File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1997/bhaskar.9707, message 9


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). 



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