Date: Sun, 13 Apr 1997 00:54:46 -0700 (PDT)
From: LH Engelskirchen <lhengels-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: BHA: How Gauling (he said with a CR wink)


 
 
Remember Tobin the Hound of the Bhaskarvilles is our mascot and
belongs to all of us, you gave him to us, and we just left him with
you to take care of.  And a pretty good job you're doing of it too
if he snaps (unintelligibly of course) at the mere mention of
Habermas.  I say right on.  But don't let him chew on any more of
my posts.  They get to you all garbled.  
 
You say
 
>"It seems to me that you [me, Howard] and Colin are adding
criteria that *presume* that there are only atomistic and physical
real beings, i.e. individuals.  And to me, *that* has very real
political implications, since it means that dominated classes,
races, genders, etc. can have agency only through individual action
and should not bother with organizing, or they'd be engaging in
fetishism, indulging a fiction (false consciousness, anyone?), or
whathaveyou.  Indeed, it says that socialism itself --
cooperatively *organized* labor and decision-making -- is just a
pie-in-the-sky fantasy and could never *exist*." 
 
What I say explicitly is that we want to maximize the intentional
activity of each in order to maximize the causal power of all. 
 
I do not say that when individuals organize all they have is their
own intentional activity.  On the contrary they bring into being
new social relations, new conditions and social forms of action,
which are real.  These new conditions and forms of action, which
are emergent, have causal powers.  They are unavailable to
individuals acting alone.  They are unavailable to mere
quantitative aggregations of individuals.  But to have causal power
does not mean that the newly emergent conditons and social forms of
action actually, in an agency sense, act -- unless you mean this in
the generic sense you told us to avoid.
 
The problem all goes back to your position that 
 
"The criteria we've determined for a social agent are (1)
intentionality, i.e. reasons that can be effective causes of action
. . ."
 
I argued that a collectivity could be said to intend because
intentions, reasons or beliefs are all forms of meaning and meaning
is social.  Once a political party has adopted a platform or
principles, then this is its political line and its line provides
reasons for action.  But for intention to become action involves
more than meaning (2d Thesis on Feuerbach).  It involves also the
real appropriation of nature, which social forms cannot, in
abstraction from the intentional activity of individuals, do. 
Moreover, intention can be the cause of action and yet the action
not be of the same entity that intends.  The capitalist provides
the goal and end of capitalist production.  The laborer acts.  A
spur can be moved from one place to another miles away because it
has the causal power to cut and sting.  But it is the horse that
moves.  Social relations provide the conditions for the intentional
activity of individuals.  But the real appropriation of nature
through labor is always a process involving the muscle and mind of
an individual laborer.  If that laborer works in conditions of
isolation, he or she will not benefit from the causal powers of
social labor.  If he or she works in cooperation, then his or her
individual labor will exist also as a bearer of collective labor. 
 
 
"Who built the seven gates of Thebes?  
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed,
Who built the city up each time?  . . .
 
Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Was there not even a cook in his army?
Philip of Spain wept as his fleet
Was sunk and destroyed.  Were there no other tears?
                              Brecht
 
 
 
Your doggie also chewed up the part about fictions and fetishizing. 
I do not think society is a fiction, as you know, and I do not
think collectivities like the state and the corporation are
fictions either.
 
I do think they are fetishized.  But that does not mean I think
that any cooperative action of any kind involves necessarily
engaging in fetishism.  This would be no more true than to say that
because commodity fetishism exists, it is impossible to produce and
distribute a product without engaging in fetishism.  
 
Also, pace you, I do not say society's existence necessarily
involves fetishism and fictions if you mean this in the strong
sense that society is only composed of fetishes and fictions.
 
On the other hand, if, when you say, 
 
"RB . . . does not, *pace* Howard, conclude that claims of
society's existence involve fetishism or fictions," 
 
you mean that RB does not believe society's existence ever involves
fetishisms or fictions -- 
 
No, I know you cannot mean social life according to RB never
involves fetishisms or fictions because exposing such things and
their necessity is integral to his project.  The function of
metacritique is precisely to explain what *cannot* be said about
ideas and institutions in a given frame of language because of the
fictions and fetishes generated by social life.  We are tonguetied
when it comes to expressing the distribution of social labor
embodied in any particular product of labor.  So instead we let our
products express our social relations.  We are mute when it comes
to expressing the combination of individual efforts involved in
marching north through Europe.  So we say Caeser beat the Gauls.  
 
Howard
 
Howard Engelskirchen
Western State University
 
     "What is there just now you lack"  Hakuin


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