Subsumption Theory

The work of Robert Alexy is closely associated with the “principle theory”. For Alexy himself, the principle theory represents the heart of his theoretical work, around which most of his publications are organized. In Alexy’s work, and in the work of his students, the label “principle theory” suggests theoretical unity. Despite this impression of unity, the principle theory is far more multilayered and multifaceted than the “unitary” label would suggest. The critique of Alexy’s principle theory, which is the topic of this article, has two objectives. First, I distinguish between the different types of theory which have found refuge under the unitary label. By clarifying the different theoretical aspirations pursued by proponents of the principle theory, I systematize these different theoretical and doctrinal efforts which are often not clearly separated in the debate. The critique aims to offer a framework within which to situate the different arguments and criticisms, so that it becomes clearer which type, level or aspect of principle theory the argument is about. This is the constructive part of the critique. Second, the critique aims to evaluate the theoretical and doctrinal positions and achievements of the various principle theories on each of the levels identified. This analysis is for the most part critical. The claim is that the principle theory is wrong on most counts and misunderstands itself by confusing the different levels of its theoretical and doctrinal aspirations. At its origins, as put forward by Josef Esser and Ronald Dworkin in the framework of a theory about the concept of law, it has its merit in rejecting the simplifications of positivist theories of adjudication. A defense of the role of specifically legal principles in the process of adjudication against arguments to the contrary from Larry Alexander and Ken Kress is offered. But the acceptance of legal principles does not entail a validity relation between the law and morality as supported by Alexy. As a theory of norms, the principle theory fails in its effort to claim a structural difference between rules and principles. It also fails as a methodological theory that reduces adjudication to subsumption under rules or the balancing of principles. It misunderstands itself when it is conceived as a doctrinal theory especially of fundamental rights as it is developed in Alexy’s main work “A Theory of Constitutional Rights”. The most promising aspect of Alexy’s principle theory could be its contribution to a more comprehensive theory of legal argumentation.

Le seguenti riflessioni hanno un fine teorico-pratico: imparare a trattare adeguatamente i due giudizi in cui si articola la decisione del giudice. Esse nascono da un’esperienza personale, che forse può essere utile comunicare. Nel corso della mia attività di giudice penale, ho notato che, sebbene la differenza concettuale tra giudizio probatorio e giudizio sussuntivo sia alquanto chiara, grazie alla netta differenza di senso delle quaestiones che essi mirano a risolvere, nondimeno tali giudizi interferiscono variamente tra di loro, in modi non sempre afferrabili. In particolare, in diverse occasioni mi sono trovato disorientato, in quanto ciò che credevo di star facendo o di aver fatto in funzione sussuntiva (in fase di istruzione, di deliberazione o di motivazione1) mi sembrava servire, al contempo, a fini probatori, o viceversa. Donde il desiderio di comprendere se queste interferenze siano di vari tipi, quali sono le loro cause, se siano tutte patologiche, se siano in parte evitabili e così via. D’altro canto, nello svolgimento dell’indagine, mi propongo di resistere alle opposte, diffuse tentazioni di far valere visioni astratte dell’attività del giudice o semplici intuizioni professionali: tentazioni parimenti incompatibili con un’aspirazione davvero teorica. Così, il contributo che vorrei offrire costituirà l’esito di un percorso graduale, articolato nei seguenti passaggi. Nel § 1, indicherò i principali fattori di complicazione del rapporto tra prova e sussunzione e cercherò di mostrare il carattere in buona misura apparente della problematicità che ne deriva. Nel § 2, sulla scorta di tale analisi preliminare, suddistinguerò in due tipi le principali tesi formulate sul nostro rapporto, tesi sovrappositive e tesi discretive. Nel § 3, col corredo di vari esempi tratti dal processo penale, proverò a sviluppare una delle tesi discretive, quella dell’Ermeneutica Giuridica Continentale, che tratta prova e sussunzione come attività di giudizio e si interessa al loro svolgimento naturale. Nel § 4, infine, ricapitolerò in forma poco più che stenografica i risultati dell’intera indagine.

It is often thought that consciousness has a qualitative dimension that cannot be tracked by science. Recently, however, some philosophers have argued that this worry stems not from an elusive feature of the mind, but from the special nature of the concepts used to describe conscious states. Marc Champagne draws on the neglected branch of philosophy of signs or semiotics to develop a new take on this strategy. 

The term “semiotics” was introduced by John Locke in the modern period – its etymology is ancient Greek, and its theoretical underpinnings are medieval. Charles Sanders Peirce made major advances in semiotics, so he can act as a pipeline for these forgotten ideas. Most philosophers know Peirce as the founder of American pragmatism, but few know that he also coined the term “qualia,” which is meant to capture the intrinsic feel of an experience. Since pragmatic verification and qualia are now seen as conflicting commitments, Champagne endeavors to understand how Peirce could (or thought he could) have it both ways. The key, he suggests, is to understand how humans can insert distinctions between features that are always bound.

Recent attempts to take qualities seriously have resulted in versions of panpsychism, but Champagne outlines a more plausible way to achieve this. So, while semiotics has until now been the least known branch of philosophy ending in –ics, his book shows how a better understanding of that branch can move one of the liveliest debates in philosophy forward.

This paper deploys an orthodox Marxian reading of the concept of subsumption of labour under capital. It does so through a brief, critical overview of the components of the Marxian conceptual instrument of subsumption of labour under capital (formal, real, hybrid and ideal subsumption). Recapitulating Marx's concept, it sheds some light on the consequences of such a reading as a way of understanding the current transformation of the global higher education sector into a capitalist production sector per se. The reconstruction is then considered here as an attempt to approximate the specifics of the subsumption of labour under capital within the higher education sector. Moreover, the paper aims at showing that a discussion of the university dominated by capital with reference to the functioning or constituting of markets does not provide real opportunities for the understanding and solution of such problems as precarization, exploitation or acceleration of academic work. Thus, it joins a wider stream of Marxist higher education research and could be seen as a conceptual contribution to a critique of the political economy of higher education.

This book documents the first life-cycle of the Post-Media
Lab (2011-2014). Taking up Fèlix Guattari’s challenge, the Lab aimed to combine social and media practices into collective assemblages of enunciation in order to confront social monoformity. Here we draw together some key essays, images and art projects by the Lab’s participants, as well as a close documentation of its associated events, talks, and exhibitions, to create a vivid portrayal of post-media practice today.

Edited by Clemens Apprich, Josephine Berry Slater, Anthony Iles & Oliver Lerone Schultz

With contributions by: Clemens Apprich, Josephine Berry Slater, Micha Cárdenas, Sean Dockray, Mina Emad, Bogdan Dragos & Inigo Wilkins, Fabien Giraud, Adnan Hadzi & James Stevens, Martin Howse & Jonathan Kemp, irational.org, Anthony Iles, Oliver Lerone Schultz, Gordan Savičić, Moritz Queisner, Rózsa Zita Farkas
– Part of the PML Books series. A collaboration between Mute & the Post-Media Lab

Uniwersytet jako dobro wspólne. Podstawy krytycznych badań nad szkolnictwem wyższym to kompleksowa propozycja wyrywająca nas z utartych sposobów myślenia i dyskutowania o problemach szkolnictwa wyższego. Biorąc za punkt wyjścia diagnozy o niewystarczalności nowoczesnej opozycji między tym, co publiczne, a tym, co prywatne dla wyjaśniania współczesnych transformacji uniwersytetu Autor kieruje naszą uwagę na toczący się w tym obszarze konflikt między kapitałem a dobrem wspólnym. Dzięki temu  jest w stanie zaoferować solidną podstawę dla formułowania alternatywnych rozwiązań najistotniejszych problemów stojących obecnie przed szkolnictwem wyższym. Krytyczne stanowisko zarysowywane na kolejnych kartach tej książki, spełni oczekiwania wszystkich tych, którzy mają już dość ciągłego interpretowania uniwersytetu w kryzysie, a chcieliby go wreszcie zmieniać.

The study that follows entitled Forms of violence in Marx’s Capital aims at locating the theming of violence in the mature Marxian work, particularly in the first volume. Non autonomous theming in social theory as well as in the Marxian work has led to this theoretical pursuit. At the same time an attempt is made at designating the political element in this fundamental work of the Capital.
For Marx violence is located at the first stages of the emergence of Capitalism most of all in natural forms.  During the process of constituting this new type of society violence acts through jus by going through it and structuring it with the element of one-sidedness. Consequently, in the established by now capitalist societies and relations, violence goes through the structures and relations of the financial life and field while it is internalized and consolidated by new productive relations and subjects. The present study keeps track of this succession and points out the violence and its forms that are embodied in the stages of development of the capitalist society.
The clear form of direct violence that can be traced in the protocapitalist era gets transformed most of all in unstated forms of violence in the new capitalist relation. This direct violence is transformed with a repetitiveness that gets registered and consolidated in the labor subjects so that the continuous, visible and direct form of violence does not occur anymore as necessary in the contemporary capitalist societies.
The choice of the categories of subsumption (real and formal) as organizational heuristical shapes helps us to point out the transition from the exterior obtrusion of violence to its internalization, with the form of obedience by the labor subjects, at the same time bringing out a different theming of violence in the Marxist work. The violence of financial relations, as an indirect form of violence in modern societies confirms its presence continuously through the coexistence of the forms of absolute and relative super plus value. Finally this in turn validates the exploitative element that structures the unequal capitalist mode of production. In periods of crisis, respectively, this contradictory element intensifies revealing vividly that next to the internalized obedience of financial relations, institutional state violence is continuously present. Also, it is capable of combining with other forms of violence emphasizing  the class-related trait of the violence itself as a medium as well as the social relations and contexts that request it.
In a parallel manner the notion of subsumption, continuously present in financial discourse and social life, is utilized as a relevant reading tool of the contemporary versions and imprints of violence in crisis conditions.


Key words: Marx, violence, primitive Accumulation, real and formal subsumption, relevant and full super plus value.

Carbon markets as a policy tool to mitigate emissions of greenhouse
gases continue to be controversial, especially in developing countries.
It is thus refreshing that Carton and Andersson (2017) undertook a
field investigation of a transnational forest carbon offset project in
Uganda. However, I am concerned that assumptions of structural
Marxism that underwrite subsumption theory may have led the
authors to see the project as inherently conflict ridden and
exploitative and to neglect actual benefits. Their presentation of the
project’s local impact jarred with my own empirical research into this
project, undertaken in 2009, as well as more recent news accounts.
While my field effort preceded the authors’ by 6 years, I attribute our
different interpretations largely to theoretical and methodological
differences. Evidence I present below suggests considerable
alignment between the interests of transnational carbon markets
and Ugandan smallholder farmers. Additional fieldwork might be able
to resolve these differences in interpretation.

An extended version of my conference paper, Capital's Means of Subsistence, in which I argue that Marx's theory of subsumption applies to the matter processed under capital, as well as labour. This paper considers relationships of food and power using food regime theory and the Frankfurt school (Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer), tied together by themes of domination, distance, and durability.

In Oliver Lerone Schultz’s dialogue with media activists Felipe Fonseca (Brazil) and Alejo Duque (Colombia), the interaction between smallscale, autonomous practices and their deployment by the state is discussed. Lula’s socialist government in Brazil turned to the expertise of urban media activists to try and implement its policy of digital inclusion for the country’s
often rural poor. The result was that some progressive ideas, such as copyleft  and open source software, were integrated into government policy as ways to bridge chronic underdevelopment and the need to accelerate the use of computer networks. Although the activists had few illusions regarding the
stakes of ‘digital inclusion’, nevertheless the experience of these delicate social and technical networks’ use as conduits of increased normalisation was sobering. But, shifting their focus from the technical, Fonseca reports that the unexpected outcomes were the lessons media activists learned from poor communities in ‘simple human values like generosity, sharing
[and] dynamic social formations oriented to problem solving.’ This exchange exemplifies the non-linearity of capitalist development and its resistance: pre-techncial networks of co-operation and enunciation come to affect a ‘later’ technical form that can be deployed to both normalising and singularising effect.

Anxious to Act
Five years after the tumultuous political events of 2011, which triggered a series of dispersed yet medially choreographed acts of resistance, the larger patterns and nature of global activism and individual action are in need of assessment and reinvention. From Tahrir to Taksim, from Occupy to Indignados, from the Twitter and Facebook Revolutions to the Blackberry Riots, the Anxious to Act stream confronts the events behind us as well as the fundamentally paradoxical challenges of action and activism in the muddy now.

Having seen the systematic recuperation of acts of resistance by a combination of media-savvy counter-choreographies and brute-force attacks, media-based action has been cast into uncertainty and ambivalence. A creeping unease as to what can be achieved by popular media expression has set in during the Post-Snowden Era. What was once conceived as the "noosphere" or "World Brain" has emerged as a fragmented global sensorium—one in which micropolitical and geopolitical movements seem out of sync, aside from the all-too important idea of "the commons."

Dealing with the complexity of notions of intervention and resistance within gigantic networked systems of subsumption, the discussions that make up this stream zoom in on the contradictions inherent in “media activism” as a still-evolving, uncertain concept. The stream reflects on the need for renewed convergences beyond the technological in a time that offers ever greater scopes for interaction—and reasons to intervene.

The Post-Media Lab’s first life-cycle, which this book documents, ran from September 2011 to February 2014. Its focus was the potential for ‘post- media’ practices. Its inspiration and name are derived from Félix Guattari’s concept of those social and media assemblages which unleash new forms of collective expression and experience. Retrieving Guattari’s concept of post-media, which can be found running through 30 years of new media practice and theory, the Post-Media Lab (PML) offered a space in which to reflect and operate upon the networked, mediatised society. Not regarding this as a purely theoretical endeavour, it also drew on the provocative notion of ‘post-media operators’ developed by Howard Slater through which he linked mediatised (sub-)cultures of all sorts with a programmatics of non- conformist practice.

Biologically inspired behaviour-based approaches to agent design have been particularly successful in mobile robotics. In this approach, rather than decomposing intelligent agents by function, the systems is segmented into independent components  of end-to-end functionality, which mirror behaviours such as wall-following and obstacle avoidance. To-date, although vision has been a vital part of robotic systems, it has tended to be treated as a monolithic peripheral, even in behaviour based agents. This research explores architectures for systems that extend decomposition by behaviour to vision. In such platforms a number of camera agents, each monitoring some simple vision characteristic (eg movement or boundaries) learn to collaborate in real-time on the interpretation of a scene. Visual learning unifies methods that are developed under the major dichotomy between supervision and adaptation in machine learning. Two monochrome non-stereoscopic look-forward cameras are used to test the strength of agent-based vision for mobile robots.