Date: Tue, 2 Apr 1996 00:15:05 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: PROBLEMATIZE THIS!


Hello again everyone. I post with some hesitation because I do not know if I
can persevere very long in this discussion. The same constraints which made
me disappear rather suddenly from what is now M1 last August are still with
me (learning how to teach) for another few weeks. But I did have a few
reactions to Leo's latest post in the context of the conversation that has
begun between him, Rahul and Ralph. Leo wrote:


>My
>position is: Certainly events take place separate from their representations
>in historical narrative, but do these events have meaning without the
>interpretative frame of the historical narrative? (And what depending upon
>what we may mean by existence, that too can depend on representation; an
>historical event of a century ago simply does not exist for us without a
>representation.) No doubt, there is some quality of the event prior to the
>representation which places limits on how the event can be plausibly
>interpreted, on what meanings can be given to it, but that is different, I
>would contend, in saying that it determines, in some causal way, the
>representations. There is no event-in-itself.

The point I would make is twofold: (a) there is more to the objectivity of
historical events than the mere fact that they took place, namely that they
constitute generative mechanisms which produce real effects; (b) but at the
same time Leo is right to assert that even the causality that this implies
has no 'meaning' outside of some interpretive framework. In other words I
think we have to try to hold on to two notions at once, one being
'causality' and the other being 'meaning'. They interact but neither is
reducible to the other.

I would agree that causality does not determine meaning, and also that we
insist on attaching meaning to all causality. One result is that meaning is
in its own right a source of causality. Many of the stories we have told
ourselves over the centuries have been products of attempts to attach
meaning to events that come as close to absolute contingency as one would
want, for example interpreting the appearance of a comet as an omen. Yet
these interpretations, these beliefs in omens and such, have organized and
generated social forces which contributed in some instances to making
whatever they predicted come true. They stimulated belief-dependent emergent
capacities. 

I would argue that this is a feature of ideological systems in general and
it is what makes them generative mechanisms in their own right. Any set of
ideas can mobilize and channel human effort in such a way as to magnify or
extend its capabilities. These ideas do not have to be "true" in any
acceptable sense of the term. An illustration of this is provided by the
fact that manifestly false beliefs have transformed history (eg. Nazism). 

This is one way in which I think that it is legitimate to say that social
structures are independent variables. Furthermore, the effects that are
generated by these different structures are felt over varying time frames. I
think of Braudel's "longue duree" here, especially in relation to Leo's
assertion that "an historical event of a century ago simply does not exist
for us without a representation". I agree, as I said above, that
representation is not causally determined. Down that road lies some manner
of unacceptable determinism. But this doesn't mean that there are not other
forms of causality that *are* determined in this way, and that generate real
effects independently of our perception of them. 

This means that past history does exist for us even when we are unaware of
its existence, and can therefore attach no meaning to it. But even then,
this objective dimension can only exist in and through the activity of
living human beings. This is what Bhaskar called the ontological peculiarity
of social structures. I also like the following paragraph from Karel Kosik's
_Dialectics of the Concrete_:

"Social reality as human nature is inseparable from its products and from
forms of its existence. It does not exist other than in the historical
totality of these products which, far from being external and accessory
'things', reveal and indeed retroactively form the character of human
reality (of human nature). Human reality is not a pre-historical or a
transhistorical and unvarying substance. It is formed in the course of
history. Reality is more than conditions and historical facticity; but
neither does it ignore empirical reality. The dualism of transient and
emptied empirical facticity on the one hand, and the spiritual realm of
ideal values rising independently above it on the other hand, is the mode in
which a particular historical reality exists: the historical reality exists
in this duality, and its entirety consists of this split." (p. 84)

Howie Chodos



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