From: MSPRINKER-AT-ccmail.sunysb.edu Date: Tue, 09 Dec 1997 11:11:19 -0500 (EST) Subject: FWD: RE: BHA: RTS3.3, abstraction and Althusser To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu State University of New York at Stony Brook Stony Brook, NY 11794-3355 Michael Sprinker Professor of English & Comp Lit Comparative Studies 516 632-9634 09-Dec-1997 11:09am EST FROM: MSPRINKER TO: Remote Addressee ( _bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu ) Subject: FWD: RE: BHA: RTS3.3, abstraction and Althusser For some reason, the attached seems not to have made it to the list. At least, I never received a copy, as I ordinarily do when I send my own posts to the list address. Apologies if this is a duplication. Michael Sprinker Michael Sprinker Comparative Studies 516 632-9634 06-Dec-1997 12:44pm EST TO: LH Engelskirchen ( _owner-bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU ) Subject: RE: BHA: RTS3.3, abstraction and Althusser This, a somewhat belated rejoinder to Howard's belated post about Althusser, overdetermination, and depth ontology. In fact, I think Althusser's model of the social whole has three levels, the deepest of which is the economy. In any empirically given historical society, the other two levels can occupy either stratum I or stratum II. Althusser cites Marx on feudalism to say that the apparent dominance of politics (the relation of coercion necessary to enforce the feudal economic relation between owners and producers) is dictated by the nature of feudal economic relations, making the economic "determining in the last instance," as Althusser, following Marx, puts it. It's arguable, if not yet demonstrated, that the ideological level appears to play a dominant role over politics in late capitalist parliamentary democracies, but if this is the case, it is because of the special requirements of the capitalist mode of production in these societies at this period (the necessity to expand the reach of the commodity form into ever more corners of social life, somethign that politics itself cannot well accomplish: people don't generally by more gadgets and trinkets because a statute requires them to do so!) It's true that Laclau and Mouffe and their epigoni tend to flatten out the ontology in Althusser, but a careful reading of the texts in FOR MARX discloses Althusser's own sensitivity to--and careful distinction from--the kind of pluralism that has become the norm among the post-marxists. On one point, though, I think there may be more distance between early Bhaskarian critical realism and Althusser: to wit, in their differing conceptions of the sciences. Bhaskar is no reductionist, but as Howard's recourse to the example from physics symptomatically discloses, there is a tendency in critical realism to measure the scientificity of a practice in relation to physics or some other pilot science in the natural sciences. For Althusser, as for Aristotle, this is a category mistake: there is no such thing as "science," only different scientific practices, and this just because each of the sciences has a different object, both in thought and in reality. If there are in fact fewer levels in Althusser's account of society than can be found in physics' account of nature, then that derives from the different structures in each. Finally, nothing in Howard's exemplary exposition of Marx on price, value, and the relations of production contradicts anything in Althusser. Political economy is just a regional science within the continent of history, and to the extent he comments on it at all, Althusser is very orthodox in his adhesion to what Marx conceives as the different levels of economic analysis. Fraternally, Michael Sprinker --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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