>Oy, Chuck, it's just gossip about gossip. Are you sure you care? Here
>you go: ..... Michael Pollak
>
>This does have some interest for the history of the Frankfurt
>School. Also, I find Cassirer interesting, and wonder if other list
>participants have any thoughts about him. Christopher Dkema
I had written:
Marx also tries to show that in the exchange relationship these commodities count as aliquots of social labor time, as value, as the expenditure of the *abstract* labor which they represent.
Marx corrects the classical labor theory of value by respecifying it as an abstract labor theory of value. Nine out of ten commentators on Marx don't grasp this--for an important exception, see Wm J Blake Marxian economic theory and its criticism. NY: Corden Press, 1939
In the exchange relationship commodities do not count in terms of their use value which results from their qualities as derived from the concrete labor embodied in them. Of course a commodity must prove to have been a social use value to be a value, but its use value which results from the kind of concrete labor embodied therein is not expressed in the exchange relationship itself, in its price. _______
In Logic of Cultural Sciences, trans. S.J Lofts [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000]: p. 40). Ernst Cassirer analyzes the removal by (early) modern physics from nature of expressive (trustworthy, frightful, friendly, terrifying, etc.) and then sense (color, tone, etc.) qualities. In a sense, nature is deconcretized.
Is there some kind of uncanny resemblance here between abstraction in physics and reduction of commodities to bearers of an abstract, nonsensuous property in the exchange relationship?
Alfred Sohn Rethel thought so, argued that the capacity for abstraction on which modern science has hitherto depended develops out of the mental operations learned in money exchange:
"The economic concept of value [resulting from commodity abstraction] is characterized by a complete absence of quality, a differentiation purely by quantity...These qualities of economic value abstraction indeed display a striking similarity with fundamental categories of quantifying natural science without, admittedl, the slightest inner relationship beween these heterogeneous spheres being as yet recognizable."
Adorno evidently thought this was a great insight and carried out an extensive correspondence with Sohn Rethel.
But the program in (strong) social epistemology which grew out of Sohn Rethel's and Lukacs' early attempts to ground the basic concepts of modern science in the abstractions which are created in and through social exchange relations explains only very general characteristics of scientific theories, in relation to which any specific theory is indifferent; moreover, the program fails to explain the possibility of acquiring objective knowledge.
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