Re-reading Capital: the problem of old marginalia

Some of my colleagues underline and annotate books with pencil; I suspect this habit might have to do with the fact that, when returning to a text after years of intellectual development, they will have the option of erasing embarrassing marginalia made by their younger selves. Unfortunately, I have always preferred to use pens instead of pencils––not for any political reason, mind you, but simply because for some reason I own more pens than pencils and because I don't like the way that pencil smudges and fades.  Hence, whenever I return a particular book years after my initial reading I am met with more permanent traces of my previous self that can only be effaced by deliberate scribbling, a clear sign of guilt.

Recently I have started re-reading Capital––between other books I'm reading for the first time––in the interest of consolidating aspects of my ideology and practice.  I first read volume one during my MA, volume three by the end of my first year as a PhD student, and volume two by the mid-point of my second doctoral year.  (Yes, I read them out of order.  My only excuse is that, when I bought volumes two and three at the same time, I found volume three more engaging.)  Since then I have returned to them in a non-linear manner, reading large portions more than twice, but have never reread any of them from front to back.  Thus I figured, since my political commitments have changed since my first reading, it would be worth a systematic reread.

Yep, this is the version that I possess.

But good lord the marginalia!  One thing that makes my skin curl is the thoughts and insights of my younger self, recorded for posteriety with the naivete of a student who believed his views wouldn't change.  This younger reader of Capital was an autonomist marxist who approached (the first volume at least) according to a politics influenced by authors such as the early Negri, Tronti, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Harry Cleaver.  Hell, chances are I was reading Reading Capital Politically at the same time as I wrote most of those margin comments.  All chalk full of assumptions about "general intellect" and autonomist-style "workerism".  There has been more than one occasion where I was tempted to scribble out a previous "insight" or, at the very least, respond ironically, my older self dismissing the thoughts of my younger self.

Still, you can learn something about your younger self when you encounter old marginalia.  In the section about "the working day" in the first volume of Capital I discovered various excited comments about Marx's recognition of how the capitalist mode of production internally mutates, as well as underlined passages that might have to do with that autonomist obsession with the fragment on the machine in the Grundrisse.  I probably would have breezed past these elements, now that I care less about them, if these comments and emphases had not existed.

(As a side note, I'm also reading Lazzarato's most recent book, Governing by Debt, at the moment.  Funny how I keep returning to the odd autonomist analysis of capitalism and discover, despite being simultaneously annoyed, things that are interesting.  As opposed to The Indebted Man, as well as long-standing autonomist biases, Lazzarato is reasserting Lenin's theory of finance-capital.  That's enough to help me stomach his bizarre understanding of class struggle.)

In this context it is worth asking that terrible question that philosophers of mind/identity have been asking for a very long time: are we ever a unified person, is there an I that persists across time?  Something might indeed survive, but let's be honest: when I encounter the marginalia of my past self I only recognize it as the residue of a previous self because some part of me remembers writing it.  And if I'd encountered this marginalia a decade later, would I remember writing it?  What if someone was to read it to me, without letting me know that it was my copy of Capital or showing me the handwriting, would I recall it as the work of a previous self or would I find it wholly alien?  Indeed, my first instinct upon encountering some of my past marginalia is to argue against it, as if I am debating someone else––it might as well have been written by another person.

All I have to say is that I'm glad I'm not rereading the Grundrisse; I have a dim memory of filling that book with even more marginalia than Capital––I'm scared to crack its spine again for fear of what horrors my less political self will embarrass me with!  After all, that was one of the foundational books of operaismo, the inspiration of Negri's Marx Beyond Marx.  (To defend my earlier self a little, I liked early Negri but was greatly disappointed, after being excited, with Empire.)  That book is bound to be littered with embarrassing marginalia!  Maybe I should get a clean copy…

In the end, however, there is something worthwhile about encountering your past self in the margins of important books.  You can chart your political development, make sense of the gap between your current and previous self, and learn something in the process.  Hence, a part of me looks forward to the marginalia I will encounter in volumes 2 and 3 of Capital when I was growing closer to the politics I now possess.  And maybe I can learn something from my past selves just as they probably could have learned something from the self they eventually became.