Is M-C-M' a narrative motion? The answer to this question is not at all as apparent as it may first appear.
One might answer in the affirmative by rehearsing Lukács' Theory of the Novel, in which the return of the individual to the social whole after his bildung narrativizes M-C-M' (though the book is written before his Marxist turn and does not frame things in this manner). The Lukácsian model narrative, however, is more properly analogous to an Althusserian reproduction of the relations of production. Thus at best one can argue that modern narrative shows the preconditions for capital's self-valorization.
Conversely, M-C-M' character as at once change and not-change might seem to defy the category of narrative. After all, it is not clear that change is itself narrative (as in the case where the same "change" is repeated ritualistically and reset so as to be repeated again). Certainly motion isn't intrinsically narrative. Is increase narrative? Or is such a belief itself entirely ideological? Moreover, Debord's account of "frozen history" (itself routed through Lukács) suggests that M-C-M' is fundamentally anti-narrative, much as Marx suggests that history begins when the M-C-M' cycle comes to an end.
It may be that the best one might propose is that narrative is an imperfectly-wrought mechanism for inspecting the lifeworld of M-C-M', as well as being in its contemporary form one of the formula's many effects.
Posted by jane at November 29, 2008 08:59 AM | TrackBack