"Observable relationships"?

[Carrol Cox]

Eric Franz Leher wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> And now something to annoy you. You must infer relationships, but
> presumably can observe objects (my hand, the card). But that can't be
> quite right either - many objects are composites of other objects, so in
> 

Not at all annoying. There are probably even stickier problems with the
idea, and I have not replies to any of them. A note on history.

To someone living in feudal society, it _seems_ to be observable that a
Duke is a Duke. Also, in any social order in which production is
primarily for use, the inner reality of an act seems to be manifest in
its appearance. Hence the vast analogies of Dante's Comedy, the
Aristotelian concept of substantial form, and the more or less
spontaneous acceptance of social hierarchy as simply given, not subject
to critique. The slave rebellion of Spartacus did not aim at the
elimination of slavery, but merely at an escape from the Roman Empire
(to an area in which the ex-slaves themselves might become
slave-owners). The chapter on Act in Kenneth Burke's _Grammar of
Motives_ is  illuminating here.

But when market relations become all-pervasive, the link between
appearance and reality is snapped once and for all. The same act may
have quite different realities (inner motive); different acts identical
motives. Observing a peasant family harvesting its grain in 1200 one
could _see_ the inner meaning of that action: food for the peasant
family and its hierarchical superiors. Seeing a clerk wait on a customer
in a 7-11 gives no information whatsoever on the meaning of that act
(which in any case will only be established retroactively, by what the
clerk's wages will buy, what "free" choices the clerk will make in the
spending of those wages: perhaps to buy a new shirt, perhaps to pay an
assassin to murder his/her spouse. "Science" (systematic knowledge) no
longer can aim at "saving appearances." Relationships are invisible.

The view of the world encapsulated in the phrase "petty bourgeois
individualism" is grounded in the small producer's (quite
understandable) bitterness that her act fails to embody or manifest her
reality.

Carrol