Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2002 07:33:19 -0400
From: Doug Porpora <porporad-AT-drexel.edu>
Subject: Re: BHA: Culture as structure


Hi again,

About the surveillance, Mervyn, I don't know how it works.  Tobin 
suggests my Eudora (Tobin, that is what I use) at school is set to do 
this.  It never was before, but I will check on Monday.

On the issues, Mervyn, I think we largely agree.  I would only point 
out that  in social science it continues to be important to 
distinguish what is dependent on consciousness from what is not.  In 
my maybe not so hard Marxian view, once rules of property ownership 
give rise to class relations, those class relations can objectively 
exist even if no one in the society is at all conscious of them. 
Hence, they are extra-cultural.

I would agree that culture and ideas always play a role in any 
historical process.  My only point is that material relations matter 
too. With the so-called "cultural turn" in sociology, ideas and 
culture have swallowed up everything.  So we are past the debate over 
materialist reductionism.  Instead, the pendulum has shifted to where 
what we now have to resist is idealist (i.e., cultural) reductionism.

doug

>Hi Doug, all,
>
>>is not this level of
>>surveillance not a bit spooky?
>
>Could someone please explain how this surveillance works? It doesn't
>happen to me using a private computer in the UK. Is it an institutional
>or a peculiarly American thing, and why does it bombard those under
>surveillance with reports of its activity??
>
>Doug, again I think I agree with everything, but would like to elaborate
>on one point.
>
>>Mervyn,
>>wouldn't Rachel like this hard Marxist talk from one who is soft on
>>God.
>
>I think she would, but perhaps for the wrong reason (I should explain to
>some that Rachel (Sharp), to whom I'm copying this, is my wife and takes
>a somewhat less positive view of the spiritual turn than I do. She's
>been trying to get onto the list, and when she succeeds will of course
>speak for herself).
>
>The thing is that your 'non-reductive materialism', as your comment
>implies, is in no way incompatible with being 'soft on God' or with
>metaphysical idealism.
>
>(I should explain that I'm not myself a metaphysical idealist or
>materialist, but in a sense both, though it would perhaps be better to
>say that I espouse a third position which sublates both, holding with
>Bhaskar that mind *as possibility* is enfolded in matter from the outset
>both qua causal power and 'implicate order' or the potential
>stratification of being. I'm agnostic about 'God'.)
>
>So when you say that relations are 'material' you can't mean this in a
>metaphysical sense. And of course they're not in fact material in that
>sense - as you say, they're just an irreducible category: the universe
>is so constituted that relations are causal (they're an aspect of its
>implicate order, one could say). While they're 'ontologically
>objective', there's nothing that pertains to 'matter' as such about
>them. They're materially present only in their effects on physical
>objects (this by extension from Bhaskar on social relations (PON), which
>are materially present only in their effects on people).
>
>Thus the only sense (and this seems to be yours) in which they can be
>material is in the Aristotelian sense of 'material cause': that which
>pre-exists and enables and constrains and is in turned shaped by
>activity. When we apply this to the human world, we move away from the
>terrain of metaphysical materialism vs idealism as such to a dispute
>about what has causal primacy in human history: historical materialism
>vs historical idealism. I'm beginning to wonder, though, whether this
>isn't, like the metaphysical one, a false contrast. Material causes
>notoriously do and must include ideas, concepts, culture etc *as well as
>social relations*, and this is the sense in which Marx himself speaks of
>'material conditions' and of a materialist 'primacy' thesis. So in the
>dispute between historical materialism and idealism the main issue is
>not between the 'material' on the one hand and the 'ideal' on the other
>but between a robust realism about material causality in the above sense
>vs a voluntaristic emphasis on the role of ideas. To be sure, historical
>materialism stresses the central role, within material causation in this
>broad sense, of the mode of production and reproduction of our physical
>being, which idealism largely ignores, but here too ideas are of course
>centrally involved.
>
>I think this is the kind of thing Bhaskar is getting at in his
>'reassessment of the role of ideas in history'. This in no way precludes
>an emphasis on the mode of production, and in fact he has recently
>emphasized, in discussing the philosophical discourse of modernity (in
>*Reflections on Meta-Reality* I think) that Marxists are right to stress
>that the qualitative change in the discourse in 17th century Europe was
>bound up with the changes in the mode of production.
>
>Furthermore, Marxists are committed, like Bhaskar, to the notion that
>the species is capable in principle of replacing, largely at any rate,
>unwanted with wanted material causation in the above sense - i.e. of
>acting like the architect, not the bee, realizing ideas (including
>Marxist ones! - at the level of theory historical materialism is itself
>a set of ideas) in their social relations and institutions.
>
>From all of which I conclude that 'hard Marxist talk' about material
>relations and conditions is not incompatible with assigning a crucial
>role to ideas in history, and is irrelevant to the issue of God (or to
>the spiritual turn, which is agnostic re God).
>
>Which is I think entirely compatible with what you said, but I wanted to
>draw out its implications a bit, because the contrary is often assumed
>to be the case.
>
>Mervyn
>
>
>
>
>
>
>Doug Porpora <porporad-AT-drexel.edu> writes
>>Hi everyone,
>>
>>As my previous message was the first I've sent the list in a long
>>time, I was flabbergasted to receive tons of messages telling me not
>>only who had received my message but also who had read it and who had
>>had the nerve just to delete my wisdom unread.  Realizing now that I
>>have done the same when way behind, I apologize to all who have
>>received such reports of my behavior.  But is not this level of
>>surveillance not a bit spooky?
>
>>
>>Anyway, to the issues:
>>
>>1.  Viren, I will send you separately the pieces I still have on file.
>>
>>2.  Unlike, I guess Carrol, I have no problem with culture defined as
>>intersubjective or shared norms, values, and beliefs.
>>
>>3.  As such, yes, cultural elements are generative mechanisms too.
>>
>>4.  In social science, I would decline to call cultural elements
>>"structures," although, as Tobin points out, each -- like a text --
>>might have a structure.
>>
>>5.  Viren to get to your point directly, I don't think we need to go
>>to natural relations among resources to find what does not reduce to
>>rules or schemas.  No relation reduces to rules, resources, or
>>schemas.  Not even a discursive relation within a text is a rule, a
>>schema, or a resource.  Relations are just a separate, irreducible
>>category that Sewell, following Giddens, has simply ignored.
>>
>>6.  Again, Viren, I am quite happy to concede that relations may
>>arise from rules.  The constitutive rules of property ownership give
>>rise to quite definite property (or class) relations.  So, yes, a
>>nonreductive materialism can admit that rules have even logical
>>priority in many cases.
>>
>>7.  Yet, nevertheless, class relations are not the same as the rules
>>of property ownership that give rise to them.  Nor is the power
>>relation between worker and boss (or between dept head and provost)
>>the same as the rules that create that this power relation.
>>
>>8.  Once created by the rules, class relations or power relations can
>>exist without anyone's knowing about them.  They are what I call
>>"emergently material."  In any case, however much they arise from
>  >cultural intersubjectivity, they are not themselves either cultural
>>or intersubjective.  They are ontologically objective.
>>
>>9.  To ignore such objective or (emergently) material relations is to
>  >do away with political economy.  It is to pursue what amounts to
>>cultural reductionism.  Although no one listens to us anymore, such
>>reductionism amounts to what we Marxists call idealism.  Idealist is
>  >what I consider the Giddens-Sewell trajectory to be.  (Mervyn,
>>wouldn't Rachel like this hard Marxist talk from one who is soft on
>>God.)
>>
>>10.  Viren, Sewell's new piece on going beyond the cultural turn
>>sounds salutary. Can you send the reference; I would be very
>>interested to read it.
>>
>>11.  Dick, I don't like Skocpol's definition of structure since
>>anything social can be changed by people.  I do basically agree with
>>your own definition of structure as patterns, insisting, however,
>>that patterns are composed of relations.
>>
>>Now, be on notice that I will be looking very carefully to see who
>>among you just deletes my message unread.  And my computer will even
>  >tell me in advance whether your subjective reaction is appropriate.
>>
>>doug
>>
>
>
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-- 
doug porpora
dept of culture and communication
drexel university
phila pa 19104
USA

porporad-AT-drexel.edu


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