Re: Bad writing

["Doyle Saylor" <djsaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Title: Re: Bad writing
Greetings Comrades,
    In responding to Louis, Gary MacLennan brought up Roy Bhaskar.  I had been
thinking of responding to a posting by Yoshie Furuhashi about a comment of
Bhaskars, so I will combine the thread on bad writing with this point that Gary
makes and Yoshie's previous quote of Bhaskar.
Gary MacLennan

As always, Lou provokes me into thought.  My favorite philosopher is Roy
Bhaskar.  Indeed I consider myself to be intellectually enormously indebted
to him.  Yet Bhaskar is not an easy read.  The Bhaskar list periodically
erupts with complaints about his prose style.
Mandarin would appear to be an apt description at one level.  But Bhaskar
is a libertarian socialist and deeply committed to spreading the
word.  However he has written that he wants to avoid the trap of trying to
use old words to express new thoughts. For example he has coined the phrase
'ontological monovalence'. He uses this to describe the tradition
established by Parmenides which has it that only the positive is real. Now
other philosophical traditions, such as Buddhism, have a concept of reality
consisting of nothingness as well as being.  Heidegger too wrote about
nothingness being a positive.  And of course there were many mystics who
define God as Nothing. But it is only Bhaskar who has attempted to evolve a
contemporary theory of absence into a new dialectic, and to do this he has
really had to signal the novelty of his thoughts by using novel language.
Doyle
I would observe here that for me the issue of "realism" arises with how Bhaskar
expresses himself.  I used this point against Butler in this thread on 'bad
writing'.  I said of Butler she is not a realist.  I want to make this more
plain and clear.  Philosophy invents conceptual tools for human beings.  For
example where Gary cites Heidegger
Gary
Somewhere Raymond Williams wrote that the pull towards ordinary language
could become the pull towards ordinary thought. I have always remembered
that in any debates on style.
For my sins I am  reading Heidegger at present and he is also extremely
difficult.  Again, like Bhaskar, he insists on inventing words and phrases
to express the new thoughts that he is expressing.
Doyle
Where Heidegger uses "nothingness" as a means to create philosophy how does this
work materially arise from human brains?  That is what I mean by realism. 
 Philosophy
is a kind of brain work with a labor process that is practical for everyone
whether someone invents it or uses a philosophy subsequently to orient their
thoughts, just as the calculus is useful for everyone whether they know it
directly or enjoy the fruits of what the calculus makes possible.  Going further
though if one is realistic about the labor process then one could imagine that
inventing philosophy, or creating philosophical tools is subject to economic
activity just as any other human activity.  That is why I think Butler is not a
realist, nor Heidegger.  They are bound up in the tradition of academic
construction of thought when this  period we live in now shows clearly computing
automates brain work and that human thought is about to be automated down to the
last crevass of the gyra and sulcus.  To not subject philosophy to a grounding
in how thinking actually works in human brains, is a severe problem for
Heidegger because we cannot discern myth from reality in such attempts.
Said slightly differently, every human being thinks.  Some parts of that process
are suitable for different talents depending upon some variation in the labor
potential of individuals, but if a labor process is dependent upon its
creativity of individual human labor, then we are missing how capitalism really
works.  For the capitalist, they are moving toward the goal of automating
thinking in the context of mass markets, and mass oriented tools of production.
 They believe they can reach that goal of artificially creating machines that
think on a par with human beings within the life time of most people now living.
 Where some people think the labor that a Heidegger does is Heidegger's, the
individual, we are about to see how Capitalism grasps that production value and
converts it to something else to their own uses fed by the goal of extracting
the profit.  
Where Butler fails to ground herself in the materiality of human consciousness
she is not a realist.  In the same sense so is Heidegger.  Heidegger was
nostaligic for the past human unity, but in fact Heidegger has not a clue about
what that community was doing (which Merleau-Ponty seems to have broken with
other phenomenologists by trying to ground his philosophy in human physiology).
 Heidegger could not tell us in anything but mythic ways about what really
connects human beings community through their minds.  He is anti-realistic.  So
is Butler.
That is not to dismiss what Gary is writing about because we all are pulling
ourselves out of the muck of a world where consciousness is beyond knowing by
looking into the depths of what we issue from.  Did not Marx use Hegel by
turning the spirit upon it's head.  A fine tool can be produced outside a regime
of realism.  For example the Catholic Church produced a lot during it's reign
over Europe.  They resuscitated Aristotle, and Plato from the ancients.  Similar
remarks can be made of China during it's long feudal epoch, or the rest of the
world's culture.  But we are Marxist, we are realists!
In discussing what is at the heart of libertarian issues for Socialists, and
these seem to me to be about human consciousness,  we cannot really understand
things unless we have a concerted effort to ground the points in what
consciousness really is.  The point Yoshie want to raise by quoting Bhaskar was
that contemporary Capitalist Science fetishizes facts apart from the totality
(commodities over human reality).  But even a concept like a fetish could well
use a sense of what that really means in terms of how human minds produce
attention.  These issues then could be materialized and we could have something
powerful to work from.
cheers,
Doyle Saylor