Critiquing Critical Realism: a working paper

ECER conference Portugal 2002

The critical realist project seems to be about how things work in the world, where the world is regarded as a real 'something', the powers of which are able to be discovered. A distinction is clearly made, by critical realists, between the world of nature and the world of the social. The former is amenable to a variety of forms of experimental and statistical analyses and the latter is not. The reason for this is firstly, that the social researcher is part of the world being studied hence the act of researching affects what is being researched and its results changes the social world. Secondly, the world of the social is composed of agents who are continually constructing and de-constructing their world and their acts within the world. In short, the social world cannot be as highly controlled as the objects defined by the natural sciences. It is with the messy, uncertain, supercomplex and dynamic realm of the social and the individual as agent in his or her own destiny that I am interested in this paper. Does Critical Realism provide useful insights and approaches to aid help us understand, explain and act more effectively in the world of the social?

As a basic premise, since Critical Realists accept that the social world does not function in the same way as the natural order, then they argue that it cannot be studied with the methods that have proven powerful in analysis, building theoretical explanations and predicting events in the world of natural objects. This, however, it is argued does not mean that all forms of measurement and mathematical or logical strategies are thereby excluded (Byrne 2002). Far from it. What it does mean is that measurement has to be re-thought for applicability in the social worlds of people. The trap appears however that in retaining this possibility, that there is then a rush to application before sufficient discussion of the nature of the social and of the individual as agent has taken place. Standing in the way of realising this aim are the often frustratingly enigmatic, provocative, and 'flashy' writings of those who have been labelled postmodernist. If their various critiques of the modernist frameworks of doing research, the formation of identity and managing the social are to be adopted then the critical realist project crashes in flames. One has only to see the dogmatic diatribes trotted out by Critical Realists (Pawson and Tilley 1997, Byrne 2002) drawing on Bhaskar's etc analyses.

What is in dispute is the central notion of the 'real'. I have elsewhere distinguished a number of ways of approaching the concept of the real (Schostak 2002). Hence critiquing Critical Realism commences by an exploration of the 'real' which is at the heart of contemporary disputes. When for example, Baudrillard stated that the Gulf War did not happen there was an outcry. It was an insult to those who suffered and died. However, the statement that the Gulf War did not happen is consistent with Anderson's (1983) discussion of the role of newspapers in the nineteenth century creating a sense of national identity and of belonging to a community within the context of British Colonialism. The sense of community that was created was imaginary in the sense that it was mediated and constructed by the articles that appeared in newspapers of the exploits and events of various British notables, organisations and the military. Few people in Britain would ever see, for example, India, nor would they meet the people being written about, nor indeed would they meet the vast majority of any other British person. Hence whatever they learnt of others and other places under British dominion would be at best second hand, mediated by the newspapers. It is in this sense that the Gulf War did not happen because it is a construction that stands in place of the complex, messy realities of what really did happen but rarely get reported.

In this context, what is the 'real'? Are we just playing with words? Or is 'playing with words' the structure of the 'real' for engagement with, construction of, and management of 'realities'? Postmodernists, as a presumed group, are criticised by Critical Realists for having no conception of the real and for being relativist. Others accuse them of having no politics or conception of improving, reforming or radically engaging with the inequalities, injustices and misery experienced by millions of people around the world. However, it seems to me that taking these views seriously leads to an over easy dismissal of the various postmodernist writings. First, there is no single postmodernist viewpoint. Secondly, there is a lack of attention given to the de-construction and creative tension at play in much writing designated postmodernist. Thirdly, there is a failure of politics for framing alternative modes of living for oneself and with others in the contemporary context of global change. That is, the contemporary living spaces that 'emerge' without any overall conscious planning or control at either global or local levels become the frame within which critical intellectual activity emerges as a dialogic opening onto multiple ways through which life becomes organised. The 'drawing out' of ways of seeing, thinking about, and experiencing the complexity, the messiness and the dynamic qualities of the global-local framings of social life becomes the educational project of those who wish to create philosophies, natural scientific explanations and political, economic, social and psychological scientific accounts of the realities that are under emergence. The symbolic processes underpinning the social are creative of worlds. This means that there are as many symbolic worlds as imagination can conceive. It is at this point that social science transforms into educative science.

Critical realism is in danger of closing down dialogue just when it is needed most by defining its project as a description of the real modelling its conception of the real in terms of the natural order of things in the first instance and then framing a necessary difference with that of the symbolic order of the social. In one sense this is not a problem since the traditional distinctions are thereby maintained and hence does not trouble the interests of the careers of academics and other professionals. The problem is in the intricate manner in which the social and the natural fuse in social action. Methodologically this demands a creative reflection upon the traces, the shadows, the swirls of forces or energies set in motion by the intrication of social actions. All this, of course is metaphor, the invention of and the straining of words. In reflecting like this we reflect within, not outside of the very medium that is to be studied. Critical realists appear to shy away from the medium in order to privilege a concept of a real that can be definitively discovered, described and activated under definable conditions. What is not being tackled, therefore, is the question of the methodological and epistemological nature 'representation' in the context of 'something' which is being targeted as a 'real' that exists independently of the representation. These are pivotal words: 'representation', 'real' and 'something'. I will explore them under the headings of:

The representative

The educative

The self-ation of the imagination

The Representative

There is a typically employed distinction between the real and that which represents the real as its sign or symbol. I do not wish to use the concept of the representative solely in this way. However, I do wish to retain it as within its field of articulable possibilities. There is a first step, an historically useful image within which to find a prime articulation of the representative. It is that of the dead body which represents the loved one who is remembered and whose life is celebrated at the funeral ceremony. The representative is the occasion for celebration of the life lived and being lived. The distinction between real and representative is as hard to define as the distinction between 'life' and the 'body' or in Cartesian terms between mind and body. Yet, there is the moment of death, the moment when life drains and the residual is a body without life that can only represent but not be the life that was loved as a being incarnate. The loss is absolute. The representative can never be the full measure of the life. To perceive or believe that it is so is to be trapped into a realm of fantasy objects, the little representatives of a lost-real that Lacan labelled mischievously as object petit a. Zizek, for example has explored the role of coca cola adverts in proclaiming coca cola to be 'the real thing', to provide the missing 'thing' that completes a sense of joyful life. And in science we surround ourselves with the explanatory little letters which are organised into the formulae through which the real is tamed and completes our ambitions as experts, professionals, managers and scientists to control and master the confusion, doubt, uncertainty and messiness of the circumstances of our lives.

A second prime image of the representative is provided by the distinction between the original and the copy. With the invention of printing, the power of the copy, the series of copies that could be delivered to the masses from a single 'original' transformed everyday life into a world of the mass as audience to the political plays of the master authors of the real. Here, of course, the dead body is not a copy of the original living body. Yet, keep this uneasy contrast in mind because if the representative as copy is not the 'original', the 'real', the 'author', the life force, then it is the dead. Again, there is something missing no matter how apparently identical the copy is seen to be with the original. There is a lack which is irrecoverable and any attempt to do so is a fantasy and the fantasy object is again Lacan's object petit a.

A third prime image of the representative again associated with a revolution in the mode of communication is the virtual reality of information technology. Here what counts as the 'original' and what as the 'copy'? This is the stuff of Baudrillard's remark that the copy comes first. That is, there is nothing other than copies. Indeed, copy and original in this context are exhausted of meaning. And where is the space where virtual reality exists? When Willam Gibson coined the term cyberspace for his novel 'necromancer' he reinaugurated the images of pure light, the pure zero space of infinity and immortality and the uselessness of dumb flesh and its essential corruptability more commonly associated with Christian visions of heaven and the impurity of the flesh. Cyberspace as the zerospace through which contemporary forms of globalisation are being effected is with us and already transforming our realities, our primal sense of the 'real', the 'valid', the 'truth'. So when Baudrillard said the gulf war did not happen, it did not happen in the the same way as cyberspace does not take place because it is everywhere and nowhere.

The real that critical realism, if it is to be relevant in contemporary academic working practice, has to deal with is that of the representative in all its possible articulations. The real, it seems to me is being usefully defined by critical realists as a play of powers and the circumstances through which they become active. This is a formula that is capable of addressing the contemporary scene, the scene that postmodernists have explored, and celebrated in the de-constructive plays with the cultural and creative powers at their disposal. The issue is not so much whether creative powers work differently from the powers to be discovered in the world of natural objects through the scientific imagination and scientific reasoning and practice. It is whether we have at this point in time sufficient vision to enter and explore another space for reasoning about and living the real. What space?

The Educative

It is a sadly neglected space. Historically it has been displaced by a politics of mass control and surveillance the core vehicle of which is schooling with the aim of producing citizens who will take their places in the prevailing corporate, governmental and public service organisations without seriously challenging or disturbing the underlying contemporary frameworks of power, belief and wealth distribution. Schooling is a system through which the real is represented under its form as 'copy' in relation to an 'original' or author which represents the authority through which expertise of the teacher is legitimated to mould and instruct the minds and behaviours of masses organised into 'classes'. The fear that articulates schooling is the so called anarchy of the ignorant mass. Schooling then is the vehicle through which the little letters of the law, science and culture are to be transmitted and impressed on the young. The lack of knowledge, culture, respect, self control that are presumed to be the qualities of the untutored masses are filled by schooling. Schooling then functions as the real thing that is lacking. To have schooling is to possess, or rather, be possessed by the real thing that completes individuals, rendering them as citizens.

However, schooling is always unsatisfying. It never fulfils what is demanded of it. It never provides enough scientists, nor enough skills required by business, nor enough 'common sense', nor enough respect for authority, nor enough people sufficiently interested to vote when they grow up. Yet schooling is always seen as the solution. It is just a matter of getting the engineering right, of constructing high reliability systems.

What then is the educative as I wish to use it here? The educative, in contrast to schooling, begins with the explorations of individuals in realising their active, imaginative and creative powers in conjunction with others to generate events. Briefly, I define educative science as the process, practice, knowings, and knowledges derived from drawing into being or real-ising the ideas, values, images and sensations of the creative imagination. A fuller but relatively early figuration of this educative science can be seen in Schostak 2002. Where schooling is essentially monological, the transmission of approved cultural cannons in the sciences, literatures and faiths that preserve prevailing social orders education is essentially dialogic and thus emergent. Education cannot take place unless there is difference, change, alternatives otherwise there is no possibility of the play through which life evolves its meaning, purposes, values and visions. Where schooling seeks reliability, conformity, measurability against pre-existing standards, education seeks challenge, change, difference and thus the new, the novel, the qualitatively exciting.

An educative space, like and in conjunction with that of the cyberspace of Gibson, is the globally distributed zero-space of the virtual realities of the imaginable that arise in dialogue. And like virtual reality it is a space for living that impacts locally and globally upon the prevailing social and natural worlds of life. It is at this point, it seems to me, that critical realism contributes most forcefully its focus on its concept of causative powers and the ethical principles and procedures for drawing values from facts.

Critical realists reject the Humean approach to cause and effect in terms of constant conjunction. It is argued that things work because there are discoverable underlying powers that produce effects under certain contextual conditions. The typical example is of gun powder which explodes under only certain conditions. It is conceivable that this black dust can lay around on a table top for years without ever exploding and thus never 'revealing' its powers. This does not mean to say that the explosive power does not exist, only that the circumstances have never arisen to demonstrate it. The real, it is argued can be described in terms of its structure of causative powers. The term causative is preferred because it does not imply that something will happen but that it is implicit until some triggering conditions arise. Thus, science can only develop an effective body of knowledge if the underlying structural frames within which action can take place are discovered.

There is an intriguing body of work preceding (Edgely 1976) and postdating Bhaskar that holds contrary to the belief that values cannot be drawn from facts, that facts necessarily imply values. Bhaskar expresses it thus:

If one is in the possession of a theory that explains why false consciousness is necessary, then one can pass immediately, without the addition of any extraneous value judgement, to a negative evaluation on the object that makes such consciousness necessary and to a positive evaluation on action rationally directed at removing it.

(Bhaskar 1991: 155-156)

There is no space here to explore the complex arguments in detail. However, a useful critical de-construction can be found in a paper by Lacey (in Archer et al 1998) in which he explores this brief statement and concludes that Bhaskar's argument fails when 'social structures are posited to play key causal roles' but 'does appear to apply for theoretical analyses developed within the 'logic of the popular movement' and that none of his theories criticisms 'query Bhaskar's more general view of the relevance, and necessity, of social theory for emancipatory practices.' (Archer et al 1988: 497). In short, following a critique of the general proposition, there is indeed a generalisable proposition that there are cases where and 'ought' can be derived from an 'is', that is, values from facts.

An early exploration of the relationship between facts, values and ethics can be seen in Poole's (1973) book. The argument is that values are deeply embedded in facts and scientific practice. Thus for example, to say that when a bomb is dropped during a war time strike that there is 'collateral damage' is not an accurate or indeed 'true' statement of the facts. More accurately, people have been killed and injured. When a bombing strikes kills thousands is this more or less accurate than saying that thousands were slaughtered? To say that Hitler brought about the conditions under which 5 million died is not as accurate as saying that 5 million were annihilated. Value and fact are not to be set apart without doing violence to the truth, accuracy and validity of the 'facts'.

Indeed, the very act of articulating something or representing something can do violence to its 'truth' (Carruth 1995). At the extreme, how can one find the words to express the experience of a trauma, to express the experiences of those who lived through concentration camps, genocides or massive natural disasters that have devastated whole communities? What theory can 'explain' what is felt? What measure can encompass it? What expertise can over come it?

In the case of a trauma, it is not that something that is said has to be listened to. Rather it is that something as yet is unsaid. Its expression is most likely to be a cry or a soundless utterance. Here, no accommodation to what exists can be made. No meaning can be addressed that founds itself on the prevailing patterns of social and discursive order. It is here that some neologism arises by which to recognise and affirm, providing an aye for that which cannot be fully said.

(Schostak 2002: 210)

In the 'real' of the trauma there is an intrication of experience, fact, value, representation and action where any unpicking of the complex in order to produce something that can be said to be 'neutral' and manipulable for experimental or management purposes is a further act of violence. Critical realists have underplayed this complexity. The counter process is that of the educational, that is to say, the drawing out of the powers of the individual in relation to others in order to be productive of creative ways of re-finding being in the world. This is a process of what I call the 'self-ation' of the imagination. The near homophone with 'salvation' is deliberate.

The Self-ation of the Imagination

The 'real' that I am exploring is that of the powers of the individual in the world. It is drawn from an exploration of the 'I' as creative source and the 'me' as a social framework for knowing and expressing the 'self'. The comparison with Mead is deliberate (1934). The 'I' is unrepresentable rather like a shadow that is sensed but always gone before it can be seen. It is the eye that sees but in seeing cannot see itself. It is the cry that has no sound, it is the affirmation of being that cannot be proclaimed. It is in Levinas' terminology 'autrui'. In Schostak 1999 I explored it as the 'cr/eye of the witness'. As soon as the unsayable is represented in words, the power to express, be heard and engage with others is bought at a cost: the cost of a loss of the Truth of the 'cr/eye' in becoming the verifiable 'truth' of an expression. The self is thus split between the cr/eye and the 'me' that engages strategically with the Other. It is the essentially split, estranged, alienated self of Lacan's psychoanalytic clinic. It is the divided self that is a subject in and subjected to language and is only a subject as mediated by language. The 'me' as a representative of the 'cr/eye' or of the whole process through which a self emerges as a socially 'see-able', nameable entity enables both agency and repression, that is, the freedom to express and the slavery of being trapped within the framework of the expression that is able to be measured, controlled and placed under surveillance. If education is to be a creative, indeed personally and socially liberatory experience and practice, then it must side neither with the 'I' nor the 'me' but seek their 'self-ation' in the reality of the powers of the imagination to generate, value and evaluate alternatives for personal and social action. The practicalities of doing this I have explored through a range of funded projects described in Schostak 2002. Essentially, the process involves putting into place the necessary structures to promote dialogue through which the frozen social identities emanating from the formation of contextually specific 'me's' are de-constructed through the challenge derived from alternative views on 'reality' obtained through different subject positions. The pupil views the world different from the teacher. The accountant measures cost differently from the philosopher. The differences matter and dialogue facilitates not consensus but the creative production of alternatives.

The diagram below tries to express something of the complexity involved in engaging the 'real' of the human individual and should be read in conjunction with the above and through the imagination. It fails of course. Nevertheless, it provides, I hope, a stimulus for dialogue, dispute and creative re-presentation. Education, if it is to engage the individual in relation to others, becomes the scientific practice of facilitating the debates through which individuals make claims about knowing and knowledge and engage in action.

Making the Educational Real – concluding remarks

What are the circumstances under which individuals can engage with each other to produce real events that bring about desired improvements in their everyday lives? If, as critical realists argue, value judgements and thus ethical claims can be made on the basis of facts and theoretical explanations of how things work in the world, then educational practice should be about liberating individuals to make these judgements and to effect change on the basis of them. This represents a radical challenge to contemporary schooling which rests upon a structure of divorce such as between theory and practice, fact and value, authority and action, teacher and taught. The divorce represses creative energies and liberatory processes and sets in their place an Hegelian like structure of master and slave. What then are the structures that must be set in place before creative, liberatory events can be realised in the lives of people?

Critical realists offer a way of thinking through this last question and I have explored them in Schostak 2002. However, without a fuller exploration of the 'real' as a working concept for educational practice, critical realism by closing down dialogue about the real, could too easily become yet another technicist tool for the creation of the high reliability school that meets only the criteria of the powerful rather than those who are under their power. An example may be found in Pawson and Tilley's example of how to reduce street crime. Essentially, the motive is laudable. However, it does not tackle the realities only the symptoms. The task was to create a high reliability alert system so that potential thieves are easily spotted. However, while addressing a local issue from the point of view of home owners, it does not address the wider issues of what kinds of structure are maintained in place that continually generate criminality. It is here that an educational response needs to be formulated that tackles the real from multiple points of view. What needs to be put in place in the lives of individuals to enable them to generate creative, liberatory relations with their neighbours, and with strangers? What should educationists be doing to address the complexity of the realities that enmesh individuals? These are urgent questions.

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