What exists is not an essentially homogeneous entity - the capitalist system – which merely allows for empirical and accidental variations in different historical and geographical contexts. Instead, there are global configurations -historical blocs, in the Gramscian sense -in which the 'ideological', 'economic', 'political' and other elements are inextricably fused and can only be separated for analytical purposes. There is therefore no 'capitalism', but rather different forms of capitalist relations which form part of highly diverse structural complexes.
Sayfa 26 - Verso, 1990.Kitabı okuyacak
In that case, the myth of a separate and definable ‘economic instance' must be abandoned.
Sayfa 25 - Verso, 1990.Kitabı okuyacak
İlk birikimin zorla sağlandığı öncülü kabul edildiğinde:
If, as we have seen, the very antagonism between worker and capitalist is not internal to the relations of production, but is established between the relations of production and an identity external to them, then the modes of relation with that 'outside' cannot be an automatic effect of the logic of accumulation
Sayfa 25 - Verso, 1990.Kitabı okuyacak
This argument on the contextual nature of identities must be maintained without restriction. Claude Lefort, for example, has shown how a category like 'worker' does not designate a suprahistorical essence, since its condition of existence is the separation of the direct producer from the community and the land, and this required the genesis of capitalism.
Sayfa 24 - Verso, 1990.Kitabı okuyacak
What we find, then, is not an interaction or determination between fully constituted areas of the social, but a field of relational semi-identities in which ʻpolitical', 'economic' and ‘ideological' elements will enter into unstable relations of imbrication without ever managing to constitute themselves as separate objects.
Sayfa 24 - Verso, 1990.Kitabı okuyacak
While the first — objectivist - kind of questioning of the social looks for essential characters behind historical specificity, the second moves in the opposite direction; weakening the boundary of essence through the radical contextualization of any object.
Sayfa 22 - Verso, 1990.Kitabı okuyacak
If the constitutive nature of antagonism is taken for granted, the mode of questioning of the social is completely modified, since contingency radically penetrates the very identity of the social agents. The two antagonistic forces are not the expression of a deeper objective movement that would include both of them; and the course of history cannot be explained in terms of the essential 'objectivity of either. The latter is always an objectivity threatened by a constitutive outside. But as we know, this implies that the conditions of existence of any objectivity that might exist must be sought at the level of a factual history. Moreover, as this objectivity has a merely relational identity with its conditions of existence, it means that the 'essential identity' of the entity in question will always be transgressed and redefined.
Sayfa 22 - Verso, 1990.Kitabı okuyacak
Link between the blocking and simultancous affirmation of an identiey is what we call 'contingency', which introduces an element of radical undecidability into the structure of objectivity.
Sayfa 21 - Verso, 1990.Kitabı okuyacak
In our case, there is a more subtle dialectic between necessity and contingency: as identity depends entirely on conditions of existence which are contingent, its relatonship with them is absolutely necessary. What we find, then, is a relationship of complete imbrication between both: essence is nothing outside its accidents. But this means - and this is the second consequence -that the antagonizing force fulfils two crucial and contradictory roles at the same time. On the one hand, it 'blocks' the full constitution of the identity to which it is opposed and thus shows its contingency. But on the other hand, given that this latter identity, like all identities, is merely relational and would therefore not be what it outside the relationship with the force antagonizing it, the latter is also part of the conditions of existence of that identity.
Sayfa 21 - Verso, 1990.Kitabı okuyacak
Contingency does not therefore mean a set of merely external and aleatory relations between identities, but the impossibility of fixing with any precision -that is, in terms of a necessary ground-either the relations or the identities.
Sayfa 20 - Verso, 1990.Kitabı okuyacak