Re: [OPE-L] Derrida's ghosts
From: Stephen Cullenberg (stephen.cullenberg@UCR.EDU)
Date: Fri Nov 04 2005 - 18:20:58 EST
"Complex structures" in political economy have to be
contextualized
temporally and spatially. Within that more concrete context (of,
for
example, an individual social formation during a specific time
period),
it is often not possible to layer all of the causal variables "all
the
way up" and in the same direction. That is, variables which
might be
of minor importance at a more abstract level may have great
explanatory
power within a particular, more concrete context. Similarly,
variables
which are important in a more abstract context may have little
explanatory power for understanding a particular concrete
phenomena.
It's too bad our postmodern Marxists aren't taking part in this
conversation now. This thread might be seen as an opportunity
--
a "postmodern moment", a "learning
moment."
I
Jerry,
Sorry for not replying sooner, but life gets very busy at times, as it
does for us all. Let me just raise a couple of issues that I see
from your comment above, which perhaps will reply to Howard in part as
well. I see your point in your example above, but I am bit cautious
of your use of "minor importance" and "great explanatory
power". If you work with the idea of overdetermination or
constitutive causality (as I do and I recognize most others don't), then
the ranking, layering, or creating a hierarchy of causes, whether
deterministic or stochastic, is problematic. Causality is a matter
of qualitative difference, and to say something is more or less causally
important is a category mistake, from the POV I am working with.
If I might, I have excerpted some paragraphs that go to this issue in an
article I published in the Journal of Economic Issues in December
1989. I was looking at certain similarities between some stands of
Marxian theory and some types of institutionalism.
.......
Overdetermination is a theory of existence that states that
nothing exists in and of itself, prior to and independent from everything
else, and therefore all aspects of a society exist only as the result of
the constitution (mutual determination) of all of society's other
aspects. Overdetermination implies, then, a theory of causality, one
where everything constitutively determines everything else. This theory
of causality is clearly not the dominant notion of causality today, which
instead is one where a billiard ball metaphor of mechanistic causality
applies, where some things come first and others follow. It is not a
theory where you can single out a prime mover(s) and argue that
"X" is the cause of "Y," or even that "X"
explains, say 46 percent of Y. Obviously, there is an implicit critique
here of classical statistical inference. The emphasis is on qualitative
analysis, by which I mean non-reductive differences and a refusal to
characterize events by formally comparable metrics, whether that implies
scalar or vector dominance.
Another way of thinking about this is that overdetermination is a
critique of "depth models" of social explanation-a critique of
essentialism if you want-where one level of analysis is explained by a
different level and is somehow thought to be prior to and independent
from the first. Classic Hegelian causality of essence and appearance is
an example; neoclassical utility analysis grounded in uncaused
preferences is another. In this sense, then, overdetermination implies a
sort of relativism--a relativism of existence. As nothing exists except
as the result of everything else, or nothing is assumed to
"underlie" anything else, then there is no meaningful way to
argue that something is more important than something else, which would
require a metric that is unavailable in this analysis. Of course, one
could choose a metric like weight, labor-time, money, height, etc., and
argue that along that dimension something is greater than something else
(but you run into an immediate problem when you do not have vector
dominance). Simply put, overdetermination is an appeal to qualitative
analysis similar to the institutionalist insistence on the unique context
of each analysis.
Let me give a couple of examples, very briefly, that might elucidate
further the idea of overdetermination as causal method. These examples
emphasize the institutionalist notion of emergence.
1. Consider the simple example of baking a cake. The ingredients would
likely consist of sugar, flour, milk, eggs, water, and chocolate. In the
combining, or overdetermination, of the ingredients of the cake, the cake
emerges. But it would be folly to argue that the cake is primarily the
result of such and such an individual ingredient, or that 40 percent of
the cake is due to its flour content, and 20 percent is due to its sugar
content, etc. You might want to say that 40 percent of the weight of the
ingredients is due to the flour, but that is a different question that
presumes one metric (weight) among the many. The point is that the cake
emerges as the result of all of its conditions of existence (ingredients)
and is qualitatively different from its constituent parts, and it would
be a category mistake to reduce the cake's existence to any one, or a
percentage of any, ingredient.
2. The same kind of insight can be applied to the long-debated
nature/nurture distinction. Are we who we are because we are 34 percent
nature and 76 percent nurture, for example? If that question could be
answered that way, then it would certainly be an answer inconsistent with
overdetermination. However, as Stephen Jay Gould, among others, has
argued persuasively, we are both nature and nurture, and their effects
cannot be legitimately separated out in strict statistical percentages.
3. There are policy implications as well to the idea of
overdetermination. Consider the problem of drunk driving and someone who
gets into an accident by running into a tree. What is the cause of the
injury? Well, we might claim, as is conventional, that it is due to
excessive drinking, or it may be the lack of wearing a seat belt, or it
might be an unsafe car. Or we might try to get deeper behind the problem
and say it is due to the poor education or social problems of the driver
or to the lack of safety concerns by automobile manufacturers. All of
those reasons and possible causes cry out for policy solutions, many of
which have been tried. Of course, however, we could take a radical
approach and simply cut down the trees! This sounds ludicrous, but my
point is that the event of the accident did not happen (in this case)
without the tree, so we could, if we wanted, make the country look like a
southern Californian desert and avoid traffic accidents of this type. The
reason we do not is not because we reall y know what finally caused the
accident (because all these factors overdetermined the accident), but
because of what we think is politically feasible or desirable. Cutting
down all the trees is an option not ruled out by the constitutive
causality of overdetermination, but rather by the failure of it being an
acceptable policy option.
4. Then there are political consequences of a greater scope. Consider an
example from Richard Lewontin. He argues that tuberculosis is caused only
in certain environmental contexts, and that it makes as much sense to say
that "industrial capitalism in nineteenth century Britain" is
the "cause" of tuberculosis, as is the more standard
epidemiological claim that tuberculosis is caused by the tubercle
bacteria. How and why we focus on certain causes have telling social
consequences, which of course is Lewontin's point in this case. We could
have ended tuberculosis by doing away with industrial capitalism, but
society chose the more acceptable epidemiological solution. The idea of
overdetermination in this context carries enormous methodological
implications for how we consider solutions to environmental problems,
disease, and poverty.
That brings me to the last point I want to make. Overdetermination is a
form of relativism to be sure, but that does not imply a quietude,
whether scholarly or politically (if you want to separate them out). It
does imply, I think, an attention to case study and the specificity of
each analysis as done by institutionalist economists and not the strategy
of empirical work as is classically done with econometrics, which tries
to separate out distinct explanatory factors and weight or sign them.
And, it does not mean you cannot take a position politically and argue
for it. Marxist institutionalists, for example, generally focus on class
analysis not because it necessarily explains or underlies other important
oppressions or indignities in society (it certainly has its effects, to
be sure, to be discovered by analysis), but primarily because, in the
Marxian view, changing the class structure is an end in itself that is
desired and desirable.
Steve
Stephen
Cullenberg
Professor of Economics
University of
California
Riverside, CA
92521
Office: 951-827-1573
Fax: 951-787-5685
Email: stephen.cullenberg@ucr.edu
http://www.economics.ucr.edu/people/cullenberg.html
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