Is critical realism useful?

[Mark Johnson]

One of the criticisms of critical realism is that it is perceived as not being practical - all 'talk and no action'. Personally, I think this is a misrepresentation, although I can perfectly understand how people arrive at that conclusion.

What do people think about this - and how can we address this misperception?

[Prakash Chatterjee]

There are lots of examples of critical realist "attempted" interventions, at all sorts of levels and in all sorts of areas to be found in the established literature.

I agree with you - it would be interesting to know how other people on this forum attempt to use cr to inform their practice ...

[Mark Johnson]

On reading about CR interventions, I'm usually left in agreement with the arguments, but unconvinced by their practical application, where conclusions often amount to recommendations that read more like a manifesto (which I might nevertheless agree with) than practical steps to move things forward. This is a problem for me trying to interest my more practically-minded colleagues in CR.

[Stephen Childress]

I am using a critical realist approach to the process of making a biographical documentary (my Ph.D. dissertation). I am attaching the paper that describes the project. It is clear from the film project that critical realism has practical application. Solid theory and ontological grounding are the basis for application.

[Mark Johnson]

Many thanks for this Stephen - There's some great stuff in this paper, and plenty to talk about - are you sending it for publication?

Clearly, CR has had a significant practical benefit to you in creating your film, and I broadly agree with your take on it (I find some of the diagrams fascinating). As a composer I have found that CR has been similarly beneficial to me in cutting a way through the complexities of authentic artistic statements. I'm inclined to think that CR has 'personal efficacy' for me.

However, I'm less sure about social efficacy. That's a question which is tied to the idea of an objective rational truth, and that CR is a method to uncovering and articulating this truth. Can an individual perspective, however methodologically sound express something more universal, and more importantly, can it have social efficacy as well as personal efficacy? That to me is a hard call, and - if you argue it does - tends towards a sort of 'CR fundamentalism' which I'm uncomfortable with. (Just to add, I don't get this impression from your paper - it's just an abiding worry I have...)

It strikes me, however, that our relationship to film, music, drama isn't entirely rational, it's a much more deeply embodied, visceral experience (good to see Merleau-Ponty in there!) - so there seems to me to be a conflict between rationalising ontological depth and creating something with which our relationship isn't wholly rational (but nothing wrong with that, it's just that CR is slightly uncomfortable with irrationality!)

CR is also used to make methodological critiques of research into the organisation of the health service, education or business. Here rationality becomes more to the fore, because practical decision-making in complex organisational structures is the requirement. And here I think the problems begin in terms of articulating an effective plan for action: its attempt to rationalise something highly complex produces something almost as equally complex, and the opportunity for sharing insight with a wide range of stakeholders is lost. My own view is that, in terms of sharing insight into complex systems, rationality is very limited; modelling however, can be more successful.

On the subject of which, and coming back to your biography, do you know anyone who has done a similar thing on President Allende in Chile? Now there's a fascinating story!! (see http://www.cybersyn.cl/ingles/context/context.html)

[Stephen Childress]

Mark,
Thanks for your reply. I have just recently sent the paper's abstract to several conferences and am waiting for a reply.

Well…my paper is my first attempt to bring CR into the film process, and it's really a work in progress whose problems and results simply won't be known until the process is over, the film in hand. The avoidance of analytical dualism is one of the strong points of CR, therefore any talk about contrasting rational and irrational aspects in research methods is null and void; both are useful, real, and part of being human and in society, so they come into play continually in interrelated ways. The beauty of CR in the film process is its ontological grounding, which keeps the filmmaker focused from a clearly-stated platform so s/he doesn't shift from ontology to ontology.

Film can't, by its very nature, be entirely rational, and a documentarist must recognize that from the outset. In fact, the 'truths' that slip through rational understanding during thick description interviews are one of the reasons I'm utilizing film to explore the genocidal philosophy(ies). CR, through the employment of methodological pluralism, recognizes the value and necessity of utilizing hermeneutics in the Geertzian sense, where interpretation comprises both rational accumulation of data as well as intuitive sorting out, making connections (abduction), and finally putting a shape to the data and impressions gathered by the researcher that often have no verbal equivalent—another reason I'm using film, to catch the nonverbal.

I don't believe there is a rational, objective truth to social behavior, nor do I see Sayer, Danermark et al, or Archer espousing that it does or should, rather—and I find Sayer the most pragmatic—they insist on the unbridgeable gap between natural science and social science because of the recursive nature of the human mind. And this is exactly what I'm after in the documentary, showing the levels of reality that make rational choice impossible to follow or predict. There are several paths to take at any given point in time and while rational choicers can model possible outcomes they cannot say anything about underlying aspects of human agency; rationality leaves us without motive.

So, I don't hope to make rational something that isn't, but rather to reveal through complexity what is complex; to simplify complexity is nothing more than an attempt to make our world more easily explained, but it doesn't make the world more understandable. There is no reason that we should expect society to be more easily represented than particle physics, in fact it is considerably more complex than particle physics. My understanding is that CR, through interdisciplinarity and the recognition of multiple-layered social structures, allows researchers to build, over time, a large repertoire of understandings that, together, represent in a sophisticated way social interrelationships, but that these representations are part of an endless series of representations because society is constantly changing. My documentary should make this clear, should alert the audience to this very basic social science understanding, and not feed them a formulaic product that they can gulp down without critical thought. But neither should it leave them in a miasma of imagery or visual data, like cinema vérité, where they are left to make up their own response from whole cloth. We are not all anthropologists, nor does a film have the ability to represent the complex interactions that occur 24-7 in a particular culture; cinema vérité is no more the 'truth' than what a tourist with a Kodak shows.

An individual perspective is all that ever exists, and universality exists in some aspect of every human product, the only differences are how particular cultures shape or color universals. Killing is a human and a universal act. Genociders are no different than anyone else, as homo sapiens sapiens, but their destructive acts are morally condemned because they occur in a certain context. One can take a rational approach to murder but it has obvious limits. None of the Hutu peasants involved in the killings could explain, when interviewed, why they killed, they were all dumbfounded by their actions. Sheila Kunkle is the only person that I'm aware of that has tried, through Lacanian analysis, to decipher the psychological mechanism underlying genocidal behavior, but psychoanalysis is not, cannot be a rational understanding, but depends on intuitive interpretation. CR has never (and I'm following Archer here) claimed to uncover 'truth', but to try to describe emergent properties, which are not truths but elements that might help in building up over time a deeper understanding of society. I think CR people like Sayer or Archer would say that its wrongful science to look for 'truths' because that implies some kind of absolute, which is antithetical to the human condition—'truth' to whom, when, where? Even people in the natural sciences reject such concepts as 'truth', in conversation they all acknowledge that they're only working with certain intellectual tools that seem to 'work' and produce testable results.

It has often been said by musicians and other artists (I have an MFA in painting and sculpture) that music (or painting, or writing, or..) chooses them rather than the other way around. There are vary rational elements in music notation, even a mathematical rigour, especially in 12-tone composition. And in the visual arts metaphor can have rational underpinnings. We all try to make sense out of the world. That is what I like about Sayer, he embraces the non-academic, everyday world of practical understanding as being 'scientific, with people testing and retesting hypotheses in varying degrees and coming to some understanding of the world around them, making their own models. The genociders do that, as well, and it's that modeling that I am interested in trying to understand, but I wouldn't say there's 'truth' in whatever understanding I accomplish, I would only say that I think I've approached pretty closely to what it is that may have driven this person or persons to adopting a genocidal point of view and then allowed them to carry it through. If I can do that with enough genociders and over enough different genocides then those findings might yield some universals about people engaged in mass killing. I am not concerned with whether that would constitute a 'truth', and consciously avoid using the term because I really don't know what it means. Likewise, I don't like using the terms rational and irrational because I think they're too culturally binding, as well as being too undefinable. That is, if we say that a mathematician employs rational thought in solving a problem and we also say that Hitler or Eichmann rationally went about organizing the liquidation (rational terminology) of an entire people, then what does rational mean? Methodical? Following a particular paradigm of thought? Unemotional? It just doesn't work for me as a research term, as a way of examining the complexities of any society, human or non-human, and Archer's admonition to avoid analytical dualism applies to the inherent problems incurred with the use of rational/irrational, truth/non-truth, etc.

No one that I know of has applied a CR treatment to biography. But then there aren't that many people working with CR. The psychology dept. and econ dept. here completely eschew CR. It is only because I'm in an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. program that I can utilize it. If my documentary bio works well then I can write up the results and hopefully get CR some credit or publicity.

[Mark Johnson]

I'm not sure the rational/irrational thing can be easily dismissed as an analytical dualism - which is after all a rather rational position to take, but I would broadly agree with your comments about truth (my slightly loose use of language there).

I think talking about the efficacy of an artistic product (whether CR-inspired or not) is difficult. Many CR people believe a poetic response grinds against the CR desire for objective rationality (and they might possibly disagree with some of the things you say (and I agree with) concerning rationality). Biography in particular is very interesting, since our experience of it is not only visceral, but vicarious. I'm generally sympathetic to your comments about understanding 'genociders', but in terms of social efficacy, such a holistic picture would not go down well with anyone who has been personally affected by these people.

Much of this, it seems to me, is about 'teaching' - about engaging others in a dialogue, where the maintenance of the dialogue, and the relationship that ensues, is carefully balanced with the messages that are conveyed - so that the 'message' doesn't necessarily take priority. Then you can start to change people, and through them organisational change. Language (and art) is I suspect in the most part consensual.

Artists have often been inspired by philosophical ideas, and I'm not sure that my relationship to CR, or perhaps yours (please disagree), is that different from Beethoven's to Goethe, or Wagner to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. It forms part of the personal mechanism that contributes to the formation of the work - I think it's quite closely related to technique. But if the work is purely the product of technique, or ideas, I suspect it can become divorced from the reality that art is privileged to witness. It's interesting that you mention 12-note music, because I think this is a case in point.

[Prakash Chatterjee]

I think the rational/irrational thing might be somewhat misapplied in this context. When we "consume" a painting or listen to a piece of music do we ever feel that our "rationality" is being challenged? Even when artists challenge our rationality - as in say Surrealism - it is almost always a way to suggest a higher order rationality - not irrationality. Hence, it might be better to think in terms of the "meta-rational" rather than the "irrational". Lets not create dualities where none exists.

[Stephen Childress]

I'm not clear what you mean by social efficacy, but Miguel de Unamuno's observation that "Fascists hate intelligence" seems to me strikingly correct. A holistic examination of any people responsible for crimes against society debunks the propaganda and false myths surrounding such perpetrators. The greatest respect we can show to the victims of genocide is not to write off their deaths as the simple doings of madmen, or 'evil' people. To gain a deeper perspective on this (genocide studies is my main field, and I have taught a course on genocide for the last three years) I would suggest reading the short introduction and the afterward to "Ordinary men: reserve police battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland" by Christopher Browning, in which he adequately defends this position. In his words, "To explain is not to excuse, and to understand is not to forgive" …. "Shortly before his death at the hands of the Nazis, the French Jewish historian Marc Bloch wrote, 'When all is said and done a single word, 'understanding', is the beacon light of our studies." Browning's study is considered a valuable tool in genocide studies and other social studies programs. There is nothing sympathetic about showing the full nature of mass murderers. In fact, getting to know the qualities of such people and how they manipulate the public is in the public's best interest. Of course, 'how' the message is conveyed is important. Serious documentarists are aghast at Ken Burns' nationalistic, myopic, and simplistic treatments of enormous events. His "The War" is nothing more than an hours-long Life magazine type of photo shoot of Americans portrayed in a Norman Rockwell aura. Who can be offended by it? But what do we learn after hours of such mundane dribble? We have learned to mythologize the past. This is frighteningly similar to what any politician would love to accomplish. The Japanese are so dehumanized and demonized in the film that it could be a war-time propaganda piece. The tens of millions of Russians who died in the war with Germany and made it possible for the Allied landing at Normandy aren't even mentioned. This is all very palatable to Americans who fought in the war and to the families that lost loved ones in the fighting—who could be offended? But an understanding of war is nowhere in sight, and it is clear that Burns doesn't work within a paradigm of holistic thinking. I would suggest the documentary "Shoah" by Claude Lanzmann is the benchmark film on genocide, and a must see. He peels away multiple layers of society and through thick description accomplishes a deeper penetration into the Holocaust and a genocidal regime than any film I've seen.

The problem in our discourse is the meaning of terms, and I think this is irresolvable and the bug-bear of social science. The natural sciences don't have this problem, but in social science the fact that the study of human behavior relies on so many terms that resemble so much mercury slipping through a sieve makes it impossible at certain junctures to find commonality. I explicitly don't work with terms like irrational-rational because I find them more confusing and disruptive than useful. Other people may find them essential to their work and arguments. There's no solution to that. Social efficacy, for me, must always give way to what Sayer says: "The point of all science, indeed all learning and reflection, is to change and develop our understandings and reduce illusion. This is not just an external and contingent sociological condition of learning but its constitutive force, which not only drives it but shapes its form. Without this universal necessary condition, none of the particular methodological and ethical norms of science and learning in general has any point. Learning, as the reduction of illusion and ignorance, can help to free us from domination by hitherto unacknowledged constraints, dogmas and falsehoods." (Sayer 1992: 252).
Social efficacy is constraint. Stockhausen would never have developed his musical theory if he had worried about efficacy. Gaspar Noe's daring film "Irreversible" will not be watched by Midwestern housewives but is very important in the history of film. Likewise, any avant-garde works in any medium.
As far as the Tutsi survivors' response to any holistic film about the 1994 genocide, anything they and the Hutu can learn about President Habyarimana's mistreatment of them would be in their best interests, naturally, and what needs more than anything to be revealed and exploded are the destructive racist myths created by Habyarimana and his regime—myths which still motivate the Hutu genociders at large. The more that is known, the less misunderstanding can be spread. To talk of social efficacy and to talk of disseminating knowledge at the same time is to talk of censorship in one degree or another. Bush's refusal to let coffins of killed soldiers in Iraq be filmed by the media is an example of social efficacy as he defines it, but not as the press does. Social efficacy is always point of view and, as such, is highly personal (as well as highly manipulable and changing).

Artists' ideas, whether mostly borrowed or home-brewed, are always philosophical because ontological.

I don't see that CR is primarily interested in objective rationality, in fact Sayer, Archer, Danermark et al, go to pains to dispel the notion that objectivity (in the natural science sense) is possible, and enlist the aid of abduction and hermeneutic interpretation as part of their methodological pluralistic aspect of the CR approach. Art is not social science but part of the social fabric that CR studies. CR can be enlisted as a tool in a creative process like documentary, because it informs research, and CR could conceivably be enlisted in any process as a way to form ontological grounding, the accumulation of data, and an understanding of social interrelationships. A music historian would find CR very useful, I believe, in putting his subject of study in a complex context, but at this moment in time I haven't investigated what use CR would be in the visual plastic arts. Except as a way to make an art product that revealed society according to CR principles, I don't see any other use for CR in the visual plastic arts. First of all, it would take an enormous amount of space and material to convey the complexity of a subject in society—this has normally fallen into the purview of novels, plays or films, where words convey meaning. The "1812 Overture" may be a complex piece of music, but it doesn't follow or allow for a CR treatment because it isn't concerned with empirical data and the reduction of ignorance. Social science is not art but can be used to inform art projects, probably any art product (art can be informed by anything), but the two are nonetheless separate (that includes poetry).

Surrealism started in France among writers and was called 'automatic writing'. The rationale was (following Freudian theories of dream analysis) to tap into unconstrained or undirected streams of consciousness that would produce hitherto untapped forms. It was clearly an attempt to evade what might be called 'rational' construction of sentences, word relationships or ideas. Painters and sculptors picked up on it as a freeing approach to deconstruct the image, or abstract it. To talk of rational or irrational regarding this movement and the divergent minds and media involved is hopelessly confusing. What matters is simply what they were trying to do, how the approach came about, and what effect it had in time-space. Who knows whether creativity is meta-rational or a biologically evolutionary tool for better surviving in a complex environment? Would we say that a chimpanzee using a stick to knock down a banana it can't reach is meta-rational? Perhaps it is less convoluted to simply say the chimp is solving a problem. And to say that the Surrealists were solving problems, as we all do when we create. I'm making a documentary dissertation because I want 'social efficacy', as you put it. I would simply say that I want as many people to see it as possible and video, film, internet streaming, are the best ways to do it. A doctoral dissertation laying around gathering dust and read by a small coterie of like-minded individuals is not my idea of 'social efficacy', and I don't think it's in society's best interests. Likewise, I consciously shun a vocabulary that is privy to only a small and elite community. That is why I particularly like Andrew Sayer's writing about CR—he's able to eschew and defuse terms that most likely cause confusion in themselves and take away from the argument. And that's why I don't like the words rational/irrational, because they have already, just in the few replies we have made to each other, caused problems not generic to the subject, and trying to parse meaning from such terms has nothing to do with my use of CR, particularly as it is employed in the documentary film process.

There is the same problem of definition with the words 'teaching' and 'informing'. A simple distinction can be made using a chimpanzee example, again. When one chimp, over time, learns about the efficacious effects of different plants from other, older chimps, then I believe that can rightly and unequivocally be seen as learning—the other chimps have inadvertently passed on knowledge, or 'taught' her, as it were. But a vocal or visual signal that alerts the group to danger can, I think, be described as 'informing', in the sense of being a short bit of transferred information that carries no 'new' information, per se, but is a sign, or call to action (or inaction). When I was teaching ESL abroad I used the terms facilitator and learner, rather than teacher and student because the definitions carry clear relational meanings that describe learner-centered as opposed to teacher-centered pedagogy. The specific terms strongly affected every aspect of my ESL experience, in and out of the classroom. So, I don't see film as a teaching tool, but as a wide-open exploration of everything and anything that can be done with film, including where it's shown, how it's shown, and to whom. In documentary alone there are, now, so many 'created' categories that the word 'documentary' has become a term that many intelligent filmmakers refuse to use. But I don't know what all these different forms of documentary 'teach' us, because the effect of a particular film on any given individual is impossible to predict. If I show my documentary on Habyarimana and the Rwandan genocide to Swedish farmers it certainly isn't going to be perceived in the same way Cameroonian policemen would see it, or a Chinese Ph.D. in anthropology. What can I 'teach' them? Or, perhaps a better question would be, "How can I make the most 'honest' (that is, without lying) holistic approach to the subject?", and let the cards fall where they may. Then, whatever people take away from that is simply whatever they choose to take away. I will hazard that this is perhaps a 'democratic' relationship.

I don't know that I would consider consensual the highly controlled propaganda disseminated by Goebbels for the Nazi regime with the German public readership, or the reciting and memorizing Koranic verse in Maddrassas by young children, or the saying of the pledge of allegiance by U.S. schoolchildren.

My overriding concern is with how to make CR useful in the film process. If that project is successful, then it might be a springboard for people with different projects. But my use of CR is a social science use that informs the film process—CR does not itself become art or film. There is no confusion here between poetry and CR, art and CR, music and CR. CR is an informing philosophy that can be applied to research methodology related to, I think, any project, as long as the subject has something to do with society—CR is a social science philosophy, as I understand it. Music, the plastic arts, and film are social arts and part of the total social field that falls under the gaze of CR-driven research. When trying to discern how CR can be used in a 'practical' manner, this relationship of CR to the subject is crucial. Pawson and Tilley's "Realistic Evaluation" gives some very useful case studies using CR, and points the way to further work in this area, although my approach to CR and film is considerably wider-flung.

I don't believe one can accurately or completely describe what our interface with music is. At the extremes there isn't even a very wide consensus on what constitutes music. John Cage certainly challenged that idea, especially with his silent piece for piano, where he sits, lifts the keyboard cover, remains motionless for several minutes, puts the keyboard cover back down again and leaves. He also was wont in class to play a single key on the keyboard repeatedly for as long as an hour. Some students would go mad and leave fairly soon, while others would find themselves relaxing into something like a meditative trance, and reply afterward that it was one of the most soothing experiences they'd had. To begin to label what we do with music is a dangerous area, and I think it's pretty clear that whatever we say is easily disproved or contradicted or amended in some way. To say music is rational when a baby smiles at its mother singing a lullaby, or when Amazonians dancing with animal skins over their heads truly believe they have become that animal, misses the point considerably, I'm afraid.
Art, love, altruism, murder, torture, genocide—these things (and many others) defy close definition or understanding because words can't encapsulate non-verbal agency, and because human agency is comprised of so many different elements working in unique interrelationships formed within individual experience. Even a holistic approach to the Rwandan genocide will show, as I've suggested, a few of the facets of the kaleidoscopic series of 'events' resulting in what we call genocide. No truth but perception.

Just as these thoughts are.

[Joe O'Mahoney]

I don't know if people are interested but we run a 'Critical Realism in Action' group which moves from Uni to Uni. We're currently on our fourth one and have applied for ESRC funding. The next is in Cardiff on 27th Feb.



Best wishes

Joe