Date: Sun, 8 Jun 1997 04:38:19 -0700 (PDT) From: LH Engelskirchen <lhengels-AT-igc.apc.org> To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU Subject: Re: BHA: Base & Superstructure On Colin's first point: I don't think we are disagreeing about things but about labels. There is the universe of all agents which includes anything that exercises causal power. As a subset of that universe there are intentional agents, of which individual human persons are a prime example. Intentional agency is how we exercise our causal powers. On the second point, I take it Colin's objection is to the use of the word "determines" rather than to the idea, for example, that machines may stand idle as a consequence of a crisis of overproduction. But I don't think we should be finicky about using this word. There is nothing wrong with the word. If the context is humean, then there is a problem, but it is always the context that causes the problem, not the word. The state of weather does determine whether cricket games are played in England. But domed stadiums can be built. On the third point -- whisper, whisper, nudge, nudge, wink, wink -- I do think we need more than a ready retort. From the point of view of methodology we need real definitions. And that takes theoretical work. Which connects with Tobin's point about language. Tobin read my post as a resounding defense of the base- superstructure metaphor. Actually I was hoping it would be read as a resounding defense of the importance of our common effort to grapple with the text of RTS 2(5). For example, Tobin, your explication of the root meaning of "autonomous" was a real contribution to my understanding. I didn't know that. It helps me fix the meaning of the use of autonomy in RTS 2(5). It seems to me completely consistent with the idea RB is trying to communicate -- that the autonomy of a thing depends on the law it gives to itself by the exercise of its causal powers. I would have welcomed your explanation of that as an explanation of 2(5). It is authentically a small concrete example of "from each, to each" -- from each according to her understanding. This is the main thing I look for on the list. Tobin argues that I have reconstructed Marx because he uses "economic" base and I say it is more than economic. I didn't express myself well. If everybody used 'economic' the way Marx does I wouldn't have any problem with the word. But criticisms of Marx's presentation often understand economics in a very narrow positivist and neoclassical sense. I meant to differentiate my understanding from that. Marx uses economic base to refer to the relations of persons with one another and with the raw materials and instruments of labor in the process of appropriating nature to use. I accept that as an adequate use of the word "economic" and adequate to what is meant by the "base." I am not trying to add other dimensions to that or to fuzz the edges. Nor do I think that what you refer to as an "ontological reinterpretation" incorporating "ontological emergence" is a reconstruction. The extent to which Marx was a depth realist in the critical realist sense is an interesting question. My reading is that Bhaskar has made it possible to appreciate the extent to which Marx's methodology was not derivative of positivist philosophies of science, but was something genuinely revolutionary. Consider the concept of "value." There is no way to access this except through the methodology of depth realism. You must make a distinction between the tendential operation of a mechanism and a pattern of events. If you deny this, I don't think you will be able to make sense of the first 100 pages of Capital. But there is no question Marx considered the relation of value real. So where is the ontological reinterpretation? And if you accept that value is real, and manifest in, but distinct from, the pattern of events (price, demand and supply), then I can show you, had you world enough and time, how that determines something different from it, yet required by it, namely relations of coercion. Bhaskar teaches me to say "emergence," but the dynamic and relationship, and its palpable ontological reality, are present in Marx. What is not present in Marx is a clear specification of the scientific objects to be studied in the case of the superstructure. And there has been very little attention to this, all things considered. I think he provides some pretty good suggestions for law, and I think we can specify the ontological object as material relations of coercion (whose function is to appropriate the will), but what is the scientific object or objects designated by the ideological or cultural superstructure? That is, how can the question get asked "where does language belong?" Must it belong? What is it about the base/superstructure problem that presupposes its belonging? Where does "intentional agency" belong in the base superstructure metaphor? The question doesn't make sense. Like intentional agency, language seems a presupposition of what we are. The social relations into which we enter in the appropriation of nature are necessarily meaningful relations. So are the social relations of coercion which make the appropriation of nature possible. The more pertinent question would seem to be how language might function differently in these different structures. What does Voloshinov have to say about this, by the way? I largely agree with Tobin's critique of my critique of the passage on causality Erik provided from Korsch: "It just won't do to read back bhaskarian definitions of causality or dialectics onto Korsch, if he had something else in mind." Fair enough. With this qualification. Causality we suppose to be ontologically real. And the causality natural science identifies is independent of its identification. So it is not incorrect to say that I disagree with the idea that causality as applied to natural sciences does not apply to understanding the base/superstructure problem, even if Korsch understood that causality differently. But anyway I take your point and also I would not understand the proposition just asserted dogmatically -- all I would maintain is that the notion of causality is meaningful in social science in something of the same general sense that it is meaningful in natural science. Referring to the quote from RTS 105 concerning the way laws situate limits or impose constraints, Tobin writes that this is not a complete definition of causality: "To define causality as the (negative) limits on what something can do, gives us no understanding of what it (positively) *can* do." This is an important qualification. Perhaps the point is that insofar as a thing is an autonomous thing, then whatever influence some other structure or thing has on it, including one from which it emerges, must be played out through its own intrinsic laws. In other words, the state of the market can determine whether machines are used, but economic laws are not relevant to the way a piston moves up and down. In order for economic mechanisms to causally influence a machine, they must be played out through machine mechanisms. Michael, I have never had any idea what "the lonely hour of the last instance never comes" could mean. I have recently looked again at parts of Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, incidentally, and thought it was quite good on base and superstructure. But I don't get it for the lonely hour. You say that economics never appears as a pristine determinant, but this is a funny way to say that. The proposition is that the economic structure is determinant in the last instance. I think some aspects of the economic structure do shape some legal relations. A very limited claim. But then the lonely hour has come. I mean for those legal relations shaped by economic relations the bell has sounded. The trouble with the lonely hour is with the methodology of abstraction. Instead of using abstraction to point to mechanisms which can only be accessed by abstracting from events, Althusser seems to point to an abstraction as something true in a theoretical sense, but not really true. This is the way idealism uses abstraction. Hans -- I think these questions of causality would be advanced by the material in the next section. Howard Howard Engelskirchen Western State University "What is there just now you lack" Hakuin --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005