postone?

[Daniel F. Vukovich]

Colleagues,

Ive just subscribed, and noted in the archive that there was a suggestion a
few weeks ago, for some reading/discussion of Postone's fine study, Time,
Labor and Domination.
Anyone still interested, and might I suggest beginning with the second and
thrid parts of the book (the reconstruction of the traditioonal marxism in
Part One)?

Ive been thru the book once, and think its an important reconstruction of
Marx as, indeed, a critical theoriest of "society," and not simply or
primarily a political economist/scientist.  More specifically, I'm
interested in reading and discussing the book's "themes" of the
temporalities of capitalism, and the Value process (which has always seemed
to me the strongest, yet most cryptic, part of Marx-as-socail-theorist).  
I am, then, much less interested in debating the forces v. relations of
production dialectic, the critique of Habermas, or Postone's "errors" or
"deviations."  My question to the book, though, is to what extent it is
still tied to a "productionist" perspective.  Postone picks up and runs
with the Value-question or rhetoric in Marx, to argue -- persuasively --
that it is esential to understand Marx as "beyond" a critique of the
market, circulation, and "what happens to labor" within these moments.  The
problem is with the very category or institutionalization of "labor" as
such, and so one's perspective should be a bit broader or more totalizing,
focussed on the overall and contradictory dynamics of the totality. 

All well and good, if not banal.  But still Postone is, I think, grounding
the Value-process (or that thing which produces capital itself in Marx)
within "the" production process as a whole...not simply the shop=floor and
the market/circulation, but, still, within the economy as such.  Again,
this is itself persuasive.  But, to me, Marx's rhetoric of Value points to
something even broader and more provocative than this: that it is a
process, one not "limited" to or itself an epiphenomenon of the economy or
mode of production, by which *all* exchange, communication or sociality
comes to exist.  IN other words, I think it marks in Marx a way to
understand the modes of subjection within a given, historically determined
totality.  It makes one thing stand in relation to another, in a relation
of equivalence or exchangability.  Such "things" would be *any* instance of
labor-power or productive activity, which is by the Value-process or
"capitalist abstraction," coded or socialized: e.g., any artistic or
creative practice or product.  I realize what I'm writing here is itself
hopelessly abstract, and apologies for this.  But my understanding of Value
here is informed by Spivak's, Gail Rubin's and Teresa Brennan's readings of
Marx, readings which I think move in step with traditonal critical theory's
take on this aspect of Marx (as in SOhn-Rethel esp, but Adorno and
Horkheimer too, at least implicitly).

At any rate, if others are interested in Postone, I'll sit down with the
book and respond more lucidly, but regardless I am interested in discussing
any aspect of critical theory's relation to or readings of Marx.

Best,
Dan
     
Daniel Vukovich
English; The Unit for Criticism
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign