Supersuming Subsumption: Theory and Politics

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Published Jul 2024

Marco Briziarelli

Author: Marco Briziarelli

The main purpose of Supersuming Subsumption is to extrapolate from the Marxian understanding of subsumption — and the author’s own socially historically situated reading of it — a dynamic and holistic theory of capitalist social power relations. The work brings this theory to bear on the anti-capitalist analysis of everyday practices.
Despite a recent and renewed interest in the subject, subsumption remains a fairly under-explored category, used either as a ‘floating signifier’ to describe a vague and wide-ranging tendency of capital to colonise social life, or, alternatively, as a highly technical concept in the specialist literature on Marx’s later writings. The present work aims to maintain the specificity of the concept while opening up its domain of application to the realms of everyday life and practical politics.

Biographical Note

Marco Briziarelli Ph.D. (2012), University of Milan-Bicocca, is an associate professor in Sociology. He has published monographs and many articles on media theory, social movements and digital labour.

Readership

The book would of immediate interest of undergraduate and post-graduate students in the field of Sociology, Political Science; Anthropology, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, and Critical Theory.

Table of Contents

All That Is Solid about Subsumption Melts into the Air
1 A Tentative Definition
2 The Question of Subsumption: An Incomplete but Totalising Abstraction
3 Subsumptive Relations as Theory of Power Relations: Unstable Hegemony
4 The Structure of the Book: Subsumptive Relations and Subsumptive Scenarios

Defining a Legacy
1 Defining Subsumption: A First Approximation to a Logic and Material Tension
2 Critical Genealogy: The Kantian–Hegelian Trajectory
3 The Legacy of Kant and Hegel in Marx
4 Systemic Dispossession and Systemic Subsumption
5 The Marginal Centrality of Subsumption in Marx
6 Marx’s Multiple Subsumptions: Formal, Real, Hybrid and Ideal
7 Selective Traditions of Subsumptions: Two Main Narratives of Totalisation

From Subsumption to Subsumptive Relations
1 The Terrain of Class Struggle Relations
2 Subsumptive Relations and Hegemony
3 Integral and Welfare State
4 The Legal Hegemonic Apparatus
5 Unfreedom of Labour

Determinate Supersumption: Molar and Molecular
1 Molar Determinate Supersumption
2 Molecular Determinate Supersumption

Subsuming Communication: The Rising of the Translation Machine and Data-Subjects/Objects
1 Communication: Relational Labour and Labour of Relations
2 Translatability and Translational Labour
3 Digital Platforms as Translation Machines
4 Who Is Exactly a Translational Worker…?
5 Data Subjects and Data Objects
6 Active Supersumptive Politics: Freire and the 150-Hours Laboratory on Communication

Domesticated Living Bodies and the Social Space of Subsumption
1 Space and Subsumption
2 Covid-19 and Determinate Supersumption
3 Digital Abstract Space
4 The Contradictory Facets of Domestication, or Subsumption as Always

Conclusions: Two ‘Futures’ of Work
1 The ‘First Future of Work’: Remote Working and Class Relations
2 Another Future of Work, or Cryptocurrency as Technological Fetish

Bibliography
Index of Names
Indices of Subjects