Date: Thu, 17 Sep 1998 02:02:51 +0300 (EET DST)
From: j laari <jlaari-AT-cc.jyu.fi>
Subject: RE: Sociology or epistemology?


Help! I shouldn't have opened my dumb mouth...!?

Some remarks...

> Jukka, is it possible that people are getting confused over the relationship
> between ontological materialism and historical materialism?  
> (..) Marx didn't particularly care about matter as an ontological
> category in the manner of dialectical materialism, that his materialism was
> strictly sociological, etc. This is baloney, by the way, (...)
> seems to me you can't be a historical materialism without being an
> ontological materialist, but then you don't have too spend too much time
> fleshing out your ontological materialism if you wish to concentrate your
> attention on historical materialism.

Well, shame on Marx if he believed that social scientists and
philosophers can manage without such "anthropological" questions we
have been tackling with the past 50 or so years. (100 years?)

My point is that according to one view all these weird discussions on
body and the like are continuation and development of Marx's
materialist conception of history. (You don't have to accept this. You
probably would call it rubbish pomoism? However, there are serious
reasons for all this. But about them more with better time.)

Another point: These discussions are heavily loaded with phenomenology
(especially the French developments in it - Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, up
to Deleuze), psychoanalysis (esp. all that Lacana), and structuralism
(Levi-Strauss, Lacana again)... They emerged, or at least got new
power, when French philosophers and social scientists faced Hegel's
critique of Kant's transcendental philosophy (sometime between the
world wars). You could interpret it as an effort to turn Kant's
aprioristic transcendentalism into theory of historical constitution &
development of thought forms, social forms and the like. Or as social
theory purified of neokantianism! There were two basic strategies. One
concentrating on (to put it bluntly:) the phil. of consciousness
(Sartre etc.), the other on more sociological terrain (French
epistemology, and later structuralists too). But they all worked on
the same bloody problems. Marx might have believed there's no need for
"extrapolation" and filling the holes that were in his visions. But
that was then.

Third point: PB's theories are *loaded* with all these issues. He
knows it very well and tries to swim in the sea of structuralist
sharks ("objective idealists" as you probably would call them) and
existentialists ("subjectivists" as you probably would call them).

Lastly, I don't make so drastic difference between historical and
ontological (materialism). Historicity of materialism is such that
what once (in 18th century Enlightenment) was grounded on matter has
afterwards been based on materialistically understood historicity.
"History" is an "ontological" category: "social world is basically
historical" is an ontological claim, but it doesn't make difference
between "idealist" and "materialist" emphasis. That's always made on
good old phil. basis - around which contemporary discussions also
revolve, only in "new" terms. "Economy" isn't particularly
materialistic category, by the way, except in Feuerbach's and early
Marx's sense of sensuous activity. But that's "anthropologicism"?
(Sorry, I'm slightly exhausted by now and I don't have attention
enough on what I write. More about this all in my replies to Sergio
following immediately.)

> This makes me think of the Bhaskar list for some reason.  One can spend so
> much time trying to get the logical microfoundations right for the
> ontological status of society viz. the individual, the Transformational
> Model of Social Action, etc. etc., that one never substantively develops a
> social theory.  Just like structure and agency, these microfoundations have
> a place in the scheme of things, but if one spent one's entire life getting
> them right, one would never progress onward to substantive social theory.

Which means that for you substantive social theory lacks all the
crucial questions except those of phil. of history? But then it
couldn't go any further than to claim that It's All History and that's
it?

> Agreed!

Fine!

Yours, Jukka L


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