Reading Capital: Part I Concluded (A Last Word or Two)

A system, or a normative structure, determines its concepts both synchronically and diachronically (as they are defined in themselves, and their order in a proof). But the system cannot be arrived at “diachronically,” i.e. in terms of genesis. Genesis can give us the elements of a system, but not the system itself (unless we posit a system of systems). The mechanism of production of a KE lies in the underlying forms that give the order of whatever procedure takes place in the system. This holds for knowledge as it does for society. But if knowledge (no matter how real as a structure) is knowledge of society, and if society (no matter how implicated knowledge and theory is in its structure) is a real thing of which we can have knowledge, we’re no closer to discovering how the production of society as a KO gives us a grasp of it as a RO.

Thus, what makes the KE possible is the systematicity of the system. The system of knowledge has its own order of forms that is not derived from the "real." But the relation between the system of knowledge and the system of society or production has not been grasped on a fundamental epistemological level.

The KE acts in the play between the norm-giving structure or “system” (synchronic) and the appearance of forms of order in discourse (diachronic). The proper question then is about the specific difference of scientific discourse from other forms of discourse; it is only in the discourse that we see the system, which really just is the fully explicated KO in all its ramifications and differences. Knowledge differs from other discourses not simply in its object, but in its mechanism and in the norms that govern its order.

We have not answered the epistemological question—does the KO grasp the RO—we’ve only really considered the question of the mechanism. But this leaves much up in the air.