[PEN-L:7429] Re: Re: J. Donald Hughes on Mayan collapse

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

J. Barkley Rosser, Jr. wrote:

>       First let me say that I think your review of
>Harvey is perfectly reasonable.  I have published
>a bunch of stuff on dynamics within complicated
>ecological-economic and spatial hierarchies
>(see button on my website for recent pubs for
>those who are curious) and I agree that gettting off
>into Lebinizian monadology is just a waste of time.

According to the index, there are 45 pages on which Leibniz or the
Leibnizian conceit appears, in a book with 438 text pages. About 25 of
these pages are part of an extended discussion.

Here's an excerpt from Harvey's book. Readers can decide for themselves is
this is "getting off into Leibnizian monadology" or not.

Doug

----

from David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, pp. 74-76.

There are, plainly, different versions of how to understand internal
relations. My own preference (and it has been a fairly consistent feature
of much of my previous work) is to treat of "moments" within processes
rather than to take the monadic view of, say, production as the element for
sole consideration. Consumption, exchange, distribution must be considered
as moments in their own right precisely in order to understand the process
of internalization as it occurs in production. Marx produced strong
arguments to support his view that the moment of production was more
crucial than the others to explaining how capitalism works and how
socialism might be achieved, but this does not in any way justify neglect
of the other moments - indeed, working on those other moments (such as
consumption) is a fruitful way towards internalizing specific and desired
forms of change within production (the most obvious case is when consumer
boycotts affect production activities). To the degree that Ollman fails to
make such distinctions clear enough (though I suspect he agrees with me),
he leaves open the possibility for both a conservative and idealist
doctrine of internal relations as well as a purely "productivist" version
of Marxian political economy.

This still leaves the thorny question of where change comes from in
particular, in a world construed in terms of internal relations. Why might
certain agents for change (such as an organized working class) be
considered as more fundamental than others? This is perhaps the foremost
question to be answered and it will be a major preoccupation in later
chapters. For the moment, all that I need record is that critical
assessment of doctrines of internal relations places that as a metaphysical
as well as a political issue of paramount importance. Leibniz's particular
solution, arrived at in the Monadology, was founded on failures of
political practice that made retreat into the windowless world (his study)
of an intellectual monad engaging in extensive correspondence with the
outside world a particularly attractive proposition. Hardly surprisingly,
the political failures of the left in the last two decades have rendered a
similar retreat into a windowless Leibnizian world of internalized
relations, as for example in the case of Deleuze (1993), a rather
attractive option. It has been facilitated in many respects by the
perfection of computer technologies [another innovation of Leibniz who, as
Heim (1991) points out, developed not only the first calculating machine
but also the binary arithmetic - a universal calculus that "would compile
all human culture, bringing every natural language into a single shared
data base" - to go with it]. The picture of the monadic individual, locked
onto a computer screen connected by modem into a vast world of
correspondence in cyberspace in many respects is a fulfillment (repetition)
of the Leibnizian dream. "Monads have no windows, but they do have
terminals" writes Heim, going on to describe a cyberworld in which
Leibniz's "monadological metaphysics" underpin both the logic and 11 erotic
ontology" of cyberspace. And there are many who now regard intensive
exploration of this new space as a form of radical and revolutionary
action. I will return to this topic in chapter 10.

The "new radical idealism," as I shall call it, rests largely on such a
withdrawal and it is something which in itself the pure doctrine of
internal relations is powerless to prevent, except by embedding it deeply
in the political commitments [or, as Bhaskar (1993) prefers it, in the
"liberatory axiology"] that gave Manes dialectics and his historical
materialism so much of its power. Otherwise the severance between freedom
and political commitment becomes just as fatal a contradiction for
contemporary dialectical work as it ultimately became for Leibniz.
Dialectics, with its focus on change, has a strong claim to be at least one
of the key modes of enquiry. But, as Bhaskar (1993) notes, there are
various strains within that tradition and it is important to be as explicit
as possible concerning how dialectics can operate and what it might mean to
bring some rather than other dialectical principles to bear upon any form
of enquiry. Treating different modes of thought dialectically (a kind of
metadialectic if you will) as complementary though antagonistic rather than
as mutually exclusive and unrelated can, for this reason, yield creative
insights. This is an ancient principle that the Greeks understood well.
"The finest harmony is born from differences," said Heraclitus, and
"discord is the law of all becoming." Marx, likewise held that "one-sided"
representations are always restricting and problematic and that the best
way to proceed was always "to rub together conceptual blocks in such a way
that they catch fire." Perhaps a little rubbing in the right way can chart
creative ways to think about sociogeographical and environmental change,
and how to bring spatio-temporality, place, and environment (nature) within
the frames of social and literary theory. In the chapters that follow, I
shall try to put such a mode of argument to work to see what it can yield.
In the process I shall try to dissolve dialectics as an abstract set of
principles into a flow of argumentation and theoretical practices.