From: ajit sinha (sinha_a99@YAHOO.COM)
Date: Sat Nov 05 2005 - 06:00:34 EST
--- Stephen Cullenberg <stephen.cullenberg@UCR.EDU> wrote: --------------------------------- "Complex structures" in political economy have to becontextualized temporally and spatially. Within that more concrete context (of,for example, an individual social formation during a specific timeperiod), it is often not possible to layer all of the causal variables "allthe way up" and in the same direction. That is, variables whichmight be of minor importance at a more abstract level may have greatexplanatory 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 concretephenomena. 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 "learningmoment." I Jerry, Sorry for not replying sooner, but life gets very busy at times, as itdoes for us all. Let me just raise a couple of issues that I seefrom your comment above, which perhaps will reply to Howard in part aswell. I see your point in your example above, but I am bit cautiousof your use of "minor importance" and "great explanatorypower". If you work with the idea of overdetermination orconstitutive causality (as I do and I recognize most others don't), thenthe ranking, layering, or creating a hierarchy of causes, whetherdeterministic or stochastic, is problematic. Causality is a matterof qualitative difference, and to say something is more or less causallyimportant 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 anarticle I published in the Journal of Economic Issues in December1989. I was looking at certain similarities between some stands ofMarxian theory and some types of institutionalism. ....... Overdetermination is a theory of existence that states thatnothing exists in and of itself, prior to and independent from everythingelse, and therefore all aspects of a society exist only as the result ofthe constitution (mutual determination) of all of society's otheraspects. Overdetermination implies, then, a theory of causality, onewhere everything constitutively determines everything else. This theoryof causality is clearly not the dominant notion of causality today, whichinstead is one where a billiard ball metaphor of mechanistic causalityapplies, where some things come first and others follow. It is not atheory 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 critiquehere of classical statistical inference. The emphasis is on qualitativeanalysis, by which I mean non-reductive differences and a refusal tocharacterize events by formally comparable metrics, whether that impliesscalar or vector dominance. Another way of thinking about this is that overdetermination is acritique of "depth models" of social explanation-a critique ofessentialism if you want-where one level of analysis is explained by adifferent level and is somehow thought to be prior to and independentfrom the first. Classic Hegelian causality of essence and appearance isan example; neoclassical utility analysis grounded in uncausedpreferences is another. In this sense, then, overdetermination implies asort of relativism--a relativism of existence. As nothing exists exceptas the result of everything else, or nothing is assumed to"underlie" anything else, then there is no meaningful way toargue that something is more important than something else, which wouldrequire a metric that is unavailable in this analysis. Of course, onecould choose a metric like weight, labor-time, money, height, etc., andargue that along that dimension something is greater than something else(but you run into an immediate problem when you do not have vectordominance). Simply put, overdetermination is an appeal to qualitativeanalysis similar to the institutionalist insistence on the unique contextof each analysis. Let me give a couple of examples, very briefly, that might elucidatefurther the idea of overdetermination as causal method. These examplesemphasize the institutionalist notion of emergence. 1. Consider the simple example of baking a cake. The ingredients wouldlikely consist of sugar, flour, milk, eggs, water, and chocolate. In thecombining, or overdetermination, of the ingredients of the cake, the cakeemerges. But it would be folly to argue that the cake is primarily theresult of such and such an individual ingredient, or that 40 percent ofthe cake is due to its flour content, and 20 percent is due to its sugarcontent, etc. You might want to say that 40 percent of the weight of theingredients is due to the flour, but that is a different question thatpresumes one metric (weight) among the many. The point is that the cakeemerges as the result of all of its conditions of existence (ingredients)and is qualitatively different from its constituent parts, and it wouldbe a category mistake to reduce the cake's existence to any one, or apercentage of any, ingredient. _______________________________ But Steve, in your example the ingredients of the cake exists prior to the existence of the cake and the cake is CAUSED by the ingredients put through a baking process. I'm not sure to what extent this example serves your case. Even if you apply it as a critique of empirical quantitative analysis such as regression analysis, I don't find it making a compelling case. Let us suppose you have a cake and you don't know the ingredients of it or at least what were the proportions in which they were mixed in the cake. Now if some kind of empirical analysis tells you what the ingrediants were or at lest in what proportion they were mixed to create the cake, wouldn't you agree that this would amount to knowledge and a knowledge worth having? I think, to argue for Althusserian notion of "overdetermined structure" it is better to use the example of a family. In a family structure, father, mother, husband, wife, brothers, sisters, etc. do not exist prior to or independent of the family. The interesting part of Althusserian notion of structure, in my opinion, is that the elements of the structure do not have any prior and independent existence of their own outside of the structure. Even though they constitute the structure, they themselves are constituted by the structure itself. Hence the structure is not CAUSED but OVERDETERMINED. We need to get away from the idea that "every thing is determined by every thing" as overdetermination. Such a proposition is a tautology and void of all knowledge content. Cheers, ajit sinha __________________________________ Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click. http://farechase.yahoo.com
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