From: MSPRINKER-AT-ccmail.sunysb.edu
Date: Wed, 25 Sep 1996 12:15:40 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Things



               State University of New York at Stony Brook
                       Stony Brook, NY 117777

                                            Michael Sprinker
                                            Professor of English & Comp Lit
                                            Comparative Studies
                                            516 632-9634
                                            25-Sep-1996 12:07pm EDT
FROM:  MSPRINKER
TO:    Remote Addressee                     ( _bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu )
 
Subject: Things

In response to Ruth Groff's post, the last bit only.

Some "things" do depend radically on our descriptions of them,
others do not.  Gravitational attraction, electromagnetic
interactions among sub-atomic particles, the specific weight
of mercury all fall into the category.  But other things, e.g.,
revolutionary social change, may often depend in some measure
on how we describe them, that is to say, wrong descriptions
(bad theories about what is to be done) can prevent a 
revolution's occurring.  Lenin was right, the Mensheviks
were wrong, and on that fact some measure of the success of
the Bolshevik Revolution depended.

Not all social phenomena are of this order, but consider the
following:  if the majority, or even a large plurality, of
workers in a capitalist society were suddenly to reject the
ideological compact of the wage-relation, might that not
make the continuing existence of the capitalist mode of 
production in that society less certain?  It's a tricky
business theoretically, I know, but it is worth pondering
whether the social structures that dominate our lives, even
those that are "relatively enduring" and products of many,
many long-dead actors and actions, might not, at certain
determinate points in history, depend on the conceptualizing
of them that would at other times be taken for granted by
most.

Michael Sprinker