Date: Tue, 15 Apr 1997 08:25:21 +0100
From: ccw94-AT-aber.ac.uk (COLIN WIGHT)
Subject: Re: BHA: Fetishism


Howie,

I have already accepted that i may be sailing periously close to
methodological individualism. However, close is the same as being. You argue:

How do we avoid the
>twin defects of voluntarism and determinism which I take to be one of the
>guiding elements of CR?

Yes, I think we are all agreed on this.

 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. 

But states only act insofar as embodied people act in virtue of them.
However, since these embodied people are not simply 'cultural dopes', then
we have to take them into account. They are not simply causally driven to
enact the role that the state gives them. They intrepret and give meaning to
their lives. Hence, here I think I can reverse the charge and say that in
talking of states "acting" you are in danger of advocating determinism. I
don't actually mean this charge, but am merely pointing out the tightrope we
are all walking on these issues. Nor are solutions simple.

>We need to find a way
>to better organise social life so that the emanations of our interaction
>serve us rather than dominate us.

100%

>
>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. 

And where this happens, as in talk of things acting which do not have the
powers to act, we should attempt to expose it.


>One sense in which I think it is fair to say that social structures 'act' is
>their ability to shape their environment.

The building firm does not build the bridge, even though bridge building
would possibly not happen without it. 'Structures don't take to the
streets'. But they are causally implicated by setting the conditions of
possibility for such acts.

 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.

Again absolutley, but without reinserting the embodied agents that do the
acting, you are sailing close to a determinist wind.

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. 

Again, I absolutely agree, and can they move, can they do anything without
the human agents doing it for them? And if not then we need to reinsert
these moving forces, who are not simply playing pre-determined roles. If
onbly beacuse cahnge has often come through those posirtioned practitioners
who transform the positions. Do positions transform themselves? Since social
structures only exist in virtue of the agents that reproduce and transform,
you simply can't write these agents out. Talk of states acting tends to do
just this.

>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? 

Actually this is RB's argument not mine (although I do agree with it).

 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. 

Yes but the TMSA is an INSISTENCE that human agents cannot be written out.

T
>
>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. 

Well, this puts it really well, because: who is going to do the transforming?


>
>If we cannot control them, can we change them? 

Again, I read this is a tacit admission of my position. What or who is the
"we", structures?

Thanks,


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Colin Wight
Department of International Politics
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Aberystwyth
SY23 3DA

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