Date: Sat, 20 Feb 1999 21:24:23 +0000
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: replying to Howie & Cultural Studies & DPF


Hi Howie, all

1. I agree that Archer's work has its problems, in particular I'm not
sure how social contradictions and material culture or the material
infrastructure can figure in an Archerian analysis. However, while she
is not a professed dialectician, if one defines dialectical thinking
with Bhaskar as the art of thinking the coincidence of distinctions and
connections, then I think her work on agency and structure (the latter
including the Cultural System as a system of logical relations between
propositions) may properly be thought of as dialectical. Of course, this
is a limited sense of dialectic - I don't think she's committed to a
notion of dialectic as objective process involving real dialectical
contradictions etc - 'a concrete level of dialectical processes', in
your words (but I'm not familiar enough with her work to say that with
any great confidence).

2. Duality of structure. I take it that you meant to say 'duality of
structure and agency'. The concept 'duality of structure' has always
been employed in Bhaskar's work, from PON on, so far as I am aware, to
denote that structure is both the condition (material cause) and the
ever reproduced outcome of agency. 'Duality of structure and agency'
denotes their existential interdependence and essential distinction,
with a 'hiatus' in the duality preventing conflation and making
'dislocation' possible (as in social forms surviving, at the extreme,
without or even despite any present human agency). I am not aware that
Bhaskar has rejected either notion; certainly, he employs both in DPF.
What Archer has persuaded him of is the enormous importance of past as
distinct from present agency in social causation, which he has taken on
board in 'the negative generalization of the TMSA'. It is structural
reproduction/change which occurs in the present; the causal properties
of structures are entirely the result of past activity, much of it long
past, and their effects precede their reproduction/change. Bhaskar now
seems to agree that he did not stress this enough in his early
formulations, and I think that is so. (Surprisingly, neither Archer nor
Bhaskar acknowledges Marx on this, who assigned enormous causal weight
to the past. Bhaskar wants to say that Marx underestimated the weight of
the past programmatically, but that is a different matter and I'm not
sure even of that.) 

3. The merit of Mao's dialectic. I'm not sure (with Bhaskar, DPF 151-2)
that dialectic as the unity of opposites can handle emergence, and above
all would want to invoke the so-called 'third law', the negation of the
negation, as central to dialectics. Not as the cancellation of
contradiction (Hegel, Stalin, where did Mao stand on this?), but in the
sense of Bhaskar and, as I read him, Marx as 'the geo-historical
transformation of geo-historical products', involving a never ending
process of absenting constraints on human flourishing (a logic unfolding
precisely 'from the premises of TMSA' as I understand it).

4. Dialecticization. You seem to have in mind two related things above
all as constituting the 'something' which 'clashes seriously with the
goals and spirit' of CR. First, the inaccessibility of DPF to the
ordinary person. This came up at the seminar in London yesterday on
dialectics and DCR (Bhaskar, Ollman, Norrie). Bhaskar's response was
basically, 'Well, what do you think? Dialectics just is extremely
difficult and complex. It would be nice if, you know, human history
could be grasped in simple, undialectical terms, but that just isn't the
case' (not his exact words - the gist). You seem to accept this up to a
point, saying that there are two jobs to be done (I would say five or
six at least! We're doing part of one on the List) and that the
principal task now is indeed theoretical. (Incidentally, I'm not sure
that theoretical work is ever the principal task and would even perhaps
cheekily invoke Mao on the primacy of practice on my side. I think we
should have a modest estimate of our own importance - indispensable but
just one aspect of a multifaceted process. But I know and accept what
you mean.) But you want to say, secondly, that Bhaskar's dialectic is
*unnecessarily* complex and difficult - 'grandiose and all-embracing'.
I've stated in other posts why I think it needs to 'overreach' other
philosophies. But another issue that has surfaced from time to time,
including yesterday, is the extent to which he is 'encroaching' on the
domain of social science and history. Ollman argued that his system
doesn't just flow from transcendental arguments, he is actually a very
creative *abstracter* from the real, and Bhaskar seemed to accept that
yes, there was a role for 'positive abstraction' in his work. I think
this is so - the concept of 'generalized master-slave type relations',
for example, is an abstraction which can't be transcendentally deduced.
But I don't see any problem with that, other than that he perhaps needs
to indicate in his work more clearly what flows from deduction and what
from abstraction. On the contrary, I think creative abstraction
indispensable to his project, which can be viewed as nothing less than
to articulate a *general conceptual schema* (philosophical ontology) for
the social sciences comparable to the schemas unifying some of the
natural sciences (or as Alan Norrie put it yesterday, 'a philosophical
backbone' for the social sciences); the lack of such a schema, he said
in his very first book (RTS), is what is really the matter with the
social sciences. That, it seems to me, given the central role of social
science in the dialectic of desire to freedom, is a tremendously
important project from an emancipatory point of view and puts the sheer
scope of the project in a different light.




Howie Chodos <howie-AT-magi.com> writes
>Some initial reactions to Mervyn's and Gary's responses to my previous post.
>
>1. Does _Critical Realism: Essential Readings_ exist in a paperback
>edition? Barnes & Noble only lists it in hardback at US$115.
>
>2. Mervyn cites Margaret Archer as an example of someone whose work employs
>dialectics. While I think there is much of merit in her "Morphogenetic
>Realism" (in particular her account of emergence), I also think it is
>deeply flawed, and in a way that I would be inclined to characterise as
>undialectical. In fact, I find it extremely curious that RB seemed to agree
>with Archer's criticism of the basic argument for the TMSA. 
>
>At the inaugural Centre for Critical Realism conference at Warwick, when RB
>introduced Archer he presented her as being one of the few intellectuals
>who had been able to convince him that he was wrong about something. He
>then seemed to endorse Archer's position that to embrace the idea of a
>duality of structure was to conciliate with the 'central conflationism' of
>Anthony Giddens's Structuration Theory, and that he had been wrong to have
>argued that the TMSA had many affinities with Giddens's approach.
>
>The problem, as I see it, is that to reject the duality of structures is to
>lose the possibility of seeing structures as being both ontologically
>distinct from individuals, yet also existentially intertwined with them.
>And that formulation, to my mind, captures the essence of the dialectic. It
>highlights the idea that there are two poles that are mutually irreducible,
>yet each is indispensable to the other; that their interaction is causally
>efficacious, generating a continuum, whose extreme positions they
>represent; that all events that are somehow affected by this dialectic will
>contain traces of each pole, but neither pole can ever be actualised in a
>pure form. This establishes a level of causality that I would agree can
>only be termed dialectical. 
>
>I use the word 'level' advisedly here. The best way I have found to think
>about dialectic is to see it as itself dialectically linked to a more
>concrete level of dialectical processes. Dialectic can be analytically
>distinguished, but does not anywhere dictate the development of any
>particular dialectical process. Thus, we could posit a dialectic linking
>working class and capitalist class, but saying this does not permit the
>prediction of any particular outcome. It does not indicate, for example,
>how the evolution of capitalism will occur, nor whether there will ever be
>an end to the ability of the capitalist system to reproduce itself. 
>
>It does set parameters, however. What this means is that, using our example
>of the contradiction between capital and labour, outside certain conditions
>there does not exist a dynamic generated by this contradiction. (I would
>argue that the core condition is the commodification of human labour power,
>but that is another matter.) This means that socialists who wish to see the
>elimination of capitalism need to think about how to change the very
>essence of this dynamic. The question we must confront is how to alter
>social relations so that the contradiction between capital and labour can
>no longer be 'spontaneously' reproduced. It seems to me that this is where
>a 'dialectical' approach is required.
>
>3. With regard to the dialectic in general, I favour an approach that seeks
>to simplify, as well as to explain complexity. If we are serious about
>transforming the world, we will, someday, have to be able to express our
>core philosophical ideas in ways that lots of people will find useful and
>convincing. This does not mean that we should immediately seek to do this,
>or abandon all discussion that is not entirely free from specialised
>jargon. It simply recognises that there are two jobs to be done. I would
>argue that, right now, the principal task (to borrow a way of talking from
>Mao -- on whom, more below) is, indeed, theoretical. At many levels we lack
>the conceptual tools to be able to paint a clear picture of what social
>transformation means to us. Until we have them, it will remain exceedingly
>hard to popularise a vision of the future worth fighting for.
>
>Which brings me to the merit of Mao's dialectic. Now, if you want an
>unpopular version of the dialectic in the western academy, choose Mao's --
>in this respect Mao makes Bhaskar look like a welcome guest at the
>philosopher’s banquet. Having said this, however, I do not wish to argue
>that the way in which Mao articulated and utilised the dialectic is
>necessarily the way to go. That would be a stronger position than I am
>comfortable with. But I do think that his characterisation of the central
>dynamic of dialectics as being the unity of opposites has a lot going for
>it. (See the opening paragraphs of his _On Contradiction_.)
>
>The model of this kind of dialectic for me is, to repeat, the TMSA. If
>Bhaskar's dialectic unfolded from these premisses, I would be on board in a
>flash. But I worry it does not. As Mervyn and Alan argued, but from an
>opposite viewpoint, the style in which he writes *is* connected to the
>conception that Bhaskar has of the dialectic. I find that it has become
>such a grandiose and all-embracing edifice that it is, to my mind, almost
>inconceivable that it could ever provide inspiration to a sufficiently
>large cohort of the population to be able to become a real guide to human
>emancipation.
>
>As I have been trying to argue this does not mean that all talk of
>dialectic is bad, or that there are not many insights that are to be had by
>working with RB's version. But it does express severe and serious
>reservations about the nature of the emancipatory project that is conveyed
>by the overall form of Bhaskar's dialectic. I do not for a minute want to
>question Bhaskar's personal commitment to advancing the cause of human
>emancipation, nor do I wish to belittle the important theoretical and
>philosophical contributions he has already made to that cause. I feel that
>I personally owe him a large debt of gratitude for helping to guide my own
>intellectual evolution (although I'm sure that there are no doubt some who
>would wonder whether I properly digested the lesson). But I do think that,
>even accepting this, one can still hold that there is something in the way
>the dialecticisation of CR has proceeded that clashes seriously with the
>goals and the spirit that CR had so forcefully articulated. 
>
>This, to me, is what is at the heart of the dispute. This is also why I
>would advocate an informed pluralism with regard to the CR/DCR debate. If
>people holding either position do not think they have the right to be able
>to decide the issue, while always being ready to put their case, we should
>be able to generate a congenial context for us all to learn from one another.
>
>Howie Chodos
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Mervyn Hartwig
Editor, 'Alethia'
Newsletter of the International Association for Critical Realism
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Email: mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk


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