Tom McCarthy, Karl Marx, and the Money on the Books

Abstract

By way of contrast to recent work on the problematic of representation of capital and its prioritized aesthetic mode, visuality, this article addresses the problematic of mediation in financialized capitalism through an attention to the relationship between writing and contemporary money forms. To elaborate this problematic, mediation is deployed methodologically as well: selections from two bodies of work concerned with capitalist monetary phenomena—those of Karl Marx and the novelist Tom McCarthy—are analyzed in parallel. McCarthy’s oeuvre is presented as preoccupied with monetary-inscriptive techniques and pockmarked by Marxian concepts and concerns. It is argued that Remainder, specifically, can be read as theorizing the relationship between money and writing under early 21 ^st-century regimes of finance capital through its elaboration of retail loyalty accounts and the multivalent concept of ‘remainder’ or ‘surplus’. The article reads this theorization against neglected sections of Marx’s second volume of Capital in which money is enigmatically treated from the perspective of bookkeeping.