> Mentioning institutions of state and capital point to a lack in all of
> Butler's writing - an almost complete silence on issues of money and
> property (both of which grant privileged access to state power).
in the intro, the subject emerges thus: the subject is dependant for its very existence - as a subject - on power. (i am not entirely sure how to read the stuff on melancholia (is it loss? and, loss of what?, but clearly that is important to the argument, but i'll leave it for now)
doug mentioned both the state and capital. i tend to read marx's stuff as a complex theory of subject formation, and here - crudely - is what i get from uncle whiskers: labour is the dispossessed substance of capital, and through this dispossession, capital takes on the appearance - and, indeed reality, since it has real effects even though it is an ideology in the restrictive sense of that term - of subject, labour the appearance of object. the question of agency, or really what is the question we would ask of the degree to which, whether or not, and how labour can produce a space outside the domination of capital, is more or less answered by marx in terms of 'needs', not needs as something essential or unchangeable, but as he says time and again, socially constituted needs.
now, i reckon butler complicates this whole thing about needs, and for the better, but to my way of thinking not contra marx, or at least the marxism i like. needs may well be constituted entirely within the frame of what is best for accumulation, etc. but i think this is not crucial, since the issue of working class needs as a counter to the 'logic of capital' is not that the content of needs are oppositional or not, but rather that any expansion of working class needs (that is, demands, which are generally sated in capitalist society through access to money) means a struggle over the relative proportions of labour-time: the surplus and the 'wage'. that is, needs as that which 'remains unassimilable' in its very effect rather than its content. (see p29)
is this too simple a rendition? probably. and i'd appreciate being told where i'm going no place with this.
going back a step, i think butler is too caught up in a kojevian reading of hegel, and too much neitzsche, or maybe not enough nietzsche, in that she makes the bondsman a product of the master, but fails to tell me where the master comes from. so: i think that marx's model of the relation between capital and labour may well be a better way to conceive this relation, since it affords an explanation of the creation of labour (the historical creation of those without land, property, and the 'micro' creations of many instances of this dispossession in the form of the expropriation of surplus value) and the creation of the capital (as itself the very exemplar of dispossession become subject).
is that a ramble or what?
angela