Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 10:27:14 -0600 (CST)
Subject: Re: BHA: Re: topics for discussion




On Wed, 21 Jan 1998, Colin Wight wrote:
> 
> Also, has anyone seen the recent Andrew Sayer piece in the latests JTSB
> (Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour), where he is fairly critical of
> CR's lack of engagement with normative issues?
> 
> I remember asking a question at the CR conference some years ago when RB was
> talking about the notion of the person as a concrete singularity. My
> question was that if the TMSA implies that what it means to "be" is in part
> defined in terms of both the self and the social circumstances, what happens
> when parts of the concrete singularlity begin to look as if they are doing
> damage to other parts? Genital mutilation to women, for example can be
> decribed as part of the cultural complex which constitutes women as such in
> certain parts of the world. In order to make a moral critical commentary on
> such practices do we have to priviledge parts of the concrete singularity
> over other parts - that is, give priority to the species being over the
> cultural circumstances of the flourishing of that species being? 

I haven't seen the Sayer piece, but in the interest of getting discussion
going again (maybe), I'll offer an initial response.  One could argue that
it would not privilege parts of the concrete singularity over other
parts,
or species being over the cultural circumstances of the flourishing of
that species being to oppose genital mutilation and the instance of the
sex/gender system that underlies that practice.  The flourishing of the
species being of humans surely cannot include the systematic denial of the
full sexual being of such a large portion of the population.  And this
practice is, I understand, related to the general subordination of women
which involves us in the thwarting of their being in other dimensions.  

But your basic point is that concrete singularity cannot become "cultural
relativism" without doing harm to the goals to which Bhaskar says he is
committed in Dialectic.  So, a normative dimension is necessary, isn't it?

Let's see what RB has to say:

"Dialectical processual consistency recognizes the authenticity of every
concretely singular agent's own narrative or story no less than the rights
of her being." (DPF, 170)

Hmm, it's a draw.  Not much help, philosophically speaking.  But he
details this on the next page, emphasizing (as I read it) that the sorts
of struggles in which these rights are involved are historical and social
in nature.  So there's some messiness involved in that one must consider
the needs and desires of actually existing agents--and here I defer to
anyone who knows more about genital mutilation than I do. 

But it's worth noting that Bhaskar includes species being within concrete
singularity in the definition that he gives at the back of DPF.  In that
case the non-coincidence of species being and embodied selfhood would
simply be an indication of the decidedly non-utopian conditions of
existence for the women involved, not a conflict between species being and
concrete singularity.  Concrete singularity would have a normative
dimension built into it, species being.

Well, there, I surrender the floor to anyone who actually knows what
they're talking about.

Tim Dayton
Dept. of English
Kansas State University



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