Re: [xmca] motive/project

Andy,

I'm struggling to catch up with piles of xmca messages after a week away
from the computer, but your comment here caught my attention. Perhaps you
would agree with me that the selection of the commodity form as the unit of
analysis was based on the presumption that it contains the key contradiction
of a capitalist economy. This suggests to me that the identification of a
unit has to be based on a consideration of the whole in which it is found.
And this in turn suggests that there can be no unit of analysis for
'activity' in the abstract, but rather a variety of units each of which
depends on the concrete whole which one is studying. As you suggest,
'wooing' is an activity that is possible only in the 'world' - the form of
life - of romance. So, when we select a unit we will need to acknowledge
both the spatial and temporal discontinuities among distinct forms of life.

Martin

On 12/18/08 9:34 PM, "Andy Blunden" <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

> f I sing to my beloved while standing outside
> in the rain, in what sense am I "using" something? There is
> a school of thinking that would say, it makes me feel nice
> to be wooing my beloved, therefore I am using her to make me
> feel nice. But all that is really bankrupt, isn't it? We
> have to get into the idea of romance and find in the
> figuring of the world according to a concept of romance, a
> set of motives, which motivate the series of related
> practices which make up the universe of romantic activity.
> "Use" applies OK only to a resicted sense of motivation.
>
> Andy

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Received on Fri Dec 19 07:50:25 2008