Marx's concepts of formal and real subsumption are not reducible to the rise of wage labour, nor the emergence of industrial production, or factory discipline, though they do include these. Unlike the concepts of absolute and relative surplus value, which are confined to struggles around the punctual moments of production (in particular work time), r/f subsumption characterises a passage wherein the very concept and practice of 'production' is reworked -- what constitutes productive labour, the distinctions between the economic and the aesthetic that might characterise, for instance, a neokantian deloyment of the conflict of the faculties (science, culture, production and so on), et cetera. So, not an analogy of the concepts of r/f subsumption, but an application.
Justin wrote: "Rorty, btw, does not think that the 'solidarity' he imputes to "Americans" is self-evident but that its inescapable for 'Americans.'"
I meant "self-evidence" in the sense of being evident to one's self and as the final, discrete and axiomatic evidence of the presentability of one's self. That is, no sense of the differences upon which "American" is constituted and by which the speaking of the proper name, properly, creates and enforces a certain bounded 'American' -- thinking about those processes would be little more than a "nuisance" to Rorty's pragmatism. In other words, Rorty simply does not want to be troubled with the kinds of discussions Balibar remarks on in as the construction of internal and external borders in fichtean nationalism, not that is, unless these differences are quantifiable differences and open to a quantifiable restitution. (Which is also why Rorty thinks of progress as the linear accumulation of goods.)
Justin wrote: "Pomos don't goa round analysing thing in terms of race and gender? The subject positions of various (particularly) subordinate groups, women., Black womwn, Latina women, etc isn''t the mainb topic of discussion when they get together? The Rortyians aside, of course."
'Rortyans aside, of course' -- but Rorty seems to expend quite a bit of energy flying the flag at the same time as denouncing those "who talk about black women, latina women" -- hence why it's quite easy to think of Rorty as a kind of low-grade Fichte. But precisely how many of those writers we've listed so far "talk about black women, etc" whenever "they get together"? Derrida's written about South Africa, does that count? Leaving that aside, I fail to understand the kind of anxiety that might require the iteration of 'particularisms' as 'black women', and the simultaneous universalisation of 'we, americans' in which 'race and gender' are fated to appear only as an impediment to the formation of 'we, americans'.
Justin can't cite any 'pomos' who think that the terms of debate are theoretical versus observational, but he can refer to this as a big hollapalooza in anglo-american philosophy! And that is my point. Justin, neopragmatist, self-evidentiary, Homo Americana Academicus that he is reads everything as a species of anglo-american debates even though he admits "I think the inference is bad, but it has been kicking around for a long time." Well, I haven't been in anglo-american philosophy land, and have little inclination to regard it as a serious aspiration. But I agree, it is a bad inference, and it's one that stems from placing an anglo-american grid on Foucault as much as others cited here to represent the _anglo-american canonical version of 'pomo'_. (As an aside,when I read Derrida and Deleuze, one of the mose emphatic things they do share is a hostility to the canonical, to the kinds of theoretical and institutional practices that generate and require canons. Their canonisation within the US and on this list not only obscures this particular shared sense of theoretical practice, but also the very sharp differences between them. One might appraoch those differences with a view to reconciling them, so much the better to enable a smooth canonisation and systematisation; or one might instead take the Spinozist approach, and resist the temptation toward the abolition of singularities.)
As for Justin's charge of being "disingenous" when I insist that it is not in fact a claim shared by Derrida, Baudrillard, Foucault that, as he puts it, "there is no extralinguistic reality apart from the way we talk about it" -- I admit to nothing but an insistence that he cite where this is the case. As far as I can ascertain, not a few of these writers would contend that what counts for and as reality cannot be separated from 'language', that what interests Foucault, for instance, are the combinations of the visible and the articulable. That doesn't look to me as the same thing as "there is no extralinguistic reality apart from the way we talk about it", though it might include, as it does for Foucault, a claim that there is nothing _behind_ 'language'.
So, when along similar lines I write, "Anyways, I think you're reading 'pomo' as an amplified species of social constructionism -- which is part of the problem I keep mentioning, [that is]'pomo' as the way in which a whole host of writers got inserted into the US academic factory and its pre-existing disputes.", Justin replies, "Yeah, I'm talking about realw orld pomo, the way it plays out here in America." Well, duh. And, if you can't reduce something to this 'real world', to make of it a sub-branch of the US academic industry, then it doesn't exist because it's incomprehensible, sayeth the neoprag philosophy prof. And, it's not the same 'US academic pomo' tune sung a little differently elsewhere, but a different tune being sung altogether. I might mention something about the imperial embrace, not only by the bland conflicts of the US faculties but by the US itself, but I can see incomprehensibility looming. I might also mention that I doubt very much, given the assertions about 'pomo taking over women's studies and ethnic studies in the US', that, whatever it is, it bears no relation to various movements outside the academy. Certainly the names of Deleuze and Foucault and Derrida appear in discussions ranging from prisons to the zapatistas to queer politics to the recent campaigns to close refugee prisons to the anti-wto campaigns in various places, mostly not the US. But, kids and foreigners! Who can understand them?
Angela
- who is not, thankfully, in the real world of anglo-american philosophy and so does not exist.