Rudi Supek—Freedom and Polydeterminism in Cultural Criticism

Culture
is very likely

one of the most
sensitive
areas of

social criticism.

Nowhere else
can

the inadequacy or absurdity of theoretical presuppositions or methodological procedures
be
uncovered so rapidly,

nowhere else
can

human creative activity
overwhelm
erroneous premises and conclusions with such promptitude,

and

nowhere else
can

such harm be
inflicted
upon the creative potentialities of human beings

as when

a dogmatic theory
is
imposed on cultural policy

by means of
social compulsion.

... The creative nature of man,

the mode of human participation in social life,

the relationship between the collective élan and individual creative potentialities,

the establishment of certain social limitations on creativity,

and individual ability to overcome personal and social limitations in the service of one and the same ideal,

are all
most prominent
in
the field of culture.

It is precisely in the realm of culture
in our times

that the contradiction
between
society and the individual,

between
the collective consciousness and the individual consciousness,

and between
the concrete totality represented by society
and
the ideal totality represented by the individual,

begins to sharpen in the most obvious way.

Well, Rank would not accept
that this is a product only of
our or anyone else's times.
Rather, it belongs to all times.

We have just encountered,

in the concept of totality,

the first category that is a source of

certain     ambiguities          and                 one-sided interpretations

in social criticism.

This category is interpreted in the social sciences generally,

and in sociology in particular,

in terms of the concept of society as such,

either

in the spirit of

ontological realism

or

in the spirit of

ontological nominalism .

Society in the former sense is

some sort of
higher,
organic,
and closed
entity to which the
individual
is
subordinated
in every respect
;

society in the latter sense is

no more than
a chance accumulation,
an aggregation of interests,
or the locale
in which
individual wills and interests
are
operative
(or join together,
or compete,
or struggle)
.

Both concepts

have deeply permeated

the thought, philosophy, and sociology

of bourgeois society.

While

classic liberalism
(Smith, Hobbes, Bentham)

held to

nominalism,

romantic philosophy

interpreted society

and the people

in the light of

ontological realism.

The latter conception

thus carried over

from

Hegel and Schelling

to
the

theoreticians of the “folk soul”

(Lazarus and Steinthal)

and

organic positivism

(Comte, Spencer, Durkheim)

and thence
to

the most recent

totalitarian doctrines of the

fascist
and

Stalinist

varieties.

So,
total conceptions of society are mirrored in totalitarian domination.
This is counterintuitive amidst the Red State-Blue State crossfire,
wherein the notion of society as something

to which the individual is subordinated in every respect

is openly and virtuously claimed by many who fancy themselves
(sometimes quite self-consciously)
antifascist.

Seems to me, though,
that the total-ness of conception
is less at fault than is
the sheer scale
at which we are now forced to contemplate such matters.
The "realist" conception
has very different implications
in a neolithic "community"
than in a post-industrial "society."

on this occasion
we will treat only certain theories in the realm of culture,

and in particular the Marxist application
of the category of totality
to
the interpretation of culture and cultural policy.

In this field,
we must face up to
three well known conceptions in the spirit of ontological realism,
which involve
the complete subordination of the creative individual to the social totality.

The first conception in this series falls within the range of
theory of reflection.

By analogy with the reflection of “objective reality” in the subject,
this theory assumes that the cultural superstructure
is only a reflection of
the material foundation of society,

with the entire “social reality” being considered
as
something more real and more primary in terms of value

and with cultural creation being regarded
as
nothing but a more or less adapted reflection of reality proper.

This theory falls back on the Platonist idealization of “objective reality”
and affirms the inferiority of culture and the art that can only reflect
(not to say imitate)
this reality.

Art necessarily lags behind reality.

The best compliment that art can possibly receive
is that it has succeeded in conveying an impression of social reality
“as faithfully as possible”
or
“as characteristically as possible.”

Cultural creation,
along with the whole realm of esthetics,
thus becomes in ontological terms
just an epiphenomenon of material reality.

The thing is
with all this business about
the inferiority of culture and its alleged lagging behind reality,
even then
I've never been quite sure
why tf
the imperative to reflect
and to convey an impression
follows necessarily or even directly from all of this.
If art is so inferior for such purposes,
then why apply it in this way at all?

Within the bounds of historical dynamics,
the material social foundation
becomes something not only objective
but also causative,

the cultural superstructure
being something subjective
and consequential.

Since the social and political correlative of the material foundation is in the ruling class,
culture is always the spiritual expression of a single class.

When the foundation changes, the superstructure also changes.

When the foundation disappears, the superstructure likewise disappears.

Culture thus retains the characteristic features of an epiphenomenon,
even when the inverse effect of the superstructure on the foundation is mentioned
out of respect for the dialectic.

It is important in a methodological sense at this point to keep in mind that
the foundation and the superstructure are the correlatives of the same historical entity.
The cultural superstructure in this view,
thus remains closed within the bounds of a given foundation
and incapable of transcending this foundation in any way,

i.e., incapable of shifting to another historical epoch in terms of value.

Such a grasp of the whole, or totality,
of a given historical situation
leads to certain consequences in the theory of culture.

First,
the search is on for the class correlatives
or “social equivalents”
of particular cultural themes and artistic styles.

Second,
attempts are made
to explain
changes in cultural creation
exclusively
in the light of
changes in the social foundation.

This second consequence
of the theory of reflection
is particularly rejected by Rank
as
failing to account for psychological factors;
and this not
because psychologies necessarily diverge into an intractible diversity
but
in fact because
there is an all-but-universal psychological conflict
which theories of reflection
simply fail to take any notice of;
this being,
for Rank,
the tension between individual and collective concerns.

This is not quite the same thing as merely invoking "individual" diversity or autonomy to push back against attempts to explain changes in cultural creation exclusively in the light of changes in the social foundation. It is, in fact, to hold that at least one significant element of the social foundation doesn't change. And that is not something that self-styled psycho-voyeurs with eager ears to the social ground are likely to accept.

The theory of the
progressive and decadent development
of society
as an historical entity

is our second example of
the erroneous application of the category of totality.

This theory is really just a subvariety of the first,
which introduces the ideas
of
the progressive and decadent development of particular phases
into
the relationship between the foundation and the superstructure.

By applying the foundation superstructure scheme

o
n
e
s
i
d
e
d
l
y

to the realm of culture,
this theory projects
the political and social decadency of a society
onto
cultural creativity.

To be sure, this theory soon encounters
certain small difficulties.
It cannot explain
why
the most valuable
cultural achievements
have
so often been produced
in
such decadent epochs
as

the Athenian era after Pericles,
the Roman era after Caesar,
and the Middle Ages after Dante,

not to mention the decadence that is supposed to have set in
with
the appearance of impressionism in bourgeois society.

Well, sure.
But
you can always just deny the value.
It seems that this denial merely had to become imaginable
(if not quite plausible)
in order to
pretty much
take
over.

This theory has also created
another difficulty
by introducing a purely gnosiological criterion
alongside
the historical criterion of progress and decadence.

"Gnosiology" on Wikipedia:
"the philosophy of knowledge and cognition".
In Soviet and post-Soviet philosophy,
the word is often used as a synonym for epistemology.
...
In philosophy,
gnosology
(also known as gnoseology or gnostology)
literally
means the study of gnosis,
meaning knowledge
or
esoteric knowledge.

Under the theory of reflection,
the progressive is that which is more objective or realistic
and
the decadent that which provides a more subjective reflection,
i.e., a reflection which is subjectivistic or expressionistic.

The gnosiological criterion being lasting and unalterable,
realism must necessarily be progressive
and
impressionism or expressionism decadent or even reactionary,

the latter art forms being
expressions
of
a subjectivistic attitude toward reality.

From Lukács to Timofeev,
the theoreticians of socialist realism
have
confused
historical dynamics
with
the postulates of cognitional theory
that
are otherwise applicable
only to scientific cognition.

It is a genuine riddle to them
why
the revolutionary bourgeoisie expressed itself

at one time

in a pronouncedly subjectivistic art
and
the revolutionary proletariat
during the time of the October Revolution
likewise
made use of a subjectivistic art
in
the expressionism
of

Mayakovsky,
Piscator,
Meyerhold,
and
so many others.

The “cultural superstructure” obviously fails completely
to respect certain of the fundamental principles
of the theory of reflection.

How else are we to explain
the fact
that

the bourgeoisie expressed itself
in
a romantic and subjectivistic manner
during its progressive phase,

with realism making an appearance
only
by the time of the first serious social crisis after 1848
as
a symptom of crisis
and thereby
of the beginning of decline?

This seems to me the right tactic in one respect:
collect and catalog counterexamples such as these until the master theory starts to look implausible.

The pitfall,
though,
is that now we are playing the enemy's game;
we have been dragged down to the idiot's level,
as it were,
whereby (s)he may now beat us with experience.

Ultimately
it is neither the scientific worldview
nor the desire for economic justice
nor the Materialist view of the world
which must be abandoned.
What must be abandoned,
rather,
is something seemingly more trivial but in reality equally fearsome:
the conceit to "expression."

The accusation of a subjectivistic attitude toward reality
and the parsing of this attitude as decadent or even reactionary
cannot sustain itself without accompanying theories of
transmission,
correspondence,
interpretation,
and the like.

It is precisely the conceit to "expression"
which asserts that the subjectivistic artist has said something about reality,
though they may in fact
have
said nothing,
said something that is less obvious,
said something false with full knowledge of its falsity and with some second-order effect in mind to that end,
etc.,
etc.,
etc.,

Rank is again apt here:

Compared with the idea of the soul or its primitive predecessors even the abstractest form of art is concrete, just as on the other hand the most definite naturalism in art is abstract when compared with nature.
(AnA, pp. 11-12)


In one point modern research is more or less unanimous: that the most vital elements in our culture—the making of fire, agriculture, domestication of animals, measurement of time, observation of the stars—originate in the satisfaction not of practical, but of religious, supersensible, and ideological needs.
(p. 235)

It is not only
scholars, critics, and artists ourselves
who abuse the conceit to "expression"
,
but also
Puritans,
holier-than-thous,
and
of course
all those faux-"realists" who have
confused historical dynamics
with
the postulates of cognitional theory that are otherwise applicable
only
to
scientific cognition
.

Once you claim to be "expressing" something other than what appears to be there, the door is open for you to be accused of "expressing" something you never thought and didn't even know existed.

Realism, freedom, community...all these things are great, but what is really, desperately needed from all concerned is honesty. That is our greatest deficit as measured against our needs. It is for lack of honesty among its exponents that the scientific worldview comes to look so oppressive, or perhaps actually becomes oppressive in concrete ways. A little honesty would upend everything, uncomfortably at first to be sure, but ultimately for the best.

If we assume that decadence set in immediately after the era of realism in painting and literature,

i.e., with the appearance of impressionism and naturalism,

then the only conclusion to be drawn
is that
every further cultural creation
so long as this decadence lasts
( a whole century thus far!)
will amount to
one step further into decadency .

Expressionism will be more decadent than impressionism,
surrealism more decadent than expressionism,
and nonobjective or abstract art the extreme mode of decadence.

The longer the decadence lasts,
the more profound will be the decline in values,
and
the greater the dehumanization.

For these reasons, the more recent cultural achievements of bourgeois society will always be less acceptable than the older achievements, which are then transformed into “the classics.”

In this way,
so far as the cultural inheritance is concerned,
the theory leads to
traditionalism and
to the sole acceptance of
old and outmoded cultural values .

Such an orientation
in relation to the cultural inheritance in a socialist society
must necessarily “go always against the stream and against the era”
and make fresh forces old before their time.

Again,
we are somewhat trapped within the terms of
the Expressionist Fallacy
if
we make this squandering of fresh forces
and the outmoding of cultural values
central to our case.

But
even I wouldn't deny that there are artworks,
particularly "popular" artworks,
where something fresh is unleashed
(though I would deny that
this has anything to do with
"expression"!).

We have already pointed out that this theory leads to
a variety of difficulties in the interpretation of cultural dynamics
and often to absurd conclusions. And

the adherents to this theory themselves frequently contradict each other .

Lukács thus considers
that bourgeois art
was progressive
only during its earliest phase,
e.g., in the Flemish landscapes,
and then fell into decadence with the onset of romanticism
(even though the latter amounted to
a “French revolution in poetic form”!)

On the other hand, the idea is much more common
(shared alike by Plekhanov, Hausenstein, and Hamann)
that decadence set in with the appearance of impressionism,
through which “the petty bourgeoisie attained its culminating position.”

Plekhanov nevertheless noted
the joyous aspect of this art
and considered it to belong
to the society of the future
by virtue of its hedonist unconcern .

On this basis, the Soviet theoretician Matsa has been impelled to doubt that impressionism is decadent art and to ascribe the beginning of decadence to expressionism, which “deforms the external world.”

As we have already seen,
the question then arises
as to how the October Revolution
could have been echoed in expressionism.

The answer is simple.

The shout,
the cry,
the slogan,
and the directive
are always going to be compact in the expressionistic mode like action itself,
for narration is unfeasible in the course of the action.

Yet such an uncomplicated psychological explanation
is
not accepted by the adherents to socialist realism.

To be sure,
there have been
some recent attempts
to
consider nonobjective art alone
as genuinely decadent art.

This opinion has been expressed by the Soviet critic
Lifshits
on only one occasion
but seems to be acquiring a multitude of adherents,
although it has not yet become “official.”

The theory of reification is our third example of the erroneous application of the category of totality in the field of culture.

Much more subtle than the others, this theory has attracted large numbers of contemporary Marxists, for it undeniably contains a fragment of the truth. The weak side of this theory is its historical relativism, conditional upon the enclosure of the cultural historical situation within the bounds of a specific totality.

Like the other theories,
the theory of reification
lays stress on the foundation,
i.e., on the economic relationships
or modes of production in capitalist society.

...

The process of reification
thus consists essentially
of the transformation of
qualitative relations
into
quantitative magnitudes .

The roots of reification naturally lie in a whole conglomeration of secondary phenomena that are inseparable from a system of hired labor...

The process of reification amounts to the foundation of bourgeois society in so far as the creation of market values is concerned,
and must inevitably be generalized or reflected in the superstructure...

Max Weber and George Lukács,
and recently Erich Fromm and Lucien Goldmann
have been particularly insistent
on the fact
that
goods and money production is not only the configuration of the economy in a bourgeois society
but also the “soul” of such a society.

Usefulness,
profit,
money,
quantification,
rationalism,
and instrumentalism
have thus saturated all realms of social life and thought.
Rationalism along with science
in this same circle
has become the enemy of humanism,
instrumentalism along with technology
the chief source of human alienation. ...

In fact,
the application of the category of totality in the social criticism of bourgeois society under the theory of reification
does not go beyond the dependence of the superstructure upon the foundation,
i.e.,
the dependence of the social totality upon a universal process termed reification,
so far as the essential determinism of social phenomena is concerned.

The starting point is an historically closed system,
viz., bourgeois society,
the analysis of which
comes down to a kind of
phenomenological reductionism
of
delusive phenomena
to
a fundamental and essential process of change.

No determinism capable of transcending this particular historical situation has been taken into consideration, either as a preceding series or as a future series.

In what manner ought these theories to be subjected to correction?

First, it is necessary to transcend social, economic, class, cultural, and historical totalitarianism, and thus relativism in two senses,

viz.,
in individual or personal terms,
and
in terms of world history.

In the first instance, the category of social totality deserves to be interpreted in relation to “total social facts” (Marx, Mauss, Gurvitch).

Let us recall no more than the following definition from Marx:
“Hence,
however much a human being should be a separate individuum,
and it is precisely his separateness which makes him an individuum and an actual individual being in the community,
he is likewise a totality,
the ideal totality,
the subjective existence of an imagined and experienced society in itself,
just as he exists in actuality at the same time as the perception and genuine spirit of social existence and as the totality of the human manifestation of life.”
(Karl Marx, Der historische Materialismus [Leipzig: A. Kroener Verlag], Vol. I, p. 298.)

Obviously, Marx has kept in mind the fact that both society and the personality are “total social facts”;

i.e., the whole social reality can be encompassed if we proceed from the one to the other and vice versa.

This reciprocity of perspective is based
in any event
on
a dialectical relationship that imparts full independence to the personality in the sense of an ability to identify with any other personality in the society (any reduction of the art of a given artist to his class origins being thus illusory ),
and an ability to identify with the entire society as a whole
(to transcend in consciousness narrower class or group interests),
and an ability to transcend the present day state of society—to anticipate the future as the “totality of the human manifestation of life,” not only in the name of the negation of that which is in existence, but also in the name of the entire historical experience of mankind.

Well,
people who try to anticipate the future usually fail.
But it is not just the self-important, transcendence-seeking artist
who runs afoul of this limit on our clairvoyance
but also the reductionist social critic
who cannot imagine that the usefulness or appeal of artworks
could be capable of enduring or rearising.

Positivistic organicism is not only incapable of comprehending
the role of the personality in cultural creativity

, but also finds geniuses to be an enigma .

No less a figure than Lukács himself naïvely explains the survival of works of genius solely in terms of selection on the part of the ruling class from whatever in the past should serve the immediate interests of this class!

In point of fact,
great cultural works live on
despite
all barriers of history and class
for the sole reason
that
such works have been created by personalities
distinguished for greatness or genius,

i.e., such individualized social totalities
as have encompassed a maximum of “human totality”
in a personal creative act. ...

...

In other words,

the individual represents a specific determinant of cultural creation
precisely because as an individual he deserves to be a part of the analysis of the culture of a society.

For example,
in terms of the universal process of reification
it is wholly incomprehensible why romanticism should have ignored the processes of reification while the realism that followed with Balzac did not ignore these processes.

Was it only because romanticism was “more reactionary” or less progressive than realism,
or
was it because the romantics as human beings were less progressive than the realists
(e.g., Victor Hugo as opposed to Balzac)?

The answer to the question indicates that to ask it is wrong.

Romanticism had no need to reflect reification,
for its aim was to express what was vital after the bourgeois revolution,
viz.,
a new conception and a new expansion of the human personality,
Promethean and autonomous.

This personal and sentimental expansion of a grand sensitivity proved very soon to be illusory when confronted with social reality,
but lost nothing thereby of its universal human and cultural value.

Let us remember that Romain Rolland went to combat in behalf of socialism via Beethoven.
Marx conducted himself in the same way with Phidias or Shakespeare,
even though the social organization inhabited by these geniuses could scarcely have been pleasing to him.

In other words,
we are obliged to keep track of the fate of human creation equally in the dimension of the class struggle and in the dimension of the human personality,
at the level of human sociality and at the level of the artistic liberation of the personality.

Second,
cultural phenomena transcend the foundation-superstructure scheme and historical relativism in the sphere of world history,
by which we understand a continuous curve with all its internal contradictions throughout the historical epochs up to the present.

Such a curve is assumed to be wholly natural where advances in science or technology are concerned.
It is considered entirely understandable
and even inevitable
in these fields of endeavor
for new discoveries to be linked together with the older ones
and for such new discoveries to multiply increasingly, with the general curve of discoveries or cognition appearing in an exponential form,
i.e., as a curve with positive acceleration.

Positivistic organicism,
historical relativism,
and the theory of the rise and fall of cultures as worlds of their own
are
nevertheless incapable of encompassing such a kind of progressive alteration with constant upsurge within the bounds of their mode of thinking.

We know that estheticians are opposed to the idea of progress in art,
but we also know that they have in mind in this connection solely the perfection of certain forms or the perfection of the esthetic experience itself.

In this sense,
we truly cannot say that esthetic expression actually advanced in terms of “the beautiful” and “the perfect” from the neolithic caves to the classical Greeks and from the classical Greeks to contemporary modernism.

On the other hand,
even if we have not advanced esthetically,
we have not necessarily failed to improve steadily in terms of the creative act proper,

in the discovery of creative potentialities,
in the analysis of expressional devices,
in the discovery of the various laws under which dead matter is configurated.

We would not find it difficult to show that man has advanced as steadily in art as he has in technology,
which some so mystically counterpose to art,
forgetting that art is inseparable from craftsmanship.

Like the dance, primitive art is frequently incapable of esthetic error, but is nevertheless wholly enslaved like primitive realism by a subject that has not yet become the object of critical reflection and is entirely bound up with a syncretic world of magic and mythology .

Only with the Greeks
did beauty begin to be discovered as a separate object of experience
and thereby as a separate theme of human creativity.

Only then were the laws of proportion, symmetry, and rhythm discovered.

Did not the Renaissance discover the laws of perspective for the first time,

Actually, no,
at least not

according to McLuhan
.

just as the Baroque period was to discover light and shadow as the medium of the spiritual existence of an object devoid of sheer mass?

And what of today’s discovery that
“what is deserving of being depicted is not the object but rather the impression which the object makes upon us”
in the form of impressionism,
cubism,
and abstract art?

Actually, this would vitiate most of what is constructive in all that has preceded it.

In point of fact,
can we ever
depict
anything other than our
impression
(as against some ultimate essence or reality)
?

The question
as to which
among these
is
most
deserving
is superfluous.

This is to say,
once someone has dared to ask it explicitly,
we will be lucky if it remains
merely superfluous.

The are no stupid questions,
but there are stupid answers.

Also dangerous ones.

On the creation side,
there are only
impressions.

That is not to say
that
there is no objectivity
on the reception side,
but
if you think you've found some
make sure to ask around
just to be sure.

More careful analysis would show us that we are constantly witnessing genuine discoveries in relation to human modes of expression and to the way in which objects are represented throughout the entire evolution of European art,

and that such discoveries have increasingly multiplied in modern times
(we need only remind ourselves of contemporary “applied art”),
to the extent that the kind of exponential curve found by the sociologists in the field of science and technology
could easily be constructed in the artistic realm as well.

There can be no doubt
that
the cyclic phenomena
of
cultural upsurge and stagnation,
of
progressive élan and decadency,

amount to no more than a separate rhythm within a more general and more universal process of change.

For this reason,
we obviously will not have exhausted the meaning of a particular phenomenon
by
simply placing it within the framework of a process of progress and decadence.

We must instead interpret such a phenomenon within the framework of the general process of historical change,
i.e.,
in terms of world history.

For example,
a phase of decadence in bourgeois art set in with symbolism and impressionism in the light of the earlier ideo-affective expansion of humaneness,

yet the same phase no less surely marks the beginning of one of the most fruitful periods of cultural and artistic creativity in terms of the discovery of new potentialities and in terms of the constant enrichment of human sensitivity and imagination.

And the development of human potentialities,
the development of all the most diverse and many-sided of human capabilities,
should be considered the fundamental law of historical evolution (cf. Marx).

...

Fifth, if it is correct to say that some cyclic processes transcend a given historical epoch, socioeconomic arrangement, or class society, while others do not, then an important methodological principle follows, viz., some contradictions within the bounds of a given social system are resolved in the course of time , but other contradictions arise to take their places .

Some contradictions become simple differences under the law of the progressive differentiation of society and culture, while other differences become new contradictions.

In other words, it is a mistake to make use of such simple contradictions as those between materialism and idealism, subjectivism and objectivism, progressivism and reaction, and the like, in the interpretation of culture. We must instead follow the development of every established contradiction to see whether it is being resolved in the course of time within the bounds of a given social system or not.

Marx had already noted in connection with economic development that some contradictions are resolved within the bounds of capitalism . We ought therefore to anticipate that such would be an even commoner occurrence in the realm of culture , which is more autonomous and is distinguished by a higher coefficient of individual factors .

We are thus faced with a peculiar dialectic that transforms contradictions into contrarieties and contrarieties into contradictions.

Let us attempt to illustrate with an example:

An extremely ferocious campaign is being waged in some socialist countries today against abstract art as the last, “most radical,” and most distorted, expression of bourgeois decadency in art.

This campaign takes into account only certain of the spiritualistic speculations of the early Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian. No consideration is given in this campaign to the actual context and function of the art that is involved, particularly in connection with the appearance of the Weimar Bauhaus and with the analysis of the modern conception of space and pictorial matter.

Nor do these criticisms take note of the fact that abstract art protests against misuse in the name of its concreteness .

The real reason for this failure of understanding is that this campaign and these criticisms are unaware of the fact that a contradictory cultural situation, in the form of an attempt to flee the concrete world, has undergone a transformation contrary to its own original intentions by becoming involved in the concrete world and in the ecological (urban planning) problems of this concrete world.

Abstract art has thus ceased to be a negation of any world, bourgeois, socialist, or whatever. On the basis of contemporary spatial and pictorial concepts, abstract art has become a part of the most real world possible ; that is, it has become wholly neutral so far as differences of class are concerned.

Again, let's be careful. (And honest!) Nothing is wholly neutral . But if the Expressive Fallacy is rightfully and righteously debunked, then it becomes much more difficult (not impossible, just highly improbable) for any artwork to be seen as either distorting or faithfully reproducing objective reality . Works still, even then, are probably quite far from wholly neutral as far as difference of class are concerned , but this non-neutrality is no longer quite so squishy or animistic a concept as it has become in recent times. (Funny how well so-called ontological realism jibes with the "animistic" worldview!) The respect in which they are neutral (or not) is no longer a matter of what they "say" but rather what they (and perhaps also what their authors) do. No one would be surprised if class and abstraction could be at least broadly correlated scientifically. Abstractionists need not fear or deny this. Let's be honest, though, and let's accept nothing less than honesty from any assessor of our actions.

In this way, abstract art may equally be the concern of Catholics and Protestants, socialists and communists. Against the wishes of its initiators, abstract art has become only “one among others.”

The most intelligent theoreticians of abstract art would not defend its exclusiveness in the name of “progress,” going no further than to mention abstract art as one possibility among many.

Sixth, modern cultural criticism in general has not yet acquired the habit of examining the significance or sense of cultural goods from the standpoint of the actual function of these goods in relation to man. Abstract esthetic, ideological utilitarian, or economic commercial criteria are commonly taken into consideration. These criteria, which have a somewhat longer tradition in our civilization, are easier to define . The problem of actual human needs and of determining the values of cultural goods in relation to human needs remains open, although contemporary social and psychological anthropology is beginning to touch on it on an increasing scale,...

Our objections to these theories up to this point suggest that the determinism of cultural phenomena is far more complex than it appears at first glance. In a very general way, it may be said that the existence of differences in historical rhythms points the way to the existence of three fundamental systems in the determinism of cultural phenomena: society in its structuralism; the personality as a separately individualized and universal system of functions and needs; and, finally, the cultural areas proper with their own unique laws of development (science, philosophy, technology, language, art, etc.). There is no dispute today among researchers into culture about the existence of these three specific factors in cultural development. The argument begins when we attempt a closer examination of the significance and interrelations of particular systems. Our research is only now getting underway, but it is already clear that the existence and operation of these three systems will demand a polydeterministic interpretation of cultural evolution.

Seventh, if it is correct that various cycles and rhythms of historical development exist and that these three systems require a polydeterministic interpretation, then we are faced with the problem of defining the methods of cultural research and cultural criticism more accurately. Although space does not permit us to go into this problem, let us at least point out that every one-sided and simplified treatment of cultural phenomena must be excluded . The problem likewise excludes any vulgar materialistic limitation to the foundation superstructure scheme, any enclosure on the part of positivistic organicism within an exclusive course of progress and decadency, and any phenomenological reductionism to a universal basic process such as reification.

In what way ought we to approach the analysis of cultural phenomena?

Stop. First, there has to be a desperate, crying need for analysis if it is to have any justification at all. If the need is anything less than desperate, then analysis is superfluous. Speculation, theorizing, shooting the breeze...all of these things are great. Analysis by its very name, by the very name of the publications in which it appears and the names with which it is thereby associated, analysis has lofty pretensions, pretensions which match those of its intended audience, who lust for truth and certainty to the precise degree that truth and certainty are elusive in the treatment of cultural phenomena . Shooting the breeze is the stuff of life; analysis , to the contrary, harbors death in its very name. Analysis creates dishonesty without liars.

...

***the abstract is real***

Understanding Society
(Dan Little)
Atomism versus holism in social ontology

Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit addressed the micro-macro question in an essay called "Structural Explanation in Social Theory" (link), included in Reduction, Explanation, and Realism (1992, ch. 4). Particularly interesting is the brief distinction that they draw between two senses of individualism: atomism versus holism, and individualism versus collectivism. They believe that these two distinctions are quite different, and yet are commonly conflated. The first distinction has to do with the logical characteristics of the properties of intentionality attributed to the actor. The atomist holds that the actor's beliefs, rationality, and intentionality are fundamentally independent of the other individuals in the groups to which he or she belongs, whereas the holist maintains that the individual's beliefs, rationality, and intentionality are inextricably connected to the mentality of the group. "How far, for example, do I depend on the convergent responses of my fellows for being able to form concepts and think thoughts involving those concepts? The atomist tradition says that logically I do not depend on this way on the other members of my society. The non-atomist or holist tradition says that I do" (127). I suppose that both Hobbes and Descartes illustrate this sense of atomistic individuals -- Hobbes with his characterization of the mentality of individuals in the state of nature and Descartes in his philosophical method of doubt. The second distinction has to do with explanatory direction and autonomy for one level or the other. It revolves around the question of whether micro-explanations are more fundamental than macro-explanations. Do individuals in the aggregate determine the properties of the social world, or do the properties of the social world determine the actions of individuals? "The other significant question ... has to do with how far the members of society, whether they are conceived of atomistically or holistically, retain their apparent autonomy in the presence of higher-order social constraints" (127). Strict collectivists maintain that individuals "must" behave in the way prescribed by social structure; strict individualists maintain that individuals retain the ability to act otherwise than as prescribed by social constraint. Jackson and Pettit suggest that the first distinction has to do with "horizontal" issues concerning relations among individuals, whereas the second distinction has to do with "vertical" issues having to do with individuals and social structures. Both holism and collectivism are anti-reductionist, in the sense that they each deny that social facts can be derived from some set of purely individual facts; but they amount to different kinds of claims about the priority of the social world over the aggregate of individuals. It is worth asking whether the concept of "atomistic" offered here is consistent with the way the concept is usually understood. On the common presentation, atomism maintains that there is a core set of purely psychological characteristics possessed by every human being, and that these characteristics are pre-social. These might include a preference for self-interest, a concern for survival, and an ability to calculate risks and benefits of various actions. In his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on methodological individualism, Joseph Heath paraphrases atomism in these terms: "The atomistic view is based upon the suggestion that it is possible to develop a complete characterization of individual psychology that is fully pre-social, then deduce what will happen when a group of individuals, so characterized, enter into interaction with one another" (section 1). The Jackson-Pettit account captures the idea that atomism assumes a pre-social individual with basic characteristics that do not logically entail anything about the social environment. But what is somewhat unclear here is their use of "logical" in this discussion. One way of understanding their meaning is that they mean to assert that, for the atomist, the "basic" psychological characteristics can be formulated in a way that does not imply anything about the social world. For example, if our scheme of the basic psychological characteristics included "an impulse towards reciprocity", then atomism would be false -- because reciprocity implies the existence of social relationships. But there are other relationships besides "logical" that might be invoked here: semantic or causal, for example. Are basic individual characteristics definable in terms that do not analytically (semantically) presuppose some facts about the social world? And are basic individual characteristics in principle wholly caused through processes of individual psychological development, or do they unavoidably involve the causal role of social interaction and structure? Their explication of individualism and collectivism is noteworthy in a different sense: it is primarily framed around the question of the freedom or autonomy of the individual with regard to the social structures he or she inhabits. Individualism entails that individuals create / determine the social world through their actions; whereas collectivism entails that facts about social structure determine individual actions. This issue is intertwined in their discussion with the idea of explanatory primacy: is the micro-level primary with respect to the macro-level, is the macro-level primary with respect to the micro-level, or does causation flow in both directions? But these are really quite different questions. The philosophical question of "freedom of the actor" seems to have little real importance for the sociologist or the philosopher of social science; whereas the question of explanatory primary is indeed important for both. Jackson and Pettit give some legitimacy to the idea of real causal efficacy for social structures with respect to social change (and individual behavior). Their preferred view of the explanatory force of a structural explanation of an event is what they refer to as the "program model". A structural factor contributes to the explanation of an event, not by identifying the proximate or instigating cause of the event, but by identifying the frame of circumstances in the context of which the event was likely to occur. Prolonged drought is a "program factor" for the occurrence of a forest fire, not because the drought caused the fire, but because it represented a structural circumstance in the context of which many different kinds of events could ignite the tinder. "The program explanation identifies a condition such that its realization is enough to ensure that there will be causes to produce the event explained: if not the actual causes, then some others" (119). Jackson and Pettit concede that micro-level facts are "more fundamental" than macro-level facts; but they also give support to the position that Fodor called "relative explanatory autonomy" of higher-level structures in the social sciences, thought they do not refer to Fodor directly. "The third thing to say on the sider of collectivism is that the program model [their preferred interpretation] forces a break, not just with heuristic individualists, but also with those individualists who tolerate structural explanation but think that the micro-explanation of any social fact is always bound to be of more interest.... On the program model, structural explanation serves a different sort of interest from micro-explanation, as micro-explanation serves a different interest from detailed psychological aetiology, since it gives a different kind of information on the causal history of the event explained" (131). In other words, they support the idea that a structural explanation can be just as "interesting" and informative as a micro-explanation. The program model works well enough for some kinds of social explanations -- for example, the outbreak of a race riot given the ambient racial disparities and patterns of police abuse. What is least satisfying about this article is the almost complete absence of an account of what "structural factors" look like in the social realm. The examples Jackson and Pettit give are almost always social patterns and correlations -- poverty causes delinquency, economic growth causes urbanization, etc. But there is no discussion of the idea of a social structure, a normative system, or an institution. And the causal mechanism linking micro to macro is also a simple one: "All such [social] facts seem to have at least this in common, that they obtain or largely obtain in virtue of the intentional attitudes -- the beliefs, desires, and the like -- of a number of people, and/or the effects of such attitudes: the actions which the attitudes occasion and the consequences of those actions" (97). This is largely an aggregative conception of the causation of "social facts" based on individual characteristics. In particular, the analysis provided by Jackson and Pettit misses altogether the active causal powers that social structures can be said to possess. These are social features that are the object of study of organizational sociologists and institutional sociologists. And as researchers like Kathleen Thelen demonstrate (link), these kinds of social features link together into causal mechanisms constituting causal explanations in their own right. Surprisingly, their account is not very interested in "structural" explanation at all. For example, Southwest Airlines underwent a catastrophic failure during the winter holidays in 2022. (Zeynep Tufekci's article in the New York Times provides a valuable post mortem of the failure; link.) Southwest Airlines is a business corporation, an organization with leaders and individuals through whose functioning highly complex processes of coordination take place (assignments of aircraft and crews to airports at the right times and work schedules, management of investments over time). Southwest Airlines exists within a profit-driven environment in which quarterly revenue reports are highly consequential for the top executives. The coordination required of a large airline requires sophisticated computing support. But Tufekci reports that the software systems in use at Southwest were said to be woefully inadequate for several years, according to reports by insiders and labor unions, and the company delayed in upgrading these expensive systems. These are all facts about a social entity, a corporation in a specific environment, and the organizational features it possesses in virtue of which failure is likely. The result was a cascading series of thousands of flight cancellations in December that may cost the airline a billion dollars. Here we have a mechanism-based account of a major social failure that is much more complex and realistic than the context-and-influence model implied by Jackson and Pettit's arguments. In the end, Jackson and Pettit draw a position that refrains from both methodological individualism and methodological holism, in favor of what we might call methodological pluralism: The program model of structural explanation is not only a satisfactory account of how such explanation works. It also gives us a nice perspective on the debate between individualists and collectivists. It means that we can embrace the persuasive individualist claim that individuals are agent-autonomous. But it also allows us to understand the collectivist thesis that individuals often make little difference in the course of history and that the best way to study society is often from the top down, not from the bottom up. Those claims constitute the true and attractive core of collectivism. (131) The conception of methodological localism that I have tried to develop over recent years avoids both atomism and individualism, in the distinctions clarified by Jackson and Pettit. Methodological localism represents the view that structures, institutions, normative schemes, and other social entities are created and embodied by social actors interacting with each other. So the structures of the social world depend on the actions and thoughts of existing individuals. But existing individuals are themselves socially enveloped. Methodological localism proposes a view of the social world in which individuals are "social constituted" and "socially situated"; so from the start, there is no hint of the idea of a pre-social individual. This entails that the view is not atomistic. But likewise, the view is "actor-centered", which implies that individuals act according to their own intentional schemes. These schemes are socially influenced, to be sure, but they are also heterogeneous and diverse; and my premise is that individuals are not determined by the ambient social values, cultures, identities, and institutions in which they live. So the view is not "collectivist" in the strong sense described by Jackson and Pettit. And, finally, the view argues that social arrangements have durable causal powers, both with respect to individuals and to other social arrangements, and that these powers do not need to be reduced to facts about individuals. This is the view of relative explanatory autonomy that Fodor introduced, and that seems very compelling in the context of the micro-macro debate. So methodological localism is not atomistic; it supports an element of holism, in the limited sense that it asserts that social actors are formed and framed within specific social arrangements and institutions; it is not individualist, in that it does not insist that social outcomes must be explained solely through derivation from facts about individuals; it is individualist in another sense, in that it attributed "freedom" to the social actors; it is not collectivist, in the sense that it denies that social arrangements "determine" individual action; but it is sympathetic to one aspect of the collectivist view, the idea that social structures exercise real causal influence over individuals and other structures. Rather than endorsing a simple relationship between micro and macro, methodological localism posits an iterative relationship over time between "socially constituted individual" and "social structure", a view that has deep parallels with Margaret Archer's conception of morphogenesis (link).

Understanding Society
(Dan Little)
Critical realism and ontological individualism

Most critical realists would probably think that their philosophy of social science is flatly opposed to ontological individualism. However, I think that this opposition is unwarranted. Let's begin by formulating a clear idea of ontological individualism. This is the view that social entities, powers, and conditions are all constituted by the actions, thoughts, and mental frameworks of individual human beings, and nothing else. The social world is constituted by the socially situated individuals who make it up. This is not to question the undoubtable fact that individuals have social properties -- beliefs, values, practices, habits, and relationships -- that are integral to their consciousness and agency. But these properties themselves are the recursive effects of prior sets of socially constituted, socially situated individuals who have contributed to their formation as social actors. Fundamentally, then, social entities are constituted by individual actors; and individual actors have in turn been framed, shaped, and influenced by their immersion in prior stages of social arrangements and relationships. Consider a trivial illustration of the kind of recursive individual-social-individual process that I have in mind here. Consider the habit and norm of queuing in waiting for a bus, boarding a plane, or buying a ticket to a popular music concert. Queuing is not a unique solution to the problem of waiting for something. It is also possible for individuals within a group of people to use their elbows and voices to crowd to the front in order to be served earlier. But in some societies or cultural settings children have been given the example of "waiting your turn", lining up patiently, and conforming to the norms of polite fairness. These norms are internally realized through a process of socialization and maturation, with the result that the adult in the queuing society has both the habit and the norm of waiting for his or her turn. Further, non-conformists who break into the queue are discouraged by comments, jokes, and perhaps a quick jab with a folded umbrella. In this case adults were formed in their social norms by the previous generation of teachers and parents, and they in turn behave according to these norms and transmit them to the next generation. (Notice that this norm and behavior differs from the apparently similar situation of bidding on a work of art at an auction; in the auction case, the individuals do not wait for their turn, but rather attempt to prevail over the others through the level, speed, and aggressiveness of their bids.) Here we might say that the prevailing social norms of queueing-courtesy are a social factor that influences the behavior of individuals; but it is also evident that these norms themselves were reproduced by the prior behaviors and trainings offered by elders to the young. Further, the norm itself is malleable over time. If the younger generation develops a lower level of patience through incessant use of Twitter and cell phones, rule breakers may become more common until the norm of queueing has broken down altogether. This example illustrates the premises of ontological individualism. The queueing norm is promulgated, sustained, and undermined by the various activities of the individuals who do various things throughout its life cycle: accept instruction, act compliantly, instruct the young, deviate from the norm. And the source of the causal power of the norm at a given time is straightforward as well: parents and teachers have influence over the behavior of the young, observant participants in the norm have some degree of motivation towards punishing noncompliant individuals, and ultimately other sources of motivation may lead to levels of noncompliance that bring about the collapse of the norm altogether. Several points are worth underlining. First, ontological individualism is fully able to attribute causal powers to social assemblages, without being forced to provide reductionist accounts of how those powers derive ultimately from the actions and thoughts of individuals. OI is not a reductionist doctrine. Second, OI is not "atomistic", in the sense of assuming that individuals can be described as purely self-contained psychological systems. Rather, individuals are socially constituted through a process of social formation and maturation. This person is "polite", that person is "iconoclastic", and the third person is deferential to social "superiors". Each of these traits of psychology and motivation is a social product, reflecting the practices and norms that influenced the individual's formation. (This isn't to say that there is nothing "biological" underlying personality and social behavior.) Several points can be drawn from this account. First, OI is not a reductionist doctrine -- any more than is "physicalism" when it comes to having a scientific theory of materials. We do not need to derive the properties of the metal alloy from a fundamental description of the atoms that constitute it. Second, OI is not an atomistic doctrine; it does not postulate that the constituents of social things are themselves pre-social and defined wholly in terms of individual characteristics. In a perfectly understandable sense the socially constituted individual is the product of the anterior social arrangements within which he or she developed from childhood to adulthood. And third, OI does not compel us to take an "as-if" stance on the question of the causal properties of social assemblages. The causal powers that we discover in certain kinds of bureaucratic organization are real and present in the world -- even though they are constituted and embodied by the actions, thoughts, and mental frameworks of the social actors who constitute them. Now let's turn to critical realism and the position its practitioners take towards "individualism" and the relationship between actors and structures. Roy Bhaskar addresses these issues in The Possibility of Naturalism. First, the ontological question about the relationship between "actors" and "society": The model of the society/person connection I am proposing could be summarized as follows: people do not create society. For it always pre-exists them and is a necessary condition for their activity. Rather, society must be regarded as an ensemble of structures, practices and conventions which individuals reproduce or transform, but which would not exist unless they did so. Society does not exist independently of human activity (the error of reification). But it is not the product of it (the error of voluntarism). Now the processes whereby the stocks of skills, competences and habits appropriate to given social contexts, and necessary for the reproduction and/or transformation of society, are acquired and maintained could be generically referred to as socialization. It is important to stress that the reproduction and/ or transformation of society, though for the most part unconsciously achieved, is nevertheless still an achievement, a skilled accomplishment of active subjects, not a mechanical consequent of antecedent conditions. This model of the society/ person connection can be represented as below. (PON, 39) This is a complicated statement. It affirms society exists as an ensemble of structures that individuals "reproduce or transform" and that "would not exist unless they did so". This is the key ontological statement: society depends upon the myriad individuals who inhabit it. The statement further claims that "society pre-exists the individual" -- that is, individuals are always born into some set of social arrangements, practices, norms, and structures, and these social facts help to form the individual's agency. Here is the diagram to which Bhaskar refers (PON 40): The cyclical relationship between social arrangements and individual "socially constituted action" is represented by the rising and falling dashed lines. It seems, then, that Bhaskar's view is fundamentally similar to the view of methodological localism developed in earlier posts (link, link, link). Methodological localism affirms that there are large social structures and facts that influence social outcomes. But it insists that these structures are only possible insofar as they are embodied in the actions and states of socially constructed individuals. The “molecule” of all social life is the socially constructed and socially situated individual, who lives, acts, and develops within a set of local social relationships, institutions, norms, and rules. And these supra-individual structures and norms are, in turn, maintained by the actors who inhabit them. Francesco Di Iorio addresses many of these points in his contribution to Research Handbook of Analytical Sociology through his analysis of the relationship between critical realism and methodological individualism. Much of Di Iorio's analysis seems entirely correct. But, following Bhaskar, Di Iorio seems to postulate the absolute (temporal) priority of the social over the individual; and this seems to be incorrect. According to critical realists, MI cannot account for the fact that the social world and its bounds exist independently of the individual interpretation of this world, that is, independently of the individual’s opinion about what she is free or not free to do. (Di Iorio 141) It seems apparent, rather, that the relationship between the social world and the particular constitution of human actors at a given time is wholly recursive: social arrangements at ti causally influence individuals at ti; actions and transformations of individuals at ti+1 lead to change in social arrangements in ti+1; and so on. So neither social arrangements nor individual constitution are temporally prior; each is causally dependent upon the other at an earlier time period. So it seems to me that there is nothing in the core doctrines of critical realism that precludes a social ontology along the lines of ontological individualism. OI is not reductionist; rather, it invites detailed investigation into the ways in which social arrangements both shape and are shaped by individual actors. And these relationships are sufficiently complex and iterative that it may be impossible to fully trace out the connections between surprising features of social institutions and the underlying states of the actors who constitute them. As a practical matter we may have confidence about beliefs about the properties of a social structure or institution, without having a clear idea of how these properties are created and reproduced by the individuals who constitute them. In this sense the social properties are weakly emergent from the individual-level processes -- a conclusion that is entirely compatible with a commitment to ontological individualism (link). One of the most prominent critics of ontological individualism is Brian Epstein. His arguments are considered in earlier posts (link, link, link). Here is the conclusion I draw from his negative arguments about OI in the supervenience post: Epstein's analysis is careful and convincing in its own terms. Given the modal specification of the meaning of supervenience (as offered by Jaegwon Kim and successors), Epstein makes a powerful case for believing that the social does not supervene upon the individual in a technical and specifiable sense. However, I'm not sure that very much follows from this finding. For researchers within the general school of thought of "actor-centered sociology", their research strategy is likely to remain one that seeks to sort out the mechanisms through which social outcomes of interest are created as a result of the actions and interactions of individuals. If Epstein's arguments are accepted, that implies that we should not couch that research strategy in terms of the idea of supervenience. But this does not invalidate the strategy, or the broad intuition about the relation between the social and the actions of locally situated actors upon which it rests. These are the intuitions that I try to express through the idea of "methodological localism"; link, link. And since I also want to argue for the possibility of "relative explanatory autonomy" for facts at the level of the social (for example, features of an organization; link), I am not too troubled by the failure of a view of the social and individual that denies strict determination of the former by the latter. (link) It is evident that the concept of microfoundations has a close relationship to ontological individualism. Here are several efforts at reformulating the idea of microfoundations in a more flexible way (link, link). And here are several effort to provide an account of "microfoundations" for practices, norms, and social identities (link, link). This line of thought is intended to provide greater specificity of the recursive nature of "structure-actor-structure" that is expressed in the idea of methodological localism.