Rough Theory

Theory In The Rough

Monthly Archives: August 2008

The Inverted World

10 Comments Posted by on August 21, 2008

So one of Nate’s recent posts has generated my bedtime reading for the past several days – Marx’s Wage Labour and Capital, an early work updated by Engels after Marx’s death, and his 1865 “Value, Price and Profit”. The former I have read before, but not recently. The latter I’m not sure I’ve ever read [...]

Contradiction, Critical Theory, Metatheory, Negations, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity, Social Movements, Transformation

The Accident of Design

2 Comments Posted by on August 20, 2008

So for the past few weeks, when I’ve been able to fight the crowds to get to my usual spot in my coffee shop (as I type this, one of my postgrad students has walked past and casually asked, “Oh! So is this your office?” I’m getting emails from people I don’t even know, asking [...]

Coffee, Overheard, Procrastination

Things I Find Myself Writing on Assignments

6 Comments Posted by on August 19, 2008

“We don’t usually have strong data on the start of mankind.”

Overheard, Philosophy of History, Teaching

Abolishing the Quant/Qual (and Other) Distinctions

2 Comments Posted by on August 18, 2008

So today was the formal logic lecture in our newly designed social research course. In the spirit of the best pedagogical traditions we established in our quantitative methods course last year, my esteemed colleague L Magee set out to instil in our students the virtues of rigour and precision with a thorough discussion of the [...]

Logic, Overheard, Professional Life, Teaching

Resolve and Resignation

2 Comments Posted by on August 14, 2008

Mikhail Emelianov from Perverse Egalitarianism has a new post up on New (Academic) Year Resolutions – a post which he has spun mimetically, asking for responses from a few of us who are known to lurk around those parts… Mikhail resolves to (or wishes for the ability to?) include more complex material in his courses, [...]

Links, Procrastination, Thesis

Abstract Materialisms vs. Real Abstractions

2 Comments Posted by on August 9, 2008

Praxis has helpfully suggested that my thesis should be titled “Capital in Footnotes”. Personally, I’m rather more partial to “Marx from the Margins”… ;-P In either case, another footnote for your edification – this time one that often gets cited even by people nowhere near so fond as I am of Marx’s apparatus. [Returning here [...]

Abstraction, Critical Theory, Fetish, Materialism, Metatheory, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity

The In-Ourself

Leave a Comment Posted by on August 7, 2008

Okay. Labour power. Inversion. How does this inversion retroject itself onto the opening passages of Capital, transforming our understanding of what we thought we knew at that moment in the text? Just as important: how does what was already said at that early point in the text, interact with the new things that we think [...]

Abstraction, Capital v.1, Contradiction, Critical Theory, Empiricism, Fetish, Materialism, Metatheory, Political Economy, Reading, Reification, Self-Reflexivity

Scratchpad: Peculiar Commodities

2 Comments Posted by on August 6, 2008

Not a lot of substantive writing (or, indeed, writing of any kind) around here lately – apologies. Aside from the struggle to get on top of an unanticipated teaching load, I’ve been trundling through the process of revising various talks I’ve given in the last several months, so that they are in proper form to [...]

Contradiction, Critical Theory, Fetish, Political Economy, Thesis

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