Re: [Critical-Realism] Side on Harre

["Andrew Brown" <A.Brown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Howard,
 
You write that it is preposerous to deny the causal efficacy of social structures. Yes, it is. I agree, I have always agreed. It follows from our agreement that we should defend the existence of social structures against those who would deny it, like Harre. To do this it is no good just shouting loudly about this preposterousness, nor even pointing to the ethical problems that such a denial entails. Rather it is necessary to actually address the arguments made. Harre's argument is very clear: RB denies spatial location to social structures, without spatial location, there is no powerful particular, hence no power. Harre is not making wild accusations: if social structures are relations of *social positions*, then they are indeed outside of space. The *social position* 'husband' does not move, it is not sitting downwstairs, it is not in my car, it is not the type of thing to which we attribute spatial co-ordinates. This is the argument we have to address. One way to address it would be to say that social stuctures are not merely relations of positions, they are relations of *practices* [material practices]. This is indeed how I address it. Another would be to say that , somehow, social positions are spatially located: but this is prima facie preposterous. But just ignoring the argument entirely is to be defeated by it.
 
It may help if I comment on your usual example of social stuctures, viz, those of value and capital. In my view you do not fully grasp the nature of these structures in part because you do not address the argument I make above. I should make cear at this point that I think your work on value and capital is groundbreaking. It is a major breakthrough in the realist understanding of Marx, and so of capitalism. It is the best realist account of value and capital by some considerable distance in my view. But because you miss the key point re the spatial location of social structure you miss *Marx's* key point. Marx is very keen to consider the spatial location of value. And the pervisity of value is that, unlike social stuctures in general, value is not located in the labourers but in the product of their labour. Active labour *creates* value but only once 'congealed' in the product does labour actually become value. This is truly bizaar. It is a departure from the usual case where social structures are spatially located in social practices. But you cannot understand this perverse departure until you understand the usual case itself.
 
Many thanks
 
Andy
 

________________________________

From: critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of Howard Engelskirchen
Sent: Mon 6/4/2007 10:36 PM
To: Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] Side on Harre



Hi Ruth and Andy,

Ruth, to say that cats and elephants are kinds, or gold and copper for that
matter, is not to take on board all that can get meant by affirming that
universals are real.  To say that any of these things belongs to a natural
kind means that each individual cat or elephant incorporates for the most
part a relevantly similar causal structure that for the most part accounts
for what it is and how it tends to behave.  Natural kind terms refer to one
kind of thing because each of the individuals that is an extension of the
kind term is characterized by relevantly similar causal mechanisms.  But
when I go to the zoo, I don't see a bunch of individual elephants, and then,
over in the corner, a thing that is the kind, elephant.

If we say that this or that social structure constitutes a social kind, we
are saying the same thing.  There's a lot to sort out here and very little
of the sorting has been done, but roughly if I say that the social form of
commodity producing labor constitutes a social kind, I mean that there are a
bunch of commodity producers in a multiplicity of relations I can
characterize in relevantly similar ways who are joined in what we can refer
to as a field we call a market.  A value field.  This social *kind* of labor
existed in the ancient world, but as a product of different material
activities and in conjunction with different other social relations.

And, Andy, as for the idea that 'social structures don't do anything,'
however it be with Harre & Co., this notion is preposterous.  It is possible
to think of North Americans organized in a way that did not lead to an
unending orgy of killing and material devastation in Iraq. Or running a
torture prison on territory that is not their own and where they are not
welcome.  Or imagining themselves self-entitled to a military command over
every inch of the globe.  I mean it is not somehow hard wired in the genes
of the unemployed rural U.S. teenager that he or she is entitled to behave
toward others whose culture and language she or he doesn't understand
according to the principle that if there is no blood there is no foul.  Or
that if blood gets spilled it's inevitable and in the worst case gets wiped
clean by a couple thousand dollars.  It's interesting.  What kind of
essentialism is implied by the idea that social structures don't do
anything?

What I mean is that this goes to the notion of positions and roles.  I
haven't looked back at this material, but it is precisely because
differently organized social structures have different causal potencies that
we characterize the persons who play roles in them by different labels.
They engage in different material practices, different positioned practices,
and appropriate different character masks.  So maybe it's not that the
social structures are connections of disembodied positions or roles such
that we can think of them as not doing anything, but rather precisely
because different ways of organizing the individual practices do lead to
very different casual mechanisms that we find ourselves instinctively
characterizing them differently; we do so to reflect their different
participation in social entities that have different causal powers.  No one
is born a capitalist or a slave, but people do find themselves behaving in
determined ways as a result of inhabiting those social forms.  Race is
another example.  Race is not real because it is biological or because it is
a universal.   Race is real because, as a result of Europe's colonial
confrontation with the rest of the world, physiognomic, linguistic and other
features have come to facilitate the social reproduction of inequality.

Perhaps, David, what I've said above is consistent with your point.  But
there is a one way dependence here -- there are no social entities without
individuals -- or any molecules either, for that matter, without atoms.

Howard


----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew Brown" <A.Brown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List"
<critical-realism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, June 04, 2007 3:23 PM
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] Side on Harre


Ruth,

Yes you almost get me right but I'd emphasise more powerful particulars. The
fundamental point is that powers are inseparable from powerful particulars.
Only powerful particulars do things. So it seems to me you need to take
Harre's argument one step back from 'social structures can't do anything' to
'social structures can't do anything *because* they are not powerful
particulars". This makes perfect sense form his point of view which is
*based upon* the fundamental ontological category of 'powerful particular'.
What then do we mean when we say 'social structure' according to Harre? We
can only mean some form of taxonomy.

Re. universals: I hope you mean that Harre denies that *social* structures
are universals. He surely upholds *natural* univerals, kinds and so forth.

Andy







________________________________

From: critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of Ruth Groff
Sent: Mon 6/4/2007 7:33 PM
To: Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List
Subject: [Critical-Realism] Side on Harre



Hi Andy,

So it sounds as though what you want to say is "Harre doesn't have any
ontological objection to wholes so long as they are wholes that, in his
view, exhibit emergent causal properties, such that they can be
conceptualized as being powerful particulars."  Have I understood you?

That might be right, about Harre -- though the upshot re: social science is
that he is an atomist.  What he clearly is opposed to tout court are
universals -- especially, kinds.  But nominalism and atomism are not the
same thing.

It's interesting, though.  In that debate that Jose Lopez and Garry Potter
reprinted (AFTER POSTMODERNISM: AN INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL REALISM,
Athlone, 2001), he (Harre) sort of conflates those issues, it seems to me.
That is, he objects to the existence of structures on the ground that they
are akin to "taxonomic categories," which he says aren't real.  (Why?  You
got it: because they can't do anything -- where "do anything" seems to be
defined in terms of efficient causality.)

r.







-----Original Message-----
From: critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of Andrew Brown
Sent: Mon 04-Jun-07 11:52 AM
To: Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] Comment re: holism

Ruth,

You ask:

"I think that you are right that Harre thinks that only individuals are
powerful particulars, but what makes you say that he has no ontological
objection to social wholes per se?  So far as I can tell, he rejects them,
very explicitly, in part because, he thinks, they can't do anything."

My point was that he does not reject 'wholes' a priori. He surely does
reject '*social* wholes' a posteriori. He does not reject 'wholes' a priori
because they can be powerful particulars. For example, an atom can be
thought of as both a whole (it consists of interellated protons, neutrons
and electrons which in turn are relations of yet smaller things, which in
turn are relations of yet smaller things and so on) and a powerful
particular. In short, Harre accepts emergence. Thus when he comes to social
wholes, he rejects them not through a priori rejection of wholes but through
his view that only powerful particulars are causal agents - the lack of
spatial location of 'social wholes' (on RB's own account) discounts them
from existing in Harre's eyes.

Many thanks

Andy


________________________________

From: critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of Ruth Groff
Sent: Mon 6/4/2007 4:31 PM
To: Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] Comment re: holism



Hi Andy,

You write:
I would stress that it is this very point that is at the heart of Harre and
others criticism of the TMSA. They do not have an a priori prejuduce against
wholes but, rather, an a priori conception of causality as implying powerful
particulars, where powerful particulars are by definition spatially located.
(Paul Lewis, argues, in reponse, that the TMSA we should look to a different
conception of causality to that of Harre and Madden).



I know Lewis' work from a few years back.  I thought it was good.  But I
think that Howard's recent stuff on conceptualizing the efficacy of
relations is even better.  For what it's worth I think that what accounts
for this is that Howard is making the fullest possible use of a non-Humean,
scientific essentialist approach to causality as it might be applied to
social phenomena.

Warmly,
r.







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