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STREAM 8 – Roy Bhaskar Dialectical Method of Critical Realism

 

 

Roy Bhaskar (1975/2008) A Realist Theory of Science (available for free online PDF), developed a lifetime of work rescuing Hegelian dialectics from its errors (endism [epistemological fallacy [reducing eco learning to human knowing], progress myth & end of history, and monovalance privileging of one ontology over many others that Bhaskar puts in scalar relation). His 'critical realism' ontology does not address the other RPO’s (Follett, Barad, Substantialism, Deleuze, or Brier [and their is much that is similar to Peirce triads, as we will explore]). Despite his criticism of Hegel, Bhaskar picks up the idea of a dialectical process theory of identity-in-difference and ontological transformative being in succession of negations of the negations – nothing – becoming dialectics. He differentiates his critical realism ontology dialectics from that of Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger. He comes closest to developing multifractality ontology in his seven scales (see Boje, 2016, and Deleuze and Guattari 1987 chapter on space[Mandelbrot fractal].

Figure 4: Bhaskar's 7 scales (adapted & embellished by Boje interpretation of  Bhaskar, 2010 (figure by Boje, 2017)

Figure 5: Bhaskar's dialectic is tiered and stratified ontology (figure by Boje, 2017)

"Dialectic is a seven-termed one—as follows (where ‘7A’ [seventh awakening] stands for non-duality, ‘6R’ [sixth realm] for (re-)enchantment, ‘5A’ [fifth aspect] for reflexivity understood as spirituality, ‘4D’ [fourth dimension] for human transformative praxis, ‘3L’ [third level] for totality, ‘2E’ [second edge] for negativity, ‘1M’ [first moment] for non-identity: 7A>6R>5A>4D>3L>2E>1M" (p. x).

Table 2 - Summary of Bhaskar’s 7 Levels of Reality (based on reading of Bhaskar's work)

7A - Seventh Awakening [non-duality of meta-reality or demi-reality of illusion & depression and beneath that is anxiety, trust, & solidarity world that can be basis of universal human flourishing]
6R - Sixth Realm [re-enchantment]
5A - Fifth Aspect [spiritual reflexivity]
4D - Fourth Dimension [human transformative praxis]
3L - Third Level [dialectical critical realism]
2E - Second Edge [absence, negativity, & change in dialectical critical realism]
1M - First Moment [non-identity of scientific or transcendental realism]

The Actual, the domains of events, and sensory experiences. But empirical is limited and reduced to retrospective sensemaking experiences of the five senses.

We can relate Bhaskar's 7 Levels of Reality to Ensemble Leadership and to Follett's Integrative Unity:

Figure 6: Bhaskar's 7 Levels of Reality to Ensemble Leadership and to Follett's Integrative Unity (figure by Boje, 2017)

"Emprirical realism is underpinned by a metaphysical dogma, which I call the epistemic fallacy, that statements about being can always be transposed into statements about our knowledge of being. As ontology cannot, it is argued, be reduced to epistemology this mistake merely covers the generation of an implicit ontology based on the category of experience; and an implicit realism based on the presumed characteristics of the objects of experience, viz. atomistic events, and their relations, viz. constant conjunctions" (Bhaskar, 1975: 5, A Realist Theory of Science).

Bhaskar (2009) argues that there are mutiple co-contending ontologies, and that Hegel focused on monovalence (a single ontology).

Figure 7: Bhaskar Multiple Ontologies (figure by Boje, 2017)

Above the most relevant forms of dialectic co-inclusion for understanding change (Bhaskar, 2009: 79, 184). Generative separation initiates power relation differences, and at same time power struggles change generative separation of actual life (Bhaskar, 2009: 184-5).

a. dialectical contradictions in modes of ontological stratification, absence, intra-activity, and agentive agency
b. social conflicts in the modes of power, struggles, constituted by or grounded in dialectical contradictions,
c. dialectical transitions over distanciated space-time

Master-slave dialectical relationship of counter-hegemonic struggles, its sedimented structure of domination, separation of immediate producers from their labor, exploitation, and process of subjugation or control, and hermeneutical struggles over ideological ‘attitudes’, and power-relations (Bhaskar, 2009: 2, 65, 93, 109, 113, 120, 167, 184, 299).

Structural oppositionality Hegel normalises change as progress (progressive/nostalgic, emancipatory). Transformational Model fo Social Activity (TMSA) exemplifies transformative negation and can interplay with geo-historical character in its social process, and social structures, and social life embodied in networks of social relations, including that mode of autopoietic activity, and hermeneutical struggles over generalised master-slave-type relations. (Bhaskar, 2009: 70-71).Radical negation (from suicide to self-realizaiton, auto-subvesive tendency to self-overcoming process) is consistent with multiple determination within a totality (p. 162)m 63 while transformative negation is consistent with exogenous sources of change. Geo-historical materialism is an ongoing affair of oppositions of transfactually efficacious processes and rhythms that have tacit complicity in political economy power struggles (Bhaskar, 2009: 70-71, 73, 79, 99, 125, 187).

Dialectic co-inclusion in the succession over distanciated spacetime is rational core of Hegelian dialectics. Hegelian dialectics embrace generative mechanism separation, master-slave relations and praxis of the oppressed.

Earlier versions for Grouded Theory suffer from the epistemic fallacy

"Verificationism indeed may be regarded as a particular form of the epistemic fallacy, in which the meaning of a proposition about reality (which cannot be designated ‘empirical’) is confused with our grounds" (Bhaskar, 1975: 27-28, A Realist Theory of Science).

"When science is doing normal science, when things are going well, epistemically it is natural to adopt what I call this ‘natural attitude’ in which you don’t posit ontology on the one side and epistemology on the other: you just have knowledge and you take it that that knowledge is of the world. Ontology really only becomes relevant when you are not satisfied with knowledge, when what passes for knowledge is patently wrong or absurd" (Bhaskar, 2007: 192, Theorizing Ontology, pp. 192-204 in Clive Lawson, John Latsis and Nuno Martins (Eds.) Contributions to Social Ontology, Oxford/NY: Routledge).

I agree: What passes for knowledge in organizational research is patently wrong or absurd.

Bhaskar (2007: 193) "distinguished the domains of the real and the actual and two types of system – open and closed systems. The fallacy of supposing that you couldn’t do ontology was what I called the epistemic fallacy."

Bhaskar (2007: 196) has this critique of Heidegger ontology:

"Heidegger makes a distinction between the ontological and the ontic, he points out correctly that the intercourse of human beings is one that has an interior, so that when I look at someone over there and I see a frown on his face or he says ‘I don’t understand’ then I need to relate to that interior. That intersubjectivity is just as important an aspect of language as referential detachment. Heidegger of course was wont to contrast his rich internal totalities of the human world with
the cut and dried world that he assumed operated in science. But of course the scientist
is engaged in hermeneutics as well, a hermeneutic of understanding other beliefs and indeed other sciences, including importantly as necessary means of their own innovative activity, unravelling new and deeper structures, the knowledge of which will in turn be potentially critical of beliefs and actions uninformed by them...".

"We need not make the chronic mistake of the sociology of knowledge, which reasons in line with the epistemic fallacy, from the fact that all knowledge is social to the fact that all knowledge must be about society. That is a major mistake that again comes from assuming that we can’t have specific conclusions about the world, knowledge of particular aspects of being. So we can make a balanced judgement on Heidegger. Natural science also involves intersubjectivity, hermeneutics of inquiry and communication and critiques of beliefs and
actions, so that social knowledge is involved in our knowledge of the natural realm. But this transitive implication of the social for our knowledge of the natural realm should not obscure the intransitive differences between them. The major difference is that natural structures do not depend on human agency and so intentionalityand conceptuality in the way that social structures do" (Bhaskar, 2007: 196)

Bhaskar has this critique if Marx:

"Marx was what I call a material object realist. He also had a proto-critical realist view of science as involving movement from appearances to deeper structures that would explain them, but he never actually theorised this and so Marx’s innovations have always seemed to most Marxist philosophers and social scientists to be epistemological with the central epistemological category now becoming that of labour, with labour replacing Hegel’s category of spirit. That is fine as far as it goes: it is not a criticism of Marx that he had to concentrate on certain aspects of the totality. But where we could go wrong is if we assumed there was no need for ontology. Elsewhere I have argued that the rational development of Marxism does require something like a critical realist ontology – an ontology that it actually presupposes but does not itself theorise" (Bhaskar, 2007: 196-197).

What is Bhaskar's solution to epsitemological fallacy of modern science and to shortcomings he sees in Heidegger and Marx ontology?

Skinningsrud (2007: 269) puts it this way "In critical realist dialectic, adapted from Hegel, the conceptual work performed in the identification and repair of an inconsistency, leading in general to an expansion of the conceptual field, is designated the σ and τ transform respectively."

Bhaskar's ontology is differentiated into multiple ontologies, and it is also stratified into levels of reality.

To some extent, the Hegelian dialectics thus shines through in the kinds of dialectics Bhaskar (1993) could bring to 4th Wave Grounded Theory (GT):

1) Alterity: A dialectic of the otherness and difference that builds the stratified levels of Marxist ideological super structures;

2) Nothingness: A dialectic of absence, revealing how what is ignored matters when things change, transition, or transform;

3) Alienation: A dialectic of social isolation, a dialectic which can reveal our social unification as being dismissed or ignored, giving voice to local cultures on a global scale, revealing the marginalization of the peoples on the periphery by those in the center, integrating fragmented agency through unity; and

4) Voice: A group of dialectics that bring agency back to the now-totalized periphery, that increase mutual recognition and respect for identity differences, that seek unity through diversity and recentralize transformative praxis, regressing against the status quo to create a stalemate against oppressors.

In these ways, the Dialectical Critical Realism offers ground and theory 4th Wave Grounded Theory can use. arlier waves of Grounded Theory plays in what Bhaskar (2008) calls the sub-individual psychological level, reduces the individual biological level to cognitive and language skills, and has yet to venture into remaining levels of scalar reality.

1. Sub-individual psychological level
2. Individual, biological level
3. Micro-level (e.g. ethnomethodology)
4. Meso-level (functional roles of capitalist and worker)
5. Macro-level of whole regions or whole societies 
6. Mega-level of whole traditions of civilization
7. Planetary level of whole cosmos

Here we will draw on dialectical critical realism (Bhakar, 1975, 1993, 2010, and spiritual accents. We admit that Bhaskar’s work is controversial, with some critical realists ignoring the spiritual aspects, and others including them.

Figure 8: An interdisciplinary, laminated Open System account of the human condition plus situatednessin ecological space (Jenneth Parker 2010 Towards a dialectics of knowledge and care in the global system, p. 209 in in Bhaskar, R.; Frank, Cheryl; Hoyer, Karl Georg; Naess, Petter’ Parker, Jenneth. (Eds.) Interdisciplinarity and climate change: Transforming knowledge and practice for our global future. London/NY: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group)

Critical realism is a philosophy concerned with ontology, defined as the study of Being.I find good emotions and good organization in the latest crisis of global Being, including climate change.

Figure 9: Components of Climate Change(Critical realist interdisciplinarity A research agenda to support
action on global warming Sarah Cornell and Jenneth Parker 2010: p. 27).

"The Earth is constantly changing on all scales of time and space" (NSF).

 

Cornell and Parker (2010: 28) "For example, the epistemic fallacy contributes to the notion that the structures and entities with which ecology has to deal are in some way less real, and hence less important, because they cannot be so certainly demonstrated. A critical realist ontology can combine ontological realism – the objective reality of the life processes on the planet – with a recognition of thenecessary complexity and difficulty of prediction of phenomena in open systems."

First, several levels of reality in critical realism have spiritual relevance that can apply to spiritual praxis. Bhaskar (1975, 1993, 2010) theorizes seven levels of reality, and several are spiritual.

Level 6r (6th Realm) is about re-enchantment.

Level 7A (7th Awakening) finding non-duality, and overcoming the world of illusion, to find the 'real.This would be a pre-Cartesian, non-separation of body and mind person and nature, subject and object, etc.

Table 1 - Summary of Bhaskar’s 7 Levels of Reality (based on reading of his work)
7A - Seventh Awakening [non-duality of meta-reality or demo-reality of illusion & depression and beneath that is anxiety, trust, & solidarity world that can be basis of universal human flourishing]
6R - Sixth Realm [re-enchantment]
5A - Fifth Aspect [spiritual reflexivity]
4D - Fourth Dimension [human transformative praxis]
3L - Third Level [dialectical critical realism]
2E - Second Edge [absence, negativity, & change in dialectical critical realism]
1M - First Moment [non-identity of scientific or transcendental realism]

We would like to apply an analytic model to the level 3L. It has the initials RRREIC (Bhaskar, 2010: 4). From there, we then expand the analysis to show some points of convergence of spiritual aspects of Critical Realism spiritual praxis (noting this is a controversial move for many critical realists).

Bhaskar (2010: 14): "The deepening of ontology entailed by dialectical critical realism involves its
extension from the understanding of being of
• Being as such, and as structured (1M); to
• Being as process (2E),
• Being as a whole (3L), and
• Being as incorporating transformative practice (human agency)(4D).
The further extension of ontology entailed by the philosophy of meta-Reality
incorporates the further understanding of
• Being as incorporating reflexivity (and spirituality) (5A),
• Being as re-enchanted (6R), and
• Being as non-dual (or as involving essential unity) (7 Z/A)."

Table 3: RRREIC of Basic Critical Realism without Spiritual Reality
R1 – Resolution of Complex Events into its Components (or parts)
R2 – Redescription of Components into Explanatory way
R3 – Retrodiction of component causes to Antecedently Existing Events
E – Elimination of Competing Antecedent Causal Mechanisms
I – Identification of Causal Efficacious Antecedent Generative Mechanisms
C – Correcting by iteration of Previous Findings in light of above analyses

R1 – Resolution – Public university is an open-systemic phenomena (and many closed systems), with a multiplicity of (successive) cause, mechanisms, and theories about the latest budget crisis. “What is involved here is typically a conjunctive multiplicity of components” and “the logical form of open systemic phenomenon” (Bhaskar, 2010: 4). Universities and the State are complex events and components: With the collapse of oil and gas prices, our university and every other public university in New Mexico lost its funding by the State, which meant budgets in limbo, salaries frozen, no new hires with attrition. Our university, anticipated budget deficits was seen as a time to call in the business process reengineering (BPR) consultants and pay them $622,700 for 10 days consultation and a PowerPoint presentation on how to save millions by changing span of control of staff.

 
Boje, Rosile, Dennehy, and Summers (1997) deconstructed reengineering, concluding it was unscientific, counter-productive, and destructive, yet highly popular. Cuts were justified in personnel, while in another part of the university, millions of state money was spent on new buildings. A plan is being considered that would expand the 18-hole golf course (that uses one million gallons to water greens) to 27-holes, and add a hotel and shopping mall. The university’s football team continued it losing streak, but picked million dollar practice games with ranked university in other conferences. Students story: our team is used as tackle dummies, expect to lose, to build confident of big league teams. Much more money is now spent on marketing the value of the degree on billboards and ads playing before movies started in local theaters. The official narrative was NMSU was still a top tier research university, and a premiere Hispanic-serving Carnegie II-level university. Some faculty wondered if this was an espoused theory, but the theory-in-use was to cover over the lack of top-tier performance, and the strange ways Hispanics were being treated in TrumpLand.

Weekly Chancellor and Provost narratives pointed to the student, faculty, and alumni accomplishments. Ontologically, NMSU’s open system is a reality in which there are many different mechanisms at potentially emergent levels combining to produce our novel situation. The are physical mechanisms (building some new buildings, while de-budgeting people), biological mechanisms (flat birth rate in the State), psychological (it feels to us like faculty are more depressed and demoralized than anytime in our 21 years there). There appear to be psych-social and socio-economic changes, and speculation that students no longer see the ROI on higher education investments. There could be cultural reductionism, a clash of migrant culture, white culture, and Trump politics. In short, this open system is a laminated system of many components.

R2 – Redescription – What is the appropriate level of description of the state of affairs at NMSU? Is it the level of the University, the State Legislature and Governor, the Trump agenda for higher education, the transformation from knowledge society to knowledge economy, or the colonizing of higher education globally by academic capitalism? Does one professor’s meeting to be reprimanded by an administrator matter? Or, does the Governor signing off to never ever raise taxes matter?  Or is this a national trend or a global trend of neoliberal ideology to get government out of funding for public education?  Which of the possible levels of description of socioeconomic phenomenon is the explanatory critical one to focus on?
Things and events at NMSU are an intricate multiplicity of explanatory mechanisms.  For Bhaskar each instantiates some universal law. The multiplicity of mechanisms have mediations, differentiations from others. For example, the reprimanded professor is a father of three, in a second marriage, is a critical theory activist, and a fan of the Rolling Stones. There is a specific geo-historical trajectory involved, including how the birth rate is flat in New Mexico, how being on border with Mexico makes immigration more relevant, how the migrants are expected pick crops at lower wages than would be paid to citizens.

R3 – Retrodiction – refers to antecedent state of affairs. Retrodiction means an explanation or storytelling interpretation of past actions or events inferred from the universal laws that are shown to have governed them. One universal I have noticed, is every time there is an economic crisis at this university, the management department is slated for reorganization. In 21 years, this is the 3rd main economic crisis we have experienced. It seemed that with each crisis, the administration suggest a strategic plan that asks management to combine with the marketing department, to have one department head, one less administrative assistant, a reduced or eliminated PhD program. Now, admissions to our Ph.D. program have been put on hold, apparently moving to an every-other-year admissions scheme. In storytelling terms, antenarrative is a process of discovering the nature of relatively enduring generative mechanisms at work. It involves retroduction. Retroduction is a form of logical inference which starts with an observation of components of the system (R1) their Redescription (R2) then seeks to find the simplest and most likely explanation (R3).

Retrodiction and retroduction are ways critical realists can notice and care for antenarrative preparations in advance of the next economic downturn. This would include convincing legislators that higher education is important to more than vocational development. It would mean developing an understanding of the difference between knowledge society and knowledge economy. In the later, students are customers investing in education as ROI, faculty are knowledge laborers whose work is patentable, and knowledge is just a commodity traded on the global market. 

Here is an antenarrative analysis. Civilization is not unconscious, ruled by a corporate and governmental elite, which in the US this is the corporate lobby. Do we really have democracy anymore? The world is running out of natural resources, and all the rhetoric about sustainability does not meet the simplest empirical understanding of climate change, population explosion, the migration crisis worldwide, and so on. The 1% wealthy are amassing all the wealth, so much so, that half the world’s population lives on less than $2 day.

Our universities act to reinforce a number of myths that keep the generative mechanisms of economic and social inequality out of the commonsense. As an exercise in retrodiction and retroduction, we might ask ourselves and our students whether we believe the following nine myths, plus one more added by Boje, taken from Chapman (2004: 98):

1. We live in a democracy
2. Our society is just and fair
3. Economic growth is good for everyone
4. Everyone can succeed if they work hard enough
5. Society is a collection of individuals each of whom, by their choices and efforts, determine theory own fate.
6. Success is the accumulation of wealth and possessions
7. The wealth of society is managed best by its rate of economic growth
8. Progress and development are by increased control and more complex technology
9. Freedom is the ability choose in the market place.

  I will add a 10th:
            10. Liberal faculty are responsible for the decline of student’s ROI in higher education.

E – Elimination of Competing Antecedent Causal Mechanisms – Now that we have elaborated a number of generative mechanisms of the transformation of higher education, we can eliminate some of them, and focus in.  We suggest that by dumbing down higher education and purging the university of the humanities, the result is the 1% can engage in wealth accumulation while convincing the 99% general public to vote against their own self-interests. This is done by propagandizing the 10 myths above, and masking the generative mechanisms of neoliberalism.

I – Identification of Causal Efficacious Antecedent Generative Mechanisms – Here we narrow in on the culprits.  It is all about convincing the public that university education is not about the ‘public good’, not about social justice, it’s a leap backwards into Social Darwinism, into the knowledge economy, into academic capitalism.

Critical realism begins with the assumption that empirical experience (here I include retrospective sensemaking narratives) limiting our understanding of events and things (Bhaskar, 1975). The empirical sensemaking is embedded in the actual, in events and things that are sometimes quite independent of human sensemaking.  It seems that empirical  is being Trumped (pun intended) by mythic. The empirical and the actual are embedded in something still wider, the ‘real’, in which often unseen, unheard generative mechanisms, powers of the 1%, are manipulating events and things. An antenarrative analysis of antecedent generative mechanisms operating below the level of retrospective sensemaking of empirical experience, and below the actual events and things of history, can help us understand the transformations happening in higher education, in New Mexico, in US, and globally.

C – Correcting by iteration of Previous Findings in light of above analyses -  We continue our analysis with the seven levels of reality in Table 1, intertwined with four planes.
Table 2: Four-Planar "These are the plane of our material transactions with nature, the plane of social interactions with others, the plane of social structure and the plane of the stratification of the personality" (Bhaskar, 2007: p. 200).

1. Material transactions with nature – Boje chairs the Sustainability Council at my university, and we are struggling. We have lost our Gold Star accreditation rating from The Association for Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). We were about to be set back from Gold, below Silver, to Bronze. The Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System™ (STARS) system has raised the bar, and we can no longer get by with having narratives that lack policy statements. I asked the Provost to postpone the reaccreditation until we can get some policies about our material transactions with nature. I continue to fight against the idea of expanding our golf course to 27 holes, as a waste of water in the desert eco-region.
2. Social interactions between people – Interactions are tense. The department meets, but we keep silent in front of the interim head, and in front of the dean. Other faculty who never complained before, now are complaining, but only one-on-one, privately, and not in university meetings.
3. Social structures that endure -  NMSU will likely endure, but it will have a tough time convincing people it is top tier. There is an administrative order, and it expands, to cover the needs of academic capitalism: the golf, the proposed mall-like shopping area (the “mall-ification” of campuses, turning them into retail hubs like airports have become), the intellectual asset capture, the sports teams, the privatizing of everything possible, and so on. This endures, but academic freedom and shared governance, does not feel like what it was in previous decades.
4. Stratification of the embodied personality. There are administrative personalities, and many faculty personalities, we no longer recognize. We wonder if the trend towards limiting what is appropriate to be taught in the classroom, to be free of “politics,” to be limited to a strict definition of a “discipline,” is a Foucouldian panoptic gaze.

Bhaskar contends, (and here Boje agrees, while Rosile agrees but believes that this is nothing new) that humanity is in obvious crisis on all four planes. The material transactions with nature have come into severe crisis, and projections of 11 billion in population by 2100 suggest it will only worsen (Boje, in press).  I (Boje) am both a spiritual being and material being, composed of atoms and subatomic particles, and waves of quantum energy.  If subatomic materiality is lacking then there is no higher level of biological (cells and metabolism), and without these layers, there is no psychological being, and no social being.
Regarding social interactions, in politics the distribution of economic resources is inequitable but the 1% who control the wealth appear unconcerned by this widening gap. The social structures of economic and social inequality are not being redressed by WTO, World Bank, European Union, and so on. The stratification of embodied personalities seems to produce more narcissism than ever before (e.g. Trump’s election).

Universities are complex systems with multiple factors (persons, bodies, artifacts, things, buildings, etc.) in which there are interpersonal, social structures, and forms of storytelling expression.  Universities are contingent, history entities with multiple causal forces. Universities are conjectural combinations of causal forces and emergences. Universities are changing in dynamic ways, morphogenic with causes coming in and out of existence.  The university is many processes, structures, and productions.  The university is an imperfect assemblage of multiple factors held together somewhat by agency, structure, and academic cultures. 

None of us has to be stuck in our New Mexico State University identities, or in our Academy of Management identities.  New doors have opened.

These are moral emotions in response to alleged unethical university, corporate, and government workplace behaviors that have huge consequences to community and environmental destruction. When the common sense is ‘climate denial’ and ‘knowledge economy’ then defense of climate action and efforts to sustain ‘social good’ (knowledge society) are seen as in appropriate practices that challenge neoliberalism. Neoliberal morality is a weapon used now by billionaires to capture more wealth, justify environmental destruction, move working class into the unemployed poor who also lack housing and healthcare.  Bullies, for example, that I know, seem not to experience shame or guilt following oppressive acts of humiliation and belittling of those more vulnerable (Hosmanek & Rynes, 2012; Lindebaum & Gabriel, 2016,; Lindeman & Geddes, 2016; Walker & Jackson, 2016). Bullying for example is a deficit of compassion, a failure of the duty of care, a discrimination that adds to organizational malfeasance. Bullying is an ethical transaction happening with greater regularity in TrumpLand.  In a downsizing economy, a downsizing corporation or university, bullying is a way of organizational change, a way to let the cost cutters have their way, in a bureaucracy that has itself fallen into madness. 

Bhaskar’s Critical Realist Spiral theory

Roy Bhaskar (1993: 11) theorizes a ‘critical realist’ dialectical version of ‘double’ spiral.  Boje (2014) double spiral has updraft of liberatory potential that opposes downdraft of oppression. Boje, Elias, and Cast (2016) define the terms of a Heideggerian double spiral with updrafts and downdrafts: An updraft is defined as multiple organizational trajectories converging in space and time to create positive up surges in the environment. Conversely, a downdraft is defined as multiple organizational trajectories converging in space and time to create negative down surges in the environment.
Critical realism theorizes a strict separation of epistemology and ontology. Specifically, epistemologically, it is a distancing of the observer (distanciation by estrangement) that can allow critical scrutiny of situations of hegemonic inequalities in otherwise democratic oppositions. Finally, this spiral of emancipatory politics is an ontologically grounded process that spreads both spatially and temporally. As Bhaskar (Bhaskar, 1993: p. 48) elaborates:

“They may stretch forward temporally, spread outwards spatially, spiral inwards conceptually, mediate, switch or transfigure each other relationally, perspectivally or configurationally, structurally sediment, abstract, concretize, contradict and coalesce themselves”

As an emancipatory political “reinforcing spiral”, it can bring about a counter-hegemonic struggle that is potentially “extending participation in democracy…. implementing equalities….  abolishing oppressive power” (Bhaskar, 1993: pp. 288-289).

Finally, the emancipatory spiral can counter downward assimilative destructive spiral of “vicious degenerative” spreads that may undo democratic oppositions, and truncate (or disrupt) otherwise transformative dialectic processes (Bhaskar, 1993: p.  343-344).  Bhaskar concludes, “It would be foolish to suppose that Hegel did not consider some of these alternatives” (IBID.).

HERE ARE THE REFERENCES PARAGRAPHS FOR EMANCIPATORY SPIRAL

 

p.  11: “These levels of deepening of critical realism should not be hypostatized. What they specify is co-present and systematically ‘intermingle’ in reality. Furthermore, although, as in Hegel, it is the second moment — of negativity — that is the narrowly dialectical one, each of the others and the whole are implied in it as a system. Moreover, there are dialectics specific to each level. Thus the dialectics of 1M are typically dialectics of stratification and superstructure-formation or superstructuration, including emergence. The typical dialectical figures here are what I shall call the dialectical comment, which I shall write as dc', and dialectical reason (dr'), which I shall explicate in relation to Hegelian dialectic. I shall later link these figures to a characteristic pattern of problem-generation, resolution and critique in science and philosophy and to the theme of theory/practice inconsistency, which I shall see as essential to dialectic generally and pivotal to the emancipatory spiral of transformist politics and (counter-) ideology. Dialectical reason includes, in metacritical analysis, displaying the common or dialectical grounds (dg') of apparently opposed but mutually complicit dialectical counterparts or contraries, as, I shall argue, in the Kantian opposition between knowledge and faith, or more generally between anthroporealism and transcendent — which I shall rigorously differentiate from transcendental — realism, or between empiricism and idealism. This includes the logic of what Derrida has called ‘supplementarity’,14 and what Freud called ‘compromise formation’. Metacritical dialectical reason also isolates the duplicities and dialectical paralogisms generated by philosophies of identity including Hegel's own. At 2E the dialectics are characteristically dialectics of change, including interchange (reversal), and transition. Determinate transformative negation, though it is present in some guise in all dialectics, comes to the fore here, but the most distinctivefigure at 2E is dialectical process (dp') — as when, for instance, we are incessantly forced to revise our descriptive, taxonomic and explanatory vocabularies in the light of unexpected, and possibly recursive, epistemic and/or ontic change.”

p.48: “Conversely, welcoming negativity and later totality and agency alongside 1M non-identity, depth and transfactuality to our ontology situates some very interesting possibilities. What is present from one perspective, at one level, in some region may be absent from, at or in another. Presences and absences may be recursively embedded and systematically intermingled in all sorts of fascinating ways. They may stretch forward temporally, spread outwards spatially, spiral inwards conceptually, mediate, switch or transfigure each other relationally, perspectivally or configurationally, structurally sediment, abstract, concretize, contradict and coalesce themselves. Once we specifically thematize causal efficacy, emergence, tensed spatializing process, totality and sui generis social forms, all sorts of topologies become possible: hidden depths, tangled loops, inverted hierarchies, mediatized, virtual and hyperrealities; holes-within-wholes (and vice versa), binds and blocks, intra- as well as inter-action; juxtaposed, elongated, congealed, overlapping, intersecting, condensed spatio-temporalities; intertwined, dislocated and punctured processes. We shall explore some of these in due course. As it is, consider the crucial impact that the symptomatic silence, the telling pause, the vacuum, the hiatus or the generative separation possess. Or remember the effects of the non-occurrences, the undone or left alone — the letter that didn't arrive, the failed exam, the missed plane, the monsoon that didn't occur, the deforestation of the Amazonian jungle, the holes in the ozone layer, the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’, the spaces in the text, the absent authors and readers it presupposes, both the too empty and the too full. Absences, immediately or on reflection, all.* There are intervals, voids and pauses, desire, lack and need within being; and such absences and their tendential and actual absenting are, or so I {ER:599} am arguing, transcendentally and dialectically necessary for any intelligible being at all.”

pp. 288-9: “The dialectic of de-alienation can be broadened, as anticipated in §5, into a (7) generic dialectic of desire. If the dialectic of desire involves the desire to be desired and this involves the desire to be recognized, then, again through the logic of dialectical universalizability insofar as this involves the capacity to enjoy rights and liberties, it entails the real enjoyment of equal and universally reciprocally recognized rights and liberties, including the right to de-alienation and the enjoyment of health, education, access to resources and other liberties. And by an extension and deepening of the argument it entails the right of all subjects2 to be free of, and thus to the abolition of, the totality of master–slave relations, including internalized and intra-psychic ones, globally and inter-/intra-generationally and with due respect to the needs and rights of other species in the context of developing four-planar human nature. This dialectic rationally demands the satisfaction of the cognitive and empowering conditions for universal human autonomy, so that, in the first instance, if agents are so disposed, it must be included within level (4) of freedom, but then, in the next place, upon their coming to see their real interests, under the description of the free development of the concrete singularity of every other individual as a condition for their own free development. This takes us into (8) the dialectics of transition, and the two-way traffic between truth and freedom, form and content, on which I will comment immediately below. The generic dialectic of desire ([7] above) can be motivated in part by (9) the dialectic of desire for freedom. This turns on the consideration that human beings, by and large, want to be free, under some (sets of) description(s). And the logic of dialectical universalizability will rationally motivate them to accept freedom for all in dialectically similar circumstances, and then ultimately freedom as such (as dialectically valued) irrespective of circumstance. This will clearly depend not only upon immanent critique as part of counter-hegemonic struggle but also upon the possibility of mutually reinforcing virtuous spirals and spreads among freedoms — powers and needs — such as might be involved in extending participation in democracy, generalizing and safeguarding universally recognized rights, implementing equities (implicit in dialectical universalizability), abolishing oppressive power2and ultimately the totality of such (again by the logic of universalizability), relations, radically concretely singularized local, regional, and necessarily global (see §7) autonomies (implicit in absolute reason — dra' in dφ) and socializing the market without the compulsion or lack of opportunity to work subject to the recognition of the duty to care implied by the right to flourish. Let us now consider (10) the dialectic of universalizability itself. The T/P consistent fiduciary remark implies solidarity, ranging from moral and material support through empowerment, in its aspect of freedom, to participation in the depth totalizing practice concerned. This may be implicated in a dialectic of social science from neutrality to explanatory critical rationality to emancipatory axiology to dialectic per se (the subject of the sequel to this book) and by transition from descriptive morality through immanent critique to redescriptive morality to formal emissive metacritique through counter-hegemonic struggle to explanatory critical morality and metacritique (MC2 dg', drp') through the totalizing depth praxis to emancipatory axiology.”

 

pp. 343-4: “It will be remembered in C1.7 that I argued that dr° ≥ dr† ≥ dr' ≥ dr'' ≥ dr''' ≥ dr'''' where dr° is a result, dr† is a resolution of a contradiction, dr' its rational resolution, dr'' conforming to radical preservative determinate negation, dr''' effecting our reconciliation to life and dr'''' mutual recognition in a free society. It is obvious that neither scientific explanations nor geo-historical transitions generally conform to dr''. Transformative sublations, or sublations containing transformative negations, are far more frequent than the preservative Aufhebung. But other possibilities abound, including the preservative reproduction of the opposition; the occurrence of vicious degenerative, dissipative, fragmentary, chaotic, detotalizing (externalizing), generally inverse-sublatory spirals and spreads; the mutual ruin or non-preservative undoing of the contraries; the preservative undoing of their opposition accompanied by hierarchical inversion and chiasmus with or without erasure (associated with Derrida); the simple non-dialectical separation or distanciation of the poles; the absorption of one by another, with or without an internalization of their opposition; the grafting of the opposition onto another element or opposition producing a more complex, displaced and/or condensed form, and/or the simple indeterminacy, ineliminability or differential interpretation of the outcome. It would be foolish to suppose that Hegel did not consider some of these alternatives. But his epistemological triumphalism, relentless teleology and constellational closure inevitably inclined him to the preservative Aufhebung. In the at least as contradictory, but more sombre, world of the late twentieth century we cannot afford not to see this as only one possible figure of change.”

 

Definitions to help interpret Bhaskar

Aufheben or Aufhebung is a German word with several seemingly contradictory meanings, including "to lift up", "to abolish", "cancel" or "suspend", or "to sublate". The term has also been defined as "abolish", "preserve", and "transcend".

Sublate - assimilate (a smaller entity) into a larger one.
"fragmented aspects of the self the subject is unable to sublate"

chi·as·mus --- a rhetorical or literary figure in which words, grammatical constructions, or concepts are repeated in reverse order, in the same or a modified form; e.g. ‘Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.’

 

 Distanciation in general refers to the stepping back or distancing of the observer or reader from an object of scrutiny. explanatory context. NOTE: distanciation is sometimes spelled 'distantiation' Distanciation or estrangement allows for or facilitates a critical attitude.

 

References

Bhaskar, R. (2013a). From science to emancipation: Alienation and the actuality of enlightenment. Routledge.

Bhaskar, R. (2013b). A realist theory of science. Routledge.

Bhaskar, Roy. (1975/1978). A Realist Theory of Science. London/NY: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. 1st edition 1975; 2nd edition 1978. Online at http://uberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Roy_Bhaskar_A_Realist_Theory_of_Science.pdf  (available for free online PDF).

Bhaskar, 2007: 192, Theorizing Ontology, pp. 192-204 in Clive Lawson, John Latsis and Nuno Martins (Eds.) Contributions to Social Ontology, Oxford/NY: Routledge

Bhaskar, Roy. (1993/2008). Dialectic: The pulse of freedom. London/NY: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. 

Bhaskar, R. (2009). Plato Etc: Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution. Routledge.

Bhaskar, Roy. (1986/2009). Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation. London/NY: Routledge

Bhaskar, Roy. (2010). Contexts of interdisciplinarity” interdisciplinarity and climate change. Pp. 1-24 in Bhaskar, R.; Frank, Cheryl; Hoyer, Karl Georg; Naess, Petter’ Parker, Jenneth. (Eds.) Interdisciplinarity and climate change: Transforming knowledge and practice for our global future. London/NY: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. 

Cornell, Sarahand Parkerin, Jenneth. (2010). Critical realist interdisciplinarity A research agenda to support
action on global warming. Pp 25-34 in Bhaskar, R.; Frank, Cheryl; Hoyer, Karl Georg; Naess, Petter’ Parker, Jenneth. (Eds.) Interdisciplinarity and climate change: Transforming knowledge and practice for our global future. London/NY: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. 

Kwon, Gi Bung. (2006). Re-conceptualizing Hegelian Master-Slave Dialectic as Diachronic Systems Theory of Inter-societal Relations. The Korean Journal of International Relations, 46(5) 7-35
http://kaisnet.or.kr/resource/down/4_01.pdf

Kwon, G. Bung. (2010). Recognition of Estranged Other. 국제정치논총, 50(3), 137-164. http://kaisnet.or.kr/resource/down/8_1_05.pdf

Parker, Jenneth. (2010). Towards a dialectics of knowledge and care in the global system. Pp. 205-226 in Bhaskar, R.; Frank, Cheryl; Hoyer, Karl Georg; Naess, Petter’ Parker, Jenneth. (Eds.) Interdisciplinarity and climate change: Transforming knowledge and practice for our global future. London/NY: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

Taylor, Charles (1975). Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.