Post-Marxism and Post-Structuralism

While Hutchinson et al. vigorously maintain (their version of) Winch’s anti-scientism in the social sciences, much research activity in some social sciences - especially in some approaches to political science and economics where conclusions are drawn from the statistical manipulation of large data sets - is conducted without much ‘navel­gazing’ about philosophy, or the more fundamental questions of social theory.

However, a large part of the motivation that Ian and I shared when we wrote this book was to move beyond what we saw as a rather sterile and inconclusive opposition between the merits of meaning versus cause, particular versus universal, qualitative versus quantitative methods. One way of transcending these oppositions that became intellectually fashionable in the decade or so before we wrote the book was to declare oneself ‘post’ whatever tradition or set of debates one saw as definitive of the status quo in the social sciences (as well as philosophy, literature and the creative arts generally). This had the strategically satisfying effect of situating oneself in the vanguard of a historical progress (whose existence, paradoxically, most ‘posts’ denied!), and simultaneously rendering past intellectual work and its problems passe.

If we were not inclined to follow the ‘posts’, this left three prominent philosophical approaches to the nature of social reality and our ability to make sense of it that satisfied two criteria:

1. They were aware of and took into the content of their thinking about the social sciences the newer developments in the history and philosophy of the natural sciences that we considered constituted genuine advances.

2. They took seriously the arguments of Winch and other advocates of a meaning- centred practice of the social studies, but looked for ways of developing more ambitious and critical research programmes consistently with the insights present in those arguments.

These three approaches were the critical rationalism associated with Habermas and some of his associates (Chapter 7), new work linking various strands of feminism with philosophy (Chapter 9) and various versions of ‘critical realism’ associated with the work of Roy Bhaskar, Andrew Collier and others (Chapter 8).

Although both of us were sympathetic to different aspects of all three of these approaches, I had a long association with critical realism, and Ian, too, might have identified with this, though situating himself rather differently within it (closer to the hermeneutic, subject-centred end of the spectrum). Since we wrote, various versions of critical realism, and the debates among them, have been a prominent feature of subsequent work in the philosophy of social science (especially in the UK context), and have had significant influence in substantive social scientific research. However, there have also been new developments among some of the ‘posts’ that deserve serious attention (and, indeed, satisfy the two criteria set out above).

In their Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory (2007), Glynos and Howarth seek to provide philosophical underpinnings for a non-positivist, but still explanatory and critical approach to social science and politics that draws on the work of Laclau and Mouffe as well as some of the key post-structuralist thinkers discussed by Ian in Chapter 10 (especially Derrida, Saussure, Lacan and Foucault). Although their philosophical arguments are intended to show a way forward beyond the positivist/ hermeneutics impasse, their critical fire is directed most fiercely against the positivism which they see as still alive and well in the field of political science. For them, the ideal of explanation proffered by positivism is the ‘subsumption’ of particular events (activities, processes and so on) under universal laws, and the attempt to test the truth-claims embodied in such laws by deducing predictions from them.

Their view, which is shared by Winch and other advocates of the centrality of meaning in the social studies, is that the transfer of this model of explanation and theory-testing to the social world is radically misguided. This is because there is an irreducibly hermeneutic dimension in human social action and interaction, and this must be acknowledged and respected in all would-be interpretive and explanatory work that takes such action and interaction as its object. In turn, this derives from the basic ontological ‘fact’ that humans are ‘“meaning producing” or “self-interpreting” animals’ (Glynos and Howarth 2007: 23). Since they make the inapplicability of the ‘covering law’ model of scientific explanation to the social studies a matter of the different kinds of beings, processes, activities and so on that form the topics of these disciplines, Glynos and Howarth are able to sidestep the more basic question whether that model of scientific explanation is (generally) applicable even in its original domain of the natural sciences.

Though they side with Winch and other hermeneuticists in rejecting the covering law model of explanation in the social sciences, and insisting on the necessity of a hermeneutic aspect to all social scientific explanation, Glynos and Howarth believe it is possible, consistently with these, to provide explanations and critical evaluations of social relations and practices. They recognize (as we have seen in the readings offered by Hutchinson et al.) that neither Winch nor Wittgenstein was committed to the abandonment of either explanation or criticism. However, their claim is that the writers they discuss within this tradition leave undeveloped or indeterminate how either aspiration of social research might be met.

In their view, there are only two approaches that might provide philosophical justifications for more ambitious explanatory and critical research programmes in the social sciences. These are, first, their own way of developing some of the insights of post-structuralism and, second, another tradition which they identify with the search for ‘causal mechanisms’ in social life. Unfortunately, though this suggests an engagement with critical realism, they deal only very briefly and inconclusively with the work of Roy Bhaskar within this tradition, and they reserve most of their critical discussion for the methodological individualist social philosophy of John Elster (it is a justified criticism of our book that we dealt only too briefly with related individualist ‘rational choice’ theories - but to do this here would be beyond the scope of this set of comments.

Glynos and Howarth agree with critical realists that any philosophy for social science must pay attention to questions of ontology - and for them this means not just saying what sorts of things there are in the social world, but also specifying the assumptions that have to be made in accounting for their possibility and devising ways of understanding and explaining them. However, unlike Roy Bhaskar, they do not attempt to derive their ontology by way of a retroductive or transcendental argument from an unproblematic description of some familiar social action (see Chapters 4: p. 56 and 8: pp. 122-3). Instead, they simply present key ‘constitutive’ features of the social world that they derive from certain post-structuralist thinkers, often by way of their re-working by Laclau and Mouffe. Against the tendency of much post-structuralist thinking, they endorse the view of Laclau and Mouffe that ‘the real’ is ultimately irreducible to the ‘concept’. In other words, our linguistically constructed conceptual apparatus always and necessarily fails to fully capture external reality. Glynos and Howarth refer to this as a materialist ontology, though I would see it as a rather minimally realist one. There are many varieties of materialism, but they generally go beyond mere affirmation of an irreducible reality that exceeds our thought, and make substantive claims about what kinds of things go to make up ‘the real’. There is a rather technical and inconclusive discussion of what is at issue between critical realism and discourse theory on this question in a debate between Roy Bhaskar and Ernesto Laclau (Laclau and Bhaskar 1998). At its core, the difference turns on whether one can make justified inferences about the world as it is independent of our thought about it. For Bhaskar (and probably most critical realists), we can justifiably infer from the existence of human social and discursive practices what must be the case, ‘extra-discursively’, for them to be possible.

The content that Glynos and Howarth go on to put into their own ontology for the social studies emphasizes what they call the ‘radical contingency of social relations and identities’. They sometimes sum this up as an ‘ontology of lack’. A full engagement with the meaning and implications of this ontology for social scientific practice is far beyond my scope here, but at least there is space for me to highlight what seems to me a key difficulty. The notion of ‘contingency’ as Glynos and Howarth use the phrase is sometimes taken to mean that for any set of social practices (or ‘regime’) there is always a possible alternative. However, ‘radical’ contingency means something more than this, in the sense that there is a necessary or ‘constitutive’ incompleteness in all social practices and also in all subjective identities. For them, it follows that there is an ever-present possibility that moments of ‘dislocation’ might occur in which the incompleteness of a practice, its inherent ‘flaw or crack’ may become visible to its subjects, whose response may vary in ways not fully predictable. This is the beginning of the elaboration of a set of carefully worked concepts that Glynos and Howarth develop as an approach to understanding the conditions of possibility for the ‘transformation and/or stabilization of regimes and practices’ (Glynos and Howarth 2007: 103).

In large measure, this is a sophisticated philosophical re-working of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony and counter-hegemonic struggle, and takes as its broad definition of the research task Gramsci’s own theoretical problem. However, this is only partially so. One important theoretical innovation that shapes their ontology is their gloss on the hermeneutic insight that they retain. For them, any social process, even where we may seek to explain it non-intentionally, ‘is parasitic upon human practices, in the sense that they are constitutively sustained and mediated by the discursive activity of subjects’ (Glynos and Howarth 2007: 97 - italics in the original). The hermeneutic concepts of ‘meaning’ and ‘interpretation’ are transformed under the influence of post­structuralists (notably Saussure and Foucault) into the tricky and contested notion of ‘discourse’. For some, this implies that social (and even psychological) processes are always linguistic, or ‘language-like’. For others, the notion of discourse can be extended to embodied social practices so long as these in some sense can be said to be meaningful, to be intelligible in terms of culturally provided rules and norms. For Glynos and Howarth, following Laclau and Mouffe, ‘all actions, practices and social formations’ are discursive in nature. For them, ‘an object’s identity is conferred by the particular discourses or systems of meaning within which it is constituted’, and ‘the notion of discourse signals the centrality of meaning to practices’ (Glynos and Howarth 2007: 109).

In whatever way we interpret the concept of discourse, it is clear that the contrast b etween objects of the natural sciences, which are not meaning-producing or ‘self-interpreting’ is central to the social ontology advocated by Laclau and Mouffe and their associates.

Interestingly, their position in this respect is very similar to that of the earlier work of Bhaskar, who also works with a very strong ontological contrast between human agents and social structures, on the one hand, and the objects of the natural sciences, on the other (Chapter 8, p. 129ff; Benton 1981). One way to call this into question is to note that sometimes human agents are characterized as ‘meaning-producing animals’ (Glynos and Howarth 2007: 23). It is as though the social sciences could proceed as if the meaning­producing attribute alone were the whole of what we needed to take into account for our study of the social life of this very special ‘human’ animal. Even for their neo-Gramscian problematic of getting clear about the conditions for stabilization or transformation of regimes, there needs to be some acknowledgement of the role of coercion, or the threat of it, including the use of direct physical violence, as well as the role of material compromises. Each of these inescapably involves recognition of human embodiment, material needs and wants, and the availability of physical (chemical, etc.) technologies whose functioning either depends on, or is accountable only through, natural scientific knowledge. More generally, the most fundamental condition for the possibility of social life of any form is the continuous ‘metabolism’ between human practice and its material means, sources of energy and materials, and waste/pollution sinks.

Not only are discursive practices conducted by humans who are, whatever else they may be, living organisms, but the social relations they establish or transform include many quite central to their form of life which are not simply social relations among human subjects, but relations between them and material objects, physical, chemical or biological processes, living organisms of other species and so on. The causal powers of those ‘others’ that figure in human social life play their distinctive part in shaping, sustaining or dissipating it, often in ways that are ‘mediated’ by discourse and subjective recognitions. However, this is by no means the whole story. Many of the causal networks through which physical, chemical and biotic mechanisms have their effects on human practices and individual lives take place ‘behind the backs’ of conscious actors, unrepresented in discourse. Such have been the effects of CFCs or CO₂ emissions prior to their scientific identification as causes of increased exposure to ultra-violet radiation, or of climatic change. The recurrent outbreaks of cholera and other infectious diseases wrought their terrible effects prior to and quite independently of the scientific understanding of the causal role of micro-organisms.

Interestingly, Glynos and Howarth (drawing on the research of Griggs and Howarth 2007) do use the modern environmental movement as an example of a political mobilization that sets out to change social practices. Despite clear and insightful description of the tactics used and practices challenged, they conclude with an interpretation of the movement as a challenge to the prevailing language:

Certain signifiers or linguistic expressions - ‘sustainable environment, ‘health’, ‘justice for all’ and so forth - function as names that stand in for the absent fullness of a dislocated community or life. Though they are metaphors with no corresponding facts - they are moments of naming in a radical sense - they strive to represent the failure of a signifying system or language.

(Glynos and Howarth 2007: 122)

First, there is something questionable, given Glynos and Howarth’s adherence to the centrality of subject’s meaning, about the fact that the interpretation they give runs so strongly counter to what environmental activists take themselves to be doing. Few, I suspect, would agree that their campaigns are attempts to ‘represent the failure of a signifying system’, and still fewer that health and sustainability are ‘empty signifiers’ with ‘no corresponding facts’. Arguably, this is not just a somewhat idiosyncratic way of interpreting the environmental, or other social movements, but is an effect produced systematically by the ontology adopted in this approach to social explanation. Partly, this may derive from the ways in which post-structuralists who derive their view of language and discourse from Saussure tend to have difficulty with the idea that language might be used to make reference to anything outside itself - language becomes a screen separating us from the world, not a means for (among many other things) thinking, exploring or talking about it. So, political mobilization, it seems, cannot actually be ‘about’ deforestation, climate change and excessive consumerism (since there are ‘no facts' corresponding to these concerns) but can only be a challenge to the language of climate change, deforestation and the rest.

The related post-structuralist scepticism in relation to truth-claims is also at work in the tendency of Glynos and Howarth to marginalize the role of cognition in such political mobilizations. Consider, for example, the way that challenges to the fairness of the review process in some climate journals has provided ‘climate-change sceptics’ with powerful ammunition. Social actors, including political activists, are indeed ‘meaning­producers’, and they also have a repertoire of emotional dispositions and capacities, fears, desires and so on (rather obliquely acknowledged by Glynos and Howarth in their technical use of the notion of ‘enjoyment’ derived from the post-structuralist psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan - see Chapter 10, pp. 166-7). However, human agents are not solely producers of meaning and subjects of desire (etc.) but are also knowledgeable subjects, and at least some of what they know includes a stock of causal beliefs about the society they live in, its relative openness or resistance to their actual or contemplated interventions, aspirations, life-strategies and so on. But Glynos and Howarth are right to challenge the ‘covering law’ model of causality in this context. Much of this causal knowledge is tacit, and when articulated is more likely to take the form of ‘rule of thumb’ generalizations and expectations. They also are on strong ground when they point to the ‘mechanistic’ connotations of the language typically used by those of us (including critical realists) who advocate causal explanation in the social sciences. More context­sensitive and differentiated ways of thinking about causal processes in social life are certainly required.

Finally, the focus on discursive practices certainly does illuminate key aspects of the processes of stabilization and/or transformation of regimes. However, as I’ve tried to illustrate above, the rendering of ‘community life’ and its ‘dislocations’ in terms of discursive practices alone unjustifiably marginalizes (or even renders unthinkable) the causal role of living organisms such as crop plants, domesticated animals, disease organisms, industrial and consumer technologies, geographical distributions of humans, productive resources, pollution sinks and so on in obstructing, facilitating or shaping social and cultural change. Of course, many (but certainly not all) of these non-human beings and relations exercise their causal powers by way of the activities of (embodied) humans, their subjective states and discursive strategies. The point, however, is that even where this is so, little sense can be made of these states and strategies unless the wider context of diverse ‘materialities’ is brought fully into the social scientific analysis.