I think you are (strategically?) confusing two things here. You say you want to talk about the limits of theory, but, I think, what has been under discussion is (and should be, imho) the limits of capital.
You've mentioned several times on this thread that some realms fall outside the bounds of capital, things you've called life and the private. I accept that not everything is touched and/or structured by capital (though positing it as an inside/outside thing is not a good way of thinking). But I also agree with Marx and others that capital, uniquely among social systems, *wants* to colonize and utilize the entire world and that it has the capability to do so. Capital wants to and can use everything as a substratum to propel it, including (potentially) humans' biological existence. Which is why it's not "abstract" for H&N to talk about biopolitics, even though they do it in silly and bad ways sometimes.
But that's just how capital exists virtually. It doesn't *actually* occupy and exploit everything. In this sense, I agree with you that it's worth discovering and talking about which things it doesn't exploit. But the way you do it, as far as I can tell, is ahistorical and based on some eternal necessity: The private, the day-to-day, are a priori noncapitalist. You seem to think that things just exist that way. But since capital can structure everything, there has to be a reason some things remain "outside" its totality. Contra your arguments, which seem to be based on necessity and to declare the fundamental passivity of noncapitalist areas of life, I'd say either those areas are conjuncturally not useful or they actively escape capital. I won't pursue those further, but they both have an advantage over your arguments based on essence or the necessary.
Now I don't know where to go.
On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 12:01 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> O.K. I'm a bit beyond my depth here, but I'll see if we can explore this
> a bit further.
>
> Eric writes of "t the absolute separation of private and capitalist
> economies": The word "absolute" is his, not mine and not Marx's. The
> separation is an abstraction, but an abstraction by which one tries to
> 'honor' the concrete, which is placed but not grasped by the
> abstraction. In contrast, it seems to me that the abstractions
> "biopower" and "multitude" are bstractions which deny the concrete.
>
> What I'm after is a sense of the scope and limits of theory ("theory" to
> be defined later). It seems to me that Eric in these two posts is
> insisting that _everything_ can be theorized, and if a theory is not a
> TOE it is nothing. (Note: I said "Eric's two posts," not "Eric." I know
> he doesn't think this,but I think these posts imply it or are dependent
> on it.)
>
> Most of life escapes theory, and I'd rather speak of "private activity"
> than a "private economy." (Of course that's what "economy" meant in
> Greek; hence the coinage "political economy" by those confronting the
> aberration of capitalism.) I think the capitalist economy is theorizable
> from a historical perspective: that is, in order to theorize it Marx
> "looked back on it" as a completed entitity from ahypothetical future in
> which the wages system no longer existed. At that point, he claimed,
> human history would begin: and of course it would be totally
> untheorizable.That is why Paul Sweezy argued there could be no "science
> of socialism," socialism being the realm of freedom. It is also why
> there can be no Revolutionary Theory or Revolutionary Party
>
> It was this effort to theorize all of human life that I found
> obnoxious in Hardt & Negri -- and in those "feminist econmists" who
> attempted to assimilate "daily life" to economic theory. And it is the
> mistake someoe made some weeks ago in speaking of the difficulty of
> escaping the "totality." We live most of our daily life _outside_ the
> totality or rather 'would-be' totality of the capitalist economy.
>
> Not quite sure of where to go from here.
>
> Carrol