Philosophical Realism and the Aesthetic in Michael Sprinker's Literary Criticism

Tom Lewis Philosophical Realism and the Aesthetic in Michael Sprinker's Literary Criticism1 I don't consider myself an "expert" on Michael Sprinker's writings. I have not read all of his works, and among those I have read I find that his knowledge and insight into matters discussed often surpass my own. I do consider myself to be someone who has learned from Michael's work. I first met Midiael in 1988 at the conference he organized at the Humanities Institute at SUNY-Stony Brook on "The Althusserian Legacy." I delivered a mediocre paper entitled "The Marxist Thing," in which I attempted to use Althusser's philosophy to identify "revolution" as the disciplinary object of historical materialism. The argument of the paper, such as it was, need not concern us here. In any case, what I recall is the discussion that followed, in which Michael asked the first question. At the time I was a fairly orthodox Althusserian and so had peppered my paper with potshots here and there against epistemology. In particular, I stated that I intended to rule out of court all epistemological questions about "causal primacy" and methodological "entry points." So I cruised along my merry way thinking I had safely ducked issues like base and superstructure, the ontological status ofhistorical objects, the epistemological status of my own work, how do we know that Marx's account of capitalism is truer than Louis Ruckheyser's, etc. Well, as you can imagine, the first question I got—from Michael, and asked with a pretty high energy level—was precisely this: On what epistemological basis can you justify NOT asserting a causal hierarchy among social elements? How do you know that we CANT establish the methodological primacy of certain conceptualizations of sodety over others? Midiael's implidt criticism, ofcourse, was obvious: "Just how effective a Marxist ARE you if you can't defend Marxism's claim to provide a KNOWLEDGE of history and sodety?" So the first thing I learned from Midiael was the importance of being a philosophical realist, as opposed to staying in the ranks of any of the variety ofpoststructuralist nominalisms. A couple of years later a review essay that Michael published in New Left Review introduced me to the work of British philosopher Roy Bhaskar. Michael's essay equipped me and, I imagine, many others with the foundation necessary for a convincing defense of philosophical realism. And it is to a short summary of Bhaskar's positions in the late 80s and early 90s that I should now like to turn. I do this because I believe that Michael's upholding ofphilosophical realism is a major portion of his legacy, and because I believe that the methodology, as well as several if the insights, of Bhaskar's philosophy can be seen in retrospect to have nformed Michael's practice of literary criticism in his two major works, -iistory and Ideology in Proust and Imaginary Relations. 156 the minnesota review Bhaskar's work holds a natural attraction for anyone as committed as Michael was to Althusserian theory, for it accommodates the Althusserian distinction between "real objects" and "objects of knowledge" while simultaneously upholding philosophical realism. Philosophical realism asserts that "the ultimate objects of scientific inquiry exist and act (for the most part) quite independently of scientists and their activity" (Bhaskar 12). Some versions of philosophical realism nevertheless posit an isomorphic relation between knowledge and reality. Because he rejects isomorphism, Bhaskar proposes a "critical" philosophical realism, one which conceptualizes the knowledge process as an inferential one involving the distinction between real objects, which belong for Bhaskar to an "intransitive dimension " (ontology), and objects of knowledge, which belong to a "transitive dimension" (epistemology). Critical realism thus explicitly asserts the non-identity of the objects of the transitive and intransitive dimensions, of thought and being. And it relegates the notion of a correspondence between them to the status of a metaphor for an adequating practice (in which cognitive matter is worked into a matching representation of a non-cognitive object). It entails acceptance of (i) the principle of epistemic relativism, which states that all beliefs are socially produced, so that all knowledge is transient, and neither truthvalues nor...