Date: Fri, 27 Jun 1997 10:42:45 -0500 (CDT)
From: Timothy A Dayton <tadayton-AT-ksu.edu>
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
cc: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: Re: BHA: DCR


On Wed, 25 Jun 1997, hans despain wrote:

> 
> My last comment is to heed against treating the "four degrees" of 
> critical realism as (discourse) boxes, which i have charged was Tim's 
> tendency with the paper he had presented at Amherest last December.  We 
> should not use any one category to interpret anyone thinker or 
> tradition, but we indeed need all four degrees to understand (usually by 
> way of an ommisive or immanent critique) any particular tradition.
> 

First, I'd like to join the chorus and thank Gary for sharing his work on 
"Dialectic" with us--I look forward to having the opportunity to work 
through the book again, using his resumes as a guide.

Now, to take issue with Hans.  While I have no objection to the idea of
using "all four degrees" (sounds like the expression "the whole nine
yards") in the analysis of an intellectual tradition or of an individual
figure or work, it seems to me that using the degrees as categories or
boxes does have some utility.  Apparently Bhaskar thinks so too, since he
writes on p. 307 of "Dialectic": "Thus Hegel's dialectic is clearly of a
3L kind, as is Lukacs's.  Gramsci's is 2E/4D.  Colletti's, which mystified
him, is of a 1M character, as is Marcuse's, which he fully understood. 
Adorno's, with its heavy emphasis on non-identity, is clearly a vehicle of
1M."  A general characterization like this is useful even--maybe
especially--if you want to highlight moments that don't accord with that
general character.  To take a literary example for a metaphor, if you are
to get the full impact of the "utopian moment" in "The Waste Land," when
Eliot refers to "the fishmen lounging at noon,"  and the Church of St.
Magnus the Martyr with its "inexplicable splendor of Ionian white and
gold" (a moment, interestingly, which Ezra Pound made much more prominent
and forthright when he revised Eliot's draft) then you need to have a
sense of the general desolation, ugliness, and pessimism of the poem.

As for evidence of the utility of my categorizing the work of Gerog 
Lukacs and Ernst Bloch as a way of dealing with their aesthetics, I can 
only offer that the person who read the paper for me, Jamie Owen Daniel, 
found the paper worthwhile, and she doesn't keep up with Bhaskar but is 
steeped in Lukacs, Bloch, Adorno, et al. 

But what I'm mainly concerned to do here is not defend a conference paper
I worte, but rather note that Hans, without, I think, saying so, does
suggest the real problem: that the use of the degrees as categories
threatens to become an end in itself, in which case the categories are
probably pernicious.  What I'm concerned to do, when I can get back to it,
is to "put the categories in motion," attempting to arrive at some synthetic
moment specifically within the domain of Marxist aesthetics, and on the
basis of criticism of a specific literary work.  Fredric Jameson has
attempted something like this, although his synthesis machine is lots
bigger than any I care to use, but as our list-mate Michael Sprinker has
pointed out in his "Imaginary Relations," there are some real problems in
this project, as impressive and educational as it is. 

Yours,

Tim



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