The Problem with Cote d'Ivoire

http://www.cameroonvoice.com/news/news.rcv?id=3658

Gbagbo after arrest by French Foreign Legionnaires

Newt Gingrich, several months ago, said Obama displays "Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior." The irony here of course, is the US gave full support to French activities in Cote d"Ivoire to reassert French geopolitical interests in west Africa. The ouster of Gbago and installation of Ouattara, has to rank as one of the most misinterpreted events in journalistic memory- even those darn tootin leftists at NPR utterly failed in their mission to inform and enlighten citizens in democratic societies, passing along, without a single critical glance, the propoganda generated by France, US and the UN to over-code the operation to undermine Gbago.

Agent-Structure- Part 2, Philosophical Materialism

COGITO ERGO MATERIAL GIRL

For the purpose of this essay, in consideration of social ontology, we will assume several general ontological and epistemological features in accordance with “philosophical materialism,” the position under-girding critical realism. (2)
The doctrine of philosophical materialism is composed of three interlocking principles:

First, reality's “being” occurs solely within an immanent plane of possibilities, bounded by its spatial and temporal dimensions. Such immanence entails ontological materialism, which asserts the stratification of reality and emergence(3) of independent properties and causal powers at each level. Higher levels supervene on the lower in a relationship of unilateral dependence, but are not reducible to them in terms of the laws that govern the lower. Consequently, the social unilaterally depends on agental practice and psychology, which in turn is presupposed by more fundamental levels: biology, chemistry and physics. The theory of emergence is an axiom of such a stratified model of reality, and suggests, for instance, psychology is not merely applied biology, nor chemistry applied physics. The stratified nature of reality and theory of emergence counters reductionist models such as “eliminative materialism” in philosophy of the mind and scientific reductionist models that ultimately seek to explain all being in terms of particle physics, string theory or some other master explanans. As well, the reductionist project to link individual and group behavior to natural selection and genetics, undertaken most vigorously within evolutionary psychology and sociobiology, is problematized.


2) The theory of materialism we employ is described in “Materialism.” Bashkar, Roy, from A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Tom Bottomore, ed. 1999. Blackwell Publishers Inc. (369-373).

(3) The term “emergence” has two distinct meanings. The common usage denotes historical emergence, with no implied ontological claim necessary, in the sense of some entity or process coming into existence at a particular time and place. For example-- “fascist ideology emerged in the post-WWI era as a viable political program out of debates over the perceived weakness of liberal democracy and dangers of communism.” In contrast, the theory of emergence examines the conditions of possibility for an ontological emergence of independent existent layers of reality and causal mechanisms that operate there. This second meaning informs the following: “social structures emerge from agental practice, becoming the conditions for the future reproduction and transformation of practice.”

[The second and third aspects are due soon]

Agent-Structure- Part 1, Introduction

I am currently working on an essay considering various aspects of the "agent-structure problem," and I would like to share portions of my work as I generate them. The agent-structure problem concerns several foundational topics to all social theorizing, and hence intertwined with all thinking about human being in the world: What is the nature of human agency? What causal powers do social structures hold, and how do these powers influence agents? Is there a middle point between social theories that tend to efface the possiblity of the subject exercising agency (post-modernism, post-structuralism and social constructionism) and theories that fully "free" the agent-subject from any geo-historical and socio-cultural contextualization (neo-liberalism, methodological individualism and volunteerism)?

I have been grappling with the agent-structure problem since I was a graduate student in cultural anthropology, and I have been influenced by several thinkers on this subject: Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, Marshall Salins, Roy Bhaskar, and Margaret Archer. At this stage in my figurin', I find the work of Bhaskar and Archer, who both work under the "scientific/ critical realist" umbrella, as providing the most persuasive account, and I will be drawing heavily from this philosophy of social science.

The agent-structure problem is essentially a problem of social ontology, and consequently, imbricated in the political. As I work through the problematics of the nature of and relationship between agents and structures, I hope to begin a dialectical conversation over human being, ontology and the political especially in relation to the work of Lacan and Zizek.

RSA Animate - Crises of Capitalism

RSA Smile or Die

http://youtu.be/u5um8QWWRvo

Barbara Ehrenreich on unholy union between self help "positive thinking" and white collar unemployment counciling