What is Dracula

1
What is Dracula?
History? Capitalism? Sexuality? Aristocracy? Hered
itary? Evolution? Degeneracy?
2
A spectre is haunting Europe!

• The spectre of communism
• A ghostly presence, before its time
• Not yet!
• Dracula?

3
manifest (adj., verb)

• Clear or obvious to the eye or mind
• Display or show by ones acts or appearance
  demonstrate
• Against the spectral, to openly publish our
  views (Marx Engels)
• Laying the spectre to rest, making it real
• But also theatrical, performing, stage effects

4
manifesto (noun)

• A public declaration of policy and aims
• Dispelling the bogus view, making clear
• Spectre forced out of hiding, into reality
• Passion for the Real via literary adumbration

5
The spectre returns!

• A restless undeath
• Capitalism and its gravediggers a permanent
  loop?
• What is manifest becomes spectral again, and vice
  versa

The Russian Elections, December, 1995 (Cover from
The Economist, December 16-22, 1995)
6
Dracula, again

• And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old
  centuries had, and have, powers of their own
  which mere "modernity" cannot kill. (Dracula,
  Chapter 3)

7
Capital is dead labour

• Money that has been buried comes back to life,
  becomes capital and embarks upon the conquest of
  the world this and none other is the story of
  Dracula the vampire. (Franco Moretti, Signs
  Taken for Wonders)
• Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like,
  lives only by sucking living labour, and lives
  the more, the more labour it sucks. (Marx, Das
  Kapital)

8
Dracula and capital

• Un-dead
• The stronger it becomes, the weaker its victims
• Impelled towards continuous growth
• The curse of power, not personal

9
There is no manifesto of capitalism!

• All that is solid melts into air
• Constant revolutionizing, uninterrupted
  disturbance, everlasting uncertainty and
  agitation
• All relations become antiquated and are swept
  away before they can ossify

10
Capitalism is spectral

• It cannot be made manifest
• Its many manifestations dissolve before our eyes
  sorcerers apprentice
• We must conscript our services to the
  manifestation of the Real
• Communism the stake in the heart of social
  vampirism
• Working class gravediggers of the undead
  vampire of Capital

11
What is the medium of manifestation?

• Rhetoric, imagery, poetry
• Cheap reproductions, paper, speeches
• The conjurations of language usher Communism
  out of spectrality and into reality
• Printing press makes these conjurations
  mass-reproducible
• Affordable pamphlets
• Memorable phrases and cadences
• Oratorio vs. Sorcery (capitalists as sorcerers
  apprentices) but its still conjuration!

12
manifesto!

• Where radical egalitarianism runs up against the
  entrenchment of an ancien régime
• Coeval with the emergence of a public sphere or
  civil society
• But it completely resists the notion of any
  objective or neutral description of society
• Promotes partisanship or the taking of sides as
  the first test of reality
• There is no reality outside of the passionate
  fidelities and interests of side-taking
• Us vs. them is the way things really are!

13
The Manifestic We

• Speaks for the speechless (prosopopoeia)
• Exhorts our participation in a political process
  (hortatory)
• But also conjures us, invents us
  (perlocutionary effect performative)
• Excludes them from membership
• Open invocation through linguistic and rhetorical
  address (interpellation)

14
Impatience with established forms of debate

• Violence of claim
• Violence of implication
• Violence of language
• Exposes falsity of democratic conceit
• There is no universal subject
• There are only hostile camps who must never
  reconcile

15
Poetry of the future

• The social revolution of the C19th cannot derive
  its poetry from the past, but only from the
  future. It cannot begin with itself, before it
  has shed all superstitious belief in the past.
  Earlier revolutions needed to remember previous
  moments in world history in order to numb
  themselves with regard to their own content. The
  revolution of the C19th must let the dead bury
  their dead in order to arrive at its own content.
  There, the phrase exceeded the content. Here the
  content exceeds the phrase.

Karl Marx
The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
16
Content exceeds the phrase

• Productive forces fettered by social relations
• Bursting at the seams
• Just like Marxs prose
• Poetics of the future
• Revolutionary content revolutionary form
• Manifesto the time for talking is over!