Date: Thu, 16 Oct 1997 20:15:54 +0100
From: Advent <"cecilia.guardiola-AT-virgen.net"-AT-virgin.net>
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu
Subject: BHA: From Oscar Guardiola:Real Without Being Actual I


This is the first of a series of three postings concerning some initial 
thoughts concerning Dialectics (DPF). Please consider them pure 
linguistic self-management directed to achieve some perspective in 
respect to the challenges of DPF. In this sense, what I would like 
to share is less a set of truth-conditional propositions than a sort of 
orientation-coordinates to the task which lies ahead. Vygotsky noticed 
that this is always the first step before engaging in interpretation and 
argumentation. I accept his analysis and look for framing determinants 
in the external world (consisting of other philosophical theories, 
'material causes' of DPF)and translate them into a meta-talk about 
Dialectics. 
There are eight points I would like to share. I have divided them into 
three postings in order to make their reading less demanding.

1. Alan Norrie's paper at Warwick and the general definition of 
dialectics at the beginning of DPF lead one to suspect that 'any 
relation between differential elements' is, in fact, a definition of 
activity in general and of human agency in particular. Indeed, when 
Bhaskar provides a "real definition of dialectics" (besides the 
historical definition we all more or less know) it turns out to be "the 
absenting of absences" (as in Plato etc., 133). 
That definition results from a genealogy of the concept; this designates 
a movement of descent (what Collier calls the metaphor of 'digging 
deeper')into the (social) history of the concept. Bhaskar conceives the 
history of philosophy as that of the production of concepts, and each 
elaboration is a document which allows the 'digger' (underlabourer ?)to 
look for both the materials used in the elaboration (material causes, 
Althusser's 'Generality I')and the powers in virtue of which 
such materials exist (efficient causes). Notice that concepts (and 
philosophy in general)being human/social products, their main efficient 
cause is human agency. Although sometimes it seems as if for Bhaskar 
human agency would be their only 'efficient cause', I think there is no 
reason to think that this should be it; there may well be other 
non-human 'efficient causes' co-determining the elaboration of a 
concept, unless 'efficient causality' is exclusive of human agency. I do 
not think that would be Bhaskar's position.
The more one looks at this procedure, the more one cannot help but 
framing it together with Foucault's geneaology and Deleuze's conception 
of philosophy as the social production of certain concepts. Similitudes 
begin there, just to become more important at the ontological level: 
that of efficient causality and the transit from the potential to the 
actual.
The last observation ("the transit from..") comes precisely from a brief 
analysis of Bhaskar's 'real definition' of dialectics: "absenting" means 
 "distantiating and/or transforming", whereas simple "absence" is 
understood in a more or less determinate level/context-specific region 
of space-time. The first term designates absence as a process, the 
latter absence as a product (a mistake, an illness, a 'given'). The 
'real definition' amount thus to: transforming the given; notice that 
this is also the definition of work since RTS. 
What it means all this talk of 'absenting absences' then ? 
All those 'ing-s' added to nouns are an attempt to overcome the 
difficulties that English language present to providing direct 
connections between certain nouns and verbs (such as 'power' and 'being 
able to' Cfr. Collier, 1994, 9). They reveal that we are in presence of 
a use of language that tries to capture the dynamics of ontological 
movement, and so we do not have just 'process' and 'product' (the two 
poles (nouns) of the dynamic processual activity) but also 
'product-in-process' (the 'becoming product' of the material causes 
being transformed or reproduced) and 'process-in-product' (this is 
perhaps harder to swallow, the 'becoming process' of any actual outcome, 
so that finalized products are not actualistic, discrete emtities or 
things but [the effect of] potentials). This means that in dynamics 
ontology things can affect and be affected, so they are the product of 
such affections (effects)as much as the location of powers whose 
exercise may also affect things and/or persons outside themselves. The 
four-fold polysemy of 'absence' is dialectics.
Deleuzians who have heard of the 'becoming orchid of the bee' might 
think we are talking about the same thing. I think they would be right.
The problem of dialectics is thus, that of transition or actualization: 
How is it that something (a) causes something else (b) to become 
something else (c). (a), (b) and (c) are particulars and externals, in 
the sense that they cannot be reduced to each other. (a)explains (b) 
which in turn explains (c) but none of them explain the other(s) away. 
Now, (c) is a product and as such, it belongs to the realm of the 
actual, it is the actualization of its causes which are not there any 
more (as such) but nontheless are real, for I can infer them from the 
existent product and only via them I can explain its existence.
The other possibility of explanation would entail creation 'ex nihilo', 
but such a hypothesis is incoherent since creation from scratch would 
require the existent thing to be pre-formed, at the very least, in the 
head of the creator (or in a heaven of ideas)as a possibility, given 
that its state of existence is purely actual, and thus temporary. But 
then, pre-formed things are conceived as possibilities, some of which 
may be realized in the future. Possibilities are thus never real, 
whereas their effect, the actual, are indeed. But this would entail a 
consequence which is as weird as it sounds: that effects may have more 
reality then their cause.
Since creation 'ex nihilo' does not seem to be a good candidate as a 
model of ontological movement, the other alternative should be 
considered. It involves considering ontological movement in terms of 
affecting and being affected, i.e. agency. Dialectics, in so far as it 
pertains to the logics ('how is it that...') of agency, can be thoguth 
of as a theory of agency.
That is my proposal, to read DPF as a theory of action. It is based on 
the real definition of dialectics as the 'transforming of the given', 
such a process of transformation involving the phenomenon of affection 
at a distance. Action at a distance implies efficient causality, 
that is, that ontological movement occurs between causes that may well 
be virtual or 'potentials' (i.e. real without being actual)rather than 
mere possibilities, and effects which are 'actualizations'. 
The question remains: how this occurs, the transit from the potential to 
the actual ?

2. The problem of actualization or transition is not new. By using this 
vocabulary I was calling upon the precise terms used by the German 
Classic idealists to refer to this question. It is the problem which 
haunted Kant up to its later days (see his Opus Postumum)and From the 
outset hegel, for whom the question of the transition of the concept 
(the virtual) is "of a purely speculative matter" (as quoted by J. 
Zeleny in 'The Logic of Marx's Capital'). 
As Zeleny observes, the phrase reveals Hegel's understanding of 
dialectics. For him, as for Kant before him, the ontological question 
(ontological movement, becoming) has an answer in logic: the problem of 
the transition from the virtual to determined (actual) things is 
resolved via the self-positing of the subject, that is, (for Kant)the 
use of abstract categories in the construction of judgements of reason 
about things ('man' as a virtual-machine in modern-day cognitive science 
terminology). 
For Hegel it is clear that this logical solution of the problem of 
transition implies not a movement from the outside to the inside (as the 
transcendental-empiricist Kant would have it, at least prior to the Opus 
Postumum)but one of achieving self-consciousness through the (negation 
of) the other, that is, a movement from the inside to the inside, 
through the (negated)outside. 
Becoming is thus understood in terms of self-reflexivity and the 
ontological problem is resolved solely in logical terms (although one 
runs the risk here of caricaturizing Hegel. For him the speculative is 
the real. Logic is the movement of reality and reality achieves 
self-consciousness in the self-consciousness of men. This may be 
anthropic fallacy, but one reinforced via subject/object identity 
theory.) 
The moment of negation is the 'work of negativity'in which negation 
works for self-affirmation (entailing nihilism in respect to 'the 
other'). Critics of this account of negativity highlight the nihilism in 
respect to the other, but without doing away whith negation, which is 
conceived by them(contra Hegel)as distance or deconstruction (not 
destruction)of real particulars and externals.
Marx and Nietzsche emphasized the consequences that the idealist 
solution had for ethics, noticing -contra Hegel and Kant respectively- 
that both made agency impossible.The former by confussing 
objectification with alienation ( taking the distantiating of nature as 
a distantiating of oneself)conceives work (transforming the given)only 
as 'abstract mental labour' and consequently precludes any causal 
relationship with a natural/social world, bypassing its reality (i.e. 
allowing unelaborated empirical data to enter in the definition of the 
process of becoming, that which is inconsistent with the nature of the 
process itself).
The latter, by interpreting the elaboration of the given in terms of its 
propositional expressions (Kant is for Nietzsche 'the philosopher 
trapped in the web of language')thus conceiving powers and things as 
ultimata, in empiricist fashion, distinct but unified by the 
pervasiveness of the 'I' in the noumenal and phenomenal world. But the 
'I' is merely the place of ascriptionof ultimata, and as a compound of 
discrete ultimata it remains obscure how it could act (Bhaskar has shown 
that any relationship between discrete ultimata is incoherent)for, 
indeed, there is nothing left for the 'I' (not even a thing-in-itself) 
to interact with.

3. Post-Nietzscheans and post-Marxists have accepted such criticisms and 
move (contra Hegel) restituting to negativity its rights, that is, its 
character of activity rather than purely abstract mental labour. This 
comes across quite clearly in the work of Foucault and Deleuze.
In two very important but mostly unattended essays ('Distance, Aspect, 
Origine' and 'This is Not a Pipe'; see also the seminal 'Theatrum 
Philosophicum') Foucault developes Bataille's early criticism of the 
'work of negativity' into a spelled-out ontology of the potential and 
the actual based on the priority of negativity (words negating the 
object of knowledge or image of thought, the image of thought negating  
things outside; knowledge grounded in such a movement of negation, in 
absence, that is, as distantiating, as activity; activity [negating, 
absenting] as irreducible to human activity [=essentialized 'work]).
That ontology entails a criticism of the 'univocity of being' 
(Bhaskar's ontological monovalence)which turns out includes the 
operation of forces at a distance (the outside) and a conception of 
thought as a consequence of, not constitutive of, such 'outside'. Hence 
his affirmation of thought as coming from the outside.
In Deleuze the ontology of the virtual and the actual becomes central 
(See Michael Hardt's An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, Ch. 1 and 2) and 
is explicitly based on Spinozist grounds and with parallels in the 
Scholastic analysis of causality. Collier (1994, 30) has argued that 
trascendental realism sides with Thomas Aquinas and John Wyclif in the 
question of (Aristotelian)universals. I would add Duns Scotus. Collier 
himself is a declared Spinozist. It is useful to remember that Spinoza 
is also the major influence of Althusser, whose presence in Bhaskar's 
works is clear, as it is in that of Foucault and his generation. 
In 'Bergsonism' (p. 68) Deleuze talks of the "real without being 
actual". The emphasis of the statement is on the ontological 
differentiation between the potential and the actual, and the question 
of transition is resolved in terms of efficient causality.
At stake in the affirmation of efficient causality (as the principle 
that determines the coherence of being) is the critique of external 
causalism (i.e. empiricist causality) and the question of agency as 
activity or work. For him (and arguably, also for Foucault) it is 
through praxis (practices)that the potential becomes actual.
The error has been, in their opinion, to conceive 'work' as the 
essential and exclusive feature of Man (Foucault, being a good disciple 
of Althusser, criticizes the 'humanist' Marx precisely in this 
point)i.e. to reduce activity to a human attribute.
The error is caused by a discursive regime centred around the ide of 
Man. The error is here genealogical, i.e. the lack of historical 
justification of the idea of Man. For Man is not a 'given'(ultimata) 
but, precisely, the product of that movement of reducing activity to a 
human attribute. The reasons for that movement are themselves 
historical: they are related to the necessity of producing a workforce, 
that which requires to essentialize activity (work as the essence of 
humans) attributing passivity (determinism, Humean causality) to nature.
This is simply a re-enacting of the distinction passive/active current 
among the greeks (at least, 'the Greeks' invented by north-europeans in 
the XVIIIth century. Cfr. Martin Bernal's 'Black Athena').
To distinguish passive from active requires, first of all, to reject the 
(Spinozist) idea of the whole of nature (including humans) being 
characterized by a kind of activity (passion) which is neither active 
nor passive but 'intense' or potential. As Brian Massumi observes, the 
name which designates the project for thinking intensity is 'Ethics'. 
The characteristic of empiricism is precisely to deny the existence of 
forces and to attribute the principle of activity to a constructive, 
non-physical mind. Kant , in their opinion, has taken this achievement 
to the extreme (i.e. empirio-trascendentalism).
Historically, it is the operation of the law which makes possible the 
reduction of activity to a human attribute by de-realizing unexercised 
powers. The form in which this de-realization takes place can be seen in 
the paragraph 46 of Kant's Metaphysical Principles of Right, in which 
such a de-realization appears as the condition for defining what is it 
to be a person. A person, Man, is that which realizes is potential. 
Agents possesing unexercised powers/unactualized potential remain in 
'mode of inherence', i.e. unrealized as human beings. In the legal 
definition of persons, such agents are de-realized human beings; 
practically, non-human beings. Marx, arguably, would turn the same 
argument upside down: they are real humans but their potential cannot be 
actualized because forces outside of them constrain them to do so; this 
is consistent with Nietzsche's notion of a 'reactivated force': a force 
separated (by other) from what it can do. 'Superman' designates the 
unleashing of the forces of real agents.
>From another perspective, such a legal definition of person amounts to 
an 'obligation to work' via essentializing it: ti sum up, you are not 
a human being if you don't work (because Man is that which works). To 
work is some sort of 'norm' of nature. 'Normal' is a notion which 
unifies the determinism of nature with ethical subjectification. This is 
the issue at stake in Foucault's definition of madness as "the absence 
of work" and the relation with the worker's 'refusal of work', the 
political programme of Marxist workerism (Antonio Negri).

The point here has not been simply to highlight similitudes between CR, 
post-Nietzcheans and post-marxists in the continent and/or latin 
American hyper-realists, but to establish what is at stake in 
Dialectics. I hope to clarify that issue in the two following posts 
establishing some coordinates for our reading of DPF.

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
Aberdeen University/Universidad Javeriana, Bogota


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