Abstract Labour: A Critique PDF
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LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE, SOCIETY General Editors: Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Denise Riley Published titles Stanley Aronowitz THE CRISIS IN HISTORICAL MATERIALISM SCIENCE AS POWER: Discourse and Ideology in Modem Society Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen THE FREUDIAN SUBJECT Norman Bryson VISION AND PAINTING: The Logic of the Gaze Teresa de Lauretis ALICE DOESN'T: Feminism, Semiotics and Cinema FEMINIST STUDIES/CRffiCAL STUDIES (editor) TECHNOLOGIES OF GENDER: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction Mary Ann Doane THE DESIRE TO DESIRE: The Woman's Film of the 1940s Alan Durant CONDITIONS OF MUSIC Jane Gallop FEMINISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: The Daughter's Seduction Peter Gidal UNDERSTANDING BECKETT: A Study of Monologue and Gesture in the works of Samuel Beckett Peter Goodrich LEGAL DISCOURSE: Studies in Linguistics, Rhetoric and Legal Analysis Piers Gray MARGINAL MEN: Edward Thomas; Ivor Gamey; J. R. Ackerley Paul Hirst ON LAW AND IDEOLOGY Ian Hunter CULTURE AND GOVERNMENT: The Emergence of literary Education Andreas Huyssen AFTER THE GREAT DIVIDE: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism Nigel Leask THE POLITICS OF IMAGINATION IN COLERIDGE'S CRITICAL THOUGHT Michael Lynn-George EPOS: WORD, NARRATIVE AND THE ILIAD Colin MacCabe JAMES JOYCE AND THE REVOLUTION OF THE WORD THE TALKING CURE: Essays on Psychanalysis and Language (editor) BROKEN ENGLISH Louis Marin PORTRAIT OF THE KING Christian Metz PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CINEMA: The Imaginary Signifier Jean-Claude Milner FOR THE LOVE OF LANGUAGE Jeffrey Minson GENEALOGIES OF MORALS: Nietzsche, Foucault, Donzelot and the Eccentri- city of Ethics Laura Mulvey VISUAL AND OTHER PLEASURES Douglas Oliver POETRY AND NARRATIVE IN PERFORMANCE Michel Pecheux LANGUAGE, SEMANTICS AND IDEOLOGY Jean-Michel Rabat~ LANGUAGE, SEXUALITY AND IDEOLOGY IN EZRA POUND'S CANTOS Denise Riley 'AM I THAT NAME?': Feminism and the Category of 'Women' in History Jacqueline Rose THE CASE OF PETER PAN or The Impossibility of Children's Fiction Brian Rotman SIGNIFYING NOTHING: The Semiotics of Zero Michael Ryan POLITICS AND CULTURE: Working Hypotheses for a Post-Revolutionary Society Raymond Tallis NOT SAUSSURE: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory David Trotter CIRCULATION: Defoe, Dickens and the Economies of the Novel THE MAKING OF THE READER: Language and Subjectivity in Modem American, English and Irish Poetry Jean-Marie Vincent ABSTRACT LABOUR: A Critique Cornel West THE AMERICAN EVASION OF PHILOSOPHY Peter Womack IMPROVEMENT AND ROMANCE: Constructing the Myth of the Highlands Abstract Labour: A Critique Jean-Marie Vincent Professor of Political Science, University of Paris-VIII Translated by Jim Cohen M MACMILLAN French Edition @Presses Universitaires de France, 1987 Translation C The Macmillan Press Ltd,l991 First published as Critique du travail, le Faire et l'Agir by Presses Universitaires de France, 1987. All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright licensing Agency, 33-4 Alfred Place, London WC1E 7DP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1991 Published by MACMILLAN ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and Representatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Vincent, Jean-Marie Abstract Labour: A Critique (Language Discourse, society series). 1. Factors of production. Labour. Marxist theories I. Title II. Series 331.01 ISBN 978-0-333-51381-1 ISBN 978-1-349-21744-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-21744-1 Series Standing Order If you would like to receive future titles in this series as they are published, you can make use of our standing order facility. To place a standing order please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address and the name of the series. Please state with which title you wish to begin your standing order. (If you live outside the United Kingdom we may not have the rights for your area, in which case we will forward your order to the publisher concerned.) Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 2XS, England. Contents Preface by Stanley Aronowitz xi Author's Preface to the English Edition xxiii Translator's Note xxx Introduction 1 1 Luk&cs: Individuality and the Teleology of Works 12 The young Luk4cs as philosopher of existence Antagonisms: soul vs. life, art vs. life The refusal of individualism and subjectivism The crisis of bourgeois individuality From Dostoyevsky to Hegel The proletariat as a collective actor: the subject- object identity The teleology of labour The inversion and the reversal of the inversion Labour as value Marx's anthropological model of the artisan and the engineer Liberation of production or liberation from production? The presupposition of decadence Luk4cs' scorn of internal experience Individual immediateness and the practical-political sphere Social crisis and individual crisis Restoration and rejection of modem art 2 Ernst Bloch: Concrete Utopia and the Ontological Trap 28 The theme of retreat in contemporary thought The unity of society and the individual in official Marxism Bloch against solidarity with the old world The incompleteness of humankind The world from the standpoint of objectivity vi Contents The ontology of the 'not-yet' Society as multiversum Class struggle as the reorganisation of consciousness and the bringing of the past into the present The fragmented character of contemporaneity Religion as struggle against theocracy The Communist Manifesto in the Bible Marxism, eschatology and ethics Docta Spes (the hope principle) and subversive practices Bloch and labour The proximity of the future The deconstruction of the objective spirit Bloch's materialism: nature and human history The aporia of the dialectics of nature 3 Heidegger with Marx: Politics in the Element of Finitude 46 Part I 46 Heidegger's philosophy of retreat Problematic man Daily life and the subject-object dialectic The will-to-will as a unilateral relation to the world Mastery as illusion The ambivalence of retreat Existential analysis and the critique of daily life in capitalist society The moralistic view of labour in the workers' movement The suppression of capital as conservation/ valorisation of labour Marx, thinker of technology? No privilege for production in the procedure of explanation Technology as a social relation The 'technological veil' The servitude of the productive forces Marx and science The critique of political economy as critique of Contents vii the traditional meanings of theory and practice Knowledge as ascetic activity and as relation of production The logics of identity and specificity Heterogeneity of the notion of law in Capital Part II 61 The fruitfulness of the Marx-Heidegger confrontation History and the surpassing of Western metaphysics The Hegelian dialectic as critique of metaphysics within the limits of metaphysics The ploy of reconciliation unmasked in Capital and Being and Time Convergence between Marx's critique of fetishism and Heidegger's critique of ontology: representation as reification The real abstraction of labour The social and Heidegger's Dasein Technology as world-view and as total mobilisation of individuals Technology as deviation of thought and as crystallis ation of social practices Part III 71 The principle of technology or the historic schism of social practices The tight embrace of the processes of valorisation Displacement of sociality towards non-productive activities Marx's anticipated critique of Weber's notion of disenchantment Poeisis and praxis ('doing' and 'acting') The teleology of means and collective interaction The politics of power and the wait-and-see attitude of thought Political institutions and the languor of the social Revolutionary politics in the element of finitude viii Contents 4 The Fetish of Labour and its Dominion: The Critique of Economy as Critique of the Value-Form 79 Part I 79 The so-called monism of Marx Marx beyond Marx Surpassing the objectivationlalienation dichotomy From the critique of Proudhon's 'labourism' to the critique of Ricardo's concept of value The peculiar battle of political economy Decomposition of the objectivity of value Dialectics of the finite and the infinite in Marx's Capital Representative thought as abstraction of labour Part II 86 The dialectical character of the economy The unlimited and open character of the valorisation process The variations of capitalism and economic science The naturalism of value and critique of the value-form The critique of political economy as radical questioning of the mechanisms of representation and valorisation or as utopia of crisis realisation Technology as the logic of abstract labour Socialism as realisation and rationalisation of labour The positivist aspect of Marxist economics Labour-value and utility-value as expressions of symmetrical social subjectivities Class struggle and accumulation The economic and political dialectics of the wage relation The development of the state as a forward flight Contents ix Part III 102 The aporia of the future The destabilisation of labour The intellectualisation of production The de-realisation of social relations and the sur-realisation of the symbolism of seduction by objects Pragmatic realism and the domestication of the imaginary 5 Transforming the World or Transforming Action: Reflections on Art, Labour and Politics 108 Part I 108 The legacy of Marxism Against the concept of collective subject The constraint of repetition in Marxism The psychic repression of concrete utopia The unity of theory and practice in question Refusal of the non-identical in contemporary thought Science as mythical model of successful practice Teleology in social relations Automatic reactions of the object and the subjectivism of the individual Towards a historical critique of individuality: the conformism of spontaneity The repetitive character of representations of the future Part II 118 Art as ascetic intellectual activity Artistic reason as the superseding of productivism and aestheticism The mass majority and the industry of the imaginary
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