Suchergebnisse

The question of value comes to the fore in early modernity with the delineation of the distinct discursive fields of economics, ethics, and aesthetics, and their respective development into the self-sufficient practical forms of economic rationality, private morality, and modern art. Lying as it does at the intersection of the modern subject's internal world of needs and desires and the external world of the sources of their gratification or deferral, value begins to assume a considerable importance. Although the three realms of value co-emerge as differentiated with the inauguration of modernity, and each has been accompanied by a discourse concerned to elaborate its own autonomy and self-referentiality, they nevertheless stand in a complex relation to one another to define themselves mutually in a crisscrossing network of relations.

Argues that Theodor W. Adorno's theory of the aesthetic produces an understanding of the relation between culture & the economy that does not reduce the one to the other, but remains aware of the primacy of the economic for understanding cultural artifacts. This is accomplished through a theory of value in which the aesthetic is understood in terms of a particular understanding of use-value. Rather than an object of satisfaction for the subject's identity, the aesthetic in Adorno's theory functions as use-value to the extent that it evokes otherness, radical heterogeneity, & conceptions of identity outside the subject. The aesthetic is conceived of as autonomous, but also as a repository for the irrationalities squeezed out by economic logic & practice. In raising these inequalities to consciousness, the aesthetic performs its use-value in that it critiques existing social relations. Thus, the aesthetic is at once autonomous & directly linked to the prevailing form of economic relations. 22 References. D. M. Ryfe

In a discussion of the conception of rationality underlying economic practice, it is argued that economics participates in a discursive field much wider than its self-understanding allows; it meshes with & interpenetrates other seemingly removed discursive formations to produce & reproduce rational/pathological individuals who are fit/unfit to occupy subject positions in contemporary society. The collaboration of economics with the historically contemporaneous discursive formation of psychiatry in constructing & sustaining conceptions of rationality & pathology is discussed, asking: (1) If indeed the rationality demanded by the larger political economy is something like it appears in the representations of economics, then who do they do violence to? & (2) How are alternative subjectives that are potentially subversive of economic subjectivity recuperated & represented in economic discourse, & what have been their ideological effects? The collaboration of economics with psychiatry converges on a shared metaphysics of the subject, a shared epistemology of representation, & a shared commitment to expertise: a subject-centered conception of rationality in economic life helps construct a subject-centered conception of pathology. This collaboration works to efface the complicity of the institutions of political economy in the production of a myriad contemporary pathologies distinctive of the era of a pervasive economic logic & of a self bound up in its operations. AA

Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find that, as force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and military governments, as well as to the most free and popular.