What in the hell …

The LS Schmittfest bonfire’s settled down into orange and black embers. In his raking of the coals Craig suggests people reflect on nationalism and proposes privilege as a further conversation topic. (more…)

I’m having a renewed interest in matters German, partly in preparation for and partly as expressed in a plan to soon read more Kant, as a rather long detour on the way to aesthetic questions. It’s bit frustrating as I like to have a clearer map than I currently do of what I’m after, and because my German is pretty scheisse, but I think there’s a possible coherence to be stitched together later. The immediate points I can see are a dislike on my part for certain postructuralisms I’ve encountered and a dislike for certain Hegelianisms, both primarily in relation to Marxism, and a general interest in the past as contemporary with the present (a la a tesseract or perhaps a dialectical image). Two-fold interest then, put schematically, in historiography and in some specific historical contents obscured by bad accounts, with two purposes - one to disentangle from bad accounts (to not get tied up in knots), and another to clear space for moments that have their own sort of … loveliness. (more…)

Buy a copy, and then use these notes to return to it.

The stuff on urban and rural is quite like immaterial labor in those circles today, as is the stuff on language. The stuff on labor as political basis may be useful for challenging Virno’s assertion that the Arendt/Aristotle formulation has broken down in postfordism, since labor was already conceived as and functioned as political in the 1840s. Also would be interesting to compare artisan labor w/ immaterial labor, esp printers, worker-poets, pamphleteering incl Ranciere on artisans and response to him. Sewell starts the book asserting essentially the hegemony of artisan labor, rather like immaterial labor, also shows up limits of the abilities imputed to hegemonic immaterial labor (among them universalizing a nonuniversal position). Also check out the book Alberto recommended on immaterial labor and utopian socialism.

Also to return to -
p189- 193 on corps, corporation, etat,
194-200 on the July Revolution, change in idiom, change in the use of the term “exploit”
201-206 on the idiom of association, Buchez,
206-211 on association, corporation, conflict with the masters
211-215 on changes in the concept of labor and broadening the field of association
222 on the use of the term “social” (see also 143-4 on “industry” and “society”)
228 on Villerme and a moralizing bourgeois image of the workers, need for discipline (like Lenin)
235-6 on Louis Blanc, (petit) bourgeois radicalism
236-242 on worker poets and changes in the concept of labor
249 on the concept of labor
262-265 on the concept of labor, socialism, labor as providing a right to participation (the workers are the people)
267-270 on the relationship with rural and agricultural workers - a universal idiom but one which neglects important differences (universal program for association based on the experiences of urban workers). See especially 267 on “workers of thought” and “workers of the head”, and 269 on the power of speech, language as foundation

Pillage material from the bibliography on 285-290, 293, 295, 296, 298, 299, 301, 302, 305, 309-317.

Class consciousness is not a category I’ve got much interest in, insofar as I’ve encountered it. William Sewell takes it his object of study in his 1980 book Work and Revolution in France, but not so much as a theoretical category. More along the lines of “what did (some) workers think?” I’m more open to that. (more…)

A dumb idea, that’s what. (more…)

I’m enjoying the conversation with Thiago and others over at Long Sunday about Austin, in the comments on a post on a piece by Michael Berube. (more…)

To be even more obtuse, maybe it should be “relative (ideo)lexical rigidity.” Eric and I have been having a conversation by email about modes of speech, and power plays related to them. (more…)