File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1997/bhaskar.9706, message 13


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


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