---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: 21 Apr 96 16:45:20 EDT
From: Michael Williams <100417.2625@CompuServe.COM>
To: OPE-l List <OPE-L@anthrax.ecst.csuchico.edu>
Subject: [OPE-L:1844] [PAUL C] Re: subjectivity
Paul says
----
1. I am a great fan of Dennett, but I am dubious about the proposition that
political economy requires, should have anything to do with, the category
of the subject in its philosophical sense - as opposed to the category
of abstract legal personality.
Michael
I raised D. in response to the more general question you raised about
subjectivity closing off research agenda.
Paul
2. It seems to me that those economists who have recourse to subjectivity
to explain for example value, come up with theories that are both
politically reactionary and scientifically untestable.
Michael
I fail to see the reactionary implications of value-form approaches.
Is it testable? Well, it has to critically incorporate any serious critique -
rational, hermeneutic, praxeological or empirical - will that do?
Paul
3. The Marxian theory of value is both subject free, testable and does not
obscure
real economic relations.
Michael
I agree - but:
which one?
in order to facilitate the move from the economy to the wider
structure of bourgeois social relations I would rather use the category
of the subjectless subjectivity of character masks. (But then I believe
that a category has to be grasped in terms of what it is becoming, as
well as what it was and is ... .)
Paul
4 It is one of the strengths of Marx that his theory is based on the
relationship between historic economic categories, not on the subject
which is an a-historical philosophical category.
Michael
Historically specific Capitalist categories are often epochal
manifestations of trans-historical categories (use-value of useful
object, thevalue-form of (as)sociation, surplus value of surplus, etc,
etc.) The trick isto develop an adequate account of sprcifically
capitalist/bourgeois subjectivity, and its social systemic determinations.
The emergence of the category of indiviual subject (over an against
society) has already a considerable degree of historical determinacy.
Although it appears to have emerged before the emergence of capitalism,
it may well have been one of its historical preconditions.
I agree that the moment of the bourgeois subject as the legally
reproduced bearer of various rights (I would say property and existence)
is an important one, but it is not the sole one.
Comradely,
Michael