the social change thing.

[rc-am]

kelley asked:

> you've lost me here.  when research tries to manage reality what
exactly
> does that mean?

I'll answer the next question, which I think might illustrate this a
little better, but it's certainly not an exhaustive answer.

> >...which as we know, Marx clearly saw that even the classical...
>
> and you've lost me here as to the specifics of what we know Marx to
have seen?

a direct reference to Althusser, then:

referring to a passage from _capital. v1_ on classical political
economy, Althusser notes of Marx's reading,

"what classical political economy does not see, is not what it does not
see, it is _what it sees_; it is not what it lacks, on the contrary, it
is _what it does not lack_; it is not what it misses, on the contrary it
is _what it does not miss_.  The oversight, then, is not to see what one
sees, the oversight no longer concerns the object, but _the sight_
itself.  The oversight is an oversight that concerns vision: non-vision
is therefore inside vision, it is a form of vision and hence a necessary
relationship with vision.

... In the course of the questions classical political economics asked
about the value of labour' something very special has happened.
Classical political economy has 'produced' (just as Engels will say, in
the Preface to Volume Two, that philogistic chemistry 'produced' oxygen
and classical economics 'produced' surplus value) a correct answer: the
value of 'labour' is equal to the value of the subsistence goods
necessary for the reproduction of 'labour'.  A correct answer is a
correct answer.  Any reader in the 'first manner' [referred to
previously as a reading of essence in existence] will give Smith and
Ricardo a good mark and pass to other observations.  Not Marx.  For what
we shall call his eye has been attracted by a remarkable property of
this answer; _it is the correct answer to a question that has just one
failing: it was never posed_.

The original question as the classical economic text formulated it was:
what is the value of _labour_?  Reduced to the common content that can
be rigorously defended in the text where classical economics produced
it, the answer should be written as follows:  'The value of labour (   )
is equal to the value of the subsistence goods necessary for the
maintenance and reproduction of labour (   )'.   There are two _blanks_,
two absences in the text of the answer.  Thus Marx makes us see blanks
in the text of classical political economics' answer ... it is the
classical text itself which tells us that it is silent: it silences its
own words.  In fact, if we suppress our 'slots', our blanks, we still
have the same discourse, the same apparently full sentence ...  But this
sentence means nothing: what is the maintenance of 'labour' ? what is
the reproduction of 'labour'?  The substitution of one word for another
at the end of the answer: 'labourer' for 'labour', might seem to settle
the question. ... But as the labourer is not the labour, the term at the
end of the sentence now clashes with the term at the beginning: they do
not have the same content and the equation cannot be made, for it is not
the labourer who is bought for the wages, but his 'labour'. ...

This omission, located _by the answer_ in the answer itself immediately
next to the word 'labour, is no more than the presence in the answer of
the absence of its question, the omission of _its question_.  ...
That is why Marx can write: "The result the
analysis led to, therefore, was not a resolution of the problem as it
emerged at the beginning, but a complete change in the terms of the
problem."

That is why Marx can pose the unuttered question, simply by uttering the
concept present in an unuttered form in the emptiness on the answer,
sufficiently present in this answer to produce and reveal these
emptinesses as the emptiness of its presence. ...

The answer then become: 'The value of labour-power is equal to the value
of the subsistence goods necessary for the maintenance and reproduction
of labour-power' -- and _its_ question is produced as follows: 'what is
the value of labour-power?'." - Althusser, _Reading Capital_.

hence, classical political economy's remainder is this confusion, or
rather non-identity between
labour-power and labour, between the specific presupposition of capital
(labour-power, abstract labour) and labour.  it is a recognition in a
fetishised way of this 'misfit' which serves to prompt the entire field
of political economy, and which it then proceeds to render as 'blanks'
in the answers it gives, thus to make this remainder manageable, to
render it null and void within the answer by never entirely posing the
question of its own preconditions, by making labour-power appear on a
continuum with or identical with labour.  the unstated question still
remains, the management is never entirely complete or effective -- which
is why political economy still appears as a viable form of knowledge.

> I was getting at marx's claim that intellectuals' interests shift
depending
> on historical circumstances  and that this has consequences for how
and if
> they move with what you've called "the preponderance of the object".

of course it does.  but whether those consequences are in the way of
posing (to continue the theme above) an unstated question or not might
well mark the difference between a conservative (eternalising) gesture
and the ability to recognise the historical shifts which prompt also a
shift in the problematic of a discipline, theory, research practice.
but that's not all.

in another sense, the history of ethnography (for instance) bears some
going over.  ethnography tended to be used in anthropology, right?  as
the study of the structures of kinship and identity: ethne meaning
family.  and, specifically, as a range of techniques to be used when the
researcher wanted to get close to this organisation of identity _and_
where there was the presupposition that these 'proximate' techniques
were necessary _because of_ the 'ethnic' difference/distance between the
researcher and the researched.  the question that then becomes
interesting, for me anyways, is why do these techniques begin to make
their way into 'one's own country', urban settings, etc.   what was it
about statistical techniques that were felt insufficient as rendering
visible the knowledge of those topics and people the ethnographic
techniques were recently applied to?  the answer no doubt is insurgency,
and a feeling amongst whomever assigned the research or asked the
unstated question that these insurgents were not sufficiently
understood, that the source of social conflict was not sufficiently
understood, and hence not open to manipulation or management.    who
needed to understand and could not?  certainly anyone close to or a part
of the range of urban insurgencies understood already and required no
translation or felt in need of any additional knowledge.


> so, you're saying that social researchers shouldn't study folks who
have
> less power because of their institutional location, which taints their
> ability to do this work?  or, if they do, then they shouldn't do
> ethnography, but use surveys and the like?

no, I'm saying in a roundabout and hesitant way I guess that if you're a
part of an institutional research agenda then you should either get the
hell out of other people's lives or you should only do research which is
_entirely_ useless from the perspective of social control, motivation,
and social cohesion.

Angela
_________