1.) I found Hall's rereading of Marx in the "Marxism Without Guarantees" piece to be a nice moment of reflection on my own readings of Marx in previous courses. Hall's nuance with the language gives the passage concerning the relations of Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham a meaning I had up until now not considered, the softening of rather stringent terms such as "false" into ideas being partial rather than wrong allows me to view Marx more charitably. That being said, I want to ask my question on how this understanding of Marx relates to issues of class consciousness in the current moment. If we are to use Hall's reading of false consciousness, ideally then the movement toward class consciousness is the mass proliferation of information concerning the exploitative system of Capital which would theoretically produce a proletarian class consciousness that could establish a potent rival force to the ideologies and economic structures of Capital. However, this proliferation is becoming an increasingly present (if not already present) reality as access to the internet becomes an ever-ingrained element of daily life yet it seems as though Capital is not only getting more centralized but is also shifting forms into a more Social Capital dominated schemas. There have indeed been many gains to undermine and openly oppose Capital, many of which have been facilitated through the internet as both an informational database and a means of communication, however, it feels as though such a hoped for oppositional consciousness has not cohered into a force which can establish a dual power structure which allows for substantive upheaval of current institutions. Seeing as how just the recognition and proliferation of knowledge on the contradictions and exploitations of Capital facilitated by the internet has not fundamentally uprooted the system from its dominance or pseudo-naturalization, is the model of consciousness and class structures necessarily the best avenue for understanding historical progression or perhaps are there more minute issues such as psychical or specific social structures that have to be addressed if we want to keep this model of understanding socio-economic processes and relations? Essentially, is the Marxist paradigms of class really fruitful anymore? (I recognize my reading of Marx and some of the extrapolations made in this question are coming from my own interactions with Marx and large, even global, structures which I could not hope to address exhaustively here or even throughout the entirety of my career. I apologize if I have not been charitable to Marx or Marxists based on my potentially unnuanced readings of Marxist literature.)
2.) My second question is on Butler and the issue of academic terminology as it relates to time. I am sympathetic to Butler's stance, there are ideas that do require a complexity of explication that some may find alienating. To paraphrase Marcuse from Butler, if we could portray the ideas in more streamlined fashions, we would. However, this issue of lexical complexity is not just one for the present moment but also for the future. Often when I am engaging in philosophy or theory from prior centuries, there will be words used that today have specific connotations which are completely different from the ways in which the author and their contemporaries would define said word (recently I was reading Descartes for another course and the word "accident" was used. For Descartes the word was in reference to the unique attributes of individual bodies while in the modern day we often see it more as describing something mistakenly or randomly happening). This brings me to ask: does lexical and conceptual complexity hinder or help future readers to understand our work? On one hand, it potentially could hinder understanding as idiosyncratic or niche terminologies could become antiquated and generally fall out of use which could lead to confusion. However, on the other hand, if one navigates this complexity with their own unique mark I suppose, giving words and concepts meanings and definition that are specific to their work and studies, it could preserve those intentions from the ever-changing nature and use of language.
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