Social Construction in Context

Kenneth J Gergen

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780761965459, 9780761965442
• eBook ISBN: 9781446228685
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This latest book by one the world?s leading protagonists in the field will be welcomed not just by psychologists but by students, academics and professionals interested in social constructionism across a wide range of subjects.

Social Construction in Context explores the potentials of social constructionist theory when placed in diverse intellectual and practical contexts. It demonstrates the achievements of social constructionism, and what it can now offer various fields of inquiry, both academic, professional and applied, given the proliferation of the theory across the social sciences and humanities. First order issues of concern within the academic world, objectivity, truth, power and ideology, are now being augmented by widespread developments in practice - therapeutic, pedagogical, organizational and political. This book looks closely at these developments and examines both the positive potentials and limitations of social constructionist theory when applied to a variety of domains. It has been written in an accessible and scholarly manner making it suitable for a wide-ranging readership.

PART I

SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES

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1

CONSTRUCTIONISM AND REALISM: A NECESSARY COLLISION?

In order to enact a transformative politics, one must identify correctly the source of the problem – but from a relativist perspective, there can be no such thing as a correct analysis.

Dana L. Cloud, in After Postmodernism

The saints are gathering at the real places, trying tough skin on sharp conscience … you can hear them yelping.

A. R. Ammons, The Confirmers

In important respects the drama of social constructionism was born of opposition. Constructionist writings drew their principal energy from their multi-dimensional critique of the longstanding tradition of positivist/empiricist science. Long reigning was the view that scientific claims to knowledge were effectively uncontaminated by culture, history and ideology – that indeed empirical science was the crowning achievement in the human attempt to understand nature and self. Constructionist critique – emanating from the history of science and sociology of knowledge, gaining breadth and depth through contributions from critical theory, feminism, literary theory, rhetoric, and more, and then spilling across the disciplines – flew in the face of the acceptable. The capacity of science to generate transcendent truths – beyond history and culture – or by dint of rigorous methodology to ‘carve nature at the joint’, was thrown into jeopardy. And hence the drama – often called ‘the science wars – that continues to pervade the scholarly and scientific world. For constructionists, all claims to ‘the real’ are traced to processes of relationship, and there is no extra-cultural means of ultimately privileging one construction of reality over another. Realism is on the run, and the response has been aggressive and acrimonious.

Constructionist critique was enormously appealing to many groups whose voices had been marginalized by science, and to all those whose pursuits of social equality and justice were otherwise thwarted by existing authorities of truth. Constructionist arguments not only served to level the playing field, but also opened the door to broadscale political and moral critique. As later chapters will detail, constructionism and culture critique walked hand in hand. Slowly, however, those engaged in social change began to find that the constructionist axe turned back to gash the hand of the user. There was no critique of the power structure, oppression or injustice that could lay claim to truth beyond construction – that was itself not ‘one way of understanding’ among many, as opposed to ‘the correct way’. A new schism emerged, one in which culture critics found constructionist ideas inimical to their ends – insufficiently passionate, confident or cantankerous. While their targets live in constructed worlds, culture critics have not wished to jettison the privilege of truth claims. Constructionist ideas thus came under attack from both ‘right’ and ‘left’, with both antagonists sharing a commitment to realism.¹

The complexity of the conflict has further intensified: first, many enamoured with social constructionist ideas have wished to document their implications. Research has been mounted, for example, into processes of conversation, the media and identity construction. And such research is often accompanied by an investment in precisely those claims to ‘truth through method’ that constructionism has been at pains to subvert. If conversation is a major means by which we secure the sense of truth, constructionists ask, how can one ‘get it right’ about the nature of discourse or conversation? Further, humanists, phenomenologists and cognitive constructivists – who welcomed the constructionist emphasis on meaning making and its critical challenge to positivist hegemony – soon found that many of their own icons – intentionality, agency, experience, and cognitive construals – were thrown into question. While largely willing to see the material world as a construction, they wished to hold fast to certain to the realities of the mind. The relationship to constructionism resultingly cooled.² In effect, the scholarly atmosphere is striated with conflict – realism and constructionism are everywhere in conflict. How, then, are we to go on?

Conflict in cultural context

It is useful to situate this form of academic conflict within the broader context of society. Conceptual conflicts are virtually endemic to scholarly life, and in significant respects bear a similarity to altercations within the broader society – for example, between political parties, religious factions, unions and management, and so on. In virtually all cases we confront differing conceptions of the real, the rational and the good, along with commitments to integral patterns of action and particular arrangements of material. As many commentators have also noted, societal conflict has become an increasingly commanding feature of the contemporary cultural landscape. We not only confront increasingly prevalent cleavages in terms of racial, economic and gender differences, but also on issues of sexual preference, the environment, abortion, pornography, religion, social justice, and more. Elsewhere (Gergen, 1991) I have attempted to link this explosion of grass roots activism to the emerging technologies of communication. As such technologies enable persons of like disposition to locate similar others, to declare group consciousness and to generate agendas of change, so do we find an increasing profusion of value-based sub-cultures. I shall return to this expanding domain of difference in the final chapter.

In what follows I wish to treat the realism/constructionism antinomy within this broader context of societal conflict – viewing our present controversy as tissued to the society, and in turn, possibly bearing on its future. If we have created a sea of struggle within the academic sphere, how are we to proceed? Is there anything in our mode of comportment in this case that bears on broader societal potentials? Are there any insights to be garnered from our interactions that harbour promise of broader implication? My particular way of treating these questions is informed by social constructionist dialogues. My specific hope is to step out of the agonistic and ingurgitating modes of argument that have separated realists and constructionists, and inquire into our collective actions themselves. From a broader historical or cultural standpoint, why we are at logger-heads, what is at stake for us and what alternatives exist or could be created?

The present analysis is composed of four parts. First I address the constructionist resistance to realism, what is at stake in the avoidance of ultimate claims to the real. I then turn to consider the potentials of solving the realism/constructionism dispute through reasoned argument. My conclusion here is not optimistic. In an attempt to move forward, I then raise questions concerning the ways in which we as scholars and practitioners situate ourselves within the competing discourses of realism and constructionism. What is it to employ these discourses in our various relations? In addressing these questions we begin to locate a space for reconciliation, what my Irish colleagues call a ‘Fourth Province’ – a domain of neutrality outside the borders of conflict. Finally, given the potential for softening differences, I turn to broader implications and applications.

Resistance to realism: the case of the missing body

As a précis to the more general analysis of conflict, it is useful to address those many colleagues who have joined in the critique of traditional science – often employing constructionist arguments – but who wish to hold to remnants of an unconstructed world. Constructionists are variously scolded for ‘throwing out the baby with the bath-water’, and entreated to remain firm on certain matters. I have considerable sympathy with these responses, but at the same time strong reservations. It is this resistance that deserves preliminary attention. Perhaps the two domains of the real most strongly embraced by my colleagues are power and the body – the former especially significant to cultural critics and the latter to the helping professions. I will treat issues of power more fully in Chapter 7. Here let us consider the ‘problem of embodiment’ in more detail. An article by John Lannamann (1998) provides a convenient textual forum. Speaking primarily to an audience of therapists, Lannamann begins with a personal story: his parents were Christian Scientists and did not believe in practices of modern medicine. As a result Lannamann suffered the needless death of his brother. The denial of bodily reality by Christian Scientists, and the resulting agony, seemed for Lannamann to bear a resemblance to the conditions created by social constructionism. Constructionists, too, seem to deny the reality of a body outside discourse. It is in the material body, suggests Lannamann, that we confront ‘the limits’ of construction, a reality that must necessarily inform and correct the all too ‘playful’ peregrinations of the constructionist. To neglect the material body is to replicate the myopia of Christian Science – where the myth of the spirit masks the realities of disease and death.

This is surely a significant charge and one with which I am deeply sympathetic. To be sure, I live in much the same world as Lannamann; we both take bodies, disease and death very seriously. When my children were physically ill I sought medical attention as opposed to a spiritual advisor. And I will readily talk about my pain and pleasure, seek annual medical check-ups and donate funds to famine relief and clothing to the Purple Heart. However, it is at precisely this point of ‘sure knowledge’ – where bodies just are what they are, where we know very well what we experience and we can clearly distinguish between health and illness – that constructionism becomes a most valuable asset. A constructionist intelligibility opens what can be a precious space for reflection, reconsideration and possible reconstruction. Herein lies an enormous emancipatory potential, granting us a capacity to step outside the taken-for-granted and to break loose from the sometimes strangulating grip of the commonplace. And herein lies the possibility for new futures as we are invited to consider possibilities for reconstruction. We are prompted to explore alternative understandings of ‘what is the case’, and to locate meanings that enable us to go on in more adequate ways. For those who live in complex societal circumstances, the potential for creative reconstruction is a continuous treasure; for lives despondent, tormented or tortured such resources may be essential.

It is in this vein that analysts have taken a keen and critical interest in ‘bodily inscription’, or the ways in which the body is variously constructed in contemporary society (Featherstone, Hepworth, & Turner, 1991). Here the attempt is typically critical, attempting to question taken-for-granted assumptions in hopes of liberation. For example, critics question the presumption of gender differences (Butler, 1990; Kessler & McKenna, 1978), the common construction of beauty and the female body (Suleiman, 1986), the concept of the diseased body (Hepworth, 1999; Martin, 1994), and so on. So too there have been active attempts to blur the traditional distinction between the human body and the machine. Beginning with Donna Haraway’s (1985) classic analysis of the cyborg, theorists have been keen to explore the political potentials of breaking the human/technology metaphor (Driscoll & Brahn, 1995; Gray, 1995).

A constructionist sensibility also opens a new domain of dialogue on health and disease. For the constructionist, ‘health’ and ‘illness’ are terms that acquire their meaning within particular traditions of relationship. We may agree that ‘something is going on’, in what we call my body, but such agreement places no necessary demands on the configuration of phonemes we use in description or explanation, or how and whether we treat it. In Nelson Goodman’s (1978) terms: ‘If I ask about the world, you can offer to tell me how it is under one or more frames of reference; but if I insist that you tell me how it is apart from all frames, what can you say?’ In this vein Kleinman (1988) and Young (1997) challenge the existing conceptions of the body in contemporary medicine. And relevant to treatment possibilities, Arthur Frank’s volume, The Wounded Storyteller (1995) offers a major opening. If illness is simply illness, then we might consign our bodies to the care of the medical professions and be done with it. Yet, as Frank demonstrates, there are other stories to be told under such conditions. In particular, he points to the advantages of a ‘quest narrative’, in which the individual uses the occasion of the illness to embark on a quest – a movement eventuating in a deeper understanding of self and society. One may see the possibility for a change of character through suffering, an opportunity to speak for those who suffer, to bear testimony and thereby contribute to the greater wisdom of the community. In the same way, if material death is simply material death, and that’s the end of it, what an impoverished world of meaning we inhabit! If death can also be a rejoining with lost loved ones, a place at the right hand of God, a movement in an endless cycle of becoming or an ultimate tranquillity, our world is enriched: cultural life is more inhabitable.

There are further reasons for resistance to unconstructed bodies: if there simply are material bodies in the world – full stop – then what else should we add to the ontology of the undeniable? I am informed by my colleagues in sociology about the reality of social structure; economists tell me about the hard realities of the economy; political scientists speak of realpolitik; for many anthropologists culture is certainly undeniable; and for most of my colleagues in psychology there is no denying the existence of cognitive process. On what grounds shall we accept material bodies into the realm of the undeniably real and prohibit these further entries? And if we cannot deny these additional realities, what else will be offered as real beyond culture and history? As we add all the obvious realities of the world to the compendium of the undeniable, are we not ultimately driven into a reproduction of common convention, to living in worlds of meaning constituted without respect to the emerging conditions of our lives? And what then of constructionist hopes for emancipation and reconstruction? As we increase the domain of the obviously real so do we foster social paralysis.

To bring the point home, what is to prevent us from adding to our concerns with physical illness the reality of mental illness – for most of my clinical colleagues simply ‘there’ prior to and regardless of one’s discursive community? Surely, they say, we confront the brutal reality of depression, attention deficit disorder, schizophrenia and the like. Or do we? We may all agree that there is something unusual about an individual’s behaviour, but why should we suppose that the community of clinicians and psychiatrists are correct in calling it a ‘mental illness’, and that DSM categories are maps of this world?³ Why should we agree that the ‘disease of depression’ – which was never ‘discovered’ until the present century – now inflicts one in ten persons in our culture? And why should we acquiesce to wholesale prescription of pharmaceuticals such as Prozac, Ridilin and lithium? If we give up our capacity to question the callings – the alltoo-obvious realities of sub-cultures or societies – then we become the victims.

The constructionist resistance continues: such terms as ‘real,’ ‘true,’ ‘rational’ and ‘objective’ possess deadly potentials. To be sure, they are enormously useful within particular communities for affirming traditions, facilitating mutual trust, ensuring forms of coordination and generating collective enthusiasm. However, they are fraught with danger when participants in such communities extend what is local to the plane of the universal – real for all people, transcendentally true, fundamentally rational, indisputably objective. When the obvious reality of the local is thus protracted, so is the groundwork laid for the obliteration of other traditions – those who ‘don’t see things for what they are’, dwell in ‘false consciousness’, ‘reason imperfectly’ or are ‘hopelessly subjective’. Nor are the denizens of such cultures likely to gain voice, for theirs is obviously ignorant, mere folklore, mythical, mystical, or worse (also see Edwards, Ashmore, & Potter, 1995). It is just this arrogance of the local that stoked the Western colonialist fires – and the subsequent devastation of traditions throughout the world. I can readily appreciate Lannamann’s reaction to the needless loss of life he attributes to Christian Science beliefs. I’m sure I would feel much the same. The danger lies not in the grief and anger but in the derogation of Christian Science for not recognizing the truth of material bodies. And should we extend this plain truth indefinitely, we should eradicate the tradition – and possibly all other traditions holding the truth of the spirit to be more primary than the reality of material.

Animating animus: the pleasures of eradication

While these arguments are clear enough, they have not been everywhere compelling. Attacks continue from both conservative and radical directions. In major respects the course of development in such debates is quite familiar. It largely recapitulates the form of academic conflict serving as the mainstay of scholarly life. There is high drama to be derived in championing an ideal or a value against an infidel opposition. This is no less so in the case of defending scientific objectivity against the ravages of charlatanism, mysticism, ideologism or fundamentalism than it is in condemning oppression, racism or injustice, or championing a humanist vision of the person. Failure to participate in this drama of good-over-evil is to miss out on one of the most acute pleasures of scholarly life. Nor did we have to await participation in scholarly careers to indulge in this cultural ritual. It was long in place – as we defended our sandcastles against wicked intruders, an intimate friend from calumnious gossip or a beleaguered minority group against unjust policies. In a certain sense, we are all ‘Christian soldiers … armies of liberty, at the barricades, marching to Pretoria …’, and, surely, ‘we shall overcome’. Given the glories of championing the good in the face of evil, what are the central options deposited by our traditions at the doorstep of the present?⁴

In the main the most congenial option is (and has been) isolation and subterranean warfare. It is simple enough to divide ourselves into fragmented, hostile and self-satisfied enclaves. We enter our minuscule groups of the like-minded, declare the intellectual and moral high ground, circulate our truths within the journals and conferences protected by our kind, and locate ways of undermining the investments of colleagues and institutions outside the fold. Such a condition largely characterizes the relationship now existing between empiricists and constructionists. It is an emerging state among those groups set against empiricism – feminist standpoint theorists, Marxists, culture critics and humanists among them. It is a state that now threatens to divide all those who otherwise search for alternatives to what we perhaps misleadingly characterize as ‘the dominant discourse’.

How can we view this state of subterranean warfare as anything but unfortunate? It is not simply that we thus invite a condition of all against all. It is also a condition...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Social Construction and the Human Sciences
• Part II: Social Construction and Societal Practice
• Part III: Social Construction and Cultural Context
• 11 Technology, Self and the Moral Project
• Bibliography
• Index