BHA: Re: starting up DPF readings again.

[Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Friends,

Howard and Alan have been in touch with me about restarting the DPF
readings.  I had been meaning to but you know how things are forever
frantic in the academy.  This is the beginning section of Chapter 2.  I
will be in touch with Howard and Alan about all of use organising
volunteers for the rest of this chapter.

regards

Gary


DPF 38-49

Overall structure of this section

A.  Real Negation & Absence  (38 -40)

B.  Digression on reference (40-41)

C.  Absence (41- 44)

D.  The beginning of four arguments against the ontological priority of the
positive. (Arguments one and two being given on 44--5)

E.  A digression on change and difference (45)


D. (Contd) Back to the arguments against the ontological priority of the
positive. (Arguments three and four 45-47)

F. Final thoughts on the importance of the concept of absence and the
overthrow of the doctrine of ontological monovalence (47-49)


A. Real Negation & Absence (38-40)

This section begins with the equation:- 'real negation = absence'.  I
understand "real negation" as simply meaning that everything that is will
not be. Or to put it in Bhaskarian terms, everything that is present now
will be absent.

This too shall pass; the age old consolation of the oppressed, the
down-trodden and the marginalised.  Politically this is the message of
Shelley's great poem _Ozymandias_. There the power of the great tyrant,
Ozymandias, has crumbled like his statue

"Nothing remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."


I have already said enough I think about how important absence is to DCR.
Bhaskar calls it "the unifying category of dialectical critical realism".
(_Plato Etc_: 165) But I must also say that it all gets quite tricky when
we talk of the reality of absence and when everything is ontological.  I
have in mind here Tobin's question at the conference which still has me
puzzling. However back to the text.

I think the key to this section is the summarising sentence at the bottom
of page 39.

"For it is my intention to maintain in this section (1) that we can refer
to non-being, (2) that non-being exists, and that (3) not only must it be
conceded that non-being has ontological priority over being within
zero-level being, (4) but further, non-being has ontological *priority*
over being." (original emphasis)

At the conference Bhaskar summed this up by saying "In the beginning was
absence". I have no particular beef with this way of putting things.
Except a little gripe that I had said it first in my bathroom but there
were no witnesses.  I do however *feel* rather than understand that the
emphasis on absence is a very radical and even disturbing way of
reorienting us i.e. Western educated thinkers.

Ralph Dumain's point about Taoist philosophy not being based on the
tradition of ontological monovalence is indeed thought provoking.  Likewise
Bhaskar's own recent re-reading of the Vedas, when he publishes it all,
will I suspect nudge us further out of our Eurocentrism.


B. Digression on Reference (40-41)

My own specific interest is in the link that Bhaskar posits between absence
and desire and how this drives the dialectic on. (page 43)   However before
we get onto to what I see as the interesting bit we have a section on
reference (pages 40-41).  This is yet another one of those bloody big
boulders that seem to break the back of those who are struggling through
DPF.  Let us see what we can make of it.


His principal point here is that reference does not imply existence. If we
turn to the discussion on reference in _Plato Etc_ we find that Bhaskar
wants to tell us that there are "three distinct senses of 'non-being'".
(_Plato Etc_: 57).  So far so good. Unfortunately back in DPF before he can
tells us what these three distinct senses are he introduces Hare's terms -
tropics, neustics and phrastics.   I know it does not help much but I would
like to register a little sigh that I wish he had not done this.  It just
seems unnecessary to burden us with more terminology at this stage. My
intention and advice here is to ignore the talk of phrastics, neustics, and
tropics and to try and tease out the three distinct senses of non-being.

The first is the example of fictional reference.  We can refer to Macbeth,
a fictional character.  Not very controversial one would have thought but
just recently I had to review William Rothman's _Documentary Classics_
(Cambridge University Press, 1997) and there the topic of fictional
reference raised its ugly head.  Rothman argues that when I refer to a
character in a documentary film, I am not doing anything different from
when I refer to a character in a fiction  film. Here the distinction
between fictional and non-fictional discourse collapses as does the
distinction between fiction and non-fiction films. (MacLennan, 1997)

The next sense of non-being is that of an entity which has never existed.
Thus we can refer to caloric, but there never was such a beastie. (The OED
informs us that "caloric" (1792) was "Lavoisier's name for a supposed
elastic fluid, to which the phenomena of heat were formerly attributed. Now
abandoned.")

The third sense of non-being is where something no longer exists or is
absent which did have a real existence.  The example here is "Pierre is not
in the cafe".

C. Absence (41-44)

So we are now at the bottom of page 41 and into the interesting bit in this
section.  However I think it might be useful if we turn for an orienting
map to Chapter 8 of _Plato Etc_ (page 161) where Bhaskar gives us a seven
point summary of DCR.

"1. Humanity is not the centre of the cosmos.
2.  There are non-actual realities.
3.  Non-beings exist.
4.  Entities permeate one another.
5.  Intentional causality occurs.
6.  Values can be derived from facts.
7.  The good society is implicit in elemental desire."

In the section of DPF that we are dealing with the most relevant points in
the above are 2, 3 and 7.

Point 7 comes for the process where we experience an absence and this
creates an inconsistency and a drive for completeness or the absenting of
the absence.  I think it is fair to say that there is a teleological aspect
to this point.  This is made more explicit on pages 95 and 169 of DPF.  On
page 95 Bhaskar says "teleology is limited to its proper place in the
intrinsic aspect of human agency." (DPF: 95) and on page 169 he goes
further:-

"*Absence* will impose the geo-historical directionality that will usher in
a truly humane human global society, mediated (or so I shall argue) by
explanatory critical and emancipatory axiological social science." (DPF: 169)

In _Plato Etc_ we have the same notion of the dialectic as a teleological
force

"It is the absence conceived as constraint, more generally ill, that
entails the dialectically inexorable but geo-historically contingent
conatus to the eudaimonistic society." (_Plato Etc_: 165)

God help me but I am beginning to understand such sentences. Anyhow I like
it, not least because this positing of a link between absence and desire
resonates with one of my favourite arguments from one of my favourite
revolutionaries- William Morris.  Of desire Morris said we must

"teach desire to desire, to desire better, to desire more, and above all to
desire in a different way." (in Thompson, 1977: 791)


Back on page 42 we have what amounts to more of Bhaskar's political
manifesto and if I may say so on this list which has seen a lot of muck
thrown at a great man, it distinguishes him from most contemporary
philosophers in a way that I wholly admire.

"Absenting absences which act as constraints on wants, needs or (more
generally) well-being, is essential to dialectics interpreted as the logic
of freedom."

The link between absence and freedom is a very commanding one. There is
much to meditate on here.  Absence is indeed powerfully appealing. This
gives us I believe the explanation for the oft-remarked attraction of the
villain in literature. This goes back at least as far as Shelley's famous
comment on Milton's _Paradise Lost_ that the Devil was more interesting
than God.

Similarly in her work on the genre of Fantasy, Rosemary Jackson noted that
we are attracted to the villain because he has the capacity to destroy
(i.e.) absent the status quo.

Likewise the character of the "bitch" or powerful woman in Soaps is a
source of illicit pleasure to the female audience because the "bitch"
absents all those qualities of femininity that women are supposed to
acquire or even worse possess naturally.

Moreover the lure of absence provides us with an explanation of a
phenomenon that has long puzzled me.  Here in Australia - the land of Macho
Man - straight men cannot wait to get into drag.  In this instance what is
being absented is the burden of masculinity.

Finally Hannah Arendt's thesis on the banality of evil can be understood as
an attempt to deny people like Eichmann the heroic status of major
initiators of absence.

Bhaskar next attempts to show how the concept of absence interfaces with
his four levels.  There is a diagram on page 42 which for once is quite
helpful.   The process begins at the First Moment (1M).  Here there is a
non-identity or alterity.

The example I like to use in this case is based a critique I have developed
of Basil Wright's classic 1935 documentary _Song of Ceylon_ made for the
Empire Tea Marketing Expansion Board.  That film is generally regarded as a
classic of aesthetic documentary film making- Wright being regarded as one
of the "poets" of the British Documentary Film Movement.  But as Brian
Winston has pointed out amidst all the poetry Wright somehow neglects to
notice that the tea-pickers of Ceylon

"were one of the most persistently and perniciously exploited of all groups
of non-European workers".  (Winston, 1995: 25)

An alternative documentary to Wright's would have acknowledged that the
plantations were owned by the British.   So at the First Moment (1M) the
tea worker is 'other' to the people who own and also to the people who
manage the plantation.  She may not even know who owned the plantation.
Her way of life is different to theirs.  She does not give orders or make
decisions. Her lot is only to obey.

This situation generates at the Second Edge (2E) an absence.  This could be
anything from a proper wage, control over her life, or an understanding of
the process of the marketing of the tea she gathers.  At the Third Level
this produces an alienation.  She feels she does not belong in the
environment of the plantation.  She may not even see herself as united in
any sense with the other tea pickers.

So at the Fourth Dimension we have a worker in the plantation who feels
there is nothing at all that she can do to change things.  She cannot see
himself as an actor on the stage of history, only as a victim.

This is the bad dialectic at work.  The good dialectic sees the worker
engaged in a praxis which absents the split she feels.  Here she retains
her individuality but also experiences unity in the process of
unity-in-diversity with the other workers.  The worker also comes to
understand the economics of tea and the level to which she is exploited by
the British Imperialists. In other words she comes to see her place within
the totalities that constituted the British Empire.

I have mentioned before how it is interesting that here in this one
sentence on page 42 (Thus a 1M..... diagrammatised in Figure 2.1) Bhaskar
is very close to a summary of the late Paulo Freire's liberatory pedagogy -
a spot of post hoc underlabouring for an emancipatory practice.

I would like to point out yet again that when I read Bhaskar's exegesis of
the malign dialectic which produces the "fragmented impotent self" I think
that this is a perfect description of the "heroes" of Tsiolkas' or
McGahan's novels.  As such it helps us to situate meta-critically the whole
Grunge Realist nexus. Ah! a PHD just waiting to happen.

We are now at the top of page 43.  The rest of this page consists of
explaining the significance of this new version of the dialectic. I think
an important sentence is

"Indeed it (dialectics) just is, in its essence, the process of *absenting
absences*. (original emphasis) (DPF: 43)

We also have what I think is a useful restatement of the characteristics
errors at the four levels.  These errors in typically Bhaskarian fashion
are blamed for the problems of philosophy.  I have gradually become aware
that this trope of Bhaskar's seems to enrage professional philosophers.
Whatever the case I have found the statement of errors extremely useful in
my own work.  They are:- 1M destratification or homology, 2E
positivization, 3E detotalization, 4D de-agentification.

The next paragraph on page 43 continues what I think of as the celebration
of the dialectic.  Topics come thick and fast here - often at a bewildering
speed.  The trick is I think to hold onto the notion that Bhaskar is trying
to show us how valuable his dialectic is.

We begin with the notion of the most extreme form of absence -"never
anywhere-existence".  This leads us into a digression on Popper and his
doctrine that only that which can be falsified is scientific.  Bhaskar
gives a range of counter examples such as

*There is not and never has been such thing as phlogiston.*

(Phlogiston (1733) substance formerly supposed to exist in all combustible
bodies and to be released in combustion.)

Next we have an embedded aside on how we enter a world which is already
preconceptualised and where questions of existence or non-existence are
solved by reference to established criteria.

The digression on Popper then expands to a redefinition of fallibilism
-Popper's core criterion for scientificity - as the identifying and
remedying of mistakes, where mistakes or errors are seen as dependent on
absences. When we correct an error we are absenting an absence.

>From this talk of correcting errors Bhaskar spirals up to declare that
dialectic is at the heart of how we learn.  What follows is a further boost
up to discussing the whole question of agency, with a side swipe at old
Kant along the way for not emphasising the possibility of agency enough.

The climax of the spiral comes when Bhaskar declares that dialectic is the
"great-loosener".  There is then an intriguing remark about a
"Marxian-Bakhtinian fashion" with regard to the fluidity and
interconnectedness that the dialectic suggests.

Perhaps one day we will have a thought about a Bhaskar influenced reading
of Bakhtin.  Certainly it would make a pleasant change from the bowdlerised
versions of Bakhtin that the Cultural Studies establishment foisted on us
here in Australia.

The rest of the paragraph turns from the celebration of the carnival of the
dialectic to a re-contemplation of the malign dialectic - the impotent,
fragmented self who denies her own agentive powers.

D. Four arguments against the ontological priority of positivity. (:44)

This section begins with a statement of the position which Bhaskar wishes
to argue against. This is

"...there cannot be a complete parity at the transcendental level between
the positive and the negative.  Fictional discourse is dependent upon a
matrix of factual discourse, in which neustic crosses are cradled by
axiologically necessary ticks."

I gloss the last sentence as :- Being able to say that something does not
exist (neustic crosses) depends on our ability to act as if things do exist
(neustic ticks).

I do not intend here to go into great detail over these arguments.  Though
argument four will be I suppose of interest to many as it considers the
cosmos, eternity and beginnings.  But I am an old atheist now and have had
my full of eschatological musings.   As far as eternity is concerned I have
been well and truly teased out of thought long years ago by the Irish
Christian Brothers.  For now I am content with the "Ultimate Answer" that
"Deep Thought" gave. (Adams,1990: 303)


First argument:- To say that something exists in a human act and is based
on at least doubt that the entity existed.

Second Argument:- The concepts of space and time depend upon a notion of
absence.  Causality implies absenting something.

Third Argument:-  If we did not have absences; if the world was totally
positive then nothing could move and nothing could happen. Gaps are
necessary for acts such as communication.

Fourth Argument:-  A totally positive world is an impossibility but an
absolute void or absence is not.

E. A digression on change and difference

I have to say here that this section gave me a lot of problems.  It took
Hilary a long time to repair the absence. But if anyone looks up my review
of Rothman they will see that the penny finally crossed the void.

What is interesting to me now is the politics of the denial of change.  In
a world which is politically dominated by notions that There Is No
Alternative, and where everything that is social is supposed to be natural
the denial of change is an ideological necessity.

F. Final thoughts on the importance of the concept of absence and the
overthrow of the doctrine of ontological monovalence. (47-49)

This is Bhaskar at this best, IMO.  I think of a fire work display when I
read this.  Ideas explode onto the page and the writing does not let them
down.

Politically for me the fascinating bit is the impact of the absence of
"actually-existing socialism".  This is surely the ultimate of ironies.  As
we watch the tiger economies of Asia stall or implode because they are no
longer needed as a bastion against the ten-horned beast of communism, it is
in some ways amusing to see the ideologues of capitalism struggle to find a
way to account for the irrefutable evidence of the deterioration in the
condition of humanity with the spread of the "free world".

References

Adams, D. _The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Four Parts_,
Heinnemann: London, 1990)
Jackson, R. _Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, London:Methuen
MacLennan, G. _Rothman and the Challenge of Critical Realism_
Thompson, E.P., _William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary_, London: Merlin
Press, 1976
Winston, B. _Claiming The Real: the documentary film revisited_,  London:
BFI, 1995



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