File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2001/bhaskar.0102, message 52


Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 10:16:31 -0500 (EST)
From: Ruth Groff <rgroff-AT-yorku.ca>
Subject: BHA: DPF 2.5


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>Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1999 13:08:46 +1000
>From: Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan-AT-qut.edu.au>
>Subject: BHA: Diffraction Post one
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>On the Materialist Diffraction of Dialectic (DPF, pp 86-102)
>One of (probably) two posts.
>
>'The best school for the dialectic is emigration. The keenest dialecticians
>are refugees. They are refugees because of changes and they study nothing
>other than changes…If their enemies triumph, they calculate how much the
>victory has cost, and they have a sharp eye for the contradictions, The
>dialectic, may it always flourish'
>(Brecht, cited in Bhaskar, 1993: 241)
>
>
>
>Outline of Section
>
>i) Introduction A This consists of the first paragraph on page 86
>ii) Introduction B. This runs from the paragraph beginning 'The most
>significant phases in the development of Marx's thinking…' on p 86 to
>'…stratification and process in philosophy too' on page 88. 
>iii) Part 1 From page 88- 92
>iv) Part 2 From page 92-93
>v)  Part 3 from page 93 to 96
>vi)  I would suggest that another Part 4 could be thought of as beginning
>on page 96 with 'Marx's epistemological materialism presupposes…' to
>'…there will always be a conatus for freedom to become.' on page 98
>vii) I would suggest a Part 5 beginning on page 98 with 'Having given some
>examples of the broadening…' to help to change it too' on page 100.
>viii) That leaves a Part 6 beginning on page 100 with 'It may be apposite
>to close this section…' to 'What it presupposes and what it implies will be
>documented in C3' on page 102 
>
>To summarise the editorial changes (!) I have split the introduction into
>two and then created six rather than three parts. We should note that only
>the Introduction A and parts four, five and six deal with the dialectic. Of
>these it is only Part Four that is concerned with diffraction, apart that
>is from four sentences on page 92. The greater share of this section is
>given over to an account of Marx's criticism of Hegel. I will now take each
>of these divisions in turn and comment on them.
>
>Introduction A
>
>It is this that really signals what is supposedly the key intention of this
>section and also provides us with the clearest account of why he diffracts
>the dialectic. So what does he tells us here?  Well there are two elements.
>a] the use of Marx's materialist criticism of Hegel permits and demands a
>new complex dialectic. b] this new diffracted dialectic is needed to accord
>with the 'complexities, angularities and nuances of our pluriversal world'. 
>
>Quasi-religious Marxists like myself will immediately detect here the
>'dialectics of nature' controversy.  The most celebrated moment in this
>controversy was the  Sartre, & Hyppolite versus Garaudy & Vigier debate:
>'Is the dialectic solely a law of history or is it also a law of nature?'
>The debate took place in Paris on Dec 7 1961 in front of  6,000 young
>people. An astonishing number.  Here in Australia you wouldn't get six, not
>even with promises of free beer and tickets to the "footie".  [Ah, eat your
>hearts out all ye would be philosopher-kings!]
>
>In his discussion of the debate, George Novack outlines three possible
>positions on dialectics
>1] Dialectics is mystical mumbo-jumbo.  No self-respecting
>philosopher/intellectual would even contemplate raising the subject.  This
>is the dominant or establishment view at present.
>2] Dialectics is valid in some domains but not in others, especially not in
>nature.
>3] 'Dialectical materialism deals with the entire universe and its logic
>holds good for all the constituent sectors of reality'. In his inimitably
>crude fashion, Novack describes the third position as the viewpoint held by
>the 'creators of scientific socialism and their authentic disciples'
>(Novack, 1978:232).
>
>As I understand it Dialectical Critical Realism would reject all three
>positions and instead advances a position which holds it that the entire
>universe is dialectical but this is not the uniform linear dialectic of
>Hegel.  In other words Bhaskar purchases a universal dialectic but at the
>expense of the singular triadic [thesis, antithesis, synthesis] formula
>much beloved of us old Marxists.  
>
>I would not underestimate the shock this constitutes for the faithful few.
>No longer, it seems do we have the kindly light of the dialectic to lead us
>on.  No longer can we murmur amidst the seemingly endless triumphs of our
>enemies, 'The dialectic will give them according to their deeds, and
>according to the wickedness of their endeavours'. Cruelty, thy name is
>Bhaskar!
>
>Of course as David-Hillel Ruben and others long before him pointed out, the
>universal dialectic was thoroughly idealist. The full implications of
>Hegel's idealism are interesting. Nature like everything else would appear
>to be dialectical, but its movements did not belong to nature.  Rather they
>were the manifestations of the movement of the Idea. Ditto, seemingly, for
>the social world (Ruben, 1979: 46-47). So in a sense Hegel did not believe
>nature was dialectical.  Consequently when the Dialectical Materialist
>inversion of the dialectic was performed, it was a double mistake to look
>for the dialectical triad in nature.
>
>The thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad is really a theory of learning. It
>was this that led Lucien Goldmann to inform Jean Piaget that he was the
>most 'authentic' of contemporary dialecticians.  The latter was, as he
>later related, 'terrified' for he had not read a single word of Marx.
>(Piaget, 1976: 126-7).
>To sum up Introduction A, the materialist critique of Hegel's dialectic
>allows a new dialectic, which however is multiply diffracted, i.e. it takes
>a great variety of forms.
>
>
>Introduction B
>This part deals with the controversial matter of Marx's relationship to the
>Hegelian dialectic.  Bhaskar outlines three phases of the relationship
>1. 1843-44. The early attack on the mystified logic of Hegel and the
>idealist concept of labour
>2. 1840s.  The general attack on philosophy
>3. 1857-58. A more positive re-evaluation of Hegel.
>
>Bhaskar sums up the relationship thus: Marx remained critical of Hegel's
>dialectic; but he believed he was using a dialectic related to Hegel's.
>
>There follows here an allusion to Marx's famous remarks about the Hegelian
>dialectic - the rational kernel, and standing on its head etc.  I am not a
>Hegelian scholar, nor, for that matter,  is my grasp of Marx that detailed.
> But, for what it is worth, I think that Hegel will always elude any simple
>formula. Ruben puts this nicely when he says ' I do not think that one an
>ever capture all of what Hegel was trying to say by translating his
>terminology into clearer but non-Hegelian terminology' (Ruben, 1979: 40)
>What then was the rational core in the Hegelian dialectic that Marx took
>over? Bhaskar says it is 'the notion of the dialectical explanation of
>contradictory forces in terms of a structured common ground.' I will return
>to this in my discussion of dialectical counterparts, when I will outline
>what I think this formula means.  But for the moment it might be helpful to
>give Ruben's view of what the 'rational kernel' consists of. He argues this
>is 'the necessary development, opposition and change in things' (1979: 55).
>
>
>The reminder of this introductory section summarises Marx's critique of
>Hegel.  The content is reasonably clear, but the presentation is somewhat
>cluttered. Much of the criticism of Hegel is familiar but Bhaskar attempts
>to give it a Critical Realist spin and perhaps this might be a source of
>confusion. In any case Hegel's crimes are
>1. The principle of identity.  I take this to mean subject-object identity.
>2. Logical mysticism.
>3. 'The triple inversions'.  I am not at all clear what these are, but I
>love that phrase, sounds like a gay bar on a busy Saturday nite. It turns
>up again on page 93.
>4.   Realised idealism. This is linked to Hegel's triumphalism, that is the
>claim of total success for his system.
>5.  Spiritual monism. This is linked to centrism. Monist philosophies
>maintain that there is one and one only substance. Centrism is a somewhat
>slippery concept, at least for me.  I see it as referring to systems, which
>see diverse phenomena as merely expression of one element, say the economy
>as in vulgar Marxism.
>6.  Preservative dialectical sublation. This was covered in the
>introduction.  Briefly the charge here is that Hegel's dialectic preserves
>rather than absents. This is possibly linked to endism.  Endist
>philosophies posit some kind of goal or terminus, most notably in the 'end
>of history' thesis. Communism in Marx's Manifesto is suggested as a
>terminus or end for the class struggle.
>7.  Hegel's inability to sustain the autonomy of nature.
>8.  His cognitivism
>9. His failure to uphold the (geo)historicity of social forms.
>
>Bhaskar now restates these accusation in Dialectical Critical Realist
>terminology. Here Hegel is guilty of 
>10. The Speculative Illusion. The reduction of everything to philosophy
>11. The Unholy Trinity of Irrealism, that is the 
>12. Epistemic fallacy - that is the reduction of ontology to epistemology
>13. Ontological monovalence - a purely positive account of being.  That is
>an account that does not have a notion of absence.
>14. The Primal Squeeze -The most difficult of the three concepts.  It is
>the denial of a stratified reality. This is produced by the conflict
>between those who would deny science and those who would deny philosophy.
>As a result we lose a notion of natural necessity and of controlled
>scientific exploration of reality.
>
>These terms are all explained in the glossary and they are as well
>reasonably familiar to the initiated.  However they can demoralise the
>beginner.
>
>I would like to draw particular attention to the last sentence in
>Introduction B. It begins 'But it should be said before I commence…' This
>is an interesting disclaimer. Bhaskar here disavows any claim to have
>created a "theory of everything".  The dialectic did not stop with Marx nor
>will it stop with Bhaskar. 
>
>I take these disavowals at the full value.  A theory such as Dialectical
>Critical Realism which is built around a stratified ontology and notions
>such as epistemic relativism does not aim to be a "theory of everything'.
>So postmodernist or neo-anarchist attacks do not apply. 
>
>Part 1. This rehearses in a Critical Realist fashion Marx's critique of
>Hegel's philosophy of identity
>
>I have read Marx's original critique in the Holy Family and it is very
>funny.  I recommend everyone to read it (Marx, Engels, Lenin, 1977: 17-20).
>
>Bhaskar divides Marx's critique into the exoteric and the esoretic. The
>exoteric (easily  understood by laypersons) critique is really the
>Feuerbachian one.  For Feuerbach humanity created the idea of a god and
>then claimed that god had created them. Similarly the philosopher thought.
>Then deified "Thought" and claimed that "Thought" had thought through the
>philosopher. This can be expressed by the formula W -A -W, (word - act
>-word) where 'word' is 'verbally recorded knowledge, knowledge in its
>universal form, in the form of the 'language of science, in the form of
>formulae, symbols, models of all kinds, etc., etc' (Ilyenkov, 1977: 249).
>In reality the situation is A-W-A, where word or knowledge is the product
>of human acts which leads to more acts.
>
>It is however the esoteric critique which really interests Bhaskar. It is
>also where we find one of the real gems, namely the notion of dialectical
>counterparts.  Put simply and crudely Bhaskar says that Hegel and his
>objective idealist system are the mirror opposites of the subjective
>empiricist system.  The two systems, while apparently opposed to each
>other, share a common ground or conception of reality as non-stratified. 
>
>Hegel begins his system with 'uncritically received empirical data' (p 88).
>He covertly assumes that reality consists of these.  Overtly these are
>transformed into the products of the Infinite Mind or the Absolute or the
>Idea or something out there. The subjective empiricist claims to receive
>unconceptualised raw data.  But covertly she has made the theoretical
>assumption that the world consists of atomised facts and their constant
>conjunction. In both the case of Hegel and the subjective empiricist there
>is the absence of the notion of ontological depth.  This is implicit in
>Hegel and explicit with the subjective empiricist. In both cases they are
>reading the world. Hegel claims that the Infinite Mind  is writing on him;
>while the subjective empiricist is claiming that the world as atomised
>facts and constant conjunctions is writing on her.
>
>There are three diagrams in this part.  Those on page 89 are extremely
>elegant.    However, for me, the really useful diagram is figure 2.10 on
>page 91. Hegel (Speculative Illusion) departs from the status quo, while
>the  subjective empiricist (Positivistic illusion) arrives there. 
>
>This gives us the core of this critique of Hegel. There is also the
>interesting suggestion that Hegel was a logical-positivist before anyone
>had even heard of the phrase. This is followed by a note on Marx's
>epistemological materialist critique of Hegel.  Immediately after this is a
>wonderful spate of Dialectical critical realist "insults" hurled at Hegel
>at the bottom of page 91 and 92 - 'atomist, punctualist, extensionalist and
>individualist…expressivist-holist, blockist, intensionalist and
>collectivist'. Wow! Go Roy go!
>
>Let us turn to  page 92  and the paragraph beginning 'Marx's analysis has
>three other important implications'. The implications are 1. Hegel is at
>heart a conservative. 2. Beneath his dialectical analysis there is the
>empiricist assumption about the nature of reality. 3. If we reject the
>notion of subject object identity then we can have a diffracted dialectic.
>We can have epistemological dialectics (subject) and ontological dialectics
>(object)  there can even be intermingled and embedded ones. Speaking of
>which - Embedded dialectics.  For the bold few on this list who are
>interested in Cultural Studies, I would suggest that it would be fruitful
>to think of the intertextual as a subset of the embedded dialectic.
>
>I would like to spend the remainder of this post on saying briefly why I
>believe the notion of dialectical counter part is such a jewel.  It gives
>me nothing less than a critique of an entire tradition in Cultural Studies.
>For example  Babha's post colonial mimic, Bakhtin's Carnival Theory, and
>Queer Theory's bi/tran/a etc sexual are all vulnerable to this critique.
>While appearing to oppose the status quo they in effect share a common ground
>
>Take for example the theory of the carnival. Bakhtin's claim for this was
>that it created an unofficial world marked by freedom, an alternate
>universe and the people's truth. But the carnival always knew it had to
>end.  In no sense was it a challenge to the official world that might have
>ended with the transcendence of the latter. Because at the heart of the
>matter, Carnival and the Status Quo both rested on the ground of TINA -
>There Is No Alternative to Das Bestehende - the existing state of affairs.
>So at one stroke we have an elegant cut through the dominant moment in
>Cultural studies theorising.  We have a way of theoretical grounding our
>feeling that neo-Bakhtinians, like John Fiske, were talking rubbish when
>they hailed the progressive moment in television shows like The Price is
>Right and Rock and Roll Wrestling (Fiske, 1987).
>
>Part Two (pp 92-3)
>
>This part deals specifically with Marx.  It asks the question: To what
>extent did Marx in his critique of Hegel move to a radically
>anti-philosophical position?  Did he perpetrate the Positivistic illusion?
>Hegel was guilty of the opposite - the speculative illusion where
>philosophy was everything and there was little or no role for science.
>Bhaskar's answer would appear to be a tentative 'yes', especially for the
>period in which Marx produced the German Ideology.
> Next Bhaskar turns to the specifics of Marx's criticism of Hegel.  The
>first of these is clear.  Hegel thought only in terms of abstract mental
>labour.  This enabled him to hold onto his W -A -W formulation.  However if
>he had worked more on the world he would presumably come to the correct
>formula A - W- A.
>There is a problem for  me with this part of the key sentence I think there
>is a typo.  It goes  
>
>'…and is in turn based on the second form of philosophical materialism to
>which Marx is, except for a few early passages, committed, namely
>ontological materialism, asserting the unilateral *independence of social
>upon biological (and more generally physical) being, and the emergence of
>the latter from the former. 
>
>Surely this should read *dependence*? And the 'latter' is physical being?
>And the 'former' is biological being?
>
>The next sentence, which concludes this part, gives us a critique of Marx.
>It is very libertarian socialist and very 60s. I am prepared to go along
>publicly with most of it.  However deep within my Leninist closet, I mutter
>secretly to myself about the primacy of class.
>The criticism of Marx is triggered of by the statement that Hegel uses
>constellationality in a theoretically triumphalist way. I take this to mean
>that Hegel closes off his system with the return to the Absolute, the Idea
>or something.  He then claims to have solved everything. 
>
>Marx's faults are that 
>
>a. He places class as primary.
>b. He perpetrates a linear presentation. This is the charge that one stage
>is supposed to flow from the other.
>c. He tended to think as communism as the 'end of history'.
>d. His celebration of the achievements of technology (in the Manifesto?),
>tended to be functionalist, that is, not to see the downside of
>technological innovation.
>e. He indulges in notions of necessity of the conquest of nature. This
>stems in part from an uncritical reception or celebration of Modernism.
>Most notable in the Manifesto and much less clear in the last writings. 
>f. This is a hard one!!! I take it to mean that in some way Darwinism
>influenced Marx in the direction of Social Darwinism.  I met many Social
>Darwinists in China in 1990, but theirs was a very degenerated Marxism indeed.
>g. This last charge of 'programmatic practical-expressivism' is for me
>really the accusation that Marx did not take into account the full range of
>oppressions in society.
>
>
>
>
>
>References
>
>Bakhtin, M., Laughter and Freedom in Solomon, M. (ed) Marxism and Art,
>Detroit: Wayne State University, 1979: 295-300
>Bhaskar, R., Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, London: Verso, 1993
>Fiske, J., Television Culture, New York: Routledge, 1987
>Ilyenkov, E.V. Dialectical Logic: Essays on Its History and Theory, Moscow:
>Progress Publishers, 1977
>Marx, Engels, Lenin, On dialectical Materialism, Moscow: Progress
>Publishers, 1977
>Novack, G., Polemics in Marxist Philosophy: Essays on: Sartre  Plekhanov
>Lukacs Engels Kolakowski Trotsky Timpanaro  Colletti  New York: Monad
>Press, 1978
>
>Piaget, J., A brief tribute to Goldmann, in Goldmann, L., Cultural
>Creation, St. Louis: Telos Press, 1979: 125-7 
>
>Ruben, D-H, Marxism and Dialectics, in Mepham, J., & Ruben D-H. (eds)
>Issues in Marxist Philosophy, London: The Harvester Press, 1979: 37-87
>
>
>
>
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