Date: Fri, 4 Jul 1997 11:27:17 -0400 (EDT) To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU From: Howie Chodos <howie-AT-magi.com> Subject: Re: BHA: a (cr) driven critique First, let me say thanks to Hans D. for undertaking to respond to some of the points I raised in the course of our discussions a while back. I hasten to add, though, that trying to come to terms with Hans' post first thing back from vacation is a bit daunting. As I've mentioned before, I have never systematically tackled Dialectic, but I have spent some time this past week trying to come to terms with aspects of the framework that Hans has been working with in his run up to his full-blown critique. To help me, I looked back at some of Hans' previous attempts to explain to the list key elements of Bhaskar's Dialectic as well as trying to read some passages from the work itself. I have to say that I come away from this preliminary encounter with mixed feelings. On the one hand it does seem to me that there is something in Bhaskar's four-level dialectic, but, on the other, I continue to find his own articulation of it quite mystifying. Without a clear sense of how Bhaskar himself deploys his dialectical analysis, I have found it difficult to follow many of Hans' points. Despite my lack of clarity, though, I still find myself having serious misgivings about the ability of a certain kind of dialectical analysis to help us understand the real dynamics involved. I want to try to indicate very briefly the general sense of these misgivings. My reference for what follows is primarily the glossary at the end of Dialectic (the relevant passages of which I have appended to this post). I am thus not attempting anything like a detailed exegesis of Bhaskar's DCR, in the first place because I am incapable of it, but also because the points I want to draw on concern what seem to me to be his most general formulation of the significance of the four levels. Thus, my starting point is his remarks about the concepts which 'unify' each of these levels, as follows: 1M = alterity 2E = absence 3L = totality 4D = agency What struck me was that each of these does indeed characterise a specific kind of process, though I am inclined to try to grasp these processes not with reference to a single unifying concept, but rather in terms of two mutually irreducible poles. Thus we could think of four types of dialectic that revolve around processes involving dynamics that move between: identity / alterity presence / absence part / whole intentional / non-intentional The idea of dialectic, on this reading, would be that these processes are shaped by the mutual interdependence of the two terms as well as their mutual irreducibility. You can't have, for e.g., parts without wholes (and vice versa) yet the whole is never fully reducible to the parts, nor are the parts ever fully determined by the whole. The content of any particular process can never determined by its dialectical form, yet the dialectic is real in that the tensions it engenders can have a causal impact. If this is at all right, then Hans' argument concerning the relationship between value and class leaves me puzzled. He writes that: "To employ dialectical critical realism we are able to construct an expression of this with 'value' as a 1M category, the emergence of class specific to capitalism a 2E category, class relations themselves a 3L category as constituting the broad totality of capitalism based on the capital/wage-labor nexus, and class struggle and political manifestations (health care as one example) as a 4D category ... and finally (and this itself remains contingent on consciousness and actual action) the transformation or reproduction of such relations being a 5C category." In the first place, it seems to me that class is too concrete an entity for it (or even its different aspects) to correspond to a single dialectical level. Hans identifies three levels at which dialectical analysis applies to different aspects of class. But why is the first level excluded? On Bhaskar's own explication (see excerpts below) 1M deals with causal powers and generative mechanisms. Doesn't this apply to class as well? I have a great deal of difficulty with this kind of pigeon-holing in general. My own (highly undertheorised) sense is that we will find all the four kinds of dialectical processes at work across complex phenomena such as class. In the second place, I also have reservations about Hans' reading of Postone. Here, too, I wonder about the usefulness of categorising 'value' as a 1M phenomenon and class as 3L. But even if such kinds of categorisation are valid (which I doubt), I don't think that Hans' portrayal corresponds to the thrust of Postone's argument. If there is one central category in Postone, as I understand him, which imposes a direction on social evolution under capitalism, thereby exercising a 'totalising' effect (the unifying concept of 3L), it is precisely the category of value. This briefly said, I look forward to Hans' further clarifications and to his comments on other aspects of our earlier debate. Howie Chodos >>>>>>>>>>> From _Dialectic_ pp. 392-93 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 1M = Prime (first) moment. Characterized by non-identity relations, such as those involved in the critique of the epistemic and anthropic fallacies, of identity theory and actualism. Unified by the concept of alterity, it emphasizes existential intransitivity, referential detachment, the reality principle and ontology which it necessitates. More concretely, it fastens on to the transcendentally necessary stratification and differentiation of the world, entailing concepts of causal powers and generative mechanisms, alethic truth and transfactuality, natural necessity and natural kinds. Its dialectics are characteristically of stratification and ground, but also of inversion and virtualization. Its metacritics turn on the isolation of the error of destratification. 2E = Second edge. Unified by the category of absence, from which the whole circuit of 1M - 4D links and relations can be derived, its critical cutting edge is aimed at the Parmenidean doctrine of ontological monovalance (q.v.), the Platonic analysis of negation and change in terms of difference and the Kantian analysis of negative into positive predicates. It spans the gamut of categories of negativity, contradiction and critique. It emphasizes the tri-unity of causality, space and time in tensed rhythmic spatializing process, thematizing the presence of the past and existentially constitutive process. Its dialectics are typically of process, transition, frontier and node, but also generally of opposition including reversal. Its metacritics pivot on the isolation of the error of positivization and the oppositional aporiai to which it inevitably gives rise. 3L = Third level. Unified by the category of totality, it pinpoints the error of ontological extensionalism, including the hypostatization of thought. It encompasses such categories and themes as reflexivity, emergence, constellationality, holistic causality, internal relationality and intra-activity, but also detotalization, alienation, split and split-off, ill*it fusion and fission. Its dialectics are of centre and periphery, form and content, figure and ground, generative separation and de-alienation, retotalization in a unity-in-diversity. Its metacritics pivot on the identification of detotalization. There is a special affinity with 1M, since totality is a structure. 4D = Fourth dimension. Unified by the category of transformative praxis or agency. In the human sphere it is implicit in the other three. Metacriticalry, it pinpoints two complementary kinds of ontological de-agentification -- (dualistic) disembodiment, typical of (e.g. discourse in) the intrinsic aspect (q.v.), and (reductionist) reification, characteristic of the extrinsic aspect. There is a special affinity with 2E, since agency is (intentional) causality, which is absenting. Agency is sustained philosophically by an emergent powers materialist orientation and substantively by the concept of fourplanar social being in nature with the moral evolution of the species, like the future generally, open. Its dialectics are at the site of ideological and material struggles, but also of absolute reason and it incorporates dialectical critical realism's dialectic of desire to freedom (see C3.10). --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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