Mandarini, Matteo (1998) Efficient material-abstraction : towards a critical materialist pragmatics. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

Marx's critique remains the most incisive analysis of capitalism to date, though the transformations which capitalism has undergone require that his conceptual apparatus be radically overhauled. I have attempted to do so through a topological twisting of his conceptual assemblage, highlighting new elements and relations. In this way I am lead to questions of time already highlighted by Marx, in relation to an immanent and constitutive ontology. However, my primary concern remains with the contemporary strategies of capitalist command, and the new conditions and strategies of resistance it demands. Concrete/Abstract: or. The German Ideology - i)The question of ideology, the failure of its problematic, and the initial step beyond: fetishism as 'dissimulation objective' (Deleuze); ii) the function of money and the emergent 'truth in practice' of an ontology of efficient material-abstraction. Total Critique is a Pragmatics - i) The transformation of Critique from partial to Total, and the emergence of a differential materialist ontology, ii) the critique of the labour theory of value, and the transformation of capitalism into a project of heterogeneity management (fundamental ontology). Subsumption - i) An account of Braudel's notion of the anti-market, and a critique of the reduction of the anti-market to capitalism; ii) an account of real subsumption in terms of a temporal ontology. Time and Resistance - i) A re-reading of 'historical determinism' in the light of Marx's letters to Vera Zasulich on the Russian commune; ii) the question of becoming as opposed to history through a diagramming of masses rather than the contraposing of classes; iii) temporality as motor of flight/control: the syntheses of time as a diagramming of efficient capitalist material-abstraction, and of the strategies of a critical materialist pragmatics.

Item Type:	Thesis or Dissertation (PhD)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory H Social Sciences > HX Socialism. Communism. Anarchism
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Capitalism, Marx, Karl, 1818-1883 -- Criticism and interpretation, Materialism
Date:	August 1998
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Department of Philosophy
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Extent:	iv, 214 p.
Language:	eng
URI:	http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/36688

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