Date: Tue, 14 Mar 1995 09:09:40 -0800 (PST)
From: Kenny Mostern <kennym-AT-uclink2.berkeley.edu>
Subject: determination 


Howie Chodos has many useful questions about the concept of 
"determination" in marxism in his recent post, and I hope we can have a 
long conversation about this.  I agree that that the statement "social 
being determines consciousness", as a formula, is problematic without 
further elaboration; I also beleive it is pretty much true.  For me, the 
elaboration of this concept tends to come from two sources, one marxist, 
one nonmarxist but I think highly compatible with marxist thinking.  I 
don't have the time to type in significant amounts of either right now.  
But I'd be interested in working through the chapter "Determination" in 
Raymond Williams' *Marxism and Literature* (which really should have been 
called *Marxism and Culture*, so those not interested in literary studies 
would read it--its really quite an original work of marxist theory; only 
the last one-third is about literature at all) and the chapter 
"Structures and the Habitus" in Pierre Bourdieu's *Outline of a Theory of 
Practice*.

Williams states that "A Marxism without some concept of determination is 
in effect worthless.  A marxism with many of the concepts of 
determination it has now is quite radically disabled."  His primary 
concern is to understand how one can speak of materials conditions, or 
"objective social location" (Satya Mohanty's term) as locating 
consciousness without falling into a determinism that is both wrong and 
makes revolutionary struggle essentially impossible.  Williams goes on to 
argue that a full concept of determination in this context would require 
the joint notions "the setting of limits" (which is traditional to 
economistic marxism) and "the exertion of pressures", which provides the 
opportunity for "given social modes" to "effect a compulsion to act in 
ways that maintain and renew it".  He then states:

"'Society' is then never only the 'dead husk' which limits social and 
individual fulfillment.  It is always also a constituve process with very 
powerful pressure which are both expressed in political, economic and 
cultural formations and, to take the full weight of 'constitutive', are 
internalized and become 'individual wills'.  Determination of this whole 
kind--a complex and interrelated process of limits and pressures--is in 
the whole social process itself and nowhere else:  not in an abstracted 
'mode of production' not in an abstracted 'psychology'."

[My own rereading of this last sentence would be to formulate the marxist 
social scientific process a different way:  to understand that the "mode 
of production", to truly describe the totality we live in in the U.S., can 
not 
merely be called "capitalism" but must be given a name something like 
"white supremacist patriarchal captialism".]

To read Stalin, and the formations in which revolutionary governments 
generally work, through a notion of determination like this would be to 
begin to ask how the party form, the identity as a revolutionary, 
determines the identities of the actors within the revolution, and exerts 
pressures which, quite apart from the economic limits (which are already 
there) on Stalinist action, lead to forms of paranoia, cult of 
personality, bureaucracy, and the perpetual reproduction of the party.  
All of which are issues *entirely separate* from the actual content of 
Stalinist theory, which might after all be good for what it addresses.

These issues have, of course, been addressed well by a variety of 
Frankfurt school theorists; as for the significance of this sort of 
argument to any contemporary revolutionary movement, I think we'd want to 
be looking at Fanon and a variety of Pan-Africanist theory.

In extreme brief, the Bourdieu text I mention describes the "habitus", or 
what I translate as "inhabited social space" of the individual as "an 
acquired system of generative schemes objectively adjusted to the 
particular conditions in which it is constituted"; it therefore 
"engenders all the thoughts, all the perceptions, and all the actions 
consistent with those conditions, and no others."  Bourdieu's attempt to 
get us out of the paradox of "freedom" and "determinism" is provides a 
detailed description of "the setting of limits" and also the mechanisms 
with which dispositions are generated through unconsious imitation, etc., 
which provide the sense of choice even when people do exactly what 
everyone around them does.  However, because these choices are really not 
compelled, the limits are also only tendencies, and provide their own 
sets of heterodox behaviors which, in a sense, compliment the more common 
choices.

I hope this stuff makes some sense.  It was typed too quickly.  At some 
point--but not this year--I'll write a formal paper on determination.  

Your ideas abd suggestions will be greatly appreciated.  

Kenny Mostern
UC-Berkeley Ethnic Studies Graduate Group

Against:  racism, sexism, homophobia, capitalism, militarism
For:  the truth--and the funk!



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