To the person who found and left in my faculty box, without a note or other identifying comment, a copy of the charming sexual overture previously discussed here: just a quick suggestion. I will assume that this anonymous gesture had the best of motives – perhaps the sticky note identifying you or explaining why you left this in my box fell off, or perhaps you wanted to make sure I was aware that this content was associated with my name online, but were self-conscious about indicating you personally had seen it, or perhaps there is some other innocuous reason. However, in the future, just so the gesture is unambiguously dissociated from, say, harassment – since placing sexual comments about a female staff member anonymously in their faculty inbox could be interpreted in that light – it’s probably best to include some other sort of communication clarifying what the intention was. For, you know, all those other times you find inappropriate comments about me in online forums…
Since I Can’t Thank You in Person
Also of Interest
- Overheard at the Conference: Words and Things
- Difference
- Virtually Driven
- Talking to Myself
- Copping the End
NP, I am sorry to hear this and wish that I had been around when this cowardly anonymous note was left behind. You are being generous. It’s not normal behaviour.
The law is certainly less generous:
‘Harassment is any form of behaviour that is not wanted and which humiliates, offends or intimidates.’
‘Workplace bullying is repeated, unreasonable behaviour directed toward an employee or group of employees, that creates a risk to health and safety.’
I think it’s pretty safe to say that any repetition of the previous obnoxiousness is most definitely ‘unreasonable behaviour’.
I think it would be perfectly reasonable – and well within your legal rights – to be a lot less generous in response.
Wow. I missed all of that the first time around. What a mess and how very ugly and childish of those people. I hope it goes away or otherwise works out positively in whatever way you’d like it to (that’s clumsy wording, you know what I mean, right?).
Hope you’re well.
take care,
Nate
Hey folks – Thank you both for this – and Lisa: I think these things are important to spell out – thank you for pulling together the quotations in this way. And Nate: yes, I know what you mean :-)
Just for update purposes: nothing more has happened since I posted this (other than that I spoke with some people in the office about the incident – but no more incidents have happened, if that makes sense, which hopefully means no more incidents will…).
Take care all…
Hi N,
I’m not sure where to best post my (somewhat naive and blunt) request for a little insight from you – so unfortunately it must go here. (BTW, it sickens me to read about the sordid affair you’ve described above and I can only hope that you don’t let it get you down).
Anyway, a quick congrats on making it this far – you’ve got to be close to the end now, right? I look forward to reading the finished product. May i assume that it will be posted in all its downloadable glory on the site?
Ok. To the business of my humble request… I’m looking for a few interpretations (maybe I mean explanations?!) of Marx’s 1843 page turning popular classic “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” I was big fan of Capital Vol 1 (the David Harvey online video edition, that is). I have the limited edition box set at home. However, as my interests (both academic and personal) tend more toward what may be esoterically termed ‘legal praxis’ (mmmm… can of worms) I would desperately love to find someone who has distilled the contemporary “use-value” that I intuit in comments like this:
“The only liberation of Germany which is practically possible is liberation from the point of view of that theory which declares man to be the supreme being for man. Germany can emancipate itself from the Middle Ages only if it emancipates itself at the same time from the partial victories over the Middle Ages. In Germany, no form of bondage can be broken without breaking all forms of bondage. Germany, which is renowned for its thoroughness, cannot make a revolution unless it is a thorough one. The emancipation of the German is the emancipation of man. The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat. Philosophy cannot realize itself without the transcendence [Aufhebung] of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realization [Verwirklichung] of philosophy.”
Any thoughts?
Hi Rob – Sorry for the long delay in responding – I’ve been utterly buried, and have more or less grounded myself from the blog in the short term. My response will be a bit frustrating, I’m afraid: would you like to elaborate a bit on why the passage interests you? With a bit more context, it will be a little easier for me to associate around the themes that are interesting to you…
Hi N,
In reference to the passage I quoted, I’ve got to say it smacks of Spinoza to me. I’m reading the head/heart metaphor as applying to thought/extension. The whole ‘man being the supreme being for man’ perspective reads as though its been lifted verbatim from The Ethics.
My Spinozan goggles also allow me to make sense of the quite specific way in which Marx is lampooning ‘modern’ religion / theology. (i.e the partial victories over the Middle Ages – or from Spinoza’s perspective the incompleteness of the Cartesian project)
Put all that into the background, though. I assume that Marx attempting to articulate some kind of open ended “narrative” theory of self/society? (more Deleuze than Dennett, but with a hint of Chomsky). If so, cool. But then shouldn’t ‘we all’ jump ahead and using our Wittgensteinian Cheat Codes and “simply” attempt to express an integrated version of the narrative of capitalism developed by Marx into the narrative of “the law”?
Too naive? Or fundamentally flawed?
Oops that second last sentence is hard for even me to understand.
Let me rephrase…
Does Marx engage with the narrative of jurisprudence as “narrative” (i.e. as “we” in the post-Wittgenstienian world do?). Does he provide an “immanent reading” of the law? Has anyone developed marxist legal theory along these lines?
Hi Rob – Sorry for the delay – as you can tell from the lack of posting recently, my time is hyper-compressed at the moment.
I have a couple of different reactions. First, on the issue of whether Spinoza (or other figures) might be lurking in the background of a passage: I’ve become very very cautious, with Marx – he constantly plays with, spoofs, riffs off of, other figures – not always, I think, even consciously: he’s steeped in this stuff, and complex references, citations, and resonances ricochet through his work – they become part of the texture of how he thinks through things… The problem is that often these references are actually critical in some way – they are citational gestures intended to mark out a space of perverse appropriation that has a distinctly critical change.
I’m not saying that this is at all the case in the passage that interests you – I haven’t worked through the text in the level of detail I’ve come to think is needed to keep track of Marx’s complex voicing. I’m just explaining why I tend to adopt a sort of… aggressive agnosticism when approaching Marx’s texts, which I only move away from reluctantly and after I’ve lived with the texts for some time.
I’m not suggesting that this is how he “must” be read or that others have to approach the texts the same way. I’m just myself very cautious about trying to guess what he’s up to from brief passages… There may be readers lurking, though, who have done some more detailed work on that text…
The question of whether Marx is attempting some sort of “immanent” approach to law is an interesting one. I read Marx as a theorist of forms of collective practice and experience – and I read Capital as far more preoccupied with questions of the form of law, form of state, form of government, etc., than most other readers (the thesis doesn’t really get into this, since it’s really the later chapters of Capital where this becomes easier to support textually – I gesture at the point a bit in chapter 5 of the thesis, but just can’t develop the argument until I have more room to breathe than the thesis offered… My reading relies on an argument that, in these later chapters in which the text so often speaks in the voice, for example, of factory inspectors, this part of the text should not be seen as Marx just becoming a social historian – that this is also an immanently voiced perspective that he has unfolded or “derived” from his prior analysis – the voice of one more particular perspective available within the long-term historical trajectory that is capital…).
So: speaking in very general terms – yes. I think that Marx does attempt an “immanent reading” of law – but at a very high level of abstraction (just like his immanent reading of things we tend to think of as economic). So he investigates the social intuitiveness or practical plausibility of certain legal and governmental gestalts that tend to become widespread as aspects of the collective phenomenon he is analysing.
The analysis is social – focussed on human practices (although, as always with Marx, there’s this sort of Actor Network element to the analysis – he spends a lot of time talking about interactions of humans and nonhuman objects, and the qualities elicited in each through these interactions). This social analysis aims to make visible – to make citable – various perspectives that become socially plausible – that are primed by particular kinds of likely experiences and performative stances that become common.
This makes certain sorts of narrativisations or understandings of collective experience more likely to arise, because they become a sort of path of least resistance or require shorter intuitive leaps or become more readily thinkable, because we practice thinking them in common aspects of our collective experience, and so certain forms of perception, performative stances, or interpretive moves become ready to hand, available for application and extension to other aspects of experience – at least, this would be my argument.
I’m not myself certain whether anyone has applied this sort of analysis to Marxist legal theory – unfortunately the common attempt to understand Marx in terms of a strong and reductive “base-superstructure” distinction tends to get in the way of the development of certain kinds of theory…
But I’m basically associating off work on Capital here – Marx does change and develop his position over time, so I don’t mean to imply the same sort of argument could be sustained in relation to everything he writes…