Marx’s critique of representation leaves representation’s own claims unquestioned

Evidence

The problem with such an explanation was that, in revealing power to work through misrepresentation, it left representation itself unquestioned. It accepted absolutely the distinction between a realm of representations and the ‘external reality’ which such representations promise, rather than examining the novelty of continuously creating the effect of an ‘external reality’ as itself a mechanism of power. The working of this mechanism is what I will be examining in later pages of this book, but the weakness of accepting the distinction already begins to appear as soon as one asks what the ‘transparent and rational’ reality, which capitalist representation misrepresents, really is. The answer in Marx’s case, once one lifts the veil of the commodity, or the earlier veils of religion or ‘the ancient worship of nature’, was of course ‘material production’. Material production, wrote Marx, is ‘a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates and controls the material reactions between himself and Nature … thus acting upon the external world and changing it’. Such an account, however useful, is only a particular description. As Jean Baudrillard points out, it remains itself a language, a social hieroglyphic, no less a representation, and thus no more a transparency, than the commodity fetish or the ancient worship of nature. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 97

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The argument that Marx’s own ‘material production’ grounding remains a representation—a hieroglyphic no more transparent than what it critiques—is the chapter’s load-bearing move and resists easy summary.
• XREF: Connects to the critique-of-metanarrative tradition in post-structuralist thought, and to Judith Butler’s point that exposing a construction does not dissolve it. — connects to: Marx criticized bourgeois society immanently by using its own claims against it — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1435