Date: Sun, 24 Aug 1997 13:46:16 -0400
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: Re: BHA: Bhaskar on Adorno 


Hi all,

Unfortunately I don't have a lot of time to respond, but I was kind of 
confused by Colin's response to me.  I wanted at a minimum just to 
re-post my own position. [This exchange is starting to take on some of 
the maddening characteristics of the last one I jumped into...]  

My complaint was this:
>"RB doesn't give enough credit to A (and in at least one place claims 
>to improve upon A. but then essentially re-states A.'s position). What 
>I mean by not giving enough credit is both (1) that for my taste he
>under-respresents, if I can put it that way, the richness of A.'s
>thought (i.e., that A.'s thought cannot be `reduced' to the
>"non-identity" of Bhaskar's 1M) and (2) that there is no recognition
>that an effort to produce a Marxist, or neo-Marxist, "negative
>dialectics", itself worked out via an encounter (of some kind) with
>Hegel -- well, that this was exactly Adorno's project, and so it ought
>not be done again without a serious acknowledgement of this."

When Colin, I believe, quoted it, I then went on to identify and comment 
on the parenthetical "at least one place" mentioned above: 

I wrote, 
>"Adorno's own view was, in general terms at least, precisely
>that which Bhaskar presents as a correction, or further refinement of
>Adorno: viz., that "subjectivity" is "in some sense over-reached by
>objectivity."

My original point having been simply that it is precisely *because* 
Bhaskar and Adorno *are* very close here (and because Adorno came first, 
and because Bhaskar refes to him) that RB is to be criticized for not 
properly acknowledging the debt. 

But then, Colin, you write back and say that Bhaskar does *not* hold to 
any kind of "primacy of the object."  (And obviously, if I were to agree 
with you on this, then I would no longer have to complain that he didn't 
do right by Adorno in appropriating the language..)  But not only do I 
not agree with you, I can't see how you could possibly think it, or what 
it could possibly mean!  

Now, my *suspicion* is that by "Bhaskar does not believe in `the primacy 
of the object'" you mean something like "Bhaskar is not an empirical 
realist," or maybe "Bhaskar is not a reductionist"  -- since you cite 
emergence, and a concern for subjectivity as the counter-examples.  

But neither of these were ever suggested.  I mean, at a certain level, I 
was simply referring to the Bhaskar passage that you had cited, in which 
he writes:

>"...it seems intuitively, scientifically and philosophicaly
>unsatisfying and indeed refutable not to see subjectivity as grounded
>in _some sense_ , or over-reached, by objectivity, if only in a 
>meta-reflecive totalising situation of the couple." (Dialectic, p. 50.)

Subjectivity is over-reached by objectivity, Bhaskar says.  

[Or, in Adorno's terms, while subjects are mediated by objects and 
objects are mediated by subjects, there is an asymmetry.  Subject is not 
mediated by object in quite the same way as object is mediated by 
subject.  I tried to point to a few of the implicit differences in 
Bhaskar and Adorno's respective formulations.]

And this, of course, by itself is not to say much -- only that Bhaskar, 
like Adorno, is some sort of materialist.

Is that any better?
Also, are others getting sick of this topic?  Maybe we should go back to 
RTS, pre-dialectical though it may be.  (What would people think of 
doing *Dialectic* or *Plato, etc.* next?)

R.

R.



     --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---