Review of Irving Velody and Robin Williams (eds.), The Politics of Constructionism, SAGE Publications, London, 1998, 241 pp.
CONSTRUCTIONISM, if you have not come across the term before, is a collection of academic work that shares some surface affinities, and likes to think of itself as having a great common past. Gergen, cited in the introduction to this volume, situates and defines it as follows:
Drawing importantly from emerging developments most prominently in the history of science, the sociology of knowledge, ethnomethodology, rhetorical studies of science, symbolic anthropology, feminist theory and post- structuralist literary theory, social constructionism is not so much a foundational theory of knowledge as an anti-foundational dialogue. Primary emphases of this dialogue are based on: the social discursive matrix from which knowledge claims emerge and from which their justification is derived; the values/ideology implicit within knowledge posits; the modes of informal and institutional life sustained and replenished by ontological and epistemological commitments; and the distribution of power and privilige favoured by disciplinary beliefs. Much attention is also given to the creation and transformation of cultural constructions; the adjustment of competing belief/value systems; and the generation of new modes of pedagogy, scholarly expression and disciplinary relations.
That is a full plate, a sot of academic smörgåsbrod that may keep the faculty of a mid-size university busy for a couple of years. The question, of course, is: would we like to visit that university? Promising a broad ranging and critical overview of themes of social constructionism and its relevance to contemporary social and political issues, this anthology may help to answer that question.
The book consists of four parts: ‘Formulating Constructionism’, ‘The Limits of Constructionism’, ‘Applying Constructionism’ and ‘The Politics of Constructionism’. In keeping with the thrust of many of its contributors, I should not bother the readers with dumb facts like this. Instead, the reviewer would like to point out that this volume is constructed in four parts, each including a number of papers (texts, inscriptions) while excluding others, i.e., silencing voices, which is generally considered a bad thing to do. To the unsophisticated eye the division may look like a quite natural one, but of course it isn’t. Isn’t there already politics in formulating constructionism? Can we seriously apply constructionism before the dialogue on its limits has come to an end? I’m glad you asked.
Work in constructionism often seems to be driven primarily by the Charlie Brown fear of not being smart enough and losing friends. To fight this fear, authors enter into battles with the spectres of old-fashioned philosophy and other forms of naive thinking. Most of the time, they think that showing the flag will be enough to take a stand and to deter the enemy. Take one example out of many. Tom Shakespeare is interested in a ‘schematic analysis’ of the rhetorical uses of social constructionism within social movement contexts. He reconstructs this problem in terms of a debate between essentialist and constructionist explanations of minority group experience. Reconstructed in this way, the problem circles around a supposed contrast between biological and social/cultural features. A true constructionist is of course sceptical about this dichotomy. Didn’t Shakespeare know this? Of course he does, so he immediately warns us that he does “not wish to imply a correspondence theory of truth, or a simplistic positivism” — did anyone bring that up? — and continues to state that “external reality and personal embodiment are clearly not accessible except via contingent language and concepts, and the crude dichotomy between society and biology which I rely on throughout this chapter should not be taken as a denial that the natural is already and always social.” For an analysis - however schematic - of the debate, this is not relevant, but Shakespeare’s friends will be glad he wrote that.
The first three sections of this collection go on and on with the game of name- dropping, pre-emptive strikes to silence criticism that has not been - and probably never will be - aired, and give-and-take-prose that results in positions that require more acrobatic skills to keep all balls in the air than most authors have acquired. Even some critics of constructionism in this volume seem to have been infected by the virus that causes tedious, boring, pompous writing. Now that social constructivism has turned into an academic industry, the days of sharp and clear and funny writing that marked the work of Collins, Latour, and Shapin seem to be over. There is little progress to report (‘progress’ being - of course - a concept that constructionists mistrust). The one exception here is Ian Hacking, who presents a crystal clear paper that dissects the metaphor of ‘social constructivism’ (a phrase that in the course of the book takes over from ‘constructionism’). But that paper is no reason to buy or even borrow this book, since Hacking has expanded his argument in The Social Construction of What? (Harvard UP. 1999).
Section Four of the volume, however, is a different matter. No more recycling of worn- out ideas, no more unnecessary name- dropping, no historical introductions that try to position the author in a long list of fancy and famous thinkers. The papers in this section face a real problem: the relation of constructionism to politics and moral issues.
The problem is easy to formulate. As Hacking points out, there are roughly two bodies of constructivist work. The first one applies constructivist analysis primarily to ideas about people, knowledge of people, or practices that involve the interactions of people. This brand of constructivism has primarily socio-political aims. It shows that many forms of labelling and categorisation of practices that may look natural and necessary are ‘in fact’ constructed and contingent. The second one applies constructivist analysis to knowledge of inanimate nature. This brand has metaphysical aims; it criticises realism as defended in mainstream philosophy of science and argues for relativism, i.e., metaphysical agnosticism.
In the political arena, these two forms of constructivism have reverse effects. Whereas the first brand shows that because of the contingent basis of existing ways of thinking and action, there is space for alternatives and political action. The second one results in political immobility. If we can deconstruct the strong realist claims that come with the natural sciences, it must be easy to deconstruct also the real pain of real people. So why bother? Being a ‘left-wing relativist’ is a contradiction in terms. A first prerequisite for changing the world is the recognition that there is a world out there that has to be changed. The result of mixing up these two brands of constructivism are balancing acts, of the type Donna Haraway (in a passage cited by Shakespeare just after the above criticised quotation) tries to perform: “how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects … and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a ‘real world’.”
Balancing acts may be amusing in the circus, in academia they are not. There are several possible ways to get away from this. The first one is to take the route of Bruno Latour’s recent work, i.e., to try to construct a metaphysics that goes beyond the asymmetric relation between epistemology and ontology that is taken for granted in most of the Western tradition since Kant. Although many authors in this volume pay lip service to Latour, his recent work is not discussed in this volume.
A second way out is to relativise the importance of constructivism and to look for different sources for guidance and inspiration. Mitchell Dean’s discussion of Foucault serves this purpose. Dean provides an exegesis of Foucault’s paper ‘Questions of Method’ which discusses the background of Discipline and Punish. Foucault’s relation to constructionism is complex, so much is clear. If we consider him to be a ‘constructionist’, then Kant and even Carnap also deserve this label. His archaeology is a historicized version of Kantian critique with genealogy adding lineages of heterogeneous events of the content released by archaeology. But Foucault’s theme is not ‘the construction of reality’, but the effects in the real to which discourses that set up (among others) true/false distinctions are linked. His work is not directed toward scholarly ends, but to a diagnostics of the present. Dean points out that for Foucault, there is no straight line between discourses and their effects. Effects cannot be read from the realm of truth. Discourses and the programmes of conduct that come with them promote forms of visibility and evaluation. They guide the way we understand ourselves, they make possible various forms of expertise and solidify into particular institutions, and they allow certain forms of persuasive argument, etc. To trace these effects and to open up discussions, one has to go beyond the social constructivist critique of epistemology. One has to set up a ‘political ontology’ that accounts for the effects of various epistemologies, i.e., that perceives knowledge-related practices as explanandum, rather than perceives in the constructivist’s mode practices as an explanans for knowledge-claims.
Craig Mackenzie suggests another, and in many respects easier, alternative. Mackenzie points out that both Walzer and Rawls, key authors in the communitarian and libertarian tradition of political theory, argue that their theories are based on convictions and understandings that they claim we share. The empirical adequacy of these claims, however, needs more serious scrutiny than both Walzer and Rawls provide. This is a point where constructivist techniques may be quite helpful. Hacking’s discussion of child abuse is exemplary for this approach. Other (non- constructivist) approaches may be added, e.g., the one of Boltanski and Thevenot (De la Justification, Gallimard, 1991). Of course, this is a less ambitious task than the grandiose programme constructionism suggests. But for those constructivists who shy away from the philosophical complexities of Foucault’s and Latour’s work, i.e., who want to keep their feet on solid British soil, it may be ambition enough - to paraphrase John Locke - “to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way of politics.” That, however, requires also less pretentious prose than most authors in this collection of essays seem to be willing or able to write.
author’s address: gdevries@hum.uva.nl