UC Berkeley

More than one decade after his infamous interventions of Pour Marx and Lire “Le Capital,” writing in a Preface to an uncelebrated book written by Gérard Duménil entitled Le Concept de loi économique dans “Le Capital,” Louis Althusser delivers a disarmingly devastating and simple question: “how does Marx think in Capital?” This question, Althusser writes, “refers us…to the rudiments…in Marx himself.” Motivated by his longstanding dissatisfaction with the doxa that Marx’s materialism inverts Hegel’s idealism, Althusser goes on to argue not only that the discursive orders and concepts of Capital do not bear such an inversion of Hegel’s method and system, but moreover that Capital discloses a mode of thinking that interdicts recourse to discursive constructions which bind an appropriation (Aneignung) and exposition (Darstellung) of material (Stoff) in a “purely theoretical” manner. In doing so, Louis Althusser, this dissertation argues, fundamentally rethinks the field and function of inversion in the critique of political economy.

In detecting the consequences of this reconsideration, the dissertation identifies how the original and sustained limit of Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Oekonomie (1867), that is the chapter “Die moderne Kolonisationstheorie” (“The Modern Theory of Colonization”), brings forth such a critical inversion in Capital. Part One of the dissertation demonstrates both why “The Modern Theory of Colonization” has historically presented epistemological obstacles for its readers as well as the conceptual effects which are generated by grasping its notion of inversion. Foremost amongst these effects is the identification of the limit of the critique of political economy as a process, not a space, of modern colonization. Part One concludes that the critique identified by “The Modern Theory of Colonization” avails a place of thinking and speaking in modern colonization just beyond the limit of “pure theoretical” discourse in the activity that this dissertation calls, following as well as critically reconsidering Althusser, interpellation.

Oriented by these considerations, Part Two of the dissertation exposits an ethnography of a discourse of interpellation in a set of Indonesian interventions in this critique of modern colonization. The analysis focuses on three discursive and practical localities. The first is the novel written by the pseudonymous Multatuli, Max Havelaar, Or the Coffee Auctions of a Dutch Trading Company (1860) and its subsequent formal and aesthetic transformations through the 20th and 21st centuries, including its contemporary settings in the sculptures of Multatuli (2017, 2019) made by Dolorosa Sinaga (b. 1952) with her Somalaing studio in Jakarta. The second is the investigations and disputes regarding ontology and the social formation in the contemporary Indonesian Renaissance in philosophy, centering on the writings of Martin Suryajaya (b. 1989) and Muhammad Al-Fayyadl (b. 1986). The third is a practice and discourse of parrhesia in the artwork of Dolorosa Sinaga and the world of the verandah beside her Somalaing studio, where ethnographic research for this dissertation was based from June 2016 to March 2020. Part Two of the dissertation identifies how these interventions as interpellations are marked by a critical, rather than a “purely theoretical,” mode of inversion and effectivity.

The dissertation concludes that the exposition of “The Modern Theory of Colonization” orients the limit of Capital as a critique of the process whereby a colonizing state acts indirectly on the forceful conjuncture of capital and labour on the behalf of capital. The dissertation shows how this process is both identified and critiqued by Indonesian interventions within the conjuncture of modern colonization. These works both enrich and develop practices for interrupting the actuality, rather than the pure theoretical possibility, of the mistake (Verwechslung) of political economy. In lieu of reconstituting a priori theoretical impasses generated by the production processes of capital, the dissertation shows that these interventions initiate inversions in political, physical, and metaphysical modes of existence by obstructing the processes of modern colonization that mute domination and compulsion.