Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 13:21:55 +1000
From: Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan-AT-qut.edu.au>
Subject: BHA: replying to Howie & Cultural Studies & DPF


1. Taking up Howie's challenge

Howie has provided the DCRers amongst us with something of a challenge.
Thankgodallmighty he has moved us beyond the stage of complaining about
Bhaskar's language to a direct attack on DCR. In effect he has asked -
where is the work that is inspired by DPF?  He points to Tony Lawson's work
in economics as showing what CR can do.  This is it seems a bench mark we
must come up to.

By and large I accept that.  But I would point out that it is hardly a fair
test of a book to judge it by the work of others. Moreover the DCR project
has only been around since 1993 while CR was launched in 1978.  It takes
time to launch a new paradigm.  Speaking of which let me then look into the
sands of time and say which seed will grow and which will not.  By the
pricking of my thumbs, the dialectic this way comes. Slowly but surely
Howie will be forced to yield ground.  DCR will come into its own. Of that
I am confident.

I would on a personal level point out that my computer is becoming
increasingly full of articles which do employ DCR insights in my own field
of Cultural Studies. Unpublished and perhaps unpublishable. The problem for
me is that I work on Australian documentaries.  That makes the outlets for
publishing few in number.  By and large the journals that do exist are
under the control of social constructionists, Rorty types and New Realist
Policy people.  The kind of wash left behind by the ex-Althusserians.  They
have heard of Bhaskar but they won't have a bar of publishing material
using him.

So we desperately need a refereed journal that will publish CR & DCR
material.  The "we" here is those of us who are part of the (Dialectical)
Critical Realist movement.  My own suggestion for what it is worth is that
Alethia should be converted into such a journal and quick smart. But pigs
will fly first, I suspect...

2. Cultural Studies and DPF

Now I thought I would spend the rest of this post saying something more
about my own particular field.  I have been inspired here by Michael
Tierney's post telling us he works in archaeology.  What I would like to
initiate is something like a Lurker's Corner.  I would like us to begin a
series of posts which are written from out of a particular discipline and
saying how we think we might use DCR/CR.

The point of this exercise is that it will help break through the
intellectual isolation we are all feeling.  It will as well give us some
idea of who and what are on the list. It will also I think begin using this
list properly.  It is an enormously powerful resource but at times, like
now, it languishes for want of direction. Let me say it again.  I think the
Bhaskar list should have an aim and that should be the encouragement and
fostering of the (D)CR movement.

So to Cultural Studies.  I think, a really good overview of this field is
given in Dave Beech & John Roberts (1998).  With the exception of their
failure to mention the turn to Policy initiated by Tony Bennett in 1990,
their work does give us a feel for the main tensions at work within the
discipline.  What follows is my attempt to outline the main parameters and
to insert DCR within these.  Of necessity this will be at best schematic.
Still..

There are of course distinct sub-fields within Cultural Studies.  There is
the American version, the British school and I like to think that Australia
does have some impact.  But the main game is I believe the collapse of the
Birmingham School project launched by Stuart Hall.  

This began with an attempts to use Gramsci and other Marxist theorists to
critique the media.  But the defeat of the Left and their absolute
destruction during the Thatcher years has produced a turning away from
critique.  There is no mystery here. The Beautiful People fled to Australia
and there they wintered out.  In 1990 they sensed that the time was right
for them to come in from the cold. They abandoned critique and turned to
policy.  In reality this was simply capitulation to the imperatives of
social democracy -  the so-called "third way".  The aim of cultural studies
was now no longer to produce critiques of capitalism but to influence
policy.  And that is at present the dominant paradigm.

There have of course been other non-Marxist influences at work within
cultural Studies.  Here the primary one is a kind of libertarian populism.
Its main spokespersons are John Fiske and John Hartley.  In Fiske's case he
drew upon a highly bowdlerised version of Bakhtin to suggest that all was
well in the arena of popular culture.   (Fiske, 1987) 

Hartley is in the midst of an often savage polemic against what he terms
'the knowledge class'. A class which of course he belongs to, but he has
espoused the stance of the people's champion and he denounces as elitist
any attempt to suggest that there is something wrong with what TV currently
offers us. (Hartley, 1998)

What is crucial to understand is that both wings of Cultural Studies - the
Marxist wing and the 'libertarian populist' wing abandoned critique.  The
ex-Althusserians have moved on to policy boards.  The populists try to
assure us that the revolution is already here.  It just takes the form of
the Sale of the Century and the Price is Right.

Bakhtin was especially ripe for an appropriation by Fiske et al.  There is
an essentially idealist element in Bakhtin's theory of the Carnival.  Thus
he takes the medieval carnival out of its material context - the rhythms of
a life based on agriculture - and posits it as representing an abstract
conatus to freedom.  Following DPF I accept the existence of such a notion
and the *weak* teleology it implies. But it is vital to note that Bhaskar's
teleology is linked to agency and it is agency which the populists have
abandoned. In truth it seems to me that theirs is a perverse form of endism
which says about popular culture that this is all we know on arth and all
we need to know.

In addition, what the Bakhtinian influenced critics did was to clear away
all the really radical elements in Baxtin's thought - the emphasis on the
gross body of the carnival and the notion of an emancipated world. I am
critical of Baxtin, but he did suffer for his religion and he did resist
Stalinist terror. 

Instead of such inspiring political commitment his latter day epigones have
given us the highly controlled and sanitised impulses of popular
television.  I want to stress here that this was an essentially an
abandonment of the political.  To bring down Babylon it seems all we have
to do now is to turn on Days of our Lives etc.  

Bhaskar has much to say here about the dialectic of desire and the
education of this dialectic that are directly relevant.  Truly there is a
lot of work to be done.  However if Howie is still with me I would like to
intervene here with just two DPF insights- an application of the Bhaskarian
dialectic and the notion of Alethic truth no less.  This will be an
ill-favoured thing but it is mine own and it is directly due to my readings
of DPF. I should add that  much of what follows was covered in the paper I
gave at the Essex Conference and if anyone wants a copy of that they just
have to email me.

3. Dialectical counterparts or dialectical antagonists?

The populist wing of Cultural Studies has set up a number of oppositional
or resistance figures.  They range from Beech & Roberts' Philistine, and
Bhaktin's carnivalistic grotesque, to Homi Babha's mimic.  Now following
Bhaskar I argue that all these figures exist as dialectical counterparts of
the political/cultural dominant.  They claim to challenge and even overcome
the dominant but they instead share a common ground.  I call this TINA -
there is no alternative.  The Bakhtinian grotesque might flaunt his
ugliness, the camp artist, such as the early Warhol, might display for all
his insincerity and venality, but their's is a challenge which
intrinsically accepts the superiority of the Dominant moment. What is
absent from the figures of resistance is any notion that they can act to
absent the political dominant.  

Now I want to say something out loud, because this is one of the advantages
of cyber space. All you need is a keyboard and a modem. The Beautiful
People turn to Bakhtin etc because this is a form of stoicism. As Hegel
puts it

'Its (stoicism) principle is that consciousness is essentially that which
thinks, is a thinking reality, and that anything is really essential for
consciousness, or is true and good, only when consciousness in dealing with
it adopts the attitude of a thinking being.' (Hegel, 1971: 244)

Stoics do not threaten the status quo.  They substitute their own analyses
for reality.  So there is a career to be made out of celebrating the
subversive potential of The Price is Right and Fiske and Company have
certainly made one.  It is much more difficult to insist with the dialectic
that their work sustains rather than resists the Cultural/Political dominant.

On a more charitable level we could say that there is a crisis in the 4D
level of the Bhaskarian dialectic - that is we have a crisis of agency. It
is by the way the same crisis of agency which enables us to see a common
thread linking the 'aesthetics of failure' that now dominates the best of
contemporary documentary film production to the fiction  of the 'Dirty
Realists. Here again what DPF has done is to provide us with a framework, a
map if one likes and we must now fill in the details.

4. Alethia to the rescue

I am currently working my way through Richard Kilborn & John Izod's 'An
Introduction to Television Documentary, Manchester Uni Press: Manchester,
1997.  The authors are senior academics at Stirling Uni.  They are both
distinguished scholars in the field of documentary studies.  As with other
leading theorists in this area they have to address the principal
philosophical problems in the field. These have to do with the notions of
objectivity, realism and truth because it is its special relationship with
these three notions that defines the documentary.

K&I's work has to be situated within a veritable renaissance in documentary
studies of late. (Corner, 1990 & 1996; Plantinga, 1997; Rabinowitz, 1994;
Renov, 1993; Rothman, 1997; Winston, 1995) Remarkably not one of them make
any reference to Bhaskar's work at all.  Yet (D)CR where they do not
actually solve the problems at the very least help clarify the issues. 

In some ways that might appear to be the Good News for we Critical
Realists.  Is the ball not tucked safely under the arm and is the field not
wide open in front of us?  The line is there just waiting for us to step
forward and bellow 'Touch Down'.  But the ease of this operation is
deceptive.  Before one can bounce the ball & raise one's arm in the
traditional High Five one has to get on the field. For some reason or other
the coaches seem remarkably reluctant to ask the Wide Receiver from the
(Dialectical) Critical Realist bench to take the field.

But let me take the specific example where I would argue that the notion of
Alethia can contribute.  K&I discuss how narrative function in documentary
film.  They deal with the case of hybrid forms, especially the reflexive
documentary.  This is not terribly well defined but it generally means an
acknowledgment that the film maker mames to let us know that  he knows that
we know that he knows that we are watching him making a film.  What is
urgently needed is a proper definition of reflexivity which is not confined
to stylistic features, but also takes in the Bhaskarian notion of a
meta-reflexive self-totalisation. But that is another story for another day.

The problem that K&I come across emerges when they are discussing Bill
Nichols's account of reflexive films, such as Peter Watkins' Culloden and
Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line.
These films use fictional techniques to make comments about the real world.
 Nichols tries to solve this by saying that these are 'conditional tense
documentaries' that create an imaginary world extrapolating from the
present world.  Like fiction these present *a* world rather than *the* world.

K&I reject this because for them all accounts are of *a* world. They say
what reflexive documentaries offer us is a 'conditional view of the world'.
(K&I, 1997: 133) They take up a subjective idealist position where each one
of us infers, as they put it, a different world.  It is not hard to detect
the hand of Nietzschean perspectivalism here.  Such a position cannot of
course sustain a notion of shared perspectives or even what differing or
rival perspectives might actually clash over.  

What is confusing K&I is they are attempting to take account of the notion
of epistemic relativism.  But they lack an ontology other than that of
subjective idealism and so they cannot motivate judgemental rationality.
Nor can they articulate a theory of truth which would explain how it is
that Peter Watkins using fictional devices is able to get close to the
reason for the Culloden disaster i.e. the alethic truth of the slaughter of
the Highland Clans (including the MacLennans btw).  So K&I gave us a couple
of chapters on documentary theory and do not mention truth at all, at all.

Nichols does have an ontology but his is not that of depth realism and so
he too stumbles over the difference between the epistemological
(Transitive) moment which can have its flashes of imagination and the
intransitive dimension. This can be seen most clearly in his discussion of
objectivity where because he lacks a depth ontology he cannot sustain an
account of objectivity other than as a stylistic device i.e. as an exercise
in epistemology. (Nichols, 1991: 197-8)

5. The Dialectic - Will we ever be able to take it home to meet mom?

Let's face it. The dialectic is not respectable.  Karl Popper did such a
hatchet job on it during the Cold War that it was an act of some bravery
for Bhaskar to revive it.  Bhaskar has prefaced DPF with a neat quote from
Marx on the scandalous nature of the dialectic and it is worth have a look at.

My own favourite lines on the dialectic are Nietzsche's.  

'With Socrates Greek taste veers round in favour of dialectics: what
actually occurs? In the first place a noble taste is vanquished: with
dialectics the mob comes to the top.  Before Socrates' time, dialectical
manners were avoided in good society: they were regarded as bad manners,
they were compromising.  Young men were cautioned against them.  All such
proffering of one's reasons was looked upon with suspicion.'  (Nietzsche in
Mann, 1946: 47)

Long live the mob I say.

6. Take Away thoughts:

i) DPF is inspiring work which will accumulate intellectual value. But
there is a life and death struggle out there in the academy.  The various
establishments will not yield ground easily. When they are not ignoring us
they will be throwing all the shit they can about Bhaskar's style and the
irrelevance etc of the Dialectic.

ii) Within Cultural Studies the Bhaskarian Dialectic provides the
possibility for giving the field a new emancipatory basis; something that
will enable us to motivate and sustain a return to critique.

iii) On this list we should start, for want of a better term, a Lurker's
Corner.  Would someone please now tell us about their own work and how they
are using CR/DCR?

iv) May the dialectic be with you!



References

Beech,D. & Roberts, J., Tolerating Impurities: An Ontology, Genealogy and
Defence of Philistinism, NLR 227, 1998
Corner, J., (ed) Documentary & The Mass Media, Edward Arnold: London, 1990
___________, The Art of Record: A critical Introduction to Documentary,
Manchester Uni Press: Manchester, 1996
Fiske, J. Television Culture, Methuen: London, 1987
Hartley, J., Housing Television: Textual Traditions in TV and Cultural
Studies in Geraghty, C., & Lusted, D., (eds) The Television Studies Book,
Arnold: London, 1998
Hegel, G.W.F., The Phenomenology of Mind, Allen & Unwin: London, 1971
(Mervyn take note)
Kilborn, R., & Izod, J., An Introduction to Television Documentary:
Confronting Reality, Manchester Uni Press: Manchester, 1997
Mann, H. The Living thoughts Of Nietzsche, Cassell: London, 1946)
Nichols, B. Representing Reality: Issues & Concepts in Documentary,
Bloomington: Indianopolis, 1991
Plantinga, C.R., Rhetoric & Representation in Nonfiction Film, Cambridge
Uni Press: New York, 1997
Rabinowitz, P., They Must Be Represented: The Politics Of Documentary,
Verso: London, 1994
Renov, M. (ed) Theorizing Documentary, Routledge: New York, 1993
Rothman, W., Documentary Film Classics, Cambridge Uni Press: New York, 1997
Winston, B., Claiming The Real: The Greirsonian Documentary and Its
Legitimations, BFI: London, 1995



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