Take 1-3 sentences* from the excerpt of The German Ideology that you read last week, and write an exegetical commentary on them.
An exegetical commentary simply explains the sentences: describe what Marx is suggesting, interpret it, and explain why it matters.
Your goal is to take one small idea from Marx, and explain it to someone else. Think of your audience as being like our class, or someone whom you think of as your intellectual peer.
* 1 sentence is quite enough — if you choose 3, they should be consecutive; and the only reason to choose 3 sentences is that you think that readers need all three to understand Marx’s meaning.
There are a few overarching questions for the whole novel that I’d like you to bear in mind as you read:
- Who is James Bond, and what is James Bond? He is, on the one hand, an individual who is capable of affecting, for good or for ill, large scale economies. How is his interest opposed to or in harmony with that of the general interest?
- What is the general interest? And what competing interests are portrayed in the novel?
- What connections exist between Bond and Goldfinger?
But I’ll also be posting questions for each specific section, so here are the questions for Tuesday, and the section titled “Part 1: Happenstance.”
1. We’ve just spent a couple of days reading Marx, and thinking about ideology — the sense of what is normal, what is good and bad, that is woven into everyday life. The first two chapters, in particular, provide you with a glimpse of the ideology that James Bond lives with, his view of the world. How would you describe it? I’m interested in your interpretations of his views in general, and specifically in regards to money, wealth, and economics.
2. Why is it that Bond gets involved in the heroin import and export scam?
3. How is Goldfinger characterized when we first meet him? Which of his behaviors mark him as a potential villain? Both he and Mr. Du Pont are rich — what things distinguish them from one another?
4. Throughout this novel, you’re going to see problems that are dealt with through the law, and through alternative methods. What’s your response to Bond’s method of handling Du Pont’s problem? How might it be said to be the right thing to do? Or the wrong thing?
5. In your own words, how would you describe the economic problem that Bond learns about in Chapter 6? Do you see any connections or contrasts with ideas from other texts that we’ve read this quarter?
What makes labor value difficult to establish?
What makes labor value difficult to establish is the amount of effort given by an individual. Two texts which best explain the hardships of establishing labor value are The Lady’s Dressing Room by Jonathan Swift and Mary Collier’s The Woman’s Labour. Swift and Collier explain two different types of women’s labor- the type related to beauty, and the type related to agriculture work, or what is usually called “hard labor.” These two different perceptions of the authors about women and their hardships affect their role in inaugurating labor value.
The idealized image of women, promoted equally as strong in Swift’s day as in ours, causes problems for women because they become self-absorbed. Through sarcasm, Swift points out the problems with unrealistic expectations in his poem. Women are the primary consumers of these beauty products. Swift notes, through Strephon’s shocked eyes, those women spend an inordinate amount of time using beauty products when beneath it all they are normal, sweaty, stinky human beings. Women have somehow been socialized to expect to be perfect. Moreover, cosmetics are one of the biggest most booming industries in the world today. The industry shows no sign of lagging, Swift’s poem The Lady’s Dressing Room is an ironic poem. The topic of the poem is just what the title says: he’s describing what happens in a lady’s dressing room. However, the first lines signal the ironic approach: five hours to get ready? This is hammered home by the suggestion of a goddess, as if the women were divine, an image Swift then contrasts with both agricultural byproducts (dung, hard work, smell) and a kind of industrial production. This text is ironic because the male perception of beauty is natural and effortless, not something that involves work. He’s saying how much work it is to make women beautiful, and how disgusting the work behind the scenes is.
Collier’s poem describes the double shifts of wage labor, home- and field-work, and work in others’ homes that make up the lives of the rural working women. Because of their toil in the fields, as domestics, and as care-givers, they have little time for rest, she explains, and even less to reflect or to dream. Collier also criticizes the exploitation of domestic labor and the dangers of seasonal work. Mary Collier describes the variety of a woman’s work.
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