Dialectical critical realism
Dialectical critical realism was developed by the British philosopher Roy Bhas-kar (2008 [1993]) as part of the broader school of critical realism, which brings ontological issues to the fore of social meta-thcory, challenging both positivism and postmodernism (Bhaskar, 1997 [1975], 1998 [1979]; Dy et al., 2014, ch. 6 this volume; Gunnarsson, 2011, ch. 4 this volume, 2013, 2014; McCall, 2005; Sayer, 1992, 2000; Walby ct al., 2012). Bhaskar defines dialectics as ‘the art of thinking the coincidence of distinctions and connections’ (2008 [1993], p. 180). What in particular distinguishes realist dialectics from other kinds of dialectical philosophies is its pronounced standpoint that the reason why we need to think dialectically is because reality is dialectically structured, via different modes of unity-in-differcncc whereby things have both points of identity with one another and points of divergence. Such coincidence of difference and unity may be constellated in a variety of ways, ranging from the necessary tensions built into our existence to historically accumulated splits between things that arc fundamentally unified, such as humanity’s exploitative separation from the nature that sustains it (Gunnarsson, 2013, 2014).
The initial reason why I was long ago attracted to critical realism generally and dialectical critical realism specifically was precisely this non-absolutist approach to distinctions and rclationality, which is anchored in the view of reality as a stratified and differentiated whole whose elements arc both intrinsically connected and relatively autonomous from one another.2 I was frustrated with what I saw as a tendency among many feminist theorists to challenge atomistic and dualistic modes of making distinctions by altogether denying separability, since this move in fact reproduces the atomist’s basic view of reality: cither things arc absolutely separate and autonomous, or they cannot be separated at all. This mode of reversal can be seen in the way that some feminist theorists argue against the distinguishability of ontology from epistemology (Barad, 2003, 2007; Hekman, 2010; see Gunnarsson, 2014). It can be identified in the posthumanist scepticism towards separating the human from the nonhuman (e.g. Hird and Roberts, 2011, p. 109), and in many nco-materialists’ reluctance to delimit the social from the natural (e.g. Davis, 2009, p. 67; sec Gunnarsson, 2013). Similarly, the deconstructionist approach to the subject is characterisedby a tendency to deny the relative autonomy (and, hence, rcalncss) of the subject, on the grounds that it is constituted by processes outside of itself (c.g. Butler, 1999 [1990]). While this move is often seen as a radical challenge to the atomist view of the subject as self-contained, as I argue elsewhere it in fact replicates its absolutist notion of autonomy (Gunnarsson, 2014; cf. Alcoff, 2006). Finally, the fact that gender coalesces with other power relations and identity categories has led some scholars to 'completely reject the separability of analytical and identity categories’ (McCall, 2005, p. 1771; c.g. Butler, 1999 [1990]; Spelman, 1990; sec Gunnarsson, 2011).
This emphasis on inseparability is an understandable reaction to rigid modes of separation, which deny co-constitution, fluidity and mutual transformation. We might indeed interpret these kinds of interventions as a matter precisely of emphasis, rather than as a complete rejection of distinctions. What supports such a reading is the fact that all the authors mentioned above, who explicitly deny the possibility of separating ontology from epistemology, the social from the natural, the subject from its constitutive context and gender from other intersectional categories, at the same time make use of such distinctions in their writing. However, even if it is just a matter of accentuation, the tendency shared by atomist and anticatcgorical theorists to emphasise cither separateness or inseparability is problematic in itself, since it easily reproduces absolutist and undifferentiated notions of difference as well as unity.
Dialectical critical realism takes issue both with accounts that obscure the co-enfoldment of phenomena and with claims that phenomena cannot be at all separated if they have intrinsic tics to one another. If applied to the relation between epistemology and ontology, these can be seen as both separate and ‘constellationally unified’ (Bhaskar, 2008 [1993], p. 114). As Alan Norrie highlights in his work on dialectical critical realism, ontology and epistemology arc co-enfolded in one another in the sense that 'knowing is ... a subset of being, and the study or theory of being (onto-/ogy) is already epi-stemically committed’ (2010, p. 17, emphasis in original), but they must nevertheless be distinguished since one cannot be collapsed into the other; they arc different things.
On the dialectical critical realist view, being is an interconnected, open-ended whole, whose different parts and dimensions are both intrinsically connected and relatively autonomous from one another, due to processes of differentiation, stratification and emergence. Reality has a structure to it, but is also a processual becoming, and neither the structuredness nor the fluidity of being are absolute but become meaningful in relation to one another. Bhaskar’s figure of dialectical totalities conveys that something can, however paradoxical it may sound, be both part of something else and separate from it, as in the case of knowledge being both part of and separate from reality, and of humanity being both part of and different from nature (Bhaskar, 2008 [1993]; Gunnarsson, 2013, 2014). What underpins all these kinds of dualities is the notion of unity-in-difference, which challenges what I see as the most basic and problematic of all dualisms, that between separateness and inseparability itself (cf. Kirby, 2008).
