Month: November 2013

During last night’s seminar one participant remarked that in the former Yugoslavia citizens learned Marx by hearing pithy quotes. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” In the US, this is how many Christians learn the Bible. Learning Marx by quotes would tell us the same about Marxian social theory as learning quotes from the Bible will tell us about ancient Palestine, which is to say, nothing; or worse than nothing since it trivializes the subject. Marx is made to seem simplistic and naive. When we grow up we embrace mature social theory: Žižek or Deleuze or Derrida. And those who continue to embrace the connect-the-dots Marx?

If, however, we explore Marx the social theorist of radical historical immanence who ended up recommending not the completion, but the end of labor, we may find ourselves in possession of some truly helpful interpretive categories; helpful not in the sense that they “show us how” to make a revolution, but helpful in understanding our world. We already mentioned how Marx recommends the shortening of the working day as a way to reclaim our freedom. But since it is tucked away toward the end of volume 3 of Capital, few readers ever get there.

I am posting a reading from one reader who did get there. The French sociologist André Gorz built a whole career around this passage. His Critique of Economic Reason invited French citizens to enact legislation to make the shortened work day French law. They responded. And so Gorz – an ivory tower intellectual – generated a social revolution in France. The final legislation was so distorted as to be almost unrecognizable; it offered no real incentives to reclaim time that had previously been lost to labor. And, yet, when the efficiency police want to find an illustration of inefficiency, they almost always point to France.

So why is it so difficult to shorten the work day and reclaim for human being the time seized and colonized by abstract value? One answer comes from a source we have already read: Socrates’ Gorgias, which we read for the first seminar. According to Socrates, the hoi polloi (the many) are not equipped to grasp how and why their world is composed the way it is. “The many” therefore are specially susceptible to demagogues such as Pericles, who grant democratic rights to “the many” precisely because demagogues prove powerless in the presence of “the few” (oligarchoi). Remember, it is the 99% who demand the policies advanced by the 1%. And that is by design. Only were “the many” to enjoy sufficient leisure, security, education, and wealth; only then would they demand policies that are truly in the interests of the public. As it is, politicians (politikoi) – like Gorgias and Pericles – know that if they speak the truth to “the many,” their message will not be heard or understood. But this places politicians who want to serve the public in a bind. The public does not want its interests served. They do not understand their interests. So the question is, what shall we do?

The PowerPoint from the November 27 and the Giovanni Arrighi readings for next Monday are posted. I will need to meet with the presenters before you present. If you finish reading the text this before the weekend, then we should meet this weekend. If you are not finished before Monday, then we should meet on Monday.

The problem with some authors is that students know too little about them. Often this is the problem I encounter with Thucydides, Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle. The very opposite holds true for K Marx. Even if we have not read Marx, we think we know quite a bit about his theory of history, his critique of capitalism, and his political solution. Nor should there be any mystery why this is true. For over a century, “Marxism” was locked in battle with “Capitalism.” Those who described themselves as “Marxists” had a vested interest in interpreting Marx in a specific way; capitalists likewise had a vested interest in interpreting Marx in other ways. And so we enter the theater, so to speak, feeling that we have already seen the movie over and over, even when we have never seen it.
My own reading of Marx is itself highly specific. The chair of my doctoral committee, Moishe Postone, was a student of Jurgen Habermas, who was the youngest member of the Frankfurtschule Sozialforschung, a school that included Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse (among others). The Frankfurt School, in turn, was critically shaped by G von Lukacs, M Weber, F Nietzsche, and S Freud. There is a history here.
What we perhaps need to know about this interpretation is that those who hold this interpretation are inclined to situate K Marx both within the critically idealistic tradition that includes I Kant and GWF Hegel, and within the political economic tradition that includes A Smith, J-B Say, D Ricardo, T Malthus, JS Mill. Anyone who takes the time to excavate the footnotes in K Marx’s Kapital cannot ignore these references. But nor can they ignore the overall Hegelian form and structure of the underlying argument.
We must therefore call attention at the outset that what is often mistaken for K Marx’s “labor theory of value” is, in fact, the legacy of classical political economy as a whole – a point that we will have to emphasize again when we look at Chapter V, Book I, of A Smith’s Wealth of Nations. K Marx, thus, shared this theory with A Smith and GWF Hegel. Unlike A Smith and GWF Hegel, however, K Marx viewed the constitution of value by labor as neither “natural” (A Smith) nor “necessary” (GWF Hegel). So, whereas some Marxist theorists unfamiliar with the history of classical economic theory focus all of their attention on “Marx’s labor theory of value,” this is actually the least interesting and least original dimension of Marx’s mature critique of political economy.
But it is not only their unfamiliarity with the history of classical economic theory that accounts for their focus. Many Marxist theorists feel that Marx’s real aim was to highlight the injustice of the capitalist system. Since workers create all value, justice would require that they also own all value. Since they do not in fact own all value, Marx’s primary focus (these Marxist theorists believe) is to show why and how workers should seize the private means of production, make them social, and thereby eliminate the central contradiction in capitalism – the contradiction between the privately owned means of production and the public character of the forces of production. And there is plenty of evidence that this is precisely the theory that Marx held up until the mid- to late-1850s.
During his exile in London, however, Marx experienced a significant change of mind. This change of mind revolves around how Marx was coming to view labor. Yes, under capitalism, labor does constitute all value. But, this abstract value then accounts for the social form by which labor comes to be dominated.
We can clearly see Marx’s own thinking in this regard by comparing Marx’s earlier statements – where freedom is realized through the universalization of labor – with his later statements in Grundrisse and Kapital – where freedom is realized by severing the connection between labor and value. It can also be seen in a fundamental shift in Marx’s outlook upon totality or the universal. Whereas in his earlier writings, from say 1844 to 1855, Marx had viewed the stage of social history following mature capitalism as the realization of the universal or the completion of the as yet incomplete capitalist form – where all that is necessary is for labor to seize the privately owned means of production and thereby supersede capitalism first by socialism and then by communism – after 1855 Marx had already come to view any universal or totality composed by abstract labor as suspect. In the next stage of social history, therefore, human being in all of its particularities would eliminate the totality composed by its own abstract labor.
Finally, however, this means that instead of simply restating the classical economists’ labor theory of value in the first three chapters of his Capital, Marx is actually laying the groundwork for a critique not of capital, but of labor under capitalism. In other words, he is showing how labor composes value, not so that he can later make an argument for justice, but so that he can make an argument about how labor is responsible for its own domination; labor composes the system by which it is dominated. Labor in the abstract composes the abstract value form of the commodity and isolates this form from its material form of appearance. But, insofar as this is true, then, Marx shows, simply socializing the means of production does not touch this unique form of social domination. To the contrary, socializing the means of production is only the completion of the dominant totality composed under capitalism. It does not move us along to freedom. To the contrary, it is an extension of capitalist social domination.

So, what has happened since last Wednesday? Last Wednesday, we saw how Europe became accustomed to the new time discipline. But we also saw how they became accustomed to isolating abstract value from its material form of appearance and to experiencing their world and value in the world as a quasi-natural structure bearing them forward in time. As we learned from I Kant, this structure has gotten “under our skin” so to speak; it has actually taken hold of our bodies and minds. It is not only apparently structuring our experience and understanding; it actually forms the structure of our experience and understanding. It does not only appear to be bearing us forward. It actually is bearing us forward. What this means is that we should not be looking here for a deeper, more real or more natural “actual” world beneath a world of appearances.
This week we take up A Smith, GWF Hegel, and K Marx. On some level, A Smith and I Kant seem to be of two completely different worlds. I Kant is reconstructing a comprehensive set of interpretive categories through which we can grasp how it is possible for anyone to reflect critically not only upon the structure of the material universe (the world of appearance or experience), but also upon moral experience and judgment (or aesthetics or taste or culture). A Smith by contrast appears profoundly disinterested in critical reflection. Rather does he appear completely taken by understanding how economic growth – and continuous economic growth – is possible. So is there any relationship between A Smith’s problem and I Kant’s?
Yes, there is. But to appreciate this relationship we need to take a couple steps back and take a look at the mercantilist or quasi-mercantilist system at which A Smith is taking aim. According to this system, wealth is still identified with the commodity’s material form of appearance in general and with the national Exchequer’s volume of precious metals in particular. We need to think here of the wealthiest nation in Europe at the time, of Spain, and of its depredations in the New World. Based solely on its command of the material form of appearance, Spain is an inconceivably wealthy nation. And, yet, as everyone in Europe surely knew, it was not wealthy, but poor. Or we can think of France and of the French physiocrats who are inclined to associate wealth with the land and with its productivity; after all, the earth is the only renewable and (potentially) endlessly productive resource. Thus the French were inclined to associate wealth with the land in general and more particularly with agriculture. (One can see traces of this attachment to the material form of appearance throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; as an American, I think here about the large land-holders in the southern U.S. and about their incapacity to “see” or “consider” the army of abstract labor without which their considerable land holdings aren’t worth squat.
A Smith turns his readers’ attention away from this material form of appearance to the real foundations of wealth: abstract labor time expended. Herein, just like I Kant, A Smith appreciates why our focus on the material form of appearance – on experience if you like – is a distraction from the forces through which our world is actually integrated.
There is, however, a second factor that we need to bear in mind when comparing A Smith and I Kant. A Smith is writing from the heart of what is already the Third Cycle of Capital Accumulation (following the Genoese and the Dutch). There is no need for A Smith to speculate or hypothesize about comprehensive social, political, or economic integration, about the production of wealth, or about economic growth. A Smith is “living the dream.” I Kant, by contrast, is living on the periphery of Empire. And, although Prussia surely feels the effects of this hegemon across the North Sea and Channel, I Kant’s contact with the Third Cycle is largely literary. For I Kant, the comprehensive integration of the world is a theoretical problem. He is not thinking about the production of wealth. He is thinking about the production of knowledge. And, yet, by taking a couple of steps back, we can see how the world that I Kant is theorizing, in which abstract value pulls free from its material body (or, if you prefer, in which abstract labor pulls free from its material form of appearance), is the same world that A Smith is theorizing, where labor in the abstract is the source of all (again abstract) wealth and power.
So, what of GWF Hegel and K Marx? Where do they fit in? Here, GWF Hegel is the central figure because he is equally fluent in the language of critical idealism, of I Kant, and the language of the French and British political economists. So, where does GWF Hegel’s problem lie? It lies on several levels simultaneously. For, on the one hand, he does not buy the transcendental form that I Kant gives to freedom and ethics. On the other hand, he also does not buy the purely individual, partial, or private character that the political economists give to wealth. Yes, wealth is composed by the decisions of private economic actors. But, Hegel observes, they do not make these decisions in a vacuum. They are born along within a comprehensive, integrated, rational system without which all of these individual actions and decisions give rise not to order, but to chaos. So, if these decisions and actions take place within a comprehensive, integrated system, how is it possible for purely private, isolated individuals within this comprehensive system to grasp the whole? These individuals must not be anywhere near as private or as isolated as the political economists believe they are.
More importantly, if these individuals do grasp the whole, then where does this capacity, this knowledge, sit within the entire system? Where does it come from and what is its function within the system?
Here is where GWF Hegel shifts gears. Knowledge – the actual interpretive categories that grasp this comprehensive integration – must be generated by this integration. There is thus a correspondence between the interpretive categories and the material world itself. But there is more. Those who are completely embedded in this material world – those who are dependent on it – are incompetent to grasp how all of the elements fit together. To grasp the whole requires that an individual actively pursue grasping the form of the whole; and this requires independence and freedom.
Here GWF Hegel is directly appealing to Aristotle. The responsible political class cannot have a material interest in private enterprise, in oikonomia, without undermining its capacity to grasp the whole. For this reason, the responsible political class must rise above all individuality and particularity. It must rise to become the universal class – above all individual business, religious, social, or cultural particularities. What is more, it is only when this universal class truly grasps and orchestrates the whole – through universal law, regulation, and institutional arrangements – that society realizes its full potential, its full efficiency, making it possible, eventually, for all social actors to step aside and install machines in their place; therein claiming their freedom.
But, finally, there is K Marx. It is K Marx who recognizes that GWF Hegel’s totality is itself historically specific, that the comprehensive integration that it composes also constitutes the unique form of social domination peculiar to this regime of practice. This historicization and particularization of the capitalist totality does not invite us to step outside of capitalism, but to comprehend it from within so that we might step through it and on to an other side, where social actors are no longer dominated by abstract labor time expended.

All,

The readings for November 27, next Wednesday, have been posted. We have presenters for A Smith, GWF Hegel, and K Marx.

Our challenge for November 27 is to explore this new regulatory regime and to decipher how those who first grasped its true novelty understood what they were looking at. In many ways, A Smith is the “odd man out.” He is looking at the new regulatory regime from its epicenter. Two full cycles of capital accumulation, the Genoese and Dutch cycles, have already retreated into the past, long since eclipsed by the British cycle. And, like all of those who occupy the center, there are many things that A Smith mistakes as “normal.” A Smith could not have been fully aware, for example, that Great Britain’s wars with France had so depleted the Exchequer that the Crown would have to place historically high revenue burdens on its North Atlantic colonies. He could not have known that the very regime of social regulation he praises in Wealth had also given rise to a form of social subjectivity that imagined itself even more natural than the quasi-mercantile mentality that he condemns in Wealth. And so he could not have known that the consummately bourgeois revolution of capital unfolding on the Atlantic’s northwestern seaboard not only perfectly illustrated the theories he had developed in Wealth, but that it also announced the appearance of Great Britain’s arch-nemesis, which over the next century would eclipse Great Britain’s own production of wealth.

More importantly, A Smith did not see himself in his theory. Never once does he ask why or how it is he has put all the pieces together – what leisured absence of coercion, what education, and what social security empowered him to think clearly about the composition of the world. That A Smith left to his German counterpart GWF Hegel who in nearly all respects reproduces A Smith’s Wealth of Nations – division of labor, efficiency, land, labor, value – but with this difference. Hegel is curious about the conditions under which individuals enjoy sufficient freedom to think clearly and accurately about the world around them. In other words, unlike Smith, Hegel knows that thinking is itself dependent on the world about which he is thinking. And so he is curious about how he himself is composed. He thus, albeit imperfectly, illustrates what later social theorists will call immanent social critique.

From GWF Hegel to K Marx is but a small step. Because Hegel mistakenly ascribed the directional dynamism and goal of history to a rational being; to the Self-Moving Substance that is Subject. Marx by contrast recognized this quasi-transcendental Agent as nothing more or less than the sublime value form of the commodity, the rational agent and actor that gave rise to the comprehensive integration of the world system and the domination of social subjects within this system. And, although initially Marx felt that the working classes could and should ride this Agent to its natural conclusion, a comprehensive working class society, by the time he writes Capital Marx has concluded that labor is not the source of liberation, but the source of domination. Emancipation will therefore entail the end of labor through the reduction of the working day.

NOTE: Please, all presenters should contact me so that we can discuss the texts before next Wednesday.

Anyone who has dipped into any work of classical economics, whether A Smith’s Wealth of Nations, D Ricardo’s Principles, K Marx’s Das Kapital, it doesn’t matter, recognizes the intimate relationship that adheres between time and value. And, yet, what distinguishes Marx’s theory from other classical theorists, warranting some historians to call Marx the first of the neo-classicals, is that Marx was the first to recognize that not only labor, and value, but time as well is a social category. This week’s readings from D Landes, EP Thompson, and I Kant display varying degrees of recognition of the social character of time. I Kant is perhaps the most naive, but also the most important, since, when we interrogate our shared experience it naturally and easily yields Kant’s analysis. Yet, with D Landes and EP Thompson as well, we may detect, “double” time-keeping insofar as the emergence of work discipline appears against a backdrop of a drive for “industry” for which the invention of time was itself responsible. How can this be? Is capitalism simply greed? And, if greed, then why did it take so long to develop into a full system?

Which is why D Landes’ focus on religion helps move us some distance. For it is certain that in their initial attraction to time the monastics were aiming not at time, but eternity. But this only takes us part way. We still have to understand why such a novel and disturbing transformation in practice caught on with such speed once it was introduced. For, think of it; the clock is introduced some time in the twelfth or thirteenth century. By the fourteenth it is reshaping social life, if not generally, then at least in urban areas where textiles are produced. And so it is shaping the rhythms of social life throughout urban Europe. By the fifteenth century it is helping to constitute a complete revolution in religious subjectivity and practice, which by the sixteenth has penetrated the state and interstate relations. It has by then created a whole new world. How?

Part of the answer must surely lie in the relative weakness and backwardness, the fragmentation of what was not yet known as “Europe.” For there is nothing more certain but that if Europe has a culture, or if there is something resembling “Western Culture,” it is not composed out of the fragments of pagan tribes and practices left behind when Rome vacated the region for Constantinople. Rather is this culture composed here with the invention of time, this revolution in time, that occurred no further back than the 13th century and which, since, has completely engulfed the world.

This is a reminder that I will be holding office hours, 10-Noon, Mondays at Urban.

From the response, I can see that you are not convinced. Which means that you want me to lead the seminar.

So let me try to convince you why this is a bad idea. To do so, I want us to imagine that there is content in my head somewhere and content in the texts we are reading. I want you then to imagine that the seminar is a provocation to which you then are supposed to react. This means that as I am designing what I am going to say and do I am supposed to think about the ways that other members of the seminar will react to what I am saying.

Now I don’t disagree with this model. I think that it is more or less accurate. We have all read the text and I have prepared an outline of where I think we are and where I would like us to end up after two hours. Into this mix you then will throw up your own interventions in an attempt to deflect, redirect, or perhaps even reinforce the direction I have chosen; which, then, since I do have an agenda, I will try to anticipate in my outline. Yet, at the end of the day this model reinforces the hierarchical model of knowledge dissemination that (1) is either perpetuated in peer-peer relationships within the community of learning, thereby frustrating genuine collaboration; or (2) is so completely different than what might and should take place in peer-peer relationships of learning that the seminar fails to adequately prepare us for healthy and productive peer-peer learning.

But this still only scratches the surface. In the real objectified world, learning is already collaborative. And what I might learn from other collaborators is apparently what Plato’s Gorgias or Pericles learned; that those who might otherwise be independent agents capable of engaging and contributing to the construction of a shared world are instead eager to manipulated into what Noam Chomsky calls “consent.” Now it might seem that the Athenians who follow Pericles are simply duped and therefore that they are not complicit; that they are not responsible for their actions. And we might further ask whether we are right to call them collaborators, which suggests that they are responsible agents, free to respond. However, we might also recognize that their decision, following the spread of the plague, to nevertheless reelect Pericles to another term and to give all of their affairs into his hands, was the very way that they wished to exercise their freedom; that is, to freely relinquish their responsibility.

Now, I have reiterated this story from the first seminar, Gymnasium in a Box, in part to provoke reflection on the everyday relevance of that story; it is a story not only about 5th century Athens. It is also a story about us and about our pedagogy, our learning and our action.

My appeal for presenters for next Wednesday, November 20, is not only purely formal instructional technique. It is also an invitation to reflect critically on the content we are considering in the seminar; an invitation to seize the opportunity to actively live into freedom presented in that seminar. That might entail actively taking responsibility for the text in the seminar, to “own the text” as we say.

So, how might that work? In Berkeley, I sit down for an hour with presenters to see how they are reading the text and to share how I am reading it. This means that before they are put “in the spotlight” they have already had a fairly in-depth conversation with at least one other person – me – about the “problem” or “problems” the author of the text might have believed she or he was attempting to solve. It also helps me because it introduces me to a reading of the text that is different, even though by a hair’s breadth, from my own; and so it expands the community of discourse, the coordinates, that make up the “universe” deployed and recognized or acknowledged in the seminar. Finally, it constitutes a first step in poking holes in the wall that reproduces the hierarchy of learning; it invites and constitutes a culture of genuine citizenship such as Aristotle imagined in contrast to Plato.

So, I am hoping that three of you will take the plunge, that you will own EP Thompson, D Landes, and I Kant, and that we can work with these texts together before next Wednesday evening.

We are still about sixteen centuries out from the signal constellation that would eventually give rise to the current world system. As Marx points out in Volume One of Capital, the essence of that system is decisively not money, or even the love of money, or the love of things. Thus, in his discussion of Aristotle, Marx emphasizes that, since social relations in classical Greek society were not mediated by abstract labor time expended, but instead by relations of direction domination in the private oikos, Aristotle was unable to logically work out the relationships among the products of human labor.

However, Aristotle himself was unable to extract this fact, that, in the form of commodity-values, all labour is expressed as equal human labour and therefore as labour of equal quality, by inspection from the form of value, because Greek society was founded on the labour of slaves, hence had as its natural basis the inequality of men and of their labour-powers. Marx, Karl (2004-02-05). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: A Critique of Political Economy v. 1 (Classics) (Kindle Locations 2515-2518). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

What is missing is abstract time as a means of measuring the value of productive human labor. Or, to cast social mediation in Greek society in its own terms, social relationships were mediated in Greek society, as elsewhere, within and between a wide variety of practically negotiated regimes of practice. It was not really until the 14th century, using escapement mechanisms transported from China through central Asia along the trade routes that traders were now forced to share with crusaders, that human beings began to organize and coordinate the productive activities in time with the ringing of town bells.

Yet, as Landes points out, even here we must be careful not to read into its origins features that would not appear or even be useful until quite later. The escapement mechanism and bells that began to dot central and western Europe in the fourteenth century were originally erected not to discipline labor, but to announce times of prayer for cloistered mendicants, priests living in community. In the universe that they occupied, since they believed times of prayer to be a matter of divine revelation, it made all the difference in the world when a person prayed, at what hour, precisely. And in the colder and darker climate of central and western Europe other mechanisms – candles, water clocks, sand clocks, sun dials – were terribly ineffective. The Chinese escapement mechanism gave cloistered communities a means to measure not duration, which would signal the birth of capitalism, but the arrival of the proper time.

All reports are, however, that those living in the vicinity of cloistered communities were terribly upset by the constant ringing of bells. Their work rhythms were still calibrated to the rising and setting of the sun and to the cycles of seasons and tides. But since the chimes of bells in the monasteries  chimed out intervals that were completely out of sync with the rising and setting of the sun, only in the very middle of Summer did the bell announcing morning prayer chime after the Sun had risen. Otherwise, neighbors were being awakened long before they had awakened and long after they had gone to bed. All reports are that it was very annoying.

Yet, it was not long before we have records of textile out-putting shops using the chiming of monastery bells to announce the beginning and end of their work days. And with this, we find the first instance where productive human activity is measured in equal units of abstract time.

Still it is worth emphasizing the fierce resistance to this new measurement that burst forth from nearly all sectors of society; from the nobility not only because it seemed to them that entrepreneurs were locking them out of wage and price negotiations in which they played a central role, but also because textile workers were complaining about working before dawn and after sunset in the winter, and of being deprived of work in the summer, creating a point of possible rebellion; from the clergy because they too were locked out of negotiations over the just price and wage, in which, for moral reasons, they believed they had an interest, but also because it seemed to them that ignoring the rhythms of Sunrise and Sunset, replacing these rhythms with abstract, equal units of time, struck them as the devil’s work; and obviously there was resistance from the workers themselves.

We should therefore take care not to cast the die too soon. Elsewhere in the world, in communities that enjoyed stronger, more advanced, and more elaborate administrative structures, and more deeply rooted and uniform customs and traditions, there was little to no danger that this new mechanism would supplant systems that functioned quite well. The clock would not be adopted elsewhere in the world until the nineteenth and, in many places, the twentieth centuries. Nor should be forget how fiercely workers resisted every attempt to tamper with time. This story has been well-documented in EP Thompson’s piece.

But, finally, we should also remember how prior to this revolution in time the compulsion to live efficiently was nowhere in evidence anywhere on the face of the globe. Thus, no one thought that it was the least bit odd when Europeans spent nearly two-thirds of their time on holiday, much of this in festival time. To remind us of this time and its leading characteristics, I have posted an excerpt from Bahktin’s Rabelais, which offers us glimpses of a world where social relations were not yet completely integrated into a comprehensive, logical system of practice.

It is the revolution in time that makes this comprehensive integration possible.

Hello All,

Under the conviction that scholarship is always collective, even when we think it is not, I am hoping that three participants will step up and agree to present on our readings for next week. Let me tell you what this entails.

Presenters read the text looking for the problem that the writer believes she or he is solving. The presenter is responsible for identifying the problem for other participants in the seminar, explaining why the author might have thought that this was a problem, and then identifying how the author tried to solve the problem. This can provide an opportunity to discuss how well or poorly seminar members feel that the author solved the problem, whether the problem really needed to be solved, or whether there even was a problem to solve in the first place.

Usually, presenters take between fifteen to twenty five minutes working with the text. I hope that you will consider presenting next Monday, 18 November, on one of our readings.

Thanks,
Joe