Realism Discourse and Deconstruction

Jonathan Joseph, John Michael Roberts, Jonathan Joseph, John Michael Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415322638
• eBook ISBN: 9781134352340
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Theories of discourse bring to realism new ideas about how knowledge develops and how representations of reality are influenced. We gain an understanding of the conceptual aspect of social life and the processes by which meaning is produced. This collection reflects the growing interest realist critics have shown towards forms of discourse theory and deconstruction. The diverse range of contributions address such issues as the work of Derrida and deconstruction, discourse theory, Eurocentrism and poststructuralism. What unites all of the contributions is a sense that it is essential to provide a realist alternative to the hitherto dominance of social constructionism, hermeneutics and postmodernism, over many of the issues discussed. By developing a realist perspective the different authors attempt to embed discourse within the structured nature of the reality of the world. Realism can situate language, discourse and ideology within context specific, or 'causally efficacious' circumstances. Realism can help to uncover issues of power, representation, and subjectivity and how discursive and other social practices produce real effects. This can help us understand the manner in which (non-discursive) social structures are reproduced through various forms of ideology and discourse. And by knowing this, we can start to address questions concerning human emancipation and how the world is to be transformed.

1 Introduction
Realism, discourse and deconstruction

Jonathan Joseph and John Michael Roberts

This edited collection reflects the growing interest realist critics have shown towards forms of discourse theory and deconstruction. However, despite the increased interest, this debate is still in its early stages. The aim of this book is to develop this debate by gathering a number of important articles on these issues. While the aim is not to produce a definitive viewpoint, we hope, nevertheless, to bring together what have, so far, been occasional interventions in order to promote, develop and widen what is likely to be an important area of research.

The contributions in this volume are diverse. Some address the work of Derrida and deconstruction from a realist standpoint, others address discourse theory or discourse and language more generally, while others address the issue of Eurocentrism. What unites all of the contributions is a sense that it is essential to provide an alternative to the hitherto dominance of social constructionism, hermeneutics and postmodernism, over many of the issues discussed. In their respective way all of the authors maintain, contra varieties of social constructionism, that complexly layered and often unobservable strata of reality impact upon our action and thinking. By endorsing this broad-based realist perspective the authors attempt to embed discourse within the structured nature of the reality of the world and thereby stave off the worst excesses of social constructionism, especially the latter’s slide into irrealism. Albeit, it is also true to say that a variety of realisms exist with which to undertake this task. In order to avoid later confusions, this introduction will first spell out the importance of what has become known as critical realism as well as some problems that realists working within similar critical traditions have expressed towards critical realism. We will then give a summary of how the different authors in this book deal with discourse and deconstruction.

Varieties of realism

In their chapter Fairclough, Jessop and Sayer state that many theorists reject causal explanation as being inappropriate for the explanation of discourse and semiosis. They give as an example the way that the hermeneutic tradition tends to reject causal explanation in favour of verstehen or interpretative understanding. By contrast Fairclough, Jessop and Sayer argue that semiosis is both meaningful and causally efficacious. Like many authors in this collection they employ critical realism to show how semiosis produces real effects. The generally acknowledged founder of critical realism, Roy Bhaskar, himself argues that the hermeneutic mediation of meanings must be supplemented by semiotic analysis of how those meanings are produced. If the hermeneutic moment corresponds to the conceptual aspect of social life then the semiotic moment corresponds to instrumentation in empirical work (Bhaskar 1989a: 60).

So what does critical realism add to our understanding of discourse? The most fundamental conviction for any form of realism is a belief in the independent existence of a real world. The particular way that critical realism understands this is through the distinction between transitive knowledge and the intransitive mind-independent objects that this knowledge is of. Our transitive knowledge is embodied in theories, practices, discourses and texts. Critical realism argues that this transitive knowledge is socially and historically located and engendered. However, unlike postmodernism and some forms of discourse theory, critical realism maintains that there is also an intransitive world ‘outside the text’ so to speak. The intransitive is that which science seeks to study and, as Bhaskar says, ‘[t]he intransitive objects of knowledge are in general invariant to our knowledge of them; they are the real things and structures, mechanisms and processes, events and possibilities of the world’ (Bhaskar 1997: 22).

The transitive/intransitive distinction is therefore an alternative to the irrealist¹ tendencies of some forms of deconstruction and discourse analysis, maintaining that there is something beyond the text, knowledge or discourse, and it is this very something that makes the text or human knowledge possible. Critical realism therefore develops a transcendental argument along the lines that, given that knowledge is possible and meaningful, what does this tell us about the real world? It answers, as Bhaskar’s quote has indicated, that the real world is structured and stratified in a certain way and that this structure is relatively enduring and open to investigation. A critical realist ontology therefore comprises:

• structures (those intransitive properties that give an object a particular identity),
• generative mechanisms (those powers possessed through the structure of an object which may or may not be exercised in open, or contingent, conditions with other objects),
• practices (those actions and social relationships in the transitive realm of a particular object which are, themselves, partly determined by, but not reduced to, the structures and mechanisms of the object in question).

Discourse may be an important part of this reality, but it is necessary to look at how it interacts with non-discursive social structures and causal mechanisms and how the relationship between all three takes an organised form.

Critical realism also advances a theory of social reproduction and transformation that it calls the transformational model of social activity (TMSA). According to this view:

Society is both the ever-present condition (material cause) and the continually reproduced outcome of human agency. And praxis is both work, that is conscious production, and (normally unconscious) reproduction of the conditions of production, that is society.

(Bhaskar 1989a: 34–35)²

Typical questions that might arise through a critical realist understanding of discourse are the following: How does discourse relate to an unobservable reality? How can we understand such abstract things as capitalism or the law of value? Can discursive practices actually alter reality? And if so, what are the implications for human practice? What kinds of discourses or ideologies emerge in the process of normal social reproduction? What might be the basis for a transformatory or emancipatory discourse?

Critical realism offers an explanatory critique that moves from a criticism of certain ideas to a critique of the institutions and structures that produce them, thus pointing towards the need to understand, explain and perhaps transform such structures. In this way, critical realism might be said to move from discourses to underlying reality to critique. It therefore opposes those forms of deconstruction and discourse theory – such as the work of Laclau and Mouffe – for being unable to move beyond discourse, thus failing to ontologise their arguments and failing to offer a critique or a strategic alternative. The critical realist project would seem, therefore, to offer a powerful alternative to postmodern and discourse-reductive approaches to the social world.

Bhaskar’s recent ‘dialecticisation’ of critical realism seems to move closer to aspects of deconstruction, particularly with its critique of pure presence and positivity and its advocacy of alterity and absence. This convergence is noted in the chapters by Norrie and Joseph although they both stress dialectical critical realism’s greater ontological commitments. However, the development of dialectical critical realism has renewed debate about what critical realism should be. Indeed, some of the contributors to this volume are critical of critical realism more generally. Certainly there is a general acceptance of critical realism’s notion that an intransitive domain exists independently of our knowledge, but Roberts, for example, argues that there is too much of a compromise with social constructionism in the notion that we can only know this world through the transitive domain of human perception and consciousness (see also Woodiwiss 2001: 15–21).

Further, once it is accepted that human action operates within a set of social preconditions it is then necessary to gain an adequate understanding of the historical form of those preconditions. Again, Roberts and others have suggested that the transcendental method of critical realism does not do justice to the historical specificity and socially mediated nature of particular social structures. It is necessary to look at how such structures represent the forms of a historically unique inner mediation or connection. Even though this debate is ongoing (see Brown, Fleetwood and Roberts 2002) it does imply that we can identify different varieties of critical realism at work. Critical realism is an open and evolving paradigm that includes many different perspectives and criticisms. Some approaches are more open to poststructuralism and postmodernism, others see realism as a companion to Marxist analysis while, more recently, Roy Bhaskar has taken a more spiritual ‘transcendental’ turn (Bhaskar 2000). What unites the different realist perspectives collected here is a need to provide an emancipatory critique of society and its irrealist philosophies within the tradition of socialist thought.

Realist(ic) discourse

The collection of articles gathered together here is primarily concerned with presenting a realist approach to discourse theory. This is particularly pertinent because just as there can be said to exist a variety of realist positions, it is equally true to say that there exists a variety of discourse approaches. The list is extensive and includes such influential theories as Foucaldian perspectives, critical discourse analysis, social semiotics, post- Marxism, Bakhtinian discourse theory, Habermasian communicative rationality, and deconstruction. What unites these theories is a concern with how social and cultural changes are mediated through relatively stable and coherent means of representation, and how these means of representation place subjects in particular relations of power. The issue on which these theories tend to differ from one another is the degree to which discourse gains an autonomous power to construct and classify social and cultural changes irrespective of how those changes themselves structure discourse.

The authors in this collection agree that a study of discourse adds an important dimension to social analysis by drawing our attention to those mechanisms at work in constructing and maintaining subjectivities within particular social contexts. Occasionally these constructed subjectivities entail an epistemological distortion about the intransitive ordering of society which works in the interests of a specific social group. If this epistemological distortion serves to conceal relations of exploitation and power then we can say that the discourse in question has ‘ideological effects’ (Larrain 1983; Purvis and Hunt 1993). An example today would be the discursive sign of ‘asylum seekers’ which has been associated with those individuals escaping to the UK (and other European nations) from persecution. This discursive sign has been used by certain interests in society (e.g. those in the media and government) to distort the reality of why individuals feel the necessity to flee their own country against their wishes. At the same time it has been used to justify draconian state policies against those fleeing persecution and to help construct a national identity by excluding some groups from full participation in society (Hayter 2001). The sign ‘asylum seekers’ thereby contributes to a wider discourse about inclusion in British society which in turn ‘displaces’ more tangible issues surrounding relations of power such as the widening gap between social classes in the last twenty years (on which see Savage 2000).

The distinction between ideology and discourse is, therefore, important for at least three reasons. First, it suggests that discourse involves a struggle over how particular signs are combined to make sense about reality so as to produce specific ideological meanings and themes. Thus, while it is true to say that signs have relatively stable meanings and themes attached to them, it is equally true to say that signs are frequently the outcome of struggles about how the world is structured. Each sign, therefore, is more often than not mediated through different ‘accents’ in both time and space. Each sign, therefore, also has traces about how the world is structured and thereby presents individuals with resources for future struggles. Second, the distinction provides a qualitative marker with which to discriminate between the effects of different discourses. On this understanding, some discourses are more insidious because they help to reproduce, maintain and perpetuate those ideological forms at particular historical junctures which mystify real contradictions and power relations. Finally, the distinction is useful because it demonstrates that while discourse theory highlights effectively how subjectivities are produced through discursive representations, it is less clear about how these representations help to reproduce underlying generative mechanisms, structures and contradictions on a daily basis. The use of ideology-critique, as is defined here, supplies this missing aspect because it prompts us to explore how certain ideas are internally related to the ‘unobservable’, though ontologically real, level and how these ideas reproduce and distort this level. Ideology-critique thereby ‘directs’ discourse to the level of the ontologically real.

The authors in this collection all attempt in their own ways to develop this realist and critical approach to discourse theory. In practice this means that the often excessive claims made on behalf of discourse (e.g. discourse is self-referential, discourse constructs the world, reality is discursive in its essence, discourse is constructed through heterogeneous elements, subjects are constructed through discursively achieved fractured identities, and so on) are placed back within the deep layers of reality that overdetermine our daily lives. But rather than reject outright these excessive claims, the authors here incorporate them within realist frameworks to develop their respective discourse theories. The advantages of proceeding in this manner can be summarised through the following points.

• Realism can situate language, discourse and ideology within context-specific, or ‘causally efficacious’, circumstances. All of the authors show, for example, how realism can help to uncover issues of power, representation and subjectivity through discursive and other social practices and how these practices produce real effects.
• A realist perspective can help us understand the manner in which (non-discursive) social structures are reproduced and transformed through various forms of ideology and discourse. The authors achieve this task by maintaining an anti-essentialist realist position without embracing the relativism of social constructionist perspectives like poststructuralism. Thus a realist anti-essentialism does not mean the abandonment of the notion of social structures. By contrast, discourse theory not only gives up on the attempt to describe social ontology, but actually reflects the logic of capitalism in its philosophical stance.
• Because a realist approach to discourse seeks to understand underlying structures and mechanisms it is more adept than social constructionism at internally embedding its claims within the social connections of a system like capitalism. As a result it can be more reflexive about its claims at various levels of abstraction. This is particularly important as regards developing an emancipatory critique of society as many authors indicate.
• Hence, a critical form of realism is sensitive to ‘epistemic relativism’ while maintaining ‘judgemental rationalism’ through a commitment to the importance of ontology. Deconstruction, for example, is identified by some of the authors as a useful analytical tool. However, it is also shown to be problematical in its poststructuralist form by a lack of ontology or evasiveness.

Realism and critical discourse analysis

In the opening chapter, Norman Fairclough, Bob Jessop and Andrew Sayer set out the basis for a relationship between critical realism and critical discourse analysis. They rightly note that critical realism has tended to take semiosis for granted. It is, therefore, important to look at the way that semiosis has real effects on social practice and institutions. By way of ground learning, then,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Realism, Discourse and Deconstruction
• Part I: Realism and Critical Discourse Analysis
• Part II: Voloshinov and Bakhtin
• Part III: Realism and Post-Marxism
• Part IV: Realism and Eurocentric Discourse
• Part V: Critical Realism and Deconstruction