Dan Little: Social consciousness and critical realism

Daniel Little argues that Social consciousness and critical realism are interrelated. The material basis of social structures exposed through Critical Realism can explain the subjective reality constructed by agents in their Social Consciousness. Little omits the reproduction of the objective reality by agents reproducing their subjective reality.

Little argues that the subjective view of one's social identity is constructed …through interaction with other individuals, and many of those interactions are determined by enduring social structures and institutional arrangements. We do not have a sense of who and what we are in isolation. My concept of being male is built as distinct from what I perceive femaleness to be, and what others perceive femaleness to be.

So ideas and identities are objective in at least two senses, and are therefore amenable to treatment from a realist perspective. They have objective social determinants that can be rigorously investigated; and they have a particular grammar and semiotics that need to be rigorously investigated as well. Both kinds of inquiry are amenable to realist interpretation: we can be realist about the mechanisms through which a given body of social beliefs and values are promulgated through a population, and we can be realist about the particular content of those belief systems themselves.

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In a patriarchal society, the idea of gender is expressed as either male or female. How this gender is expressed is through a particular set of signs, and an acceptable set of language and actions. An example would be wearing pants for males, and wearing dresses for females. One would say that a male wearing a dress to be taboo.

Ironically, this position seems to converge in an unexpected way with two streams of classical social theory. This approach to social consciousness resonates with some of the holistic ideas that Durkheim brought to his interpretation of religion and morality. But likewise it brings to mind Marx's views of the determinants of social consciousness through objective material circumstances. We don't generally think of Marx and Durkheim as having much in common. But on the topic of the material reality of ideas and their origins in material features of social life, they seem to agree.

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In Marx's case, this is usually expressed as the Objective creating the Subjective. Reality creates our ideas about reality. If one sees two (2) genders, then one has the idea that there are only two (2) genders. This is reinforced when others report that there are only two (2) genders.

These considerations seem to lead to a strong conclusion: critical realism can be as insightful in its treatment of objective social structures as it is in study of “subjective” features of social consciousness and identities.

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What Little omits is that Marx also said that the Subjective creates the Objective. What we see as reality is not the true reality: it is only an approximation. Our ideas inform what we see. In this case, the existence of other genders is considered to be an impossiblity. This idea of impossibility precludes any discussion of other genders.