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 ---
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