Subject: BHA: Re: Directionality in history
Date: Sun, 1 Aug 2004 20:55:22 +1200


Mervyn
On re-reading your draft entry on directionality, I wondered about your
definition of "progress" in the human realm. I'd rather see "progress" as a
movement towards greater freedom in a given context, including a
socio-historical context and something that can be sustained when and to the
extent freedom at the individual/immediate level in the spatio-temporalizing
structure is at tandem with / synchronizes with freedom at the structural
level (i.e. non-reifiying and consisitent with individual/immediate level
freedom for a range of actors wthin a structure).
And about the bit about : "Progress may  be negative, consisting merely in
the slowing down of degeneration or  ENTROPY " etc. Can progress be negative
and still be "progress"? Wouldn't it be retrogression then? I don't quite
understand what you mean by that because progress would then subsume
retrograde movement and render 'directionality' itself problematic and
unilinear. Freedom is what makes tendential directionality rational in the
human realm, and I'd say the current situation - war on terror etc that you
speak of is a retrograde movement in that it takes us further away from
freedom - (this is not to endorse the post-war era in anyway, but to point
to the embedding of certain oppressive structures, war, racism, colonialism
etc).
And, while we are on the business of taking on board sensitivity of
colonized peoples, with reference to Marx and Hegel in the entry, what needs
to be clarified is: progress does not presuppose any specific or necessary
preference for or elevation of any type of social form/structure/or
organization in society and history. I think that is the nub of the colonial
critique. Instead progress must be related  to P2 relations and evaluated on
the basis of the extent to which it frees the slave types from the master
types in a given context or the way we put it in the streets: "freedom from
oppression" and "liberation".
regards
Radha


----- Original Message -----
From: "Mervyn Hartwig" <mh-AT-jaspere7.demon.co.uk>
To: <bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU>
Sent: Friday, July 30, 2004 6:15 AM
Subject: BHA: Directionality in history


> Hi all,
>
> I heard Fukuyama in a BBC radio interview yesterday describe himself, a
> propos the 'end of history' thesis, as 'a Marxist with a different
> stopping point' - he can't conceive how history could move beyond the
> liberal democratic order.  I would have fallen off my chair had I not
> been strapped to it (in a car). A Marxist!? While there have certainly
> been many endist Marxists and Bhaskar sheets home to Marx himself a
> certain 'proleptic endism', Bhaskar's own vision of eudaimonia as
> marking the beginning, not the end of history, owes a great deal to
> Marx. One of the things he has in common with Marx, Fukuyama explained,
> is an understanding of history as possessing 'directionality', and
> readers of DPF will know that Bhaskar espouses a notion of history's
> 'tendential rational directionality'. Radha in her draft dictionary
> entry on Colonialism raises this as a problem for the colonized in
> particular who have been the victim of unilinear evolutionary views, a
> problem which she rightly says should be addressed in any future work.
> Below, as a start, is my draft dictionary entry on the topic, which
> inter alia seeks to address such concerns (at the meta-level only). I
> think the concept is often misunderstood. Comments welcome. Sean Creaven
> has defended the notion in DCR on a somewhat different tack. Nick
> Hostettler and Alan Norrie have criticized it as irrealist and
> teleological, and James Daly has taken issue with the related notion of
> progress both on this list and in his published writings.
>
> Fukuyama has a new book out on the international political order or
> something. A CR critique of his works and all he stands for would be a
> good project for someone.
>
> Mervyn
>
> ***************
>
> *Directionality* pertains to 2E PROCESS (CAUSALITY), which is
> directional change or absenting (â^À^Ødevelopmentâ^À^Ù), or â^À^Øthe mode of
> spatio-temporalizing structureâ^À^Ù (see also RHYTHMIC), necessary
> conditions for which are the irreversibility (directional asymmetry) of
> time and the reality of tense. Directional change is a condition of the
> intelligibility of our embodied AGENCY, â^À^Øfor to act is to bring about
> a state of affairs which (unless it were overdetermined) would not
> otherwise have occurredâ^À^Ù (D: 252). In our multiply contradictory and
> open world, directional absenting is rarely, even in its simplest
> manifestations, unilinear. It is rather an uneven and multiply divergent
> unfolding and enfolding, punctuated by fold-back and retrogression
> (strikingly exemplified in the process of biological evolution). Just as
> there is â^À^Øno uniquely determined or predetermined path linking amoebae
> to humansâ^À^Ù (PN 100-1), so there is none from hunter-foraging modes of
> production to eudaimonia â^À^Ó â^À^Øsocial life is not a success story and
> things could have been (just as they might be) differentâ^À^Ù (SR: 140).
> Nor does directional change have a conceivable end (see ENDISM,
> HISTORICITY). CR is accordingly strongly critical of all evolutionary
> historicisms (see also PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE OF MODERNITY).
>
> In this â^À^Ønon-centrist­expressivist-triumphalist-endistâ^À^Ù
> (non-modernist, non-Whiggish, non-bourgeois) sense, we may nonetheless
> speak of *progress* in the human realm, providing that, in accordance
> with the principle of epistemic relativity (see HOLY TRINITY), it is
> recognized that all judgements of progressive import are necessarily
> intrinsic to the process concerned and made from a particular position
> in theoretical â^À^Øtimeâ^À^Ù, be it a research programme, an emancipatory
> struggle, a historical epoch or the overall process of geo-history as
> such (see consistency/ inconsistency; cf. Minnerup 2003). Progress may
> be negative, consisting merely in the slowing down of degeneration or
> ENTROPY (e.g., from an emancipatory point of view, of the current
> erosion of civil liberties in the context of the â^À^Øwar on terrorâ^À^Ù),
> rather than the positive speeding up of negentropy. (It may of course
> also be more absolutely negative, i.e. consist in movement away from the
> desired direction altogether, as in the progressive degeneration of a
> research programme.) Diversity and plurality are among its necessary
> conditions.
>
> In the case of science generally and social science specifically,
> positive progress is embedded and registered in the EPISTEMOLOGICAL
> DIALECTIC (cf. Norris 2003) and  EXPLANATORY CRITIQUE respectively (cf.
> Lawson 2003: 61n). Geo-history for its part is argued by Bhaskar to
> exhibit *tendential rational directionality* overall. This concept has
> its immediate origins in Hegelâ^À^Ùs and Marxâ^À^Ùs understanding of human
> agency as involving both separation of self from nature (see REFERENTIAL
> DETACHMENT) with a potential for ALIENATION and a fundamental drive to
> overcome it through SELF-REALIZATION (Sayers 2003), which finds an echo
> in Adornoâ^À^Ùs notion of an underlying impulse to freedom in human
> history (Norrie 2004). In Marx and Bhaskar, it â^À^Øpushes history from
> behind and from withinâ^À^Ù (â^À^Øteleonomic pushâ^À^Ù), rather than also, as
> arguably in Hegel, â^À^Øpulling it from in front and outsideâ^À^Ù
> (â^À^Øteleological pullâ^À^Ù) (D:  22; Smith 2001: 218, who however
> disagrees that the impulse in Hegel is teleological). â^À^ØDirectionalityâ^À^Ù
> is imparted to this process fundamentally by the structural asymmetry
> (see PRIMACY) of power2 relations, which desiring agents  have an
> interest in gaining the necessary knowledge and power to absent. Thus we
> can say that directionality is â^À^Øimposed on the education of desire by
> the REALITY PRINCIPLE, i.e. {the} alethic truth {of power2-stricken
> society}, mediated in practice by the meta-ethical virtue of wisdomâ^À^Ù
> (D: 176). By â^À^Ørationalâ^À^Ù is meant that the directionality is towards
> DIALECTICAL REASON or the unity of theory and practice in practice at
> the level of the species, entailing the abolition of MASTER-SLAVE-type
> relations as such and in general and the transition to EUDAIMONIA
> (marking the end, not of history, but of its power2-stricken phase, and
> the commencement of an epoch of authentic free development and
> diversity). â^À^ØTendentialâ^À^Ù highlights that it pertains to the domain
> of the real and the possible, not the actual: while as a tendency it is
> necessary and inexorable, it is highly contingent whether and how it
> will be actualized because this depends both on human praxis of the
> requisite kind (totalizing DEPTH PRAXIS) and on accidents. This is a
> fundamental point that postmodernism overlooks in maintaining that
> narratives of emancipation necessarily rest on unilinear views of
> history (the end of which is ironically claimed to be already secured in
> postmodernity itself, one-sidedly characterized as the era of
> â^À^Øfragmentation, multiplicity and pluralismâ^À^Ù (Woodward 2002)). As a
> normic universal, rational directionality cannot be falsified by the
> actual course of history, â^À^Øonly by the provision of a better, nobler,
> norm more fitting to the needs and propensities of developing
> four-planar socialized humanityâ^À^Ù (D: 280).
>
> Such a view seems fully compatible with the historical materialist
> thesis concerning the tendency of human productive powers to develop
> across history (e.g. Creaven 2003, Nolan 2002b, Pinkstone 2002),
> providing the thesis isnâ^À^Ùt interpreted actualistically and the process
> of freedom isnâ^À^Ùt reduced to the economy of time and the absenting of
> material scarcity, or seen as spearheaded by the West or any other
> vanguard or elite, or as coming to an end in communism. As already
> noted, tendential rational directionality is grounded in human agency as
> such, wherever it is â^À^Ó it is â^À^Øa species-specific ineliminable
> *fact*â^À^Ù (D: 210), which knows no East nor West nor South nor North.
> While its power has on balance been vastly enriched by the development
> of capitalism, whose historical origins contingently lay in the West, it
> is no more West- nor North-centric than the globalizing logic of capital
> itself. Unlike the latter, however, it is genuinely dialectically
> universalizing, thrusting across and beyond all power2 divisions of
> class, gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and colonialism. The
> dialectic of (desire to) freedom within which it is embedded necessarily
> moves from â^À^Øform to content, centre to periphery, and figure to
> groundâ^À^Ù (D: 208).
>
> At the end of the day (and during its course), tendential rational
> directionality is none other than DIALECTIC (maximally defined) or the
> PULSE OF FREEDOM itself, which beats most strongly in the breasts of the
> downtrodden, the exploited, the oppressed, who may increasingly come to
> understand, in conditions of post/modernity conducive to â^À^Øa dialectic
> of globalizing self-consciousnessâ^À^Ù, that the freedom of each in an
> interconnected world is a condition of the freedom of all, so enabling
> â^À^Øgeo-historical directionality {... to} catch up with dialectical
> rationalityâ^À^Ù (D: 270) and redeeming all the crushed CONCRETELY UTOPIAN
> yearnings of the past.
>
>
>
>
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