File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1999/bhaskar.9903, message 57


From: "Howard Engleskirchen,WSU/FAC" <howarde-AT-wsulaw.edu>
Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 20:42:45 -0800PST
Subject: BHA: past power





Now that all of you have completely forgotten about the causal 
properties of past structures, I've finally had a chance to think 
through responses to the original question I asked.  Probably we'll 
test whether the causal powers of the past are efficacious without 
present agency.{PRIVATE }

I think some of my words were not so well chosen, but I'm 
puzzled by the apparently unanimous agreement with Caroline's 
formulation:  

"Howard is asking whether the causal powers of social structures 
are derived entirely from past actions.  Yes, I think Tobin and 
Martha are right here in saying that they are.  An act in the 
present which is brought about (caused by a social structure 
should not be seen as 'completing' or 'expressing' it."  

On that much there seems pretty solid agreement.

If the causal powers of social structures are derived entirely from 
past actions, as Caroline here says, then do we say that the causal 
powers of capital are entirely the result of already objectified 
labor?

Tobin says a standing army may prevent an uprising without there 
ever being a need for its power to be exercised.  But while the 
power of a standing army does not depend on its present exercise, 
it does depend on its continuing, in the present, to stand.

Also, since its power is a power(2) type power, the character of it 
in the present could not be explained except in terms of the 
uprising not attempted now.  This is an example of its structure 
completed in the present.  (On the use of "completed" here, 
remember the "ineliminable" dialectic!  The present is always the 
death of a certain amount of real possibility from the past.  But 
social structures are in process and the present doesn't stop the 
process.)

Martha argues that 

"the fertility patterns of earlier generations create a population 
structure (e.g. the depression baby bust, the post-war baby boom) 
which has causal powers whether or not actors know about it and 
its potential effects on their lives as the size of those cohorts 
affect marriage, employment, promotions, construction, etc."  

But in order for these causal potentials to be realized in the 
present, people must in fact marry, be employed, apply for 
promotions, construct things, etc.  I was not concerned in what I 
said with whether people were conscious or not of the 
significance or consequence of their behavior  --  or whether they 
had any ability, as a result of such awareness, to change those 
consequences.

I thought what I was originally trying to say was captured by 
Caroline saying 

"The fact that in the Stephen Lawrence case the outcome was 
not determined by the preexisting institutional racism of the police, 
does not mean that institutional police racism did not play a causal 
role -- it certainly did, mediated as always through agency."  

Now since institutional racism is a process not buried in the past 
but completed and so to speak incompleted in the present, and 
since social relations are concept dependent, what counts as a 
structure of the past can depend on the present.  What occurred 
in the domain of the actual is fixed, but its significance (upon 
which our characterization of structure depends, doesn=92t it?) is 
not.  (Caroline, doesn't "mediated as always" contradict the 
"derived entirely" assertion above?)

The only time I can think that present agency would not mediate 
the causal properties of structures rooted in the past would occur 
in a circumstance where natural forces were set in motion that 
escaped the ability of human agency to perpetuate or modify.  
Perhaps we have a present example.  As I understand it, nuclear 
plants take some time to shut down.  You cannot decide today 
and have the thing shut down tomorrow.  So suppose a glitch on 
January 1.  Meltdown.  On some date this year we will lose the 
possibility of preventing catastrophe through present agency.  This 
is an instance where the causal power of social structures in the 
past is effective without present human agency.  But even on this 
example the persistence of past possiblity as real depends on the 
agency of present natural (though not human) forces.  Causal 
possibility from the past is realized in the present and the present 
is not inert.  

Incidentally, Doug, in a draft I am now working on concerning 
legal rules I argue that the use of the word "rule" in law is 
ambiguous in exactly the way the use of the word "law" is 
ambiguous in natural science:  On the one hand we use the word 
to refer to an object of study in the intransitive dimension -- we 
refer to a relation of force with generative powers.  But on the 
other hand we also use the word "rule" to refer to the quite 
different concept of the way a particular social actor will 
formulate and express this relation, e.g. a judge or defendant or 
sheriff or academician.  I would not understand "rule" distinct 
from a material social relation as possessing generative power.  

What have I missed?


Howard

I'm troubled by the sentence above about the significance of the 
past not being fixed.  I'll leave it as it stands.  What I am trying to 
say is that a wind now blows in a certain way and what the tree 
was becomes something different than it would have been if the 
wind hadn't blown.  What happens in the present alters the weight 
of things that happened in the past, at least insofar as an evolving 
structure is concerned.  Is this nuts?

I'll click send.


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