Transcript Marxism, Interpretation and Critical Realism

Marxism, Interpretation, and
Critical Realism
Today’s Structure
Dialectical Materialism: A brief intro
Critical Realism: An introduction
Some Key Epistemological Terms
illustrated with sex/gender (Judith Butler
will hunt me down and hurt me for this!)
Dialectical Materialism
Marx inverts Hegel’s idealistic notion that abstract ideas
drive the world
Borrows Hegel’s Dialectic
– ideas are negated by other ideas and result in a higher
proposition
– Commonly expressed as ‘Thesis – Anti-thesis – Synthesis’
– Capitalism gets negated by the Proletariat as a class-for-itself and
the product is the negation of negation, i.e. Communism!
Dialectic Materialism: material conditions produce ideas,
shape ideas, and dictate ideas
Need to study material conditions in order to understand
social structures!
Base/Superstructure
Critical Realism
 Seen as a rehabilitation of Marxism as a critical science
(Roy Bhaskar)
 A critical social science would ‘go beyond’ actors’ meanings and demonstrate
the influence of social structures that can be made the object of human
agency to change them
 More recently associated with Andrew Sayer; and Margaret Archer who
drops the recuperation of Marx.
 A critique of ‘positivism’ in natural sciences and its
inadequate ontology
 Facts speak for themselves, we can objectively account for reality by
observing it
 CR accepts that there are material objects which exist independently of our
theories of them
 BUT they can never be ‘known’ and represented independently of our fallible
theories of them! (see Roy Bhaskar)
‘Closed’ versus open ‘Systems’
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Natural scientific experiments involve ‘closed systems’
They seek to control the variables
In order to establish a causal relationship
But the social world exists and functions in an open
system
 Open systems are leaky, prone to adaptation, rejection,
and resistance
 Social interventions have a history, local contexts, and
exist within complex bureaucracies.
Critical Realist Epistemology
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Empiricists/positivists are concerned with the mere association of
events (and that is the case of statistics too)
CR theorists want to identify the causal mechanisms behind events
and their association
Also critical of Interpretivists or relativists:
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Reality is socially constructed
What we see is always shaped by theory
Observations are relative to their culture and time
Therefore there is no truth (Precluding Agency???)
 CR agrees that values matter
 BUT also interested in broader normative questions (how things
should be) – not only how they are
 Particularly concerned with socially disadvantaged groups
 And how certain explanations are dominant and oppressive
What’s Critical About Critical Realism?
 Realists sit between two positions (positivism and
interpretivist)
 CR assumes the existence of a reality that is
‘intrasitive’ (the physical and social (embodied) world
we inhabit)
 And a reality that is independent of our senses that is
‘transitive’ (ideologies, forms of social organisation)
 Intransitive and transitive reality both influence or are
causal to our behaviour and both need to be studied
Example: Sex and Gender
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See Caroline New (2005) in New Formations: Critical Realism
Today
Uses a CR approach to critique poststructuralist approaches to
the sex/gender dyad, particularly Butler’s argument that ‘sex is
always already gender’
Argues that accepting the materiality of the body does not mean
one has to accept biological determinism
Poststructuralist feminism in stuck in the discursive realm
Need to return to a second wave feminist concern with concrete
material oppression
The “discursive turn” has undermined and weakened feminist
activism
This is the product of a deep mistrust of causal explanation,
abstraction and generalisation
Transitive and Intransitive
Dimensions of Sex
 New argues that sexual difference is real
 It is prominent in all imaginable societies
 It is a causal factor for gendered orders (which may
intersect with other structures)
 ‘human beings are (almost all) sexually dimorphic, female and
male, whether and however they conceptualize this difference,
and this dimorphic structure is active, causally powerful,
enabling different reproductive roles and certain sexual
possibilities and pleasures, and ruling out others’
The Stratification of Reality
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By using the example of intersex people Butler conflates the
intransitive with the transitive
The intransitive dimension is constituted by ‘levels’ and ‘emergent
properties’
 ‘The actual’ - concrete things and historical events
 ‘The empirical’ – what can be known and experienced
 ‘The real’ – includes both of the above
• and also structures of objects (or interrelations between
constituent parts)
• And emergent properties which result from the structures (i.e.
power, hierarchy, inequality, etc.)
• And these properties have generative mechanisms (which are
interdependent with other structures – i.e. gender and
sexuality or her example of the military and masculinity)
The Reality of Sex
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Sex/gender is either seen as a discursive practice or these is an
untheorised acceptance of differentiated bodies assigned arbitrary
lables
 We don’t assign social significance to our earlobes but we do to
our genitals
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New argues sex cannot be though of like race!
 On the empirical level there are observable differences but on a deeper level there
are no significant genetic markers
 Sex is not like that!
 We can imagine a world without race but it is difficult to imagine a world without
sexual difference
Sexual dimorphism as a causal
condition of the gender roles we know
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Sex is socially significant (i.e. it has causal powers)
 We need to look at tendencies not laws
 Our reproductive organs result in different reproductive roles and
sexual possibilities
 Little boys will never grow to have a womb in which to grow
another human
 Little girls learn they can’t pee standing up
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She argues that she struggles to see how sociologists can argue that
gender happens at a bodily site rather than referring to it
 Gender is a social effect of its referent (?)
Base/superstructure
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Sexual difference as a causal mechanism acting in conjunction with
other mechanisms (contexts) to produce varied gender orders
 E.g. technological advancement, religious prohibition, etc.
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‘In sum, sex is ontologically prior to gender, and is one of the many
mechanisms the workings of which shape gender orders. It does not
determine gender, nor is gender reducible to sex’
Seminar Questions
1. What aspects of social life are considered as not socially
constructed by critical realists?
2. How do critical realists propose we should study social
reality?
3. What criticisms does John Holmwood level at Andrew
Sayer and are they persuasive?