Take a Picture of the World, It'll Last Longer

I picked up Social Construction: Entering the Dialogue (Taos Institute, 2004) by Kenneth J. Gergen and Mary Gergen, which appeared to be a brief, handy introduction to the concept. The Gergens are a husband and wife team, both psychologists and academics, both dedicated to social constructionist thought, so they should be qualified to explicate it, but they didn't manage very well. The book turned out to be something of a trainwreck, but maybe that's not the Gergens' fault; maybe it's the fault of the concept itself.  But the confusion they foster could be useful for someone who wants to understand what "social construction" means and how it's used (and misused) by some of its proponents.

The Gergens take a false step right away:

The foundational idea of social construction seems simple enough, but it is also profound.  Everything we consider real is socially constructed.  Or, more dramatically, Nothing is real unless people agree that it is [10; bold type in original].

This is the kind of rhetoric that confuses people, and enables critics of social construction to misrepresent the concept.  I think the Gergens realize this, so on the next page they try to clarify:

We must be clear on this point.  Social constructionists do not say, "There is nothing," or "There is no reality."  The important point is that whenever people define what "reality" is, they are always speaking from a cultural tradition [11].

The thing is, the Gergens themselves came very close to declaring that "there is no reality," and they did so more from an apparent wish to sound dramatic than from a need to explain their concept clearly.  Since the book is intended to introduce social constructionism to people who don't know much if anything about it, and who can't be assumed to have much experience with philosophical discourse, saying "Nothing is real unless people agree that it is" might just be the worst formulation the authors could have chosen. It might have been better to put "real" in quotes, but not by much.  Most readers, from undergraduates to psychologists, will remember "Nothing is real" as the core (or "foundational idea," another revealing choice of words) of social construction theory, which it isn't.

Ironically, the Gergens undercut themselves, because they are "defin[ing] what 'reality'' is" here -- their formulation is itself a social construction from a specific cultural tradition (namely the American Culture of Therapy), but they state it as the nature of the real world.  (They're aware of this problem, but that awareness doesn't inform their writing.)  To clarify my own criticism, consider the well-known case of "homosexuality" as a social construction.  Many proponents of that position say that there were no homosexuals before, say, 1868.  What they mean is that the word "homosexual" wasn't invented until then, and different concepts of men who have sex with men and women who have sex with women were used in a specific cultural context -- in this case, western Europe in and before the nineteenth century, and especially by lawyers and doctors in that era and place.  As a historical claim, this is dubious anyhow, but again, it might lessen confusion if such writers were careful to put "homosexual" in quotes -- "There were no 'homosexuals' before 1868" -- but they seldom do.  True, scholars may choose which definition of a term they wish to use, but in general they don't use their chosen definition consistently.  Often they even retroject "homosexual subcultures" into the period before 1868, and to other regions.  Most seriously, like the Gergens, they clearly consider these claims and statements to be the reality of homosexuality, and they forget that their discourse is a social construction in a particular cultural tradition, namely Western academic philosophy and critical theory.  I'm not being pedantic here, since one of the assumptions of social-constructionist discourse is that terminology is important, that it shapes how we view the world, and words create worlds -- so it's vital to examine the words we and others use, and to use them accurately and consistently.

Could all that we construct as "problems" be reconstructed as "opportunities"?  By the same token, as we speak together, we could also bring new worlds into being. We could construct a world in which there are three genders or a world where the "mentally ill" are "heroes," or where "the power in all organizations lies not with individual leaders but in relationships" [12].

This is another good example of the careless use of concepts.  It's not surprising that many people understand social construction to mean that people freely and consciously choose how they see the world, when social constructionists talk as if it were so. Consider the popular accusation that social constructionists claim that gay people "choose" to be gay.  It mistakes social construction for an account of the nature and origin of sexual orientation, an antagonist to "born this way," when (according to my understanding, my construction if you will) the whole project of social construction involves explaining how people come to think of customs as "natural."  I have the impression that many people who talk about social construction think that they are exposing illusion and getting at the reality of whatever topic they're discussing, be it sexual orientation, sex/gender, race, language, or whatever.  (If it's not what they really think, it's what they say.)  It's precisely what we assume to be "real" and "natural" that we must question, and it's not as easy as "speak[ing] together" to "bring new worlds into being."  ("Worlds," by the way, is another much-misused word, a sign that someone is socially constructing carelessly.)

Take the simple process of naming.  There is Frank, Sally, Ben and Shawn.  Now these individuals were scarcely born into the world with nametags.  Their parents assigned their names. In this sense, they are arbitrary.  Except perhaps for family traditions, for example, Frank could have been named Ben, Robert, Donald, or something else.  But why were they given names in the first place?  The most important reason is practicality.  For example, parents want to talk about Sally's welfare; is she eating properly, does her diaper need changing, is her brother Frank jealous of her? ... More broadly, the words we use -- just like the names we give to each other -- are used to carry out relationships.  They are not pictures of the world, but practical actions in the world [14-15].

In that last sentence the Gergens seem to suppose that "pictures of the world" are real, or at least "real."  At the very least, they're constructing a false dichotomy. Language is used both to make "pictures of the world" and to make actions in the world.  (I suspect that a sloppy understanding of the performative use of language is lurking in there somewhere.)  Neither of those uses, which don't exhaust the options, expresses the "real nature" of language, which no one knows anyway.  This section is headed "Language: From the Picture to the Practice," but it would be as accurate and useful to reverse the order, since "pictures" are often constructed to explain and justify practices.

On naming, the Gergens oversimplify drastically, evidently because they're thinking in a middle-class American cultural tradition.  Names are seldom "arbitrary": like language in general, they are often believed to invoke the nature of the world.  Even when someone, say, names her baby "Britney" because she's a big Britney Spears fan, it's not an arbitrary choice.  It seems to me that "arbitrary" is as serious an error as "real" or "natural": the Gergens suppose that naming just happens, without any social or cultural meaning.  Naming is another social construction.  One custom is "remaking" ancestors, as Richard Trexler discusses in Naked Before the Father in the context of medieval Italy, and in Orthodox Jewish tradition down to the present.  A child's name isn't picked out of the air, but chosen so that a dead relative can live again through his or her name -- and in this construction, a child is never named after a living relative.  In other constructions, a child may be named for a living relative, and it would be interesting to know why it's acceptable in some cultures but not in others.  Names generally have meanings (mine means "brown warrior," for example), even when those meanings have been forgotten.  Often they aren't.  In China, ancient Israel, and in at least some Native American cultures, the meanings of names are known by the parents who give them and by those who use them.  In traditional Korea, males' names consist of three Chinese characters, and they are not chosen arbitrarily but with some thought and care, sometimes by divination or other systems.  Girl children were often not given names, however, which is a reminder that it's not necessary to use a name in practical, day-to-day parent-child relations anyway: in Western and non-Western cultures alike, parents can and do address children not by name but by status ("son," "daughter,"), just as their children address their parents by status ("mom" and "dad." My Mexican friends address each other this way all the time: Uncle, Aunt, Cousin, Nephew/Niece, etc.  In Korea, people almost lose their names when they become parents, and are not only referred to but addressed by others as "Young-sook's Mother" and "Jung-min's Father"; there are titles for status in family constellations that are used more often than an individual's name ("Elder brother," "Youngest child," etc.).   Invoking parents' concern for children's welfare as a reason for naming them is a middle-American social construction, yet the Gergens appear to think their explanation describes reality.

Examining the customs and understandings of other cultures often informs social construction theorizing, but the Gergens seem to have only the barest -- and not very well-informed or thoughtful -- awareness of other cultures.

What is more obvious than the fact that our social world is made up of separate individuals, each normally endowed with the capacity for conscious decision making.  It is because of this that we favor a democracy in which each adult citizen has the right to cast a vote, courts of law in which we hold individual actors responsible for their deeds, schools in which we evaluate each student's individual work, and organizations in which we subject individual workers to performance evaluations?  It is largely for these reasons that we characterize Western culture as individualist.  

Yet, for a constructionist, the obvious fact of "the individual as a conscious decision maker" is not so obvious.  Rather, we see it as only one way of constructing the world.  In fact, the individualistic orientation to social life is not so old historically (possibly three centuries), and it is not shared by the majority of people on earth.  This does not make it wrong, but it does allow us to step out of the box and ask about its pros and cons [30].

This is odd, for voting, courts of law, schools, and organizations are much older and widespread than the "individualistic orientation."  "We" certainly don't have these institutions because we see persons as atomized individuals; they're compatible with a non-individualist worldview, and are found in non-individualistic cultures.

The individualist / collectivist dichotomy is itself a social construction, a narrative about cultural difference, though the Gergens write as though it were a real difference between societies.  It's also inadequate as a description of a society except in very broad terms.  The difference between an "individualist" society like the US and a "collectivist" society like Japan is one of degree, not of kind, since every category is made up of individuals, and every individual human being belongs to various collectivities.  But speaking of relative differences as if they were absolute differences is a very popular social construction.

Even within the same society, these aspects are stressed more or less according to the situation or problem involved.  (One reason I love Koreeda Hirokazu's very Japanese film After Life is that it tells stories about individuals with love and respect, with no suggestion that doing so is un-Japanese.)  It might be that the US has moved farther toward the individualist pole than most other countries, but we have certainly not eliminated categories or collectivities, as the use of terms like "America" and "Americans" alone is enough to show. 

I'm skeptical of most of the Gergens' sweeping generalizations, or constructions as they should be called.  For example, "most human conflict can be traced to the processes of meaning-making" (66).  Conflict also occurs between non-human animals, who have no language but still manage to have conflicts.  The same goes for the experience of loss.  "For you to 'lose' something (a job, a close friend, the love of others) means that you carry around a story of yourself as a major character, embarked on a course of progress or fulfillment (end-points of a good story), and have suffered a setback" (49).  Non-human animals experience loss without having language, and therefore without having narratives.  And, of course, among humans, narratives of loss are not limited to individualistic cultures.  These experiences go along with having/being bodies.

The Gergens, consistent with their status as helping professionals, proceed to describe what they present as non-individualist, "relationship-oriented" ways of dealing with human problems.  It never seems to have occurred to them that it would be instructive to examine how supposedly non-individualist societies deal with such problems.  After all, we have not only vast amounts of sociological and anthropological data about such societies, but plenty of literature and traditions from the history of Western culture, in the days before we became individualists.  Why re-invent the wheel?

Well, for one thing, it's hard to justify your status and salary as a science-based academic helping professional, working with "solid data" (90), if you're just going to appeal to tradition.  But as the Gergens are aware, hardly anyone wants to go back to the old days, even those who claim that they do.  Getting rid of tradition hasn't eliminated the abuses that were common in non-individualistic societies, but there were good reasons why people tried.  Relationship-oriented ways of dealing with conflict don't automatically lead to good outcomes, and it's arguable that even as the Gergens proclaim their rejection of the individualistic tradition, they are still working within it.  "Dialogue," for example, as the Gergens practice it, is an activity performed between individuals.  Social constructions are not something you can change, let alone escape, just by saying so, or even by setting your mind to it.

The Gergens, like many other social constructionists, skirt close to a blank-slate social construction of human beings and culture.  I think it was the philosopher Edward Stein who argued that the verb underlying "construction" ought to be "construe," not "construct."  I like that idea, but I think "construct" is a good metaphor, as long as it's remember that construction works with materials, and materials (animate or inanimate) are not infinitely malleable.  Our bodies cannot always follow where our ideas go.  Perhap more often they can't.

Social Construction: Entering the Dialogue is not a good introduction to the concept for beginners; it will probably just confuse and misinform them.  I must look for more basic texts on social construction and see if there are better ones out there.  It seems to me that while the idea of social construction is a valuable and useful one, as the Gergens and many other people use it, it is not an idea or a concept but a brand -- something like I Can't Believe It's Not Essentialism!

Rejoice, and Believe in the Gospel!

... The gospel (which means "good news") of True Science, that is. I just finished reading James Robert Brown's Who Rules in Science?: An Opinionated Guide to the Wars (Harvard, 2001). Brown, a professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and an admitted heterosexual, tries to provide a nice middle-of-the-road take on the science wars of the 1990s. He concedes that scientists aren't perfect, but insists that they are awfully good. He opposes scientific orthodoxy to "social constructivists," who are usually postmodernists, and we know about them, with their silly jargon and all.

I admit I'm out of my depth in some of Brown's discussion, because I have little formal training in science and haven't read nearly enough of the "constructivist" works he cites. (I need to read more Bruno Latour, for example.) But in those instances where I have read the writers he discusses, like Paul Feyerabend and Stephen Jay Gould, I found problems. To sum up while oversimplifying a bit, Brown seems to think that every critic of scientific orthodoxy is a "social constructivist," even Gould it appears, and he really should know better than that. This can be seen in his discussion, about halfway through the book, of science and homosexuality.

Research on homosexuality involves an inextricable mix of science and politics. “Pro-gay” and “anti-gay” represent the respective political stances of being in favor or out of favor with improving the social situation of gays and lesbians. Debate tends to flare between the “essentialists” and “constructivists.” (For better or worse, these are the standard terms.)

In fact, "constructivist" is not a standard term in this debate; "constructionist" is. I couldn't say for certain, but I have the impression that "constructivist" is used in this context only by critics of constructionism, and not even all of them. According to Wikipedia, "constructivist" and "constructionist" refer to different theories anyway, which means that Brown's consistent and insistent use of the former term undermines his entire book. (And to nit-pick, "out of favor with" is not the opposite of "in favor of".) It's also an enduring and much-noticed irony of the debate that almost no one actually claims to be an essentialist.

The former [the "essentialists"] claim that one’s sexual orientation is a condition that is either biologically determined or imprinted at an early age and remains more or less immutable through life. On this view, one is objectively gay or lesbian, whether one knows and accepts it or not. For a constructivist, on the other hand, one’s sexual orientation is fundamentally a choice, no doubt a choice conditioned by one’s history and upbringing, but a choice nonetheless.

This is wrong too. Brown describes the "essentialist" position somewhat more accurately, though as he must know, being a philosopher and all, the key is not biology or imprinting but essence, being, nature. As Foucault famously described the concept, "Nothing that went into [the homosexual's] total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitively active principle; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away. It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature." This isn't an especially scientific notion, by the way; it's almost mystical. Many people, including scientists, simply beg the question by assuming that biology equals essence; and we know what happens when you assume.

It's in his account of the "constructivist" that Brown falls flat on his face. I can't claim that I've read the constructionist literature on homosexuality exhaustively, but I've read a representative sample, probably more than Brown has, and I can't recall ever seeing a social constructionist claim that sexual orientation is a choice. The first few times someone accused me of thinking that homosexuality is a "choice" because I reject biological theories of its cause, I was taken aback because the accusation seemed wilfully irrelevant. The first person who did this was a political operative for a state-level gay-rights organization, and it was less an accusation than a lackwitted stereotype; the second was a graduate student in psychology with a vested interest in biological determinist theories, who should have known better. Brown, as a philosopher, definitely should know better, but apparently his professional education didn't extend to basic issues in philosophy like the free will vs. determinism debate.

So, let me repeat what I've said before: the point (I could mischievously call it the essence, but Diana Fuss beat me to it) of social construction theory is that many traits or behaviors or customs that people consider "natural" -- built into our human nature / blood / genes / DNA by God, Nature, Evolution -- are in fact, products of culture, learned, acquired. Not "chosen", except perhaps in some obscure technical sense of the word, because, again, the interest of social constructionism is to highlight features of human life that we take for granted, things we didn't choose because they are Natural. "That's just the way things are, that's all," though some wicked and perverse souls might decide to rebel against Nature, God's Will, Common Decency, and the American Way.

The key point that gives away Brown's misunderstanding / ignorance is his remark that for "a constructivist, on the other hand, one’s sexual orientation is fundamentally a choice, no doubt a choice conditioned by one’s history and upbringing, but a choice nonetheless." The best I can say in mitigation is that, as far as I know, social constructionists have not been able to come up with scientific-sounding explanations of how social construction works; that is, how people come to be convinced that what they have learned is something they were born with. But then, essentialists have never managed to explain how, say, a smaller INAH3 manifests itself in a talent for interior design and an obsession with ABBA.

Essentialism is compatible with that view of science I have called scientific orthodoxy: sexual orientation is a biological or psychological fact whose nature and causes can be discovered by orthodox science. (This includes both the ontological and epistemological senses of objective, but the emphasis here is on the ontological side.) On a constructivist account, by contrast, such facts simply don’t exist, at least not objectively. Instead, one’s sexuality is constructed – self-constructed at that.

This is more of the same; one' s sexuality is not "self-constructed at that" -- it is socially constructed, shaped from outside as well as inside.

Notice too how casually Brown minimizes the yawning gap between "biological" and "psychological fact." Language, for example, is probably both a biological (in the sense of being rooted physically in our brains and other body parts) and psychological fact, but there is no biological difference between an English speaker and a Chinese speaker. I once angered a gay advocate of biological determinism by pointing out that there probably is a correlation between speaking Chinese and certain physical traits (black hair, dark eyes, etc.), so that by her logic Chinese, like homosexuality, must be inborn.

Brown seems unaware that according to social constructionists, "race" is socially constructed. Even "orthodox" scientists have conceded that race is not, after all, a natural category in human beings, but here, as with "sexual orientation", the debate is as much about the status of the scientific evidence, and many white scientists at least find it difficult to rid themselves of the traditional racial categories. I was startled, a couple of years ago, to find some white liberal bloggers blithely declaring that "race is as real as nappy hair." The motif circulated for a month or two, then faded. It's worth remembering that social construction works with human bodies; the existence of a biological trait like skin color or hair texture does not prove the validity of essentialism. No social constructionist doubts that skin color, for example, is biologically determined; the question is whether skin color constitutes a "racial" trait, how it relates to culture, and so on.

Social constructionism is also compatible with what Brown calls scientific orthodoxy. Before we can really discuss the status of essentialism with regard to sexual orientation, we must first have some solid scientific results to work with, and so far there are none. The scientists involved, especially but not only Simon LeVay, have been explicit all along that they had decided in advance what they were looking for. LeVay told reporters that if he hadn't found evidence to support his beliefs, he'd have given up science. (I doubt the truth of that boast, by the way. True believers can always bend reality to fit their preconceptions, and one could ask whether by demanding that reality conform to his beliefs, LeVay hadn't abandoned science at the outset.)

To be fair, Brown concedes some of these points on page 111:

Now to the interesting philosophical point. The crucial thing about these [scientific] criticisms of essentialism that come from constructivists is that they are wholly within the framework that I have called scientific orthodoxy. Every objection would be recognized – at least in principle – as perfectly legitimate from the point of view of standard scientific method: Don’t use crude tests when better ones are available, don’t beg the question when setting up a classification, don’t take people’s judgments of others at face value, don’t ignore obvious alternative possible explanations, don’t confuse correlation with causation. The list could go on. These are principles that any champion of orthodoxy happily embraces.

Perhaps so, but they don't apply those principles. Brown himself frames the whole discussion in terms of "constructivism" vs. essentialism, but the scientific discussion, such as it is, has little to with this philosophical debate. The question is the validity, within the terms of scientific orthodoxy, of the research on sexual orientation. It's even debatable whether such critics of biological determinism as Anne Fausto-Sterling, Stephen Jay Gould, Hilary and Stephen Rose, or Richard Lewontin are social constructionists, given that their criticisms are primarily of the quality of the research on its own terms, not whether it conforms to constructionist theory. Brown simply takes for granted than anyone who doubts that every psychological fact is biologically determined must be a social "constructivist," and that doesn't follow.

The essentialist/constructivist debate cuts right across the pro-gay/anti-gay debate. The pro-gay essentialist claims that sexual orientation has a biological character and is perfectly natural, and so completely unobjectionable. It is an immutable characteristic, so it should enjoy the protection of anti-discrimination laws, just as race and gender typically do. The anti-gay essentialist is likely to see it as a nasty disease that ought to be appropriately treated. By contrast, the pro-gay constructivist sees sexual orientation as a choice, one that should certainly be tolerated, if not celebrated. The anti-gay constructivist agrees it is a choice – a wicked one that must be morally condemned.

The trouble here is that the people Brown calls anti-gay constructivists are really essentialists: they believe that human nature is heterosexual, and that sodomites are merely rebels against Nature/God. (This passage makes me suspect that Brown's only source for his discussion is Andrew Sullivan's 1993 tract Virtually Normal; the above paragraph is virtually a paraphrase of Sullivan's, um, argument.) The same claim was made for years by gay Christian essentialists arguing about the interpretation of Romans 1:26-28, who declared that their nature was homosexual, and so for them to try to be heterosexual would be "unnatural," "going against their nature."

Further, Brown oversimplifies (to put it kindly) with his assumption that "an immutable characteristic [as he assumes sexual orientation to be] ... should enjoy the protection of anti-discrimination laws, just as race and gender typically do." It isn't only immutable characteristics that are protected by antidiscrimination laws: religious affiliation, which is neither inborn nor immutable, is also protected under US and Canadian law. This is a common mistake, also made routinely by gay-rights advocates, including scientists trying to justify their sloppy research by touting its supposed political usefulness:

A typical essentialist is Simon LeVay, who claimed as a result of post-mortem studies that a cluster of brain cells in the third interstitial nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus is larger in heterosexuals than in homosexuals. This, he said, shows that “sexual orientation has a biological substrate” ... Another famous work is that of Baily [sic] and Pillard on twins. They found that identical twins were more likely to be consonant for homosexuality than were fraternal twins. Given that identicals are closer genetically than fraternals, Baily [sic] and Pillard drew the conclusion that “genetic factors are important individual differences in sexual orientation” ... In a more public piece they stated that “science is rapidly converging on the conclusion that sexual orientation is innate,” and they concluded that this is “good news for homosexuals” [“Are Some People Born Gay?” NYT, Dec. 17, A21].

Added to his general intellectual slovenliness, this shows that James Robert Brown is not competent to discuss these issues. Can these people really have forgotten that biologically-rooted difference has generally been used to justify discrimination, based on race and sex? No one doubts that women and blacks are "born that way"; that "biological fact" is used to argue that they are incapable of full citizenship. Whether homosexuality is "innate" is not an important question, and mainstream gay-rights advocates have wasted a lot of time and energy letting bigots set the terms of the debate by claiming that it is. At the same time, I've winced when some half-informed gay people have lobbed the term "socially constructed" at essentialist opponents, whether pro-gay or anti-gay. It just isn't pertinent to the controversy until you've cleared away a lot of deadwood first -- and by the time you've done that, you don't really need the label.