Preterition

4. Precursor: what the economics established

This post continues Part 2, which set out the six inferences the embodied agnostic subject forbids.

The embodied agnostic subject operates in an economic framework descended from Karl Marx by way of John Trimbur. Marx’s 1857 Grundrisse introduces the notion of productive consumption wherein consumption is immediately also production, the product becomes a product only in being consumed, and production produces not only the object but the consumer and the manner of consuming. Emphasis on the third clause: the consumer is an output. A manner of consuming is a disposition laid down over time by prior consumption, making the subject in the passage that defines productive consumption always embodied and already historical.

Marx supplies the economy and inscribes the wrong permissions to its access clause. Every account of a subject carries such a clause, declared or not: a provision fixing what a theory may treat as knowable about an interior, and on whose authority. Marx assumes the formed disposition is available to the theory describing it, and the analyst can name the manner of consuming and describe how it came to be even when the consumer cannot. Agnosticism imports no ethical scruple into economics from Butler and Glissant. It writes the access clause that productive consumption requires and Marx neglects to provide. Productive consumption relocates the constitution of value to the moment of consuming. If the consumer’s interior is then treated as readable, the relocation reverses, and the value constituted in consumption reverts to an accounting of what the consumer is assumed to have received.

Marx comes nearest to the clause at the factory door. At the end of Capital v.1 Chapter 6 he leaves the sphere of circulation—noisy, surface-level, all in view of all—and follows buyer and seller into the hidden abode of production, through a door marked no admittance except on business. The threshold prices capacity. The interior demands labor. One cannot be distinguished from the other in advance: verification requires entrance.

Marx treats that unverifiability as a problem capital solves by entering. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis treat it as a permanent condition, and formalize it as contested exchange: where the thing exchanged cannot be specified in the contract, the contract is incomplete, and something other than contract does the work: authority, monitoring, the threat of termination. What matters is not so much that monitoring occurs as the derivation of the authority to monitor. Unverifiability does not leave a gap in the relation. It produces discretion; discretion accrues to the party that can impose a cost.

Nothing above provides an economics that refuses to posit an interior. Piero Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities does. It offers a theory of value and distribution with no preferences, no utility and no psychology: prices and the division of the surplus fall out of the technical conditions of production and a single distributive variable. The subject is not bracketed for convenience. No joint in Sraffa’s system admits a claim about an interior. Sraffa does not offer modesty about the limits of knowledge, but a determinate account of an economy without reading anyone’s interior.

I offer that as one meaning of agnostic in the subject’s name, and I use it in the software sense rather than the ethical one: a platform-agnostic system runs no worse on any given platform because it declines to depend on any. Contract on observables is Sraffa’s method restated as a design rule. What Sraffa cannot offer, however, is time. His system serves as a snapshot—the economy at a position, all of it simultaneous—and so it can do without a subject. The present specification of a subject proceeds further.

5. Limits: what the subject does not claim

Sraffa’s snapshot needs no subject because nothing in it moves. Joan Robinson’s body of work insists on the distinction a single frame conceals: equilibrium runs in logical time, reversible and traversable in either direction, while an actual economy runs in one direction on historical time. The embodied agnostic subject moves in historical time, and refuses at the outset any claim situated outside history. No equilibria. No stable preferences waiting to be elicited by the right incentive. No predictability, particularly not of the retrospective kind, since a claim to know what a writer was doing a year ago is a claim to have run the direction backwards.

The second limit requires a typology from information economics. Scholars seldom cite Phillip Nelson as a theorist of the subject: his investigations query how consumer ignorance about quality shapes market structure. However, the machinery Nelson builds to answer his query makes the moment of verification into an economic variable. Some qualities can be established by inspection prior to purchase and others only through subsequent use. Nelson’s empirical classification supplies an access regime: not what a thing is, but when its quality becomes knowable, to whom, and at what cost.

Michael R. Darby and Edi Karni offer an additional limit and frame its generating condition. Credence qualities are those expensive to judge even after purchase, and they arise wherever a good is used with other goods of uncertain properties to produce a measurable output, or where the production process itself is stochastic. In the case they document, the buyer lacks knowledge of what inputs the work requires and must therefore purchase both diagnosis and service. Their titular conclusion: where a consumer cannot establish whether work was necessary or whether it was performed, free competition drives fraud not to zero but to an optimal amount.

Writing meets the condition Darby and Karni describe. A text is produced by a writer’s capacities in combination with prior texts, tools, other people and now machine agents—cooperating factors of uncertain quality and quantity—and what comes out is stochastic in Darby and Karni’s sense. Interiority in a writerly relation is therefore a credence attribute by the definition’s own terms, rather than by analogy.

Interiority as a credence attribute bounds what the embodied agnostic subject claims, and I offer the bound as deliberately narrow. The specification states a minimum and anticipates continued building, so what it leaves unsaid it leaves available rather than ruled out. Agnosticism names the remainder: whatever else may be true of subjects, none of which this account assumes. Access often occurs. Writers sometimes know what they were doing, and readers sometimes apprehend portions of that intent. Nothing here describes a sealed self or holds the interior to be empty or irreducible. It claims only that availability is unreliable, that the unreliability is unevenly distributed, and that the failures are undetectable from outside: access cannot be distinguished from its appearance by any party to the exchange, the writer included. The answer changes the contract, not the inspection. Contract on observables, convert an interior state into a declared textual object where necessary, or design to obviate the question.

I concede that the embodied agnostic subject protects what an identity-based account protects—time, non-coerced participation, the right to withhold—but derives that protection from the structure of subjecthood rather than from any named identity. The price of the generality is that it cannot say who is injured or when.

A possible objection: Glissant writes that Relation “does not act upon prime elements that are separable or reducible,” and that treated as decomposable it becomes a mechanics to disassemble and reproduce (1997, 172). The six forbidden inferences are a decomposition. Glissant’s instruction provides an answer: attend to the texture of the weave and not to the nature of its components. The decomposition here falls on instruments and the demands they make, which are the weave’s texture; it leaves the writers and readers alone, and declines to supply their natures. The warrant for that answer expires with the distinction, which the argument must continue to make rather than establish and assume.

Two further objections mark the remaining bounds. In the first, reaction precedes argument: agnosticism about the interior reads as a distancing move or refusal to see the writer as a person. Karl Stolley, in “The Lo-Fi Manifesto,” supplies a structural response: build on the fewest dependencies one can inspect, and the system survives what the dependencies do not. The value of Stolley’s response resides partly in its provenance, in that a vocabulary of platform independence reveals claims carrying capacity demands from persons. A system can require nothing legible from a writer and still attend closely to what the writer makes. Declining to depend on access does not decline to look. Butler specifies that ethics “requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness” (2005, 136). The relation survives where accounting fails.

A final anticipated objection comes from Asao Inoue’s work with student writers. The grading contracts are based on labor time, which is observable, declared, and carries no necessary inference about interiority. Inoue demonstrates that observable textual work offers the site where norm-laden standards do their harm, so that contracting on the text rather than on the hours concedes the ground to possible harm. I propose instead contracting on the volume of material a writer produces and the structure of the connections among it—descriptors rather than evaluators, yielding reduced purchase for norm-laden standards—together with a judgment of how effectively the writer represents their own corpus, a judgment that is and must remain human work.

Both positions resist demands on interiority. The disagreement turns on which observable stands proxy for value, not on access: time-as-measure against product-and-relation-as-measure. That is a labor-theory dispute in classical dress, and it puts Inoue and my own account on the same side: neither will read an interior.

One version of the objection survives reframing. A corpus judgment infers capability from performance, which is a synchronization of a different kind: reading the trace of a trajectory as a property of the trajectory. A corpus records a trajectory rather than an instant, and a corpus judgment reaches the representation, not the representer.

The requirements this subject places on a model of circulation, and the possibilities it opens, come in a subsequent post. The labor question it raises—how to protect ideational, creative and consumptive labor while automating the repetitive and the mechanical—belongs to theories of economy and technology rather than to a theory of the subject.

References

Bowles, Samuel, and Herbert Gintis. 1990. “Contested Exchange: New Microfoundations for the Political Economy of Capitalism.” Politics & Society 18 (2): 165–222.

Butler, Judith. 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press.

Darby, Michael R., and Edi Karni. 1973. “Free Competition and the Optimal Amount of Fraud.” Journal of Law and Economics 16 (1): 67–88.

Glissant, Edouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Inoue, Asao B. 2019. Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom. Denver: University Press of Colorado.

Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. New York: Penguin Classics.

Marx, Karl. 1993. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Penguin Books.

Nelson, Phillip. 1970. “Information and Consumer Behavior.” Journal of Political Economy 78 (2): 311–29.

Robinson, Joan. 1974. History versus Equilibrium. Thames Papers in Political Economy. London: Thames Polytechnic.

Sraffa, Piero. 1960. Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities: Prelude to a Critique of Economic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stolley, Karl. 2008. “The Lo-Fi Manifesto.” Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy 12 (3).

Trimbur, John. 2000. “Composition and the Circulation of Writing.” College Composition and Communication 52 (2): 188–219.