Toulouse, 3 January 2010

The subject is everything. In politics, there is one question who/what is the subject? Everything else is relative. 

What do I mean by subject? Here subject is probably best understood as that which voices, that which is capable of ‘parole’; uttering sounds which make sense to those who utter them, at the least. Grammatically, a sentence is made up of a subject noun, a verb and an object noun. We are always trying to understand who that subject is? Who is implicated or implied? Part of politics is playing with the subject; uniting us through a common identity, workers of the world or creating one through exclusion, the foreigners or the capitalists. They’re trying to get us to identify with the subject in the discourse, in their stories. The identity game, come on everybody it’s fun to play. Sociological imagination, some may say but this isn’t a professional sport but amateur living. Everyone has their own story, sound a bit too much like Milton Friedman; everyone is their own story.

The subject is not a function of the individual

The individual has become the basic unit on which the human sciences have founded their art. For political scientists, its the atoms which need to be counted and classed in order to know the truth. This truth, Friedman has fed with his philosophy of the famished individual ravished by insatiable desires. The most important thing about rational choice theory is not what it has taught us about individuals and how they act but how it has taught us to be individuals and as such how we should act. The outliars are just that, so says the travelling salesman peddling his wares at whorehouse bar; I lapidate those who don’t know the joys of owning your own.

The individual is a body that can be counted. We are all individuals but we don’t always act as individuals nor do we

 want to. Me is an individual but I am a subject. Me and I are different but you is always the same; perhaps it’s because we can never perceive the other as different except in a physical sense. 

Individuals are like crumbs but the subject is more like loaf, a baguette, a galette, a flute or  a ficelle. You can’t make anything from crumbs, you can only imagine what once was. Bread and crumbs are all essentially the same thing but the form is different. Meaning is not merely a question of content but must take into consideration the different forms.

What are you trying to understand?

Political scientists and people are like pedophiles and children, they know children are going to grow up, they will loose interest in them but they just don’t want to see it. Political scientists are the same, they can only see people as individuals, anything else and they enter into a state of denial.

The subject is the evolution. through the subject we can understand how change is affected and what effects it has.

A concept as a state or as a flow?

A static concept is like a cross-section which allow you to understand the what and how something is ‘made up’ at a particular point in space and time. A fluid conceptualisation looks at how something evolves through space and time. A census is a good example of a static concept, the residents of a territory answer particular questions at, ideally, the same point in time. This allows us to build a picture of the state of things and hypothesis about the future using information concerning similar changes between previous states. Fundamentally, it doesn’t allow us to understand how or why decisions take place (beyond assuming that the subject, residents in this case, reacts to the event(s)). The importance of a fluid conceptualisation is to understand the subject as an evolution, not simply ‘subject to change’. These similar but fundamentally different conceptualisations have very different consequences when it comes to understanding reality. The static conception sees the subject as something which is reacting to external (who knows from where?) stimuli. While the fluid conceptualisation sees the subject as us which is constantly evolving and redefining the world around us. The question is which of these concepts allows us to better understand the world in which we live?

Finally why is there a writer writing this text and why is there a reader reading this text?

Simply, because the subject isn’t the other. I am the subject. And I want to understand where I come from, how I make decisions and what kind of a future am I making for ourselves? The question is who am I?