BHA: FWD: Society, Santa

[MSPRINKER@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

               State University of New York at Stony Brook
                       Stony Brook, NY 11794-3355

                                            Michael Sprinker
                                            Professor of English & Comp Lit
                                            Comparative Studies
                                            516 632-9634
                                            06-Jun-1998 10:20pm EDT
FROM:  MSPRINKER
TO:    Remote Addressee                     ( _bhaskar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx )

Subject: FWD: Society, Santa

I apologize for sending this through the list, but the original
message sent to Colin came back to me as undeliverable to
the address I read off from his post.  Ignore this if you're
uninterested in the discussion he and I have been having--
or join in, if you feel of a mind.

Michael


                                          Michael Sprinker
                                          Comparative Studies
                                          516 632-9634
                                          06-Jun-1998 06:41pm EDT

TO:  Remote Addressee                     ( _cow@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx )

Subject: Society, Santa

Dear Colin,

I decided to do this off-list, since I fear we'll be boring
the hell out of everyone about now.

I'm going to be a bit stubborn on the points at issue, and
put the matter as follows.  In the 60s, it was popular to
ask the following rhetorical question (its origins are
apocryphal):  "What if they gave a war and nobody came?"
Let's re-jig that a bit and say:  "What if everybody suddenly
stopped acting as if there is something called 'The State'?
Would 'The State' still exist?"

I think a plausible answer could be no, and that it's the
answer that classical anarchism would give, and even,
perhaps, communism.  It seems to me that the way you posed
your objection, you came perilously to a kind of methodological
individualism, since any single agent (or smallish group of
agents) not acting in a knowing way about a social structure
does not make that structure non-existent.  But if some
(unspecifiedly large--I don't know what the boundary
conditions would be in the abstract) group of social agents
stopped acting in such a way as to reproduce a given social
structure (say no one ever got married again), then that
structure (the legal relation of marriage, which in the
example seems to be construed as among the foundations of
capitalist society), then that structure would indeed cease
to exist (although it could exist again if people started
marrying again, for whatever reason).

More consequently:  Marx insists that one of the conditions
of capitalism is that workers accept the wage relation, and
that in communist society (or in previous modes of production)
that relation would not exist.  And he further suggests that
the refusal to accept the wage relation by the proletariat
(or, later on, the state form) would be one of the conditions
for social revolution against capitalism.

So, if everyone just stopped acting in ways that ratified
a "belief" (I really don't like this word in the case) in God
or Santa, both would exist only in the same way that, to cite
Louis's example, Socrates exists:  he has become a historical
memory, what Hegel once said of works of art, "a thing of the
past."  Innumerable social formations now enjoy just this
status--Aztec and Inca society, Imperial China, the Jesuit
communities in Paraguay, the English Commonwealth, the
Kronstadt soviet.

I don't like the specific formulation that Fred Jameson is
fond of citing, but it makes my point well enough:  "In
ideology, believing makes it so."  I'd say that in ideology,
acting in ideological ways makes it so.  Ideological phenomena
are as real as, if differently than, natural things.  Society
falls more on the side of ideology than on the side of nature
along this spectrum.

Cheers,

Michael


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