Re: [Critical-Realism] How can a de-ont exist or anabsence bepresent?

["Nick Hostettler" <Nh8@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Louis, 
You ask a specific question about the poyvalence of causal chains. I'll try to answer it, but then I'll go off in other directions in the hope that the connections are meaningful. 

In your example the death of the plants is a due to a decision (the ultimate cause) which brings about an absence of water (the proximate cause) which causes the death of the plant (the negative effect). So we have an original positive which generates a negative mediation which causes the ultimately negative effect. That seems fair enough to me. 

There are many ways we could go from here. The polyvalence I was concerned with in my example was just the lack of water in the face of need, but I didn't include any prior reasons for the absence of water. 

The implications of your example brings you very close to Roy's four-fold negation in the dialectics of freedom: the removal of the constraints on the absenting of absence. The political response to your example would be to remove the political power that stood in the way of dealing with the absence of water. In other words, Roy's dialectic also posits a causal chain of action and change with a positive move at the start. That positive move, though, the positive action taken to remove the constraint, is also a negation. For Roy, action = change = negation. So each move in a chain of positive moves would have to be seen as entailing a negative side. 

This would give us both a causal chain of polyvalent moves and it would allow for the causal efficacy of absence (the lack of water causing the death of the plant). 

There are though other ways to go with this. As long as we are dealing with the consequences of decisions and actions it might be worth pondering Sartrean bad faith. Recall an example: a couple are sitting opposite one another in the cafe. One reaches out and touches the hand of the other in the gesture which says 'let us be lovers'. The other acts as if they do not notice this. They fail to act as if the choice of becoming lovers has been, literally, put on the table. They carry on without making a decision either way. The the gesture has not been accepted or rejected. Indeed, it is not possible to say what the response has been. Bad faith = indetermanacy: for Sartre a moral failing. 

Similarly, precisely where and when in any set of related causal processes should we draw the begining and end lines? Where are the spatio-temporal boundaries? In Fredric Jameson's words 'we cannot not periodise', but is there not something arbitrary (theological even) in saying that we should establish an origin with a given decision: let there be light? 

The trouble is that causal chain of meanings and responses can flounder at many points, they can simply dissolve or head off in entirely unexpected directions; they can emerge into and out of others whose structures may be more or less determinate. Now what Sartre calls bad faith is a special kind of absence. Set against what we might call a rather Newtonian conception of meaning and responsibility. (let me use Newtonian here as a shorthand for a particular kind of view of the world and the entities inhabiting it - the world of simple material beings and causal chains). Bad faith is the absence of an appropriate reaction to a meaningful action, where the appropriate reaction would be 'yes' or 'no'. Presumable some political non-decisions will be like this. Some political gestures or demands will simply not be responded to. Who can say quite what kind of causal chain would unfold from such and such a point. The unravelling of events could be a movement from one indeterminacy to another. This kind of chain would be polyvalent in a more complex way than that suggested above, with the precise structure of the co-presence of absences and presences much harder, even impossible, to determine. 

Indeterminacy and undecidability are key features of contemporary science and social theory. From quantum mechanics to ideas of liminality; questions of where boundaries really are or where thresholds might be; the lack of purchase of our existing stock of categories,etc. etc. Derrida's conception of the necessity and impossibility of certain categories or impulses. The Neitzschean rejection of origins and the importance of the idea of genealogy. The Freudian recognition of the contradictory, the ambivalent, the precarious, the essentially irrational . All of these are attempts to look at the way we live in our world and search for new ways of both describing and theorising it in the light of a failure of newtonian-positive thought. 

Critical realism is, in part, a response to questions like this, to find a rational way of dealing with worldly contradictions and complexities. It is, in part, an attempt to retain old certainties in a new guise. But Roy's dialectics, like those of Adorno and others, is also an attempt to encompass the reality of these non-Newtonian realities, whether physical, psychical or social. That is, it is an attempt to say that the world can be irreducible to the hard and fast entities and events of the Newtonian imaginary and that we need an ontology that can encompass both determinacy and indeterminacy, presence and absence.

Similarly, following on from Howard's comments about the disciplinary question in biology about real definitions. If entities are relational, and relations are historical and contingent and changing, then the apparent security of real definitions comes in for a more general level of questioning. The pertinence of this for us today is, in part,  due to the contemporary social construction of a world in which real definitions have less purchase: think of the sub-prime mortgage problem - financiers simply have no idea where those bad investments really are. They know they are out there somewhere, but no one knows who really owns them. Indeed, to say they have a determinate existence in space-time might itself be problematic. This gives an entirely new meaning to the existence of de-onts: entities which are both present and absent, here yet nowhere, with potentially devasting consequences. 

Think also of genetics and cybernetics: once clear boundaries between entities and between the social, the natural and the mechanical or technological are being dissolved: and who can say what the consequences will be. 

Given that our reality can be like this, even the newtonian dialectic of action to change things for the better itself becomes problematic as our own actions generate a world in which our capacity for both epistemic and practical purchase on it are weakened. 

So, questions about the reality and causality of absence segue into a more general set of questions about entities and causality and the world we are making for ourselves and the kinds of socio-relational entities we might be becoming. We need an ontology which forces us to question the apparent solidity of our categories because we are finding real ways of confronting what once appeared as solid boundaries. The dialectics of capital and science and technology, the pursuit of depth inquiry and the institution of practices which effectively reorganise levels of existence, are what bring these questions to the fore. 

The emergence of such peculiar forms of social existence is what drives us to ask questions about nature and to think of being in new, and often troublesome and disturbing ways. Absence, non-being in society, is attaining a novel and critical importance for us and we have to find ways of coming to grips with it: if that makes sense!
 

Nick. 


-----Original Message-----
From: "Louis Irwin" <louisirwin9@xxxxxxx>
To: "'Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List'" <critical-realism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2007 17:51:38 -0500
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] How can a de-ont exist or anabsence bepresent?

Nick,

Thanks for a post at once thoughtful, stimulating, well-written, and
jargon-free.  You write the way a lot of us (no doubt on my side of the
Atlantic) wish that RB would.

I would like to focus on a drought example, and ask you whether the
accompanying description fits your framework,; if not, where specifically
does it go wrong.  I'm not saying it is my view, I'm just trying to see why
it won't fly, if it doesn't.

At a low level of understanding, droughts occur due to an absence of water -
that's not a perceptive metaphysical insight, it's a banal truism.  At a
higher level, when a drought occurs, we look for the reasons why water is
absent.  That looking already presupposes that water is present under what
we deem to be 'normal' circumstances, so a drought demands an explanation
for deviation from the norm.  (As I understand you, that normality is part
of the identity of things in the pre-drought environment - correct?)  So we
look for causes that interfered with the normal water levels; these may
include absence of rainfall, diversion of usual river sources to other
locations, etc., and these in turn have their causes.  Let's say that the
cause was a decision to divert water elsewhere; add whatever political
machinations, forces of history, etc. you like to fill in the story.  So in
this specific example, the decisions and actions involved in the diversion
brought about the absence of water.  It seems reasonable to say that the
absence of water is a proximate cause that was in turn caused by the
decisions and actions in the diversion.  It then seems reasonable to
describe the ultimate cause to be those decisions and actions (together with
the background).  So we seem to have presences that caused the absence of
water that caused the drought.  (My intuition is that this is not the kind
co-constitutive presences and absences that you had in mind.)

Louis

-----Original Message-----
From: critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Nick
Hostettler
Sent: Friday, December 07, 2007 5:57 PM
To: critical-realism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] How can a de-ont exist or anabsence
bepresent?

Dear Howard, Louis and Mervyn, 

First off, my apologies for the inattentive responses to Howard's post, and
my thanks to Louis and to Mervyn for clarifying the central issues.
Apologies too for getting carried away: the post is a long one. 

Howard asked about "the causal efficacy of phlogiston," emphasising that his
question was not about "what someone thought or thinks about phlogiston, but
of the de-ont?"

Mervyn's initial contribution was to lay out the point about different
classes of de-onts and I hoped to develop this line of thinking with my
comments on classes of possibility. From the perspective of ontological
polyvalence, this kind of de-ont has no causal significance whatsoever.
Howard was quite right to say that: "The point generalizes. An absence,
absence of being, means an absence of causal structure and hence of causal
efficacy." Absolutely! Phlogiston is an absolute non-entity and entirely
non-causal. 

After the agreement comes the inevitable 'however'. 

Howard indicates a shift in gear, or at least an ambiguity, when he says
"What a drought causes is a result of the causal structures in place, not of
absent non-structures that aren't there." If we take "absent non-structures"
to mean that member of the class of impossible beings, i.e. absolute
non-entities, can have no causal role in the playing out of a drought then
there can be no disagreement. But this is by no means the only way this
could be read. At least, we can read into it the possibility of referring to
the other classes of de-onts: as yet unrealised possibilities and past
presences. So, when Howard asks "How can a de-ont exist or an absence be
present?" it is worthwhile trying to give a useful response, one that
disagrees with the idea that "When we speak of the presence of an absence,
there is actually no causal structure to which we refer." A polyvalent
response to this insists on the co-presence of absences and presences and
argues that the former are, or least can be, integral to any real causal
powers. 

So, this is what appears to be at stake: a polyvalent account of being and
then a similar account of causality. 

I don't have a good feel for the extent to which this is contentious, but
the reality of absence does not seem to be too much of a problem: not only
is reality irreducible to what it is possible to experience through our
senses (ontological depth), it is also irreducible to what is here and now.
Reality also encompasses all that has been (the past) and all that will be
(the future). From the limited perspective of any here and now the past (to
the extent it is no longer present) and the future (to the extent it is not
already being realised) are absences. Also, another dimension of the here
and the now we cannot experience is all the possibilities embedded and
embodied in it. These are real, whether or not they are ever realised. 

In sum, to say that something is absent from the here and now is just to say
that it is at a distance in terms of time and/or space. Absenting, on the
other hand, means that that distance is changing, i.e. something is further
off in time, space, or less of a possibility) or, in the case of absenting
the absence, that distance is diminishing. 

So, reality is essentially polyvalent: it is always-already constituted by a
given ensemble of presences and absences. What is more, that ensemble is
always-already changing: polyvalent configurations are always being
reconfigured. 

Roy's dialectic, though, has several aspects, with absence being only one.
Before we can look at what kind of case might be made for the causal
significance of the relevant classes of absence we should take some other
ideas into consideration. Two such worth mentioning are the unity of space,
time and causality and entity relationism. 

Space, time and causality are necessary ontological relations within and
between all aspects of our universe; their unity binds being together into
causal processes, tensed rhythmics. Entity relationism is closely related to
this. The old philosophical problem of the boat whose parts are so
completely changed over time raises a question about the identity of the
boat. If none of the wood from which it was originally constructed is
present any longer, then can it be said that we still have the same boat? Do
we not now have a different one? Critical realism offers one kind of answer
to this in terms of the persistence of the structure over time. Whatever
pieces are used to repair the boat, the structure remains the same: the boat
retains its capacities. Identity is shifted from the particular material out
of which the boat is built to the way in which that material is organised.
However, this has the unfortunate consequence of formalising identity. The
dialectical critical realist response to this question is to embed the boat
into the social relations which have produced and reproduced it. This shift
in perspective means that the identity of the ship is now to be understood
as changing over time and it has been considerably expanded to encompass its
integration into its social milieu. That is, this particular boat is
spatially, temporally and causally integrated into geo-history, and its real
identity as a particular entity is inseparable from that history. Identity
encompasses the many dimensions of absence: the past, the outside and the
possibilities that might unfold in the future.  

This has important ramifications for the discussion of absence and
causality: the real identity of any entity now encompasses external as well
as internal relations and it encompasses past, present and future changes to
both kinds of relation. It is in this context that it can make sense to
speak of the polyvalence of causality, thereby including absences as
co-constitutive of real change. 

So, coming back to the question about the effects of a drought: what effects
does a drought have, and how? The plants that survive in a given place do so
because their essential needs are being met: they get the water they need to
enable them to sustain their own existence. That water, then, is integral to
what those plants are, both in terms of their external relations to a water
supply and their internal metabolising of the water. Water is integral to
the structures and capacities the plants have, and we could not speak of
those structures or mechanisms without reference to it: there is no actual
structure of the plant that can be abstracted from the water. The drought
means that the external relations of these plants are changed. The breaking
of this relation to nourishment, the absence of water, puts them in danger
of perishing. This change means the plants lose something essential to what
they are. They become incomplete and failing plants, unable to function and
facing the prospect of eventual death. 

These notional plants, then, must be understood as being bound into their
environment such that their identities as living beings encompass their
on-going relations to it. The drought changes those relations, causing
external and internal absences: it generates absences which are essential
components of the causal processes which bring about the death of the
plants. So, Howard is right again to way that the existing causal structures
of the plants are essential to what happens next, but so too is the absence
of the water from them. 

In the end, though, would it be too crude to say that the drought, the
absence of water, kills the plants? Would it really be a mistake to say that
a relation of absence, i.e. lack in the face of need, is causally
efficacious? 

Nick. 


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