCK AND ROLL (Oxford University Press, 1998)

FREUD: A COLLECTION OF CRITICAL ESSAYS (Prentice-Hall, 1981)




7/13/10

20,000 (Don't Count 'Em) at French Jazz-Rock Fest

Would-be Woodstock at a Grand Prix race track is dominated by a figure out of the past: Joe Cocker

by Perry Meisel

LE CASTELLET, FRANCE - It wasn't Woodstock - on that singular point most everyone agreed.
"Riviera '76 Festival Jazz-Rock" - held July 23rd-26th - was originally promoted, at least indirectly, as the son of Woodstock. The press release began: "Seven years after the Woodstock Festival brought world-wide attention to the drawing power of rock & roll, Michael Lang, creator of Woodstock, wants to do it again." The release went on to note that the concert site, situated at the Circuit Paul Ricard, a Grand Prix race track 25 miles east of Marseille, "has held 150,000 in the past." Obviously, there were high expectations.
How many people actually showed up depends on who you choose to believe. The festival's organizers estimated a crowd of 100,000, while the local Le Provencal Marseille Sud counted a fat 150,000 in its day-after coverage (titled "Woodstock in Provence"). The more conservativeMaridional, however, found "only 40,000" in attendance, noting that Lang had been "expecting 200,000." The consensus among the American press was 20,000.
The event - a mixture of jazz/rock/Latin/reggae - matched unlikely performers like Jimmy Cliff, Eddie Palmieri and Ray Barretto, Gil Scott-Heron and John McLaughlin's Shakti and . . . Joe Cocker.
Though the crowd of generally disinterested French hippies didn't know who Jimmy Cliff was, and booed Montreal's jazz-rock sensation Boule Noire because the group sang in Canadian French, they took Cocker to their hearts, throwing rocks and bottles to get him back onstage for an encore. When the festival's charter jet landed at the Marseille airport late Friday afternoon, Cocker's presence sent the local press into rapturous praise. By Monday, Cocker was being compared to Christ and referred to as "the idol" and "the bearded king." Cocker himself looked healthy and clear-eyed, completely recovered from his shaky tour last spring.
The festival ran smoothly despite a slow start. On opening day, Lang appeared to be more interested in roaring around on his motorcycle, a la Woodstock, than in managing the innumerable petty disasters that were building up about him. He was rumored to have no money involved in the project and, according to the same source, was said to have contracted for at least half the festival profits and profits from the film shot during the weekend. Reached by phone in Paris a week after the festival, Lang denied the rumors. He planned to remain in France to puzzle out the festival's attendance figures and leftover hassles.
Lang was reportedly on the edge of a dispute with race-track officials over whether employees were pocketing the $14 admission to the festival. More than a week after the festival, both Lang in Paris and coproducer Ray Paret in New York had not produced a balance sheet, though they both stated that they expected to break even from gate and concession income alone. General overhead was estimated at $600,000, while production costs for the film and album added another $350,000 to the total budget.
Lang wasn't the only Woodstock veteran at Riviera '76. Woodstock entrepreneur and ex-Dylan manager Albert Grossman was there. "I don't really have anything to say about it," said Grossman.
Of the festival itself, Lang said, "It was basically the music." And what has the man who produced Woodstock been doing with himself for the past seven years? "Just looking for something new to get off on."

Originally published in Rolling Stone, September 9, 1976

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