Date: Tue, 20 Jul 1999 15:11:33 +1000
Subject: Re: BHA: Re: Diffraction Post three


Diffraction Post 3 

We are now on page 96, at the start of what I have designated as Part Four
of this section. It begins with the paragraph 'Marx's epistemological
materialism presupposes =85' and ends at the bottom of page 98 with the
paragraph ending '=85a conatus for freedom to become'. We have finally come
to the place where the dialectic will be diffracted. The first paragraph is
curiously tentative for Bhaskar. We learn that it 'may be wrong=85' and it
'may designate'.  But beneath the 'may' is a certainty I feel that a new
ontological dialectic is necessary to match the differentiated world. If
the dialectic is to be genuinely ontological then it must be diffracted.
 So the next paragraph consists of what I think of as a celebration of the
new freedom that we have been given.
It is difficult to know how to summarise this part.  It strikes me as
almost a kind of language game.  The words, phrases, clauses and sentences
pour forth.  Not so many sentences mind you.  This is Bhaskar at his best
or his worst depending on your point of view.  For me he is at his most
brilliantly original.  I know it is not fashionable to say such things on
this list, but there it is. 

I was intrigued on re-reading this part to think of how close it is to the
following passage from Lenin's philosophical notebooks. Though I have to
say that I cannot think of a philosophical and political figure more
distant from Bhaskar than Vladimir Ilyich.

" Dialectics as *living* many-sided knowledge (with the number of sides
eternally increasing), with an infinite number of shades of every approach
and approximation to reality (with a philosophical system growing into a
whole out of each shade) - here we have an immeasurably rich content as
compared with "metaphysical" materialism, the fundamental misfortune of
which is its inability to apply dialectics to the Bildertheorie [theory of
reflection] to the process and development of knowledge." (Lenin in Marx
Engels Lenin, 1977: 384)


I would like to pick out a few moments in Part Four for special comment, if
I may. In the vast sentence on 'The class of ontological dialectics..'
there is a clause: '(b) the  dialectics of absence that will provide my key
to the retotalisation of a multiply diffracted dialectics..' In my paper
for the Essex conference on the film 'The Good woman of Bangkok' I
announced what I felt was a new textual methodology.  I thought the task
consisted of identifying within the text a number of key dialectics and
then analysing them. The dialectics I was particularly interested in were:
the core-periphery and the master-slave dialectics, and the embedded
dialectic of the intertextual reference to the Werner Herzog film on the
Wodaabe people through the use of the Mozart aria 'Va Ma Dove?' I also saw
the use of the aria as an attempt at aesthetic reconciliation rather than
the dialectics of emancipation.  Now having gone through what I felt were
key dialectics in the film, I was aware of the need to retotalise it at
some level.  Hence my interest in the reference to the 'dialectics of
absence'. 

However I am far from claiming that I have come to terms with the
dialectics of absence. I *think* the reference is to the motor force of the
dialectic.  Absence lies at the heart of this new diffracted dialectic.  It
is the desire to absent the constraints on the absenting of ills which
drives it on.  So what of the dialectics of absence in O'Rourke's film?
For those who have not seen it the film is an account of the filmmaker's
trip to Bangkok where he buys and sleeps with a prostitute and then
proceeds to make a film about this.

What I tried to say in my critique of the film that the very possibility of
absenting the institution of prostitution is absented.  What we are given
instead is white guilt. In a move that seems almost pure Schopenhauer, we
are left in no doubt that Aoki is our 'compagnon de miseres'. Her suffering
is indeed palpable.  But there is no solidarity here.  For the filmmaker
violates the normative-fiduciary level.  There is no assertoric imperative
e.g. 'If I were you I would do x..' Rather we get the absenting not of ills
but of the victim. It is only the aesthetic it seems which offers us a
refuge from the Will, which seems to be the cause of all the wretchedness.
Forgiveness or redemption is sought not in efforts to combat the relations
of power2 but rather in the use of the Mozart aria. Janet Baker's voice
soars sublimely above the cesspit that is Pattapong

But the situation between the filmmaker and the prostitute remains
detotalised.  There is no reference at all to the cause of the prostitution
or to the brave students who were massacred in the 80s for attempting to
absent the system that we see on the film. So for all that I think that it
is a very great film in many ways, it also stands as a monument to our
current inability to think through the dialectics of absenting the ills
that plague us increasingly.

Part Four ends, predicably enough, with the most political of calls and
what I have already referred to as a magnificent endorsement of the conatus
to freedom.

Part Five.    We are now at the bottom of page 98.   From the celebration
of the extension of the dialectic we move to a consideration of its
intension or connotation. Here dialectic is defined as 'any kind of
interplay between differentiated but related elements' (pp98-9).

It follows from this definition that dialectics cannot be reduced to
contradiction. Nor do dialectical contradictions *necessarily* violate the
logical norm of non-contradiction. This is stated on page 68 as 'Most
dialectics are consistent with formal logic'.  It is only epistemological
dialectics that 'typically' violate the logical norm of non-contradiction. 

An example would be helpful here.  Alas there is none within the text.  If
anyone can supply one I will be grateful. Let me have a very tentative go
myself, first.  I have a student friend investigating cultural reproduction
with the Vietnamese diaspora here in Brisbane. This community seems to be
marked by the successful reproduction of the Vietnamese culture, above all
through the mediation of the discourse of anti-communism. However the
student is working on the heuristic that at the same time, there are
cultural sites which are eroding the reproduction of the master discourse -
anti-communism. So the assumption is that it is both raining and not
raining. In other words she is proceeding with a logical contradiction as a
heuristic.

At the bottom of page 99 the paragraph beginning 'None of this means...'
has more on the relationship between dialectics and analytics.  He promises
a return to this in Chapter 10 and we will take it up there again.  Thee is
on the way a sideswipe at Hegel for losing the dialectical crucial notion
of absence.  He even accuses Hegel of collapsing into analytics.  This is
indeed a cruel stroke and one that would infuriate Hegelians no doubt.
Some day I promise myself I will go through Lenin's reading of Hegel's
dialectic with this in mind.  It might give one a better ground for a
philosophical critique of Leninism that that supplied by Pannekoek.

This part closes with a repetition that dialectics are not all about
contradictions and then the very interesting assertion that they are not
always about change either. They can be about co-presence.  In these days
when nothing seems to change and everywhere it is a case of 'plus ca
change, plus c'est la meme chose', I think this is an important cautionary
note.

Speaking of non-change is a reminder that I have to break off here to have
yet another encounter with the dialectical joys of burned porridge.

aaaAH!

Part 6 on page 100 beginning 'It may be apposite to close this section=85'
This consists of a seven-part run though the genealogy of dialectic and a
promise to tell all in the forthcoming "Dialectical Social Theory".

Heraclitus - gives us dialectical contradictions.  Heraclitus seems to have
been Lenin's favourite philosopher. The contradiction contains the
possibility of change. As Engels put it with Heraclitus 'everything is and
is not, for everything is *fluid,* is constantly changing, constantly
coming into being and passing away (Marx Engels, Lenin, 1977: 64).
Socrates - dialectical arguments.  Here argument has the goal of the
pursuit of truth, rather than in the Sophists eristic or argument which had
as its goal of victory above all else.  We live of course in the time of
the eristic. But recently when watching the documentary The War Room (?) on
Clinton's campaign his spin doctors,  i.e. the practisers of the eristic,
were celebrating their victory over the Bush camp and I was intrigued that
suddenly they switched from the eristic to the pursuit of something better.
 The final speech was on how things would really truly, really truly be
much better under Clinton. I thought then that even in the heart of the
most practised of spin-doctors there lurks a lonely hunter. Faust never
ceases to hope that he will escape his filthy bargain with Mephistopheles

In Marxism the elenchus or that part of the dialectical argument that
refutes the opponent is the class struggle and a norm of truth or some
ideal which we are striving towards. There follows a digression on the
class struggle as interpreted by a philosopher.

Plato - dialectical reason This is meant to include the best of all the
great thinkers from the past. My dictionary doesn't give paleonomy
incidentally.

Aristotle - dialectical propaedeutics. Here the dialectical functions as a
means of encouraging preliminary learning.

Plotinus & Schiller - I am especially interested in this aspect of the
dialectic for it turns up so insistently in the work of Walter Benjamin.
There is an original and undifferentiated unity.  The loss or diaspora and
then a return to a differentiated unity or unity in diversity. There is
much to think upon here.  Especially the difference between the two
unities, that is between undifferentiated and differentiated unity.  I have
often thought looking at the labor movement that it seems to function
instinctively on the notion of an undifferentiated unity and only very
reluctantly comes to terms with the differentiated unity of modernity.

Hegel -Dialectical intelligibility
 Hegel comments on social forms but is supercession of  them is
preservative. Marx concentrates n the underlying causal grounds of social
phenomena.

Marx -dialectical praxis.  Interpreting and changing the world.

Kant, Hegel, Marx and DCR  dialectical freedom.  Again Bhaskar is at his
best here.  Boldly going. A pilgrim on the way to the Celestial City where
we will find a 'true democratic socialist humanism'. Good on him!


Done. Praises be!




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