ABSTRACT
This chapter follows Keston Sutherland and Sianne Ngai's call to heed what the figurative language employed in Das Kapital makes thinkable and palpable. Marx's likening of abstract labor to Gallerte, the German word for an edible gelatinous mass made from different animals’ body parts, is catachrestic for the graphic image has abstract labor “sound confusingly like simple physiological human labor.” Yet, it is precisely through catachresis that Marx highlights the violence inherent in the capitalist abstraction's reduction of concrete labor individual workers perform to undifferentiated labor power quantified by standardized time. The image of human brains, sinews, and bones mashed together as Gallerte for consumption also serves to nauseate readers and counter the normalization of exploitation. Recognition of this paradigm-shifting potential of catachrestic figurative language motivates the juxtaposition of Xi Xi's “The Story of Fertile Town” (“Feituzhen de gushi,” 1982) and Yan Lianke's The Explosion Chronicles (Zhalie zhi, 2013). Instead of taking for granted the economic miracle narratives that bolster the supposed viability of capitalism, both texts recast the respective “economic miracles” in Hong Kong and mainland China with catachrestic renderings that parody the elliptical and abstracting moves constituting such narratives. The two texts call for a Marxist close reading that unveils their unsuspected affinity and relevance to defanging global capitalism's ideological potency.
