<< Derrida's Obituary, or, Is Literary Theory Too Abstruse? | Front Page | Three Very Short Kurmanji Stories >>
Monday, November 03, 2008
Critique of Social Construction
Tim Burke has an interesting 4-part critique of the notion of social construction. Here’s his third point:
My third objection follows on the second. The fact that for a long time scholars spent considerable effort to demonstrate that a given identity, institution, etc., simply was a social construction, tells you something about the intent of that argument. It was designed to undercut or demolish practices being described as such. The problem is that many scholars also recognized the “reality” of such constructions–that once constructed, they were social reality, that there wasn’t any ontological, Platonic human “real” being concealed by constructions. If you said something like “modern subjectivities built around liberal individualism, around rights-bearing sovereign selves are a construction”, you also had to say, “But no less real for that”. A lot of Foucauldian work (including by Foucault himself) had this sort of coy double-gesture: madness, sexuality, criminality, etc., were “constructed”, but also “real”–and thus if you said, “Well, so are you against those constructions as we have them?” you would hear “Oh, my no, there isn’t anything but these constructions, there is nothing outside, nothing more ‘real’ beyond them”.
Comments
I’m just responding to the excerpt featured here.
On the one hand, I don’t deny Burke the kind of social constructivists he illustrates. There are silly people in the world. On the other hand, he asks a very good question - “Well, so are you against those constructions as we have them?” - and presents a very dumb answer as not just the norm, but the inevitable response internal to the logic of social construction.
It’s a strawman if this all there is to it, because there is a very different response to whether so-called social constructionists are “against those constructions as we have them,” and that’s “certainly.” Nothing is necessary is the message Burke’s strawman inverts into nothing different is possible.
I’m with Joe here. My understanding is that the only point in pointing out the constructedness of the social world is to remind people that it can be changed.
We’d have to actually address (or even mention) Berger and Luckmann’s *The Social Construction of Reality* to think even remotely closely about this issue.
People should read Rom Harre’s “Personal Being” and “Social Being”.
The social construction people argue against is crap, and the arguments against it are crap.
Burke continues with his third point:
But in Foucault and many aligned works, there’s also this sense of expose, that in seeing something as construction, you were seeing its inauthenticity, you had discovered its hidden truth, you had caught it in flagrante delicto. This coy double-gesture got old real fast. If everything is “construction”, then all we’re doing is describing process of change over time, e.g., writing history. If some things are more constructed than other things, then we need some kind of foundationalist account of real identities, psychologies, social formations, etc. If some constructions are good and others bad, then we need some kind of normative ethical or political theory about the good and the bad. (This is something Lynn Hunt supplies nicely in her recent history of ‘human rights’: she says both ‘They are constructions arising out of post-1789 global history AND they are desirable constructions’.) A lot of that leads us back away from “social construction” as cliche, but most people who used the trope too enthusiastically couldn’t be weaned away from it.
Take race--it’s very much constructed, and it’s easy to demonstrate how, and the fallacy of race as a biological essence, etc… The next step is to say that, just because that’s true, does not mean that race is not “real” in the social sense. In other words, it can be as constructed as you want, but it has a social reality that doesn’t disappear once you’ve explained its constructed nature. There will still be racists, etc…
On the other hand, once you recognize that race is a construction certain ways of thinking about race become ridiculous. There is a social change that ensues if enough people see the absurdity of a certain racial essentialism.
So I think it is a mistake to impute to Foucault the idea that there is nothing outside of the construction. There may be a more desirable organization of our ideas about something that the prevalent construction impedes. Didn’t he want to revive some older constructions of sexuality that he saw in the Ancients? Seeing that something is culturally defined does in fact allow us to step out of the definition and imagine other possibilities. (To expand on Luther’s point about change.)
I guess what I’m not seeing is the alternative to social constructionism. When we are dealing with social, manmade institutions, the fact that they are constructed seems self-evident. Even the sky is construction of society. There is no actual object or location, the sky “itself,” that lies apart from human perceptions of it. It is the name we give to a certain visual field and including disparate objects and phenomena, with particular social meanings, etc…
The social construction of reality is, in fact, the “common sense” default position (or should be). What I take Burke to be doing is to critique certain misuses of the concept, certain ways in which it seems to give permission for certain lazy scholarly practices.
Thanks, Jonathan. That’s pretty much what I had in mind: a critique of the “ordinary” implementation of ‘social construction’ as a scholarly trope, which very much followed on the genuinely revolutionary and useful implications of the concept as it appeared in a lot of theory as well as concretized studies. One might protest legitimately that we should save our debates for the best rather than the most banal expressions of important ideas. But a lot more trees die for the everyday, standardized version of some concepts or approaches, and it’s worth trying to push the standardizations of some concepts towards a more consistently rewarding, exploratory version.
At least some of this I hope is in the entry itself. Blogging is already an abbreviated form, and one where we’re trying to get stuff out there with a kind of immediate, off-the-cuff feeling. When even the limited nuance you put into a quick entry gets truncated down instantly to whatever aphoristic badness Emerson’s got in his bullseye, you kind of wonder what the point of this all is.
"I guess what I’m not seeing is the alternative to social constructionism.”
Suppose I believe in natural kinds. Suppose that I believe “being human” constitutes one of these kinds. Then whatever is entailed by “being human” is not attributable to social constructionism.
(It’s quite possible, of course, that--as Aristotle and Aquinas believed--the nature of humans was to live socially, but this does not mean that the nature of humans is a social construct.)
My understanding is that the only point in pointing out the constructedness of the social world is to remind people that it can be changed.
I agree that this often lies behind an argument that X is socially constructed: the person making the arguments wants to say that X is bad, and needs to be changed, but first needs to overcome the conservative objection that X cannot be changed, becuase it is in some way natural or necessary.
However, there can be other good reasons for being interested in whether something is contigent or socially constructed.
- Can we reasonably expect the phenomenon to exist cross-culturally, or even across species?
For example, consider the psychiatrists’ manual, the DSM-IV. This is a taxonomy of the problems psychiatric patients commonly have, at least in the West. Can you reasonably expect this taxonomy to hold in a different country? Some kinds of experiments are done on rats, rather than human beings, because the Institutional Review Board won’t let them be done on people. If you rely on rat experiments to tell you something about a behavior that you’re interested in in human beings, you’re making a very strong assumption about the behaviour existing across species.
- Is it reasonable to seek certain kinds of explanations?
For example, if we’re interested in a particular human behavior, is it reasonable for us to expect it to be controlled by genes, and to expect that anyone with the variant gene will exhibit the behavior (no matter their cultural background). For that matter, is it reasonable to expect that rats will suddenly start engaging in the behavior, if we give them the human version of the gene?
So, for example, if some intrepid biologist wants to do a genome-wide association study to find the “gene for celebrating Christmas”, do you fund their grant proposal?
As further examples of social construction arguments:
- There are therapists who avoid giving their patients a DSM-IV diagnosis, on the basis that patients will modify their own behaviour to conform to the diagnosis. (In “The Social Construction of What?”, Ian Hacking talks about “interactive kinds” - the act of classification changes the behaviour of the agent being classified)
- When amending the categories of the DSM, the argument can be made that a proposed new “disorder” should not be added, because doing so will create it, not just classify a pre-existing reality.
There’s something about psychology that makes it a particularly good source of “social construction” examples. Maybe it’s because it tries to apply the methods of the natural sciences to human activity.
A useful SEP article.
Tim Burke confesses that he was tempted to write a defense of constructionism but that has already been done (The promises of constructivism http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/087.html).
Bruno Latour is probably one of the important names in the advent & demise of constructivism so his work should not be ignored; at least he has pointed “that constructivism might be our only defense against fundamentalism...”
It might be telling that Latour’s ETP students are training as engineers and technocrats, members of a governmental elite, but that actual governmental responsibility in France is held by a different group of people who attended different schools. Though I agree that Latour’s worth reading even beyond the convenience of having a theory ready-made.