File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1997/bhaskar.9708, message 104


Date: Fri, 29 Aug 1997 08:15:59 +0100
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu
From: ccw94-AT-aber.ac.uk (COLIN  WIGHT)
Subject: Re: BHA: Bhaskar on Adorno 


Hi Michael,

I'm dashing off to the conference so I only have a bit of time to correct
your misunderstandings of my position and perhaps the basic point of
disagreement. 

My question, which I may be overstating, repeating
>endlessly etc., is not whether RB either perpetuates a dualistic either/or
>stance totally or has overcome it fully, but the extent to which the
>vocabulary of DRC is caught up in a force field of opposition between its
>pre-dialectical and dialectical phases. 

I think it is now time to make good on just what this force field of
oppositions is exactly. Just what in CR does DCR reject?

Such tensions can be highly
>productive, notwithstanding your preference for the surely impossible ideal
>of a totally internally coherent theory about an otherwise contradictory
>social and ideological order. 

Sorry, I fail to see how you extrapolate from my probings to this position.
What impossible ideal am I chasing? Also are you suggesting that the
contradictory social and ideological order _determines_ the content of our
theories to such an extent that we are inescably trapped in the web? This
seems like Foucaultian resignation to me. Look, nobody is suggesting that RB
has got everything right or is totally consistent. Long term list member
will know that this is not my position. 

For sure, ideas are causal and real, precisely
>because they are never about social reality so much as one, this-worldly
>facet of that reality. Dialectical social thought is an instance of that
>which it is about, unless one sticks with the archimedean point "view from
>nowhere" mythology - itself all-too rooted in specific this-worldy materials
>interests, AKA the "authority" of the military/technological/applied-science
>nexus.

I simply don't get your point here, apart from some vague undercurrents of
conspiracy theory vis-a-vis the military/technological/applied-science
>nexus. I don't think the social world works with this level of conscious
intent.


>I take your point (and that of others) that it might make good educational
>sense to work one's way up to DPF, although I also share Alan Norrie's view
>that the thesis and implications of DPF is far more exciting (perhaps from a
>social scientific point of view?). 

Sorry, maybe I misunderstood Alan's point, but I didn't read him the way in
which you are. Alan to me seemed to be suggesting that DCR was an enrichment
of CR. You seem to be suggeting that DCR is something altogther different
fom CR such that one can understand DCR without CR. I have to say this seems
like lunacy to me. I don't doubt that Dialetic is an important phase in RB
work (other list memebrs will again, I suspect, confirm that I have
staunchly defended Dialectic despite its impenetrable nature), but the point
is that I see a dialectical devbelopment between CR and DCR whereas as you
seem to suggest a Kuhnian paradigm shift. 

On the other hand, there are also some
>clear limits to the line which states "one must start at the beginning" and
>"learn to crawl before you try to walk" etc etc. How much time should someone
>invest in figuring out the significance and rationale of claims, theories
>etc, which even the author has, for possibly good reasons and via the
>internal dialectics of debate that characterise all living traditions, come
>to regard as superseded, inapplicable etc etc.

These are really large claims. Again and to restate, just what areas of CR
does DCR reject?

 Do I still need to learn
>ms-dos commands before attempting to double-click on a windows icon? (file
>under "yet another inappropiate analogy on the bhaskar list")

If, when you double click on the windows icon Michael, and it fails to
respond, knowing some dos commands is a form of empowerment (knowledge is
necessaery but not sufficient for emancipation). An insight I dare say that
CR could provide equally well as DCR.

. Adorno, however,
>makes the point that one cannot avoid considering the specific ideological
>constellation at play when such decisions are taken, and that we have to
>recall that in marx's period the predominant ideological forces took a
>somewhat theological/spiritual and metaphysical kind, against which the
>secular and materialist aspect of positive science made good sense as
>ideology critique and inversion. 

Here I have to agree with Ralph's comments, I see very little materialism in
positivism or in evidence today. perhaps that's what we need, more materialism.

Under consumer capitalism being a
>"materialist" has taken on quite different, even somewhat conformist
>connotations; 

Yes, but nobody is liable to claim that being a materialist in this sense is
linked to being a materialist in the philosophical sense. Have a look at
Collier, page one I think (coffee shops in Bangor etc.)

whilst we have rather been given rather more reasons to be
>cautious about linear evolutionary and causal models of historical progress
>driven by iron laws of history by ideologically-neutral forces of technology
>and productive economic forces, i.e., from spear to Mutually Assured
>Destruction.

Sorry, who are you attributing this belief in linear evolutionary causal
models too, not Bhaskar surely, or anyone on this list for that matter.

The point I am driving at with some highly
>speculative gusto is whether or not DCR may, in 50 years time say, not have
>been some reason to regret defining itself negatively against irrealism
>without an equi-distancing of itself from all manner of "vulgar" and
>reductionist versions of realism. 

Oh come on please, Michael, you cannot say that RB does not argue against
vulgar versions of realism. In fact his most vehement critiques are of just
just false forms of realism. Empirical realism, linguistic realism,
conceptual realism, all come under the cosh. Equally, it is incorrect to see
CR or DCR under the aspect of a negative critique of irrealism, rather, what
RB argues is that real/honest irrealism is impossible.


>Michael
>
>Well, I got the distinct impression that you were pretty confidant about your
>understanding of DPF, even to the point of agreeing "absolutely" with this
>minorly dialectical response to Alan Norrie (doesn't RB make a similar
>dialectical/relational point about about how differentiation from what X is
>NOT, is the means to get at what X "IS"?); 

No Michael please, i am afraid I must push you for a little more rigour. We
were debating, as I pointed out, a minor point in Dialectic (the treatment
of Adorno) not Dialectic itself. I have never suggested that I understand
totally Dialectic. The merest glance through the archives of the list will
confirm this.


>BTW do you think that in 200 years people will still be using Hegel as a foil
>against which to establish their latest "new version" of dialectic, as they
>have for the last 200? Or are you confidant that Bhaskar will have come to
>play that axiomatic role? Tricky socratic and rhetorical question?

Don't care really, since I don't have enough confidence in my own
understanding of the issue to say with certainty that RB has got it right
and Hegel got it wrong. What I do know is that I believe that DCR is an
enrichment of CR and it is precisely here that it gains its strength. As RB
himself might put it, the dialectic phase of CR is merely a ((n) important)
surface ripple on the sea of CR.

Soory if the tone of this is a little overdone, but I'm in a hurry. See you
at Warwick.

Thanks,


------------------------------------------------------------------------

Colin Wight
Department of International Politics
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Aberystwyth
SY23 3DA

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