after quoting my remark on something Alan Freeman said, Marsh Feldman writes >>I don't think this gets quite out of the woods.<< Marsh, I didn't know I was in the woods. More importantly, which woods am I in (or do you think I'm in)? the overdeterminist/pomo woods? the anti-overdeterminist/determinist woods? (the Evelyn woods? ;-)) >>First, your notion [or Alan's?] is very much like Roy Bhaskar's argument for what he calls the transformative mode of social activity. Except for Roy, not only does the past haunt the present, it also allows social institutions to have emergent properties (their own causal efficacy) independent of any given individuals. << I guess I agree with Bhaskar, but I was _not_ presenting anything but a proposed limit on the role of overdetermination in understanding social processes rather trying to present a _complete_ alternative to the RM school. (Frankly, I find most of Bhaskar's stuff to be opaque, so I rely on secondary sources like Dick Walker and Rajani Kanth.) BTW, I don't think that the idea that "social institutions to have emergent properties (their own causal efficacy) independent of any given individuals" contradicts the RM school. They reject methodological individualism, if my memory serves me well. >>Second, to say something is overdetermined does not necessarily mean everything determines everything else -- including the present determining the past.<< I was simply describing what I thought was R&W's usage of the concept of "overdetermination." My point was simply that there were clear limits to that concept -- because the present cannot determine the past. I was hoping to get some insight into the RM school's response to this proposed limit. >>All it [overdetermination] requires is multiple and contingent causes such that a given outcome is neither necessary nor sufficient evidence of any given cause. Here again I find Bhaskar much better than R&W.<< I would agree that critical realism thinking is superior to that of R&W. But again, I wasn't aiming to present a complete alternative to R&W as much as to have a civilized dialogue about one crucial detail of R&W's vision of social processes (I wasn't getting into their epistemology, for example). It seemed a good time to have such a discussion because the organizers of the RM conference on pen-l didn't want to dwell on that event any more. >> R&W seem to stop at overdetermination, whereas Bhaskar seems to start there. His critical realist theory has us identifying specific causes and their contingent interaction to explain why certain outcomes do or do not appear. If, for example, we do not see a growing reserve army of labor during a period of U.S. history, perhaps it's because gender relations interact with class relations to undermine a tendency that the latter, by itself, would foster. This is a far cry from overdetermination since it explains the "overdetermined" (contingent) outcome rather than hide it behind a 7-syllable word.<< If I understand what you're saying correctly, I agree. Maybe we should have a discussion of the limits of critical realism instead of discussing the limits of overdetermination. I would like to know why the RM school is critical of Bhaskar. (If I remember correctly, the footnote that mentions Bhakskar in R&W's KNOWLEDGE AND CLASS was merely dismissive.) But that seems a much larger subject, one that is hard to discuss over pen-l. I think that the concept of overdetermination is important and useful for understanding society, whether it comes from a RM or Bhaskarian direction. But what are its limits? in pen-l solidarity, Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Econ. Dept., Loyola Marymount Univ. 7900 Loyola Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90045-8410 USA 310/338-2948 (daytime, during workweek); FAX: 310/338-1950 "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- K. Marx, paraphrasing Dante A.
