History and Obstinacy

by Oskar Negt, Alexander Kluge, Devin Fore (Editor)

If Marx's opus Capital provided the foundational account of the forces of production in all of their objective, machine formats, what happens when the concepts of political economy are applied not to dead labor, but to its living counterpart, the human subject? The result is Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt's History and Obstinacy, a groundbreaking archaeology of the labor power that has been cultivated in the human body over the last two thousand years. Supplementing classical political economy with the insights of fields ranging from psychoanalysis and phenomenology to evolutionary anthropology and systems theory, History and Obstinacy reaches down into the deepest strata of unconscious thought, genetic memory, and cellular life to examine the complex ecology of expropriation and resistance.

First published in German 1981, and never before translated into English, this epochal collaboration between Kluge and Negt has now been edited, expanded, and updated by the authors in response to global developments of the last decade to create an entirely new analysis of -the capitalism within us.-

Genres: History, Politics, Theory, Nonfiction, Philosophy

544 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Oskar Negt is a German philosopher and social theorist in the tradition of critical theory. He is a professor of sociology at the University of Hannover.

He studied law and philosophy at the University of Göttingen and the University of Frankfurt am Main as a student of Theodor Adorno, and was an assistant of Jürgen Habermas.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 1 out of 5]

Quite possibly the worst edited book I have ever read, littered with typographic mistakes and unidiomatic English to the point of distraction. The effect is to make it absolutely impossible to trust that a challenging idea or elliptical reference was intended by the authors along the lines of their exhortation "Read for the gaps", as opposed to simple carelessness.

To the extent it's detectable within such a translation, however, I also don't think that Negt and Kluge's style is very successful, marrying as it does the Frankfurt School's fondness for cryptically figurative invocations of economic concepts with the use of extremely terse fragments that give the reader precious little with which to deduce what they mean.

A typical example from the entry on "Begriff "(concept) in their appendix 'An Atlas of Concepts': In the course of illustrating what the concept's universal (as opposed to its individual or particular) is vis-a-vis the concept of 'city', they end by saying:

"A particularity belonging to the elements of the concept of the city is the fact that in the history of the world, serfdom and slavery were not abolished in the cities of northwestern Europe until later [THAN WHAT?], and from these cities the Western concept of freedom was spread over the Atlantic. And thus concepts such as, for example, freedom and the city permeated one another such that nothing of the relationality of the concept can be left out; in the development of financial derivatives (the Black-Scholes model), for example, the economy dealt with models comprising the antithesis of this concept of concepts."

It is possible to deduce based on later unrelated passages that the Black-Scholes model is an example of antidialectical models (so-called 'exclusionary mechanisms') that rely on the principle of contradiction (either P or not P), and thus to infer that as the 'antithesis of this concept of concepts' the Black-Scholes model is the opposite of the concept's 'inclusive' universal which does not conceal or reject its own contradictory 'violence of relationality', that is, the city's status as both the politicoeconomic mechanism by which slavery was enforced and preserved as well as the ideological site where modern emancipation was developed.

Nevertheless, even after pouring over a passage like this and fitting together all its disparate ideas, the basic syntax and aim of these sentences remain fundamentally bizarre and opaque to this reader. Why were these ideas linked together in this way? Why end here? Did the authors genuinely believe that the meaning of 'the antithesis of this concept of concepts' (terms used nowhere else in the book) would be self evident in this passage? (If so, I can report: it is not.) Or did they actually think there was something instructive in forcing the reader to construct a meaning from this sudden and unprovoked quasi-Hegelian turn of phrase--not to mention the vague and unexplained system of relationships the passage unilaterally imposes on the concepts of 'city', 'freedom' and 'slavery'? (If so, I can report: there isn't.)

As a work intended to expand the remit of Marxist analysis by examining the capitalist forces operative in the hearts and minds of workers, History & Obstinacy betrays a devastating indifference to making itself understandable to just these hearts and minds.

[Kin · Rating 4 out of 5]

อ่านจริงๆ ไปแค่สามสี่บทแรก ที่เหลือสกิมๆ ดู เก็ทสักครึ่งนึง ไม่เก็ทอีกครึ่งหนึ่ง น่าจะกลับมาอ่านต่อมากๆ เป็นอีกเล่มที่วิเคราะห์แรงงานและการทำงานได้แปลกใหม่มากๆ สำหรับเรา มีแนวคิดหลายอย่างที่ช่วยให้เราคิดใหม่เกี่ยวกับงาน โดยเฉพาะในแง่มุมมานุษยวิทยาวิวัฒนาการของแรงงานและวิธีออกแรงของมนุษย์

ปล. ช่วงแรกๆ ที่พูดถึง power grip และ precision grip นี่สุดๆ ไปเลย