Re: Ynt: BHA: causal bearers in the social world

[Mervyn Hartwig <mh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Vedat,

Welcome to the list (if indeed you are new, as I think you are).

>Therefore any subjective activity is the
>realization of the social process through which that subjectivity acquires
>its all characteristics.

Critical realism dissents from such a thoroughgoing social
constructionism. I don't have time to say in detail why, but if you're
interested in finding out I think the best single source is Margaret S.
Archer, Being Human: the Problem of Agency. Cambridge University Press,
2000. Archer elaborates a position according to which the properties and
powers of the human being are neither pre-given by our evolutionary
biology, nor socially appropriated, but rather are *emergent* from our
relations with our environment, relations which are by no means
reducible to the social - importantly including embodied, practical
relations, which are a necessary precondition for the acquisition of
social skills, and without which people wouldn't have the power
intentionally to transform their social relations.

Mervyn


Vedat Aslan <Vedat.U.Aslan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes
>
>Hi all,
>Any attempt to ontologically differentiate between the social structures (or
>society) and the subjectivity (or individuals) is doomed to fail to grasp
>the issue, I think.
>Without subjectivity social structures are indefinite, and without the
>totality of the structures no subjectivity can be defined. For it is the
>totality of the subjectivites that make the social. However, no subjectivity
>can be defined without the objective (social) basis which is the only sense
>through which that subjectivity acquires its full meaning. If we try to
>define subjectivity and the objectivity in themselves alone, we end up with
>the so called epistemic fallacy.
>Marx in Theories of Surplus Value, vol. 2, was saying something similar to
>this: Money is the destructible capital, capital is the undestructible
>money.
>
>Individual is the subject of any process, whose causality can only be
>defined at the social level.
>
>Capitalist is the individual through the mediation of which the capitalist
>relations are materialized, however without the capitalists how can
>capitalism be defined. Put differently, without capitalists where can
>capitalism *exist* ?
>
>If without the social structure subjectvity is meaningless, and if again
>without the subjectivities social structure is indefinite, so why should we
>look for the causal bearers?
>Individual action is itself the realization of the social process whose
>causality is only partially grasped by the individual himself. That
>partiality is the reason why we hesitate to attribute that causality to that
>action/individual alone.
>Wage labor presupposes the capital as much as the capital presupposes wage
>labour. Both categroies are the indispensible aspects of the relationship in
>which these two categories exist side by side. The characteristics that the
>wage labor(er) assumes as a subjective existence, and the characteristics
>that the capital(ist) assumes presuppose a unity in which both of them are
>included as what they are. Therefore any subjective activity is the
>realization of the social process through which that subjectivity acquires
>its all characteristics.
>
>Vedat
>
>
>
>
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--
Mervyn Hartwig
Editor, Journal of Critical Realism (incorporating 'Alethia')
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