Provincialising Space. A central figure within the Subaltern Studies Collective, Xxxxxxxxxxx’s oeuvre, has sought to critique the pervasiveness of knowledges which sublate historical difference to the essentialising, all-encompassing logics of capital or the experiences of European Enlightenment. To do so, Xxxxxxxxxxx (2000) reads from the very same pages of the Grundrisse as Xxxxxxxx, to develop a non-foundational conceptualisation of subjectivities in relation to capital’s abstraction. From Rethinking Working Class History (1989) to Provincializing Europe (2000) Xxxxxxxxxxx’s work follows that a critique of abstraction provided Xxxx “a way of explaining how the capitalist mode of production managed to extract from people and histories that were all different a homogenous and common unit for measuring human activity” (Xxxxxxxxxxx 2000, 50). Abstract labour for Xxxxxxxxxxx describes capital’s encounter and subsumption of “the differences of history” (ibid). Echoing Xxxx and Xxxxxxxx then, Xxxxxxxxxxx asserts that the concrete is integral to the process of abstraction; the author notes that capital’s subsumption of “living” difference “is what makes this labour a source of resistance to capitalist abstraction” (Ibid, 61). Capital both requires and must demolish the vitality of labour; producing conditions for its own contradiction. In an explicit move away from a the internal relations of Xxxx however, Xxxxxxxxxxx draws from Xxxx’x distinction between the “being” of capital, its logical subsumption of difference, and it’s “becoming”, “the historical process in and through which the logical presuppositions of capital’s “being” are realized“(Xxxxxxxxxxx, 2000, 62) or in other words, the historical which capital retrospectively affirms. Drawing on the Grundrisse, Xxxxxxxxxxx notes that until this history of being is acted out “capitalists and workers do not belong to the “being” of capital” (ibid, 63). The distinction is made then, between “the universal and necessary history we associate with capital” (History 1) and those antecedents encountered by capital “not as forms of its own life process” (History 2)10. Xxxxxxxxxxx concludes that “Xxxx accepts...that the total universe of pasts that capital encounters is larger than the sum of those elements in which are worked out the logical presuppositions of capital” (ibid, 64). In this respect, Xxxxxxxxxxx’s position is perhaps uncontroversial, the historical distinction between capital’s being and becoming is typical of many analyses o...
