Date: Fri, 17 Dec 1999 17:06:47 +0000
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: BHA: Gaps


Nick Hostetler recently remarked to me that there *is* a problem with
Bhaskar's style, there are gaps in the process of thought as presented.
(I'm sure you won't mind my recounting this, Nick.) I responded with an
argument to the effect that the more leaps a complex creative writer
takes the further they get faster, and that's a good thing. The other
day I happened to open Adorno's *Minima Moralia* and it fell open (would
you believe?) at No. 50, *Gaps*. It takes my argument way past where I
had got with it. 

Adorno argues that the demand for what he calls 'intellectual honesty' -
that a writer 'show explicitly all the steps that have led him [sic] to
his conclusion, so enabling every reader to follow the process through'
'usually amounts to sabotage of thought':

1. It rests on 'the liberal fiction of the universal communicability of
each and every thought and so inhibits their objectively appropriate
expression'.

2. It is wrong as a principle of representation: 'for the value of a
thought is measured by its distance from the continuity of the
familiar', i.e. 'every thought which is not idle' is opposed to and
negates that continuity. Thus a text which accedes to the demand is
going to be banal in content as well as form.

3. The 'demand for intellectual honesty is itself dishonest' - those who
make it forget that thought, like life, always possesses a 'profound
inadequacy', is 'always less than it should be', 'disappointing by
comparison with its premises'; i.e. it is neither a purely logical nor
directly intuited affair, but is thickly mediated by experience. It is
thought's  necessary gaps or absences that drives thought on.

In another context (The Jargon of Authenticity, 15) Adorno offers a
devastating explanatorily critical aphorism which conceivably also has
some purchase in the matter of Bhaskar's style: 

'The empty chatter about expression is the ideology complementary to
that silencing which the status quo imposes on those who have no pwoer
over it, and whose claim is therefore hollow in advance.'

-- 
Mervyn Hartwig
Editor, 'Alethia'
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ALETHIA is the newsletter of the International Association for Critical 
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CONTENTS of the current issue of ALETHIA (2:2, October 1999): Geoff 
Hodgson and Andrew Collier, An Exchange on CR and Politics; Jonathan 
Pratschke, Explaining the war against Serbia; Martha Gimenez, For 
Structure (a critique of Anthony King's Against Structure); Wes Shumar, 
Beyond anthropocentrism in ethics (review article of Anrew Collier's Being
and Worth); Doug Porpora, Reducing the Scatter (review article of Steve 
Fleetwood, ed, Critical Realism in Economics); Wendy Olsen, review of 
M.J. Smith, Social Science in Question. Plus report on and responses to 
the 1999 CCR/IACR Conference held in Orebro, Sweden.


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