> 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 _________