Bruce,
1. I have been working on a response to your posts and paper(s) that will
touch on the topics mentioned in the subject line but I am travelling today
and don't have time to finish it all right now. So I'm posting this as a
first part to continue the discussion. I hope to finish with part 2 later
in the week. Here I mainly want to deal with the difficulties I find in the
use of Lukacs notion of totality in the way you've describe. I apologize
beforehand for the basically fragmentary presentation of these ideas in the
following.
Also, I would like to hear more about why you feel that the historical
consideration; i.e., that the historical practice of IS is not sufficiently
mature to allow the apprehension of the object, doesn't hold in the case of
IS. I read the Vygotsky/IS paper but didn't feel that this point was fully
developed there. Can you elaborate?
2. For me, the implications of the concept of totality which you
introduce with Smith's description of wholes (and your later invocation of
Lukacs' totality) needs to be evaluated. You are right that smith's
definition of concrete universal is quite different than
Ilyenkov's. In fact, I'm not sure that Smith is talking about the same
thing at all. Ilyenkov's notion of concrete universal can be traced to the
Hegelian "notion". The concrete universal is to dialectical materialism
what the Notion is to the Hegelian system. Hegel's comment on Kant is
illuminating in this respect:
"The capital feature in Kant's
'Criticism of the Judgment' is that he gave a representation and a name . .
. to the Idea. Such a representation, as an Intuitive Understanding, or an
inner adaptation, suggests a universal which is at the same time apprehended
as essentially a concrete unity." (Hegel, Lesser Logic, sec. 55).
Kant's apprehension of the concrete universal in aesthetic judgment,
Hegel's
elaboration of the notion, and the marxist concepts of totality and concrete
universal, all
embrace both an objective, concrete moment, and a subjective (an inner
adaptation for Hegel) moment. But Smith's definition of the whole has no
subjective moment--the wholes
are given abstractly. They are not related to a specific historical
praxis of specific subjects. However, the idea that any arbitrary totality
can be drawn, any starting point taken, doesn't square with the intent or
meaning of totality or concrete universal. Similarly, Smith's statement
concerning Hegel's introduction of "concrete universals" seems to me to be
be an example of this confusion. The marxist notion of concrete universal
(as developed in Ilyenkov) is not derived from this aspect of the Hegelian
philosophy but from the much more central concept of the Notion (the
subjective aspect of logic). I have read a lot Hegel and don't every
remember seeing him use the term
"concrete universal" and in any event, it is clearly not a central concept
in the Hegelian system.
3. Ilyenkov uses the following quote from Marx's Critique of Political
Economy
to illustrate The relationship of the concrete universal to the object of
which it is a
part. This passage is really key (I even used it in my dissertation where I
worked from an Althusserian framework of modes of production and social
formation).
"There is in every social formation a particular branch of production which
determines the position and importance of all the others, and the relations
obtaining in this branch will accordingly deetermine the relations of all
other branches as well. It is as though light of a particular hue were cast
upon everything, tingering all other colours and modifying their specific
featrures; or as if a special ether determined the specific gravity of
everything found in it."
Social formation is Marx's most inclusive
category and when he speaks of branches of production he is referring to the
relations of production in that branch; e.g., industrial production in 19th
century England v. agricultural production.
4. This passage occurs in the context of defining the relationship between
the
the concrete universal (C) and the other objects, each with their own
independent histories that have become subordinated to the concrete
universal. He gives an example from the physical sciences: "The chemical
substances involved in the development of life behave in this process in a
quite different manner from
the way they had behaved before and independently from it." In Marx both
credit, which emerged from usury, and rent, which grew out different forms
of pre-capitalist social relations, are only "abstract universals", when
studied from their own perspective since their position in the whole is not
determined internally but by the component that is in fact the cell form,
the concrete universal: the commodity.
5. I don't think this implies that one needs to study the cell-form, the
concrete universal, before studying the whole. The whole (O) is already
given in practice though it is initially abstract, a position that Lukacs
also held as in: " . . . neither the people who experience it nor the
historian have direct access to immediate reality in these, its true
structural forms. It is first necessary to search for them and to find
them--and the path to a knowledge of the histoircal process in its totality.
(H&CC: 1971:152)
6. You propose a system of relative totalities that "are
equally adequate in terms of their own goals and definition." I'm not
familiar with the source of the Lukacs quote you provided but it seems to me
to be out of context . In particular I think that you might be
interpreting Lukacs statements concerning (a) the systematic relativity of
totalities upward and downward and (b) the historical relativity to imply
that there is no need for identifying any specific component (C) that would
assign all other components their position in the object. I disagree with
this interpretation because (1) it would be in total contradiction with
Lukacs theoretical position of the role of dialectics as the theory of
working class revolution and (2) it would excise the very element that
allows dialectics to resolve the subject/object dualism
7. Kolakowski's discussion of Lukacs notion of "totality" is incisive. He
writes, "But--and this is the next fundamental point--the 'whole' is not
simply a state of affairs comprising all the particularities of reality at a
given moment. It must be undertstood as a dynamic reality, involving a
certain trend, its direction, and its results. It is in fact identicial
with present, past, and future history--but a future which is not simply
'foreseen ' like a fact in nature, but which is created by the act of
foreseeing it. Thus the 'whole' is anticipatory, and present facts can only
be understood in relation to the future.'" For Lukacs, dialectical
knowledge is itself historically situated. This is the meaning of the
impossibility of treating the dialectic as "scientific method that can be
transferred at will from one object to another . . . "In other words, it is
not the case that anyone, independent of his political status and social
commitment, can adopt the dialectical method and successfully apply it to
any object that he may choose. For the dialectic does not exist outside the
revolutionary struggle of the proletariat: it is the self-awareness of that
struggle and a component of it." (v.3, 268)
It is true that Lukacs provided the crucial impulse in marxist theory to go
beyond crude economic determinism but this was not a move toward
relativism. On the contrary, since the dialectic is part of the historical
process, for Lukacs there is only one class that can perceive the social
whole in the
isolated phenomena: the industrial working class. Furthermore, Lukacs was a
Leninist land totally committed to the proposition that the communist
party, as
vanguard of the proletariat, was the guardian of that knowledge.
Dialectical materialism, in Lukacs view, is 'nothing else than the
theoretical consciousness of the working class as it matures toward
revolution; and the class-consciousness of the proletariat is not a mere
reflection of an independent historical process, but is the indispensable
driving force of that process."
8. What happens if we eliminate this characteristic of Lukacs totality?
I
think we fall necesarily back into the subject-object dichotomy, we end up
with a non-dialectical systems model -- You write that you have provided
"an adequate, multi-faceted whole within which information sytstems modeling
takes place as one moment of the process as a whole." The question is of
course, how is that whole given, for whom is it a whole? In Lukacs the
whole is given in the action of the dynamic element , the awakening
proletariat, which organizes the particulars and "assigns them their
particular hue . . . their specific gravity . . ."
9. I think that Ilyenkov's analysis of concrete universal provides a way to
get around this difficulty of Lukacs notion of the totality which seems to
me to be part of the notion of an "end to history", a final resolution of
the dialectic (as in Hegel), etc. To do this requires comparing the
meanings and roles of mediation and contradiction in Lukacs and Ilyenkov.
I've been preparing those comments and had hoped to send it all at once but,
due to my need to travel, I'm sending this now and hope to get the rest of
the comments posted later in the week.
I'm also hoping that you understand that these criticisms are not meant to
depreciate the work you are doing. I think it's great that you are pursuing
the extension of dialectical approaches in IS, a field that seems very
amenable to such.
Paul H. Dillon
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