To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu
From: cow-AT-aber.ac.uk (Colin Wight)
Subject: Re: BHA: Re: Help
Date: Wed, 22 Oct 1997 11:27:33 +0100


Hi Alan,

Many thanks for your lengthy reply. BTW what do you think about recent discussions in Britain about the idea of corporate crime. This whole discussion very much links in with my treatment of the state at the conference I think, and the way the deabte has been framed so far really does reveal the methodological individualism at play. I mean, New labour are talking of punishing corporate crime by fining the directors are they not. When are they going to deal with corporations as structures, and structured. 

Anyway, on decentering: Of course, I know most of this stuff, I understand what the pomos mean when they talk of a decentred subject. What I fail to understand are the conditions of possibility for a decentred understanding. At some level, my pomo writer, who is called Roxanne Lynne Doty BTW, (the article, for anyone interested, is called 'Aporia: A Critical Exploration of the Agent-Structure Problematique in International Relations Theory' The European Journal of International Relations (V.3, N.3, 1997). My thesis BTW is titled, 'The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory: A Critical Realist Reappraisal' so you can see why they asked me to do a reply) must let one of her many selfs cohere into a self in order to write the article. The article is itself _centred_ around the poststructuralist gaze of the agent-structure problem. So the very possibility of a decentred understanding is itself undermined by the coherence, if there is any, in the article.

Nor, do I accept the claim that in order to be a unified subject I must supress the otherness within me. I am the otherness within me. Without this otherness I would not be me. The very idea that we can supress this otherness betrays a commitment to the very unified "in control" subject that is been denied whilst being affirmed.

>
>I went on to argue that there was value in this, but in order to really
>understand the significance of decentring, it was necessary to go beyond
>postructuralist deconstruction to dialectical critical realism (DCR).  If
>one stayed with poststructuralism, one would eventually return to the very
>forms one had claimed to deconstruct (decentre).

Absolutley, what is striking about this pomo reading of the agent-structure problem, is the manner in which the underlying empiricism forces the argument to deny agents and structures, since neither can be observed, and to affirm instead only practices, which of course can.


>As regards Bhaskar, I argued, an 
>
>'important starting point in [his] account [as against Hegel's account] is
>the decentring of mind and the insistence on ontologically real, emergent
>dialectical processes operating in society and history.'

Here I am getting fuzzy as to what you now mean by decentering, does it mean to expunge or merely displace? Doesn't the notion of decentrering imply that something once was centered? What is it that requires decentering? The Cartesian subject, wasn't this always a Chimera? Besides, the CR subject, although decentred, is not same as the pomo subject. I mean, as far as I can tell they don't have one.


>'What is required is a sociohistorical approach which can grasp the duality
>of law as a specific form of _historically constituted sociality_.  Such an
>approach reflects law's own claims, but at the same time critically explores
>and decentres them.

I can undertand decentering here as a practice that problematises contemporary accounts of law. I have no problem with this. But what is meant by a decentred understanding? I can understand decentering as a practice or method, if you like. What I don't understand is the difference between a decentred understanding and a centered understanding?

Anyway, it's all being food for thought.

Thanks to everyone.





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Colin Wight
Department of International Politics
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Tel: (01970) 621769

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