I’ve been quiet mostly because I don’t have any new projects, and have been working to get my book, The Question of Theater: Realist Social Theory and the Definition of Theater published. The proposal has gone through numerous bizarre turns, but I’ll skip the details. (Maybe someday….) In any case, recently I received a very positive report (followed by a bizarre editor action) which among other things recommended more explicit engagement with analytic philosophy, in a manner which seemed count me as an analytic philosopher, which took me aback because I don’t see myself that way. Granted, “analytic philosophy” now means all sorts of approaches, some of which are closer to critical realism than others. But I was pointed to a couple books by Michael Bennett, which I’m already familiar with, so I knew what the reader had in mind. In any case, I feel more kinship with dialectical philosophy, specifically the materialist variety. I suppose this puts me on the “Continental” side of the silly, inaccurate, and even incoherent analytic-Continental divide, not that it matters much.*

But the comment led me to review how close I really am to dialectics. For all my mucking about in philosophical subjects, I’ve not read as widely as one might wish. (That’s what you get by committing interdisciplinarity and history.) So I’ve been (re-)reading some things to confirm, mostly Bhaskar and Fredric Jameson. However, I note that the Dictionary of Critical Realism asserts that there is “a dialectic of dialectical and analytical reasoning in which dialectical reasoning ‘overreaches’ (rather than transcends) analytical reasoning. [D]ialectical reason builds on the analytical, overreaching but not transcending it, while the latter lacks without the former” (133-34, italics removed). So from a CR perspective we aren’t talking about opposition so much as expanded perception.

One major point is the important role dialectics gives to history and historical process. A historical sensibility is clear in Marx, and there’s Jameson’s famed dictum, “Always historicize!” I declare my position in the introduction’s current first sentence: “Theater is the first art with a historical beginning.” Indeed, as far as I know, I have a thicker background in theater history than most other theater theorists, who often solely consider modern and contemporary theater, including Bennett. (After all, as the general editor of Theatre Histories through two editions, I learned a few things, although even without that experience, I would still think it important to keep medieval theater in mind.)

However, in contrast with some dialectical approaches (like Hegel’s) I am not given to view processes or relationships in binary or oppositional terms (except perhaps in a few contexts). For instance, while I see an important fiction/nonfiction contrast, I also see their boundary as porous and even fuzzy; on the other hand I completely reject the sanctity of the performer/spectator opposition. Even though I see historical change as often driven by conflicts and problems, I don’t gravitate toward “contradiction”–and not all historical change seems amenable to being framed as “conflicts and problems,” for example some types scientific discovery, or aging. But as I understand it, dialectics can also refer to relational thought, and I see relationships as crucial to understanding social entities and signs (the latter especially in a Peircean sense). I have written on how one important reason for upholding Bhaskar’s concept of three ontological domains (real, actual, and empirical, or in my revision, real, actual, and semiosic) is that the powers inherent in the third domain are not physical, they are relational.

Likewise, I tend to refer to dynamics, and limit “process” to its strict meaning. (Sometimes historicity serves the same conceptual function as process.) This I think accords with the critical realist focus on powers, which I rephrase as powers and susceptibilities since one can’t have one without the other.

Deleuze, from whom I’ve drawn the concepts of virtuality and simulacrum, is a premier process philosopher with his own concept of dialectics. “Problems are always dialectical: the dialectic has no other sense, nor do problems have any other sense.  The problematic or dialectical Idea is a system of connections between differential elements, a system of differential relations between genetic elements…. [T]he economic is the social dialectic itself–in other words, the totality of the problems posed to a given society, or the synthetic and problematising field of that society” (Difference and Repetition 179, 181, 186). Problem and Idea, which are synonymous, refer more or less to differenciated structures in tension with relevant domains of the world, e.g. “An organism is nothing if not the solution to a problem, as are each of its differenciated organs, such as the eye which solves a light ‘problem’” (211). I think this is a useful materialist way of thinking. (“Differenciated” mean emergent or actualized in various specific forms.)

One of the concepts most important for me is “open totality,” described in Bhaskar’s Dialectic as “rife with external as well as internal, and (not the same thing) accidental as well as necessary connections, replete with gaps, discontinuities, voids as well as pockets of thoroughgoing (sub)totality” (1993 ed.: 270-71). (Bhaskar actually more often uses “partial totality,” but “open” appears to be synonymous and has more resonance for art and, as I see it, society and culture.) Totalities of some type are important to all varieties of dialectical thought. Reflexivity is a critical concept in The Question of Theater, and in reviewing Bhaskar’s discussion of totality I note that he calls reflexivity the “inwardized” or internal form of totality. (I am much friendlier toward Dialectic than many critical realists, though I’m not convinced by all of its arguments.)

I don’t view totalities as expressive, driven in history by a particular spirit (or subject), or having an inherent direction (i.e., I adopt the materialist view of totalities). In fact I don’t have any faith in the promise that the arc of history bends toward justice (though admittedly this may just be pessimism born of the awfulness of our time). Social totalities are complex, and interactions do not necessarily have inevitable or predicable results, though there strong tendencies. Their historical development involves no transcendence, only immanence.

Totalities, incidentally, can wreak havoc on exposition. Jameson puts it well: “The peculiar difficulty of dialectical writing lies indeed in its holistic, ‘totalizing’ character: as though you could not say any one thing until you had first said everything; as though with each new idea you were bound to recapitulate the entire system” (Marxism and Form, 306). Well do I know this: it was a significant problem in writing The Question of Theater, which has an annoying amount of bouncing around and foreshadowing, and rather often I needed to resequence material or whole chapters.

I consider emergence a crucial concept, but some versions of analytic philosophy have a concept of emergence too. I don’t know if it emphasizes the concept as much. Also I don’t recall seeing the concept in Bennett. One contrast between my work and Bennett’s has less to do with dialectics per se than materialism. We both explore the concept of possible worlds and its relevance to theater. Unsurprisingly Bennett adopts the standard logical semantics approach, which hinges on logical possibility. I am more interested in real possibility (cf. Deleuze’s dialectics), which hinges on materiality, and I displace the concept of possible worlds accordingly, formulating a concept grounded in the implications of virtual worlds (taking virtuality in the Deleuzean sense, having nothing to do with computers). Which is not to say that Bennett is an idealist, since logic is necessary for all good analysis (although I think Bennett does lay himself open to idealism). But certainly some analytic philosophy is idealist. The universe doesn’t worry about logic or meaning, only people do. The universe doesn’t even have to be intelligible.

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*  I think what the analytic vs Continental distinction amounts to, from the analytic perspective, is “Philosophy by good Englishmen, a few (ugh) Yanks and other foreigners, and a very few (shudder) women provided they write in English, vs philosophy by spiders from Mars.” I don’t know if there’s a similar distinction from the Continental perspective, but if there is, it’s probably something like “Philosophers who are interesting vs those who aren’t famous for chain smoking.” In any case, an overview of how the category “analytic philosophy” is a unholy mess can be found at Panu Raatikainen, “What Was Analytic Philosophy?,” in What Is Analytic Philosophy, ed. Hanjo Glock, Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy, vol. 2, no. 2 (2013): 11-27, https://jhaponline.org/article/view/18/17. (Glock moderates some of Raatikainen’s claims.)