Trialectics According to Mark Whitaker

Source

• Whitaker, Mark. D. 2020. “Chapter 1: Introduction,” in Trialectics, or a Green Theory of History. Manuscript. Quote as draft. [email protected]

Description

Mark Douglas Whitaker:

""The elevator pitch for the term 'trialectics' for me would be simply "tripartite positions and alliances in interaction in history” or a "sociology of plural jurisdictions." After what you said about Eichberg, I think now the term trialectics has about six different and mutually exclusive meanings. My specific meaning is closer to Simmel from 1905. However, Simmel did not continue analysis because for him history was not what he was interested in in his sociology (closer to timeless theory for him, so he was uninterested in the historical spatial/jurisdictional trialectics I am describing below.).

Quoting my book manuscript's appendix on this term 'trialectics,':

For the fifth point, slightly in the inverse, the concept of trialectics is used in views of three specific elements in ongoing interactions with a clear spatial dynamic and yet without intent to critique dialectical views of history and Marxism, and without using the term per se. Such was the meaning of Georg Simmel from 1905 in his short essay entitled “The Nobility.” Simmel’s essay is the only mention in the classical sociological canon of a spatial and strategic trialectics in history. However, Simmel left it undeveloped because its social dynamics implied history, and history was outside of sociological interest for Simmel in how he defined what was an important social form, unfortunately, since in his introduced dichotomy, history was employed in his analysis of cultural forms only instead of social forms. If Simmel could have gotten over his false dichotomy here, and could have considered that sociology and social forms had to have history in their dynamics, then trialectics would have been one of Simmel’s social forms or he would have developed an ontology of mixed social/cultural forms of jurisdictions as is done in this work. Then, such ongoing planned and unplanned social interactions of jurisdictions strategically in space and in history would have been popularized as an idea about historical dynamics, and Simmel and others would have discovered historical trialectics over 100 years ago and ended Marx’s hegemony on critical theory right there. However, Simmel ignored his own comment per the limited goals for what his ahistorical sociology was. He continued that essay only to explain his smaller topic of “the nobility.”

For the sixth use of the term trialectics, it implies a view of three specific elements in ongoing historical interactions with a clear spatial dynamic and with an intent to critique dialectical views of history and Marxism, and with both a theoretical and a historical analysis and a direct use of the term itself (contra Simmel on three points). This is my meaning here of Historical Trialectics. I invented the term as an abbreviation out of frustration with my opaque yet more accurate or definitional phase that I used for years: “tripartite positions and alliances in interaction in history.” Instead, the term “trialectics” would become my word to signify that empirical reality of a tripartite dynamic of strategies of plural spatial actors in political, cultural, material relations in history. I would learn later that other people had used this term or something like its meaning for sometimes very different purposes, to my chagrin.

However, even though Simmel described historical trialectics in passing in 1905, no one since then had really theorized about it. Given my more comparative historical and inductive epistemology, open to finding social forms of dynamics in history, I started to deduce historical trialectics. I drew on Elias’s ideas of open-ended interactions of ‘game models’ for a while, because Elias had similar ontological ideas of ongoing social forms of dynamics in history, yet his ontological ideas of figurations seemed rather shallow to what I had seen in more open-ended strategic and tactical trialectical dynamics with human agency mattering for the ongoing dynamics in history (whereas Elias has little place for human individual agencies in his figurational concepts). Thus, there is a lack of history books describing what I have seen so far, except for one of my own, entitled Ecological Revolution (2009). However, I have come across particular historians writing well about trialectics even without using the name or without awareness of what they are theoretically describing. (For just four small examples, first, see Parenti, who ironically is attempting to foist a Marxist dialectical perspective in narrative on an ancient Roman Republican trialectical dynamics in data, yet the trialectical data that he describes is better than he analyzes [xxxx]. Three other examples of historians using concepts of trialectics tend to always be long-term historians [long, xxxx; roman army, xxxx; communities of discourse, xxxx]. However, they equally employ trialectics unawares, though they describe its dynamics very well. Since most historians are loathe to write sociological theory or loathe to question the whole false dichotomy between history and sociology, while most sociologists loathe to learn long term history, neither camp has described trialectics before—or decried it, as we will see by Chapter Eight. Trialectics became a slowly evolving method with many ongoing refinements and rejections along the way. Originally, beginning in the mid-1990s, I thought about its dynamics as I probed comparative fine-grained case analysis of urban political dynamics as their scales expanded in population and territory. Later, this branched into thinking of such trialectics in spatially wider territorial state/urban dynamics a few years later. Around the year 2000, this next led into thinking of longer-term civilizational dynamics of ongoing changes. The ideas of trialectics made it into my dissertation proposal in 2001. My (sociological and non-historian) committee was clueless about what I was talking about then—and perhaps understandably hostile because I wrote 2,000 pages about the comparative history of China, Japan, and Europe concerning it that they didn’t want to read or understand—except my adviser Dr. Joe Elder who is a comparative historical theorist as well. A compromise was achieved. I got my degree, removed trialectics from my book about Ecological Revolution, and yet trialectics was unable to be removed from my mind or from history so easily. I kept looking for exceptions to trialectics, and all I found myself doing was refining it, improving the perspective over the years, and assembling critiques of almost every assumption in the sociological canon in the process. This book about trialectics—its ontology, methods, epistemology, and its recommended ‘fixes’ (how it would solve various social and environmental problems differently)—is the result of almost 20 years of thought over many drafts in the attempt to make these dynamics more understandable."

Discussion

Mark Douglas Whitaker:

"There are several points about trialectics to summarize here before I begin. First, trialectics is a sociology of plural jurisdictions in unpredictable time and in more predictable geographic spatial dynamics. Second, it is framed as an eighth school of thought for sociology, economics, and historiography quite distinct from seven others in social science (described in the next paragraph below). Third, unlike others that use this term trialectics, my meaning of trialectics is meant to describe more realistically the interaction of unpredictable case histories of choices and implications of plans and the unplanned interactions of these ongoing plural jurisdictional dynamics without assuming planned dynamics or unplanned dynamics is more important than the other. Equally, fourth, my meaning of trialectics researches in comparative retrospect the more comparative, regular, predictable, and durable tripartite patterns in geographic space of these open and unpredictable strategic jurisdictional interactions across both the histories of particular cases and across history in general. In comparative retrospect, fifth, trialectics provides us an equal framework upon which to hang two typically very different descriptive projects: how to document and explore historical case variations in particular cases and how to document and explore sociological commonalities in all cases. As mentioned in Appendix One, this is my point about how trialectics is a regular and predictable social form in geographic spatial dynamics having unpredictable open-ended choices in its historical dynamics.

Trialectics provides an ontology for the unpredictable plural interactions of socio-spatially strategic and tactical social forms of jurisdictions, that because they are innately plural and interactive, create their own wider interactive social form as a regular context of dynamics for how plural jurisdictions come to interact in particular spaces and in particular cases of time. This trialectics has been ignored so far by other reductive ontologies. So, within an ontology focusing on both a sociology of jurisdictions (in innate plural), on jurisdictional change, and on the history of regular plural jurisdictional trialectical dynamics in ongoing cases in geographic space, we can do both a nomothetic study and an ideographic study in the same ontology at last. Of course there is more on all these topics later.

As said above, this sociology of plural jurisdictions or trialectics is distinct from seven other idealist or materialist ontologies used in past historiography, economics, and social theory. In the process, it transcends many false dichotomies that have hamstrung merging social thought and methods for historical and sociological scholarship. These false dichotomies are quickly described now, and elaborated in other chapters later. To begin, the first dichotomy that trialectics transcends is between positivism and postmodern post-structuralism.

This sociology of jurisdictions or trialectics is distinct from

• [1] economic reductionistic positivism that began in

Locke’s ideas, then were seen most strongly in Smith’s economistic ontology (or rather the selective use of Smith in later 1800s classical British economics views of positivism and ‘economic laws’ that came after him in Ricardo and later in more Marxist positivist structural-functionalist thought about economics). Equally, trialectics is distinct from its dichotomized opposite of

• [2] anti-positivist postmodernism and post-structuralism. In that, it is distinct from

purist methodological individualisms seen in Max Weber and similar wholly individuated ontologies about capillary plural sites of power/knowledge noted by Michel Foucault. Equally, a sociology of plural jurisdictions or trialectics is distinct ontologically from

• [3] purist conflict

theory and its dichotomized opposite of

• [4] purist functionalist theory.

As well, trialectics is a hybrid social methods solution yet it is distinct from other hybrid solutions to social methods that have attempted (equally as I do) to put a microsociology into a macrosociology: like

• [5] Eliasian civilizational studies, Giddens’s structuration theory, or

Douglass North’s “New Institutional Economics.” [little, xxxx; nuts and bolts for the social sciences, xxxx; elias, xxxx] In short, first, a sociology of jurisdictions or trialectics transcends major self-induced methodological hamstrings in social, economic, and historical thought by voiding dichotomized ideas above that separate micro, meso, and macrosociology; equally, second, a sociology of jurisdictions or trialectics is different than other hybrid solutions above that all are still overly modernistic, functionalistic, Eurocentric; third, the other options are incapable of being more hybrid as interscientific as a sociology of jurisdictions or trialectics since only the latter integrates the world’s biophysical and geographic interactions with the social world for how it matters to social theory.

The issue of trialectics as being against biases of Eurocentrism and modernism in social theory touches on another major point of difference. Most of the other ontologies mentioned above so far tend to argue about so-called ‘modern’ epochs of history, with other falsely dichotomized deductive assumptions of processural differences between ‘modern’ versus ‘past’ history. Plus, they tend to only argue about European modern case contexts, while they deduce a narrative about the rest of the world as somehow different despite it being neglected in their analysis. However the spatial dynamics of plural jurisdictions in history, past or present, in regions equally around the world are the same even while a particular case’s temporal choices and repercussions from choices can be different and unpredictable. So the earlier mentioned capacity of trialectics, being its equally ideographic and nomothetic analytical capacity of jurisdictional dynamics worldwide, can make a more ecumenical world history of single case, cross-case, and comparative historiography about past and present as equally the same dynamics, i.e., without mentally projected presumptions that keep such ‘cross-regional’ and ‘past and present’ comparative historical analyses from happening. Thus, trialectics has an ‘amodern’ and ‘non-Eurocentric’ quality that is distinct from ideas or narrative claims developed in more modernistic, Eurocentric social, economic, and historical thought. As said above, it is the first non-Eurocentric universalistic theory of historical dynamics.

Continuing to list the differences of trialectics with other more Eurocentric and modernistic ontologies, a sociology of jurisdictions or trialectics is infrastructural yet it is different from

• [6] Michael Mann’s view of infrastructural power in history in two ways because

such infrastructural power is hardly only a modern and/or Eurocentric issue as he argues. Instead, the infrastructural extensions of jurisdictions are both ancient and modern equally without difference, and the phenomenon is seen around the world’s regions equally as well, as simply what any jurisdiction attempts to do and to extend, whether materially, ideationally, and/or with violence. Second, a sociology of jurisdictions is different than Michael Mann because a sociology of jurisdictions identifies four slightly different ‘sources of social power’ than Mann does as well (discussed later).

• [7] Seventh, a sociology of jurisdictions or trialectics is a method

more realistically interscientific, yet it is distinct from Ulrich Beck’s interscientific historical views of a socially constructed environmental risk as only happening in the modern Eurocentric present. [beck; mythen; xxxx; goldblatt, xxxx] To the contrary, a socially constructed, unrepresentative, state-elite-created environmental risk and its counter creation of an oppositional risk politics can be seen around the world in any region and in the deep past as well as the present. There is a socially constructed environmental risk politics long before European empires went around the world [Whitaker, 2009; 2008, xxxx] as well as during them as just the same phenomenon. If anything, there is a mere change of scale of jurisdictions in ongoing history of the same environmental risk politics dynamics worldwide, past or present, instead of a dichotomized change of epochal kind in which Beck tries to frame his historiography and sociological analysis. Beck’s attempt (and many others before him) in the act of trying to frame either a different epoch or an exclusive region of the world as the blame for all the world’s problems has kept us from the comparative historical analysis of seeing ongoing, systemic, organizationally-derived environmental degradation as a common civilizational problem, past and present in all regions of the world so far. [xxxx] However, such falsely dichotomized framing additionally has kept us from seeing the various triumphs in the past in any region, as others living in their own case wrestled with common civilizational pressures for expressing more representative sustainable risk politics and feedback against the unrepresentative former, that is the same in the past or the present around the world.

So within a sociology of plural jurisdictions and trialectics, we have a more ecumenical and comparative view of time and space in which Europe is treated as just another case of jurisdictional interactions in time and space in its case, like all the others, instead of treated as a benchmark of comparison to all other areas. In short, this is an eighth system of thought since it is a study of the sociology of jurisdictions at any time, in any space, place, or case in history. Equally, this study concerns itself with chosen jurisdictional change trends in human history at any time, in any space, place, or case. Plus, this study concerns itself with risk and humanenvironmental history in any time, space, place, or case as well."

More information

Videos:

Whitaker on Trialectics: A Green Theory of History; Why Malthus, Marx, Smith and Beck Are Wrong... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTgwnTSCbiU&t=3990s (14 min.) [starts near the end of this video--that section alone is about 'trialectics.']

Whitaker - 5 Ways People Use Concept of Trialectics, & What I Mean by Term in World History Analysis [more of a 'literature review' of how others have used this term and why I am not talking about what they mean by this term] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G54gXF07yUU (7 min.)