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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)




10/6/10

The Raybeats' Tight Return

by Perry Meisel

It took three songs before the Raybeats' cherubic workhorse Pat Irwin looked up from his trashy Ace Tone organ and smiled at the crowd two Saturdays ago at Maxwell's. The Raybeats had been relaxing maybe a little too much. Jody Harris's meandering guitar and the almost farcical smokeshow that brought the band onstage had bordered dangerously near Quicksilver, the Dead ethos of an organic and expressionist rock and roll nauseating to postauthenticist p--k.
But once the boomeranging chords began - drilled into formation by the commanding crack of Dan Christensen's snare and Danny Amis's picky bass - the Raybeats nestled into their customary fleecy twang, slinging vectors of reverb through your brain and heart right down to your pointy shoes. Poised between arrogance and dread, ferocity and cool, Harris and Amis nuzzled their axes with tender fingers while Irwin booped, chortled, and grunted on organ and saxophone, later joining Harris on guitar.
Formed in 1979 with late and legendary George Scott on bass, the Raybeats transistorized rock history even from the start: Harris and Christensen had worked with James Chance; Irwin and Scott had played with Lydia Lunch. Early actors in the polymorphous adventure called p--k f--k, they've come to represent its slaphappy or up side, the reverse of the down or anxious alternative of neo-funk proper. The Raybeats' key difference from orthodox p--k and conservative p--k f--k is the lighter, airier sound of guitars that snap as well as sing, a sweeter sound that the now-homogenized Ramones strut precludes even in clonebands as rhythmically powerful as Black Flag. At Maxwell's, Irwin had actually switched to a Stratocaster from the Les Paul I saw him wield at the Pep - from a denser, metal-inclined ax to a bluesier, chewier one.
After numerous listenings, I'm also convinced that the band's first album, PVC's Guitar Beat, is no toss-off. Irwin's grinding alto riffs on "Tight Turn" - the album's opener and the band's anthem along with "Searching," the opener at Maxwell's - is almost the sole vestige of the Contortions in a sound infinitely less derivative (and certainly less nostalgic) than you might think on first hearing. If at one extreme the band can sound like Bay psychedelia ("Tone Zone"), at the other it can sound like L.A. studio funk ("Cocktails"). But between the extremes - the general rule, exemplified by the luxuriant grandeur of "Searching" - the sound is wittingly (but not anxiously) sedimented with allusions to earlier rock and roll, especially the ubiquitous Ventures (overtly on "B-Gas-Rickshaw," more reconditely on "The Calhoun Surf"). Miraculously, such references ground the band in precedent without stifling it. Who five years ago would've thought a relaxed Mississippi thing like "The Backstroke" was possible from a Manhattan art band? Even what may sound like a plain old sixth-chorus heart-breaker ballad ("Guitar Beat," for example) turns out to have just enough slight chordal variation on the formula to open unlyrical combinations it never seemed to possess before.
So much is at work in this scholarly band that the absence of a singer is something you hardly notice. Especially with Irwin replacing the fuhrer figure by constantly switching instruments and attitudes, the apparent lack suggests that the band has surmounted the quaint category of personality altogether. Billed as a "combo" rather than a "band," they come together as a locus of thoughts in a highly controlled form of jamming, not as a monolith of conceptual intent signed with the kiss of a star.
Despite the band's "Secret Agent Man" edge/tone/feel/luster - even despite the skinny ties and gold-lamé uniform they seem to be dropping - the Raybeats aren't putting anybody on, least of all themselves. Though they know that you put on your values like you put on your clothes, their music suggests that p--k has now moved beyond the conversion of rock and roll into rock and role. They oversee the happy transparency of genre rather than the endless need to parody or deflect it. Even extraneous evidence confirms this: the band's 1980 EP (Roping Wild Bears, Don't Fall Off the Mountain Records) was recorded in Austin, while their current promo (like Joan Jett's) hypes them as Americans rather than New Wavers. Even my desire to compare the Raybeats with classic bands like Traffic or Booker T. & the M.G.s is a symptom of the tight (re)turn to tradition they symbolize. The Raybeats have called everybody's bluff and actually delivered.
Do they signal the end of p--k? Will p--k f--k fold back into the genres from which it came, no longer kicking and screaming? Tom Smucker's reminder to Joan Jett that she's entered history might be addressed to the Raybeats, too, and with almost as little worry. Rock and roll has grown up all over again. Just enough.

Originally published in The Village Voice, January 20 - 26, 1982

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