State, Culture and Life-Modes by Thomas Højrup

Author:Thomas Højrup [Højrup, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781351761338
Google: yPhKDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-02-06T02:37:09+00:00

Cultural Contrast and Ethnocentric Blindness

The thesis that the concept of class is fruitful and appropriate, not despite, but because of, the fact that individuals cannot be uniformly sorted into classificatory sub-sets, is associated with the way in which life-mode analysis contributes a constructive alternative to the vicious circle of causal thinking.

If it happened that the relations of labour which could be deduced from the mode of production concepts seemed to overlap with our dominant preconceptions about human life and attitudes, it would have been a sign that in relation to general common sense there was not much new to learn from this theory. With mode of production analysis, however, we are not dealing with a knowledge which reflects the known. On the contrary, it is a scientific tool with which to put a question mark against what we think we can take for granted, a tool for problematising our inwardly understood prejudices and a tool for pointing out what is not immediately recognisable to us. It is along this path that the sciences continue to contribute to transforming known knowledge and bringing new forms of order and content into the concepts which structure our knowledge.

There are several facets of the concept of class which at the present level of specification are too regional to be integrated, but which obtain their significance later in the sequence of specifications. Some of these characteristics will also show themselves to have had significance for the integration of the class concept into the causal conceptual world. However, as the concept of mode of production is the point of departure for the hierarchy of specification, it will at first only treat those forms which derive from the structure of the mode of production.

The concept of life-mode has been correctly characterised as a coherent whole of ideology-bearing, class-specific praxis, an attempt to close off the classificatory wrong paths and further develop the class concept’s intension, understood as the terminal concept for the mode of production’s relation concepts. Life-mode analysis allows us to specify the forms of self-reproducing praxis (and relations of labour) which together constitute a mode of production’s life process, i.e. its set of life-modes (see figures 2.13, 2.17, 2.18 and 2.19). As the word ‘class’ is normally confused with ‘classification’ (extensionally), it has been useful to mark the new attempt to work intensionally with the mode of production’s terminals by replacing the word ‘classes’ with ‘life-modes’.

A life-mode is constituted by the problematique which structures a self-reproducing form of praxis; this praxis is in turn determined by specific relations of labour in a mode of production. Relations of labour imply the specific concepts of ‘end’, ‘means’, ‘cause’, and ‘effect’ which together constitute a life-mode’s conceptual problematique: what we have tended to call its ‘ideology’. The problematique of a life-mode is equivalent to the labour relations determined by the mode of production, as a term is equal to its relation. While concepts of ends and means for all life-modes in the capitalist mode of production are distinct

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