For GH, Bhaskar’s ontology focuses on the stuff, the furniture of the world’ in a manner of speaking, which doesn’t adequately investigate the ‘being of beings’, or how this stuff emerges within a relational, contingent historical context.
We follow Heidegger here by focusing on the historicity and contingency of beings — and not just on the contingent interaction of fully constituted causal mechanisms … against Bhaskar we … cannot sever beings from the relational contexts in which they appear (160).
(I)n Bhaskar’s account there is a short-circuiting of the necessary and complex relationship between the ontical and ontological levels of analysis. Social structures (or ‘society’) … are ultimately privileged … what Bhaskar calls ‘intransitive objects’: “things [that] exist independently of our descriptions’. In his account of structure and agency, he thus privileges the role of structures … what this does not fully take on board, as Laclau has pointed out, is the transitive nature of the transitive-intransitive distinction (161).