Miles Jackson:
> It is exactly this insistence on the obdurate reality of "subjectivity"
> that intrigues me. The idea that people have unique subjectivities
> emerged in specific societies at specific points in human history; it
> is not simply human nature to conceptualize "subjectivities". To me,
> it's no coincidence that the insistence on the value and importance
> of subjectivity is most extreme in hypercapitalist societies like
> the U. S. To coin a hyperbolic slogan: capitalism produces
> subjectivities. Like most of the effects of capitalism, there are
> good and bad things about this.
Is is easier for me to imagine subjectivity in a rock, than to imagine a lack of it in an animal, especially a human being, because I have direct experience (however delusional) of the latter, whereas I have no evidence about the former, not being or having memory of being a rock. Far from being a capitalist invention, it seems inescapable. And so every language exhibits first person singular pronouns and verb forms. Then if one thinks about what one thinks, one is likely to conceptualize subjectivity.
Once we deny subjectivity to rocks, then we have something which is ubiquitous yet apparently chancy or contingent. One can see how something like that would be likely to elicit a lot of interest. Does subjectivity have a _value_, though? One is stuck with it, or not. We can't order it in a list of desired things to be plucked up one by one, or bring it to an exchange, can we? Only as a pretense, an imposed illusion, propaganda, a discourse of domination and slavery which accords mighty spirits to some and emptiness to others.
-- Gordon