Toward a Theory of the Subject
An account of writing as an economy requires a subject. A subject carries assumptions regarding what others may know of its interior. This series names those assumptions an access regime and proposes a subject specified by it: the embodied agnostic subject, materially particular, formed in time it can’t recover, addressed to others, with an interior that’s real and unreliably available to anyone, the subject included. Marxian, heterodox and information economics and theories of opacity inform specifications of what such a subject needs, which inferences it forbids, and what it makes possible.
-
The Embodied Agnostic Subject, Part 1
Every theory of the subject carries an access regime: what it lets itself assume it can know about an interior, from what evidence, and when. Revealed preference and authorial intention share one; the embodied agnostic subject replaces it, needing a body, an unrecoverable formation, and a structure of address.
-
The Embodied Agnostic Subject, Part 2
Treating opacity as a right turns any demand for legibility into a bid for jurisdiction. The embodied agnostic subject forbids the inferences that demand produces, from the reflective account to the integrity referral, each reading a subject that operates over time back to a single moment.
-
The Embodied Agnostic Subject, Part 3
Marxian productive consumption requires the access clause the embodied agnostic subject supplies. Contested exchange, a theory of value with no interior, and historical time give the subject its economics; information economics makes interiority in writing a credence attribute, which bounds what the subject claims.
-
The Embodied Agnostic Subject, Part 4
An embodied agnostic subject requires systems of circulation that inhabit the economic use term and contract on observables independently of their participants’ motives. It permits the self-appropriation of a writer’s archive, and permits drawing a distinction between redundant labor to be automated and human labor to be protected.