For our approach is predicated on the articulation of an alternative social ontology that stresses the radical contingency and structural incompleteness of all systems of social relations … [drawing on the Lacanian concept] the disruptive presence of THE REAL which marks the impossibility of any putative fullness of being, whether at the level of structures, subjects or discourses (11).
Following Bhaskar and others, we begin by assuming that any legitimate approach to social and political analysis requires at least some ontological assumptions and commitments … However, in our view the importance of ontology is not just about what sorts of things exist, but that they exist and how they exist. Indeed, of capital importance in this regard is the fact that objects and subjects are marked by an ‘essential instability’ that problematizes a simple listing of their necessary intrinsic properties and causal capacities. Therefore, of greater import for us is their contingency, historicity and precariousness … this perspective enables us to highlight the constructed and political character of social objectivity, and then to articulate a connected series of concepts and logics that can help us to analyse social relations and processes, while remaining faithful to our ontological commitments (11).