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youre right, asaris about the first part
my reliance on the term "fiction of the bourgeois legal subject" without qualification was a political gesture.
but i did say, in an outline, that the status of the term would shift as a function of the interpretive framework you brought to bear--and offered two examples, in shorthand, that are there only to demonstrate the dependent variable status of the term.
that what i say is specific is obvious--but i am not sure if we have a disagreement?
if we were to move from a metahistorical proposition--the status of this fiction in general, a quick demonstration of its variablility--to doing a history, then the whole scenario--assumptions, methods, locations, timeframes--would change.
so either:
we can shift into talking about how a potential history that emplotted a notion of social equality across different discursive registers, in different sites, at different points in time, might or might not have functioned to shape aspects of this abstraction you call social reality.
we could have an argument about this notion of "history of the present.... (the present" what is that? you mean like husserl's present in the phenomenology of internal time consciousness?
history of the present where? is the present one thing for all people? how do you figure that? is "history of the present" not a new version of that of a zeitgeist? can zeitgeist history be defended, even if you try to all it something else? or maybe we'll go badiou's route and substitute talk about an event and an event horizon? all this before a single word gets transmitted about this "real history".....
or:
we can consider the possibility of making a rhetorical move on your part more than a rhetorical move (which would be the first option) and decide that instead we will quaff a beer and move on at this simpler level.
either way, i would happy to talk, but i am just waking up this afternoon and feel like such a decision is outside my purview.
quote:
"And it's worth considering whether or not the story of a 'dominant order' is not itself a fiction created by a class that feels itself to be oppressed, and so invents an oppressor to motivate its own struggle."
you say is the next logical move--to turn the loop back onto itself in a sense--but at this point, things get far murkier.
another point that requires a detour---this time through the history of the workers movement if you like--it seems questionable, both at the level of fact and at the level of politics.
to simply state this---that there was for a specific period, during a particular phase of capitalist development, something like a bourgeoisie--which manifested itself in different ways in different social contexts--seems hard to refute---but then you could say well the category is what unites these folks--ownership of the means pf production is empty---and presto watch the bourgeoisie dissolve back into the particularities of a given set of social arrangements.
and then---well what?
or you could say that it should be obvious at this point to anyone who thinks about it that a marxist framework--or any critical social analytic framework---enages in an act of naming as at once teh generating of hueristics and as a political.
and that the persuasiveness of each naming comes from the arguments made about the frame, and the analytic and rhetorical power with which the frame is elaborated.
and that this same relations obtains in the gesture to simply relativize all politics in the way that you have above.
or you could say the same thing in sociological terms:
in the wonderful world of stratification analysis, i would assume that you operate inside a particular social field and that gestures on that order have acquired a particular kind of symbolic capital, such that they position you in relation to other folk. and so the attachment to a kind of relativizing move is legitimated with reference to a particular set of Authorized Sources that circulate within a given field, and that the deployment of these arguments operates at once as a positioning move within that field--and as an analytic move in a particular conversation---but that to understand the persuasiveness of an argument, you cannot seperate the formal elements from the ways in which those elements come to function as symbolic capital in a given environment, and so there we are...there we are... you can put this together i am sure, no need to go on.
but put aside such considerations and we are left with:
the answer to your argument would be formally yes, functionally no, from the viewpoint of belief no, from the viewpoint of a sociology of belief obviously yes, round and round.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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