File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1997/bhaskar.9712, message 26


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 ---

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005