File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1997/97-03-08.181, message 57


Date: Sat, 8 Feb 1997 17:35:59 -0800 (PST)
From: LH Engelskirchen <lhengels-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: BHA: personalities and purposes


 
 
At the start of the year Hans E had raised a point about the
purpose of capital.  In that exchange he and I agreed that capital
was a social relation, and that, as an ontological matter, social
relations did not purpose or intend, but instead were reproduced
and transformed.
 
But then this problem arises:  the labor process is an activity of
labor acting on nature with a particular purpose.  Through labor we
transform nature to need, and this is purposeful activity.  Now
since capital is value which increase itself and the way it
increases itself is through the consumption of living labor in the
process of production, the question is posed, how does capital give
a purpose to labor if it does not purpose or intend?
 
I think the answer is fairly straightforward, but I'm anxious to
test my impressions against what others might think.  I hope by
offering an answer I do not shut off fresh (and better!)
cogitation. 
 
I think the key is in understanding Bhaskar's concept of a
position-practice system.  In PON B argues that there is not only
an ontological hiatus between individuals and society, but there
must also be a mode of connection.  Thus the reproduction of social
relations establishes roles into which individuals must fit.  On a
baseball or cricket field a pitcher and a batter must fit their
talents into different roles and they can't be confused about which
is which.  The rules of the game don't purpose or intend, but they
provide the frame within those who wish to play the game must fit
their skills and intentions.  
 
The same would be true of exchange in the marketplace.  The act of
exchange, viewed by the individuals participating in it, is a
transaction formed by reciprocal intention.  From the perspective
of the reproduction of exchange, it is (typically) a change of
place of material objects, a change of the world, which reproduces
the conditions on which exchange depends in the first instance. 
Purpose and intention don't enter into it.  "When praxis is seen
under the aspect of process, human choice becomes functional
necessity" (PON).   
 
Thus capital also is value which increases itself.  This
establishes a dynamic of social reproduction.  In order for a
capitalist to function as such he or she must intend to increase
value.  In order to function as such he or she must exercise
purposeful control over the labor process and over labor.  The
social relation of capital provides the roles within which she or
he must fit and the social rules he or she must follow in order to
survive as an agent bearing those particular social relations.  
 
The way I get to this is ruminating on the "personality of the
corporation."  Dominant theory takes the corporation to be a
fiction, an artifical person created by law.  An earlier tradition
thought the corporation was real, but could never explain its
reality except through metaphors of individual personality or by
resort to obscure and not very persuasive notions of group
personality.
 
Bhaskar's ontology, I think, offers a solution.  The corporation is
an emergent reality, one of the forms of expression of the social
relation of capital.  But then the question arises, if it is a
social relation and does not purpose or intend, but only is
reproduced and transformed, how does it control the labor process
and enter into contracts.  The answer I think is in Bhaskar's
concept of positioned practices.  This particular form of capital's
expression sets roles and rules which must be followed if one wants
to participate in the dynamic of capital's accumulation.  Law
codifies these.  Individuals step into those roles.  They
construct, with their own purposes, the personality required for
control of labor and participation in exchange.
 
In an enormously interesting insight, Hans E, has suggested to me
that this is capital, purposeless because it is a social relation,
hijacking, vampirelike, the purposes of individuals of which, for
the tendencies of its being, it has need.
 
Colin at least has something of the same problem:  how does the
nation state purpose or intend, enter into treaties, and the rest
of it?
 
I'd welcome comments.  It's a thing I have to think through.
 
Howard
 
Here are a couple of relevant passages from the POSSIBILITY OF
NATURALISM:
 
BEGIN PON: "And we can allow that speech is governed by the rules
of grammar without supposing either that these rules exist
independently of usage (reification) or that they determine what we
say.  The rules of grammar, like natural structures, impose limits
on the speech acts we can perform, but they do not determine our
performance. . . . [N]ecessity in social life operates in the last
instance via the intentional activity of men.  Looked at in this
way, then, one may regard it as the task of the different social
sciences to lay out the structural conditions for various forms of
conscious human action -- for example, what economic processes must
take place for Chrismas shopping to be possible -- but they do not
describe the latter. (ch2,s3) . . .
 
"For it follows from the argument of section 3 that social
structures must (a) be continually reproduced (or transformed) and
(b) exist only in virtue of and are exercised only in human agency
(in short, that they require active functionaries).  Combinging
these desiderata, it is evident that we need a system of mediating
concepts, encompassing both aspects of the duality of praxis,
designating the 'slots', as it were, in the social structure into
which active subjects must slip in order to reproduce it; that is,
a system of concepts designating the 'point of contact' between
human agency and social structures.  Such a point, linking action
to structure, must both endure and be immediately occupied by
individuals.  It is clear that the mediating system we need is that
of the positions (places, functions, rules, tasks, duties, rights,
etc.) occupied (filled, assumed, enacted, etc.) by individuals, and
of the practices (activities, etc) in which, in virtue of their
occupancy of these positions (and vice versa), they engage.  I
shall call this mediating system the position-practice system.  Now
such positions and practices, if they are to be individuated at
all, can only be done so relationally." (ch2,s4) 


     --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---


   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005