ABSTRACT
Our brief history of capitalist subjectivity begins with its hybrid bourgeois form. Hybridity is the attribute of a mode of capitalism in which capital subsumes labour 'formally' rather than 'really' (Marx 1 976a: Appendix) . It is the characteristic of an emergent capitalism in which work is carried on in artisanal rather than proletarian mode; a capitalism, therefore , whose identi fying 'law' , i . e . the law of value, is retarded and limited in its motion and scope by the presence of consequential pre-capitalist relations and practices and the underdevelopment or absence of those later innovations and inven tions (mechanization, money, bureaucracy, railway, telegraph, etc . ) which would eventually enable the subsumption of individual and intersubjective intentionality and activity under a 'system' , thereby effecting the unintelli gibility of the world (at the level of common sense) and rendering sociability optional rather than imperative . 1
Formal subsumption did not have the power to dissolve the anaclitic kinesthetic rationality of artisanal making, which remained consequential for the reproduction of everyday life. Yet it demanded, through the civilizing differentiations of which Norbert Elias speaks , a new mode of intelligibility which would eventually emerge as science but which, for the moment, constituted a novel form of sensus communis. What enabled this mode of intel ligibility was the hybridity which maintained a balance between sensuous and non-sensuous presencing and between personal and impersonal social relations , or, between involvement and detachment. As I shall argue (largely though not wholly following Habermas) this balance, along with a novel mode of ownership of 'means of production' , constituted a novel form of cultural parenting which nurtured individual bourgeois relative autonomy. It is in order to mark the presence and absence of this balance that I want to make a distinction between bourgeois and capitalist. Unlike the bourgeois, capitalists approximate to the subjectivity sketched in by Marx in On the jewish Question ( 1 994) . Unlike capitalists, the bourgeois were capable of a class-specific sociability which also had a public character. Or, they were capable of a public-spirited manifestation of social love .2
