Date: Mon, 14 Apr 1997 12:11:07 -0400 (EDT)
From: Howie Chodos <howie-AT-magi.com>
Subject: BHA: Fetishism


The theoretical impasse Colin identifies in his most recent post seems to me
to turn on a question that both Tobin and Howard began to address, namely
that of fetishism. The question here is whether we can impute the power to
act independently to social structures which are themselves the product of
human activity. Does the state act? Does capital act? How do we avoid the
twin defects of voluntarism and determinism which I take to be one of the
guiding elements of CR?

Once again, I think we need to grasp the dynamics in terms of the duality of
structures. States act, and capital is driven by an inherent logic, but in
neither case is this the intentional activity of living human beings. States
are not people nor is capital. But it is precisely the fact that they can
and do act that makes radical social change necessary. We need to find a way
to better organise social life so that the emanations of our interaction
serve us rather than dominate us.

I guess I am arguing (without really knowing where this argument will lead)
that fetishism in social life is ontologically grounded, and not merely a
defect of our understanding. The transmogrification of social relations into
things is, in my view, at the heart of the dynamics of social action that
the TMSA allows us to grasp. However, at this level of abstraction it cannot
tell us the precise nature of the relations that exist between people as
intentional actors and social structures as enabling and constraining
environments that prevails in any given social formation. This can only be
understood concretely, as the outcome of historical research, careful
analysis and active participation in social life. We can misinterpret the
existing situation either by overemphasising the range of options open to
individuals or by underestimating them.

One sense in which I think it is fair to say that social structures 'act' is
their ability to shape their environment. Once a particular set of
structures is in place there are various ways in which they can become
self-sustaining. Their institutional weight favours certain kinds of
practices and discourages others. This is not intentional activity in that
these institutions cannot think, do not have desires, cannot innovate, but
the consequences can be largely the same. 

When each of us acts we must necessarily take into account the natural,
social and intersubjective context in which we act. We thus confront all
these factors in a similar fashion, whether their origin is the intentional
activity of other people, the accumulated weight of past action embodied in
social structures, or the natural circumstances in which we find ourselves.
The natural environment tends to be the most stable of these forces, but
nature's actions can at times massively affect our own actions (eg. natural
disasters). Nature does not act intentionally, purposively or predictably.
But its 'actions' do alter the circumstances of our own.

Of course, nature acts independently of us, whereas social structures do
not. This is their ontological peculiarity that Bhaskar illuminates. But
does this mean that "human agents are the only moving force in the social
world", as Colin argues? It all depends what one means by "moving force". To
me this should not be equated with "intentional". Social life can be "moved"
by many things other than the purposive activity which is the preserve of
human agents. Colin's formulation comes too close, in my view, to a simple
recasting of the basic framework of methodological individualism. We need to
grasp the irreducible specificity of human action, but I read the TMSA as
giving us a way of doing this that does not deny the directionality imposed
on social life by pre-existing social structures. This directionality is a
"moving force" in social life. Capital has a logic that shapes social action
independently of the will of individual capitalists (to say nothing of the
will of individual workers).

All this poses the thorny problem of what it means to transform something
such as capitalism, a social structure which constantly transcends its
origins in human activity in order to acquire a 'life' of its own. It would
seem to me that we need to reset the structural moment, to find a way to
order social reproduction along different lines so that the distribution of
enablements and constraints is fundamentally altered. Does this mean that we
will ever be able to exercise conscious control over social evolution?
Certainly not in the sense that most transformative movements inspired by
traditional Marxism thought possible. Our ability to understand the nature
of these social processes does not mean that they can necessarily be brought
under our control. 

If we cannot control them, can we change them? I would still say yes we can.
The goal of critical social theory should be to put on the table the
possible alternatives to current social structures so that people can
increasingly make informed choices as to what forms of social organisation
they wish to adopt. Revealing the inherently fetishized character of social
relations under capitalism, how our own activity is transformed into a thing
which then comes to dominate us, is one condition for making the
transformation of capitalism possible.

Howie Chodos



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