Copying and pasting passages from a PDF produced some interesting line-breaks… These are from “Periodizing the ’60s” (which has some interesting ideas on the proliferation of small affinity groups in that period, via Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason):
The final ambiguity with which we leave this
topic
is the
following:
the 60s, often
imagined as a period
in which
capital and first world power
are in retreat all over the globe, can
just as
easily be
conceptualized as a
period
in which
capital
is in full dynamic and innovative expansion,
equipped with a whole armature of fresh production techniques and new
“means of production.”
However para-
doxical a “materialist” philosophy may be in this respect, a “materialist
theory of
language” will clearly
transform the very
function and operation
of “theory,”
since it opens up a dynamic
in which it is no
longer ideas, but
rather texts, material texts, which
struggle with one another. Theory so
defined, (and it will have become clear that the term now greatly
transcends
what used to be called philosophy and its
specialized content) conceives of
its vocation, not as the discovery of truth and the repudiation of error, but
rather as a
struggle about purely linguistic formulations, as the attempt
to
formulate verbal propositions (material language)
in such a way
that
they
are unable to
imply unwanted or
ideological consequences.
late capitalism
in general (and the 60s in particular)
constitute a process
in which the last
surviving
internal and external zones
of precapitalism-the
last vestiges of noncommodified or traditional space
within and outside the advanced world-
are now ultimately penetrated and
colonized in their turn. Late capitalism can therefore be described as the
moment in which the last vestiges of Nature which survived on into
classical capitalism are at
length eliminated: namely
the third world and the
unconscious.