The Reality of Social Constructions
Stephen Pfohl
Boston College
"[H]ow to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge
claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own 'semiotic
technologies' for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a
'real' world, one that can be partially shared and friendly to earth-wide projects of finite
freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited
happiness."—Donna Haraway (1991:187)
“Its not that nothing is real; rather everything is real.”—Kathy Acker (1992)
All meaningful accounts of the real world are mediated by the social contexts in
which such accounts are constructed. Effective social constructions bestow a “taken-forgranted” sense of “naturalness” to some things but not others. Under the spell of
dominant (or hegemonic) social constructions, artificial things become “second nature” to
those they most captivate, blessing a particular order of things while cursing others. This
is a core tenet of social constructionist theory and methods— that, for languagedependent humans, things are never simply present in a direct and unadorned fashion.
Things are, instead, partially shaped and provisionally organized by the complex ways in
which we are ritually positioned in relation to each other and to the objects we behold
materially, symbolically, and in the imaginary realm.
The ritual historical positioning of humans in relation to cultural objects and stories
that we both make and are made over by— this, perhaps, is the elementary form of an
effective social construction. This elementary form casts a social circle of believability
around artificially constructed accounts of the world. At the same time, the believability
of the social constructions that lie inside this circle depends upon what the circle expels
to the outside. In this sense, social constructions are, at once, constituted and haunted by
what they exclude. This is true regardless of the content of specific social constructions.
Constructions of gender and sexuality, war and peace, science and religion, race and
coloniality, deviance and social control, economy and value, normal climate change and
catastrophic global warming— each is mediated by the social force fields of power and
knowledge in which they are produced, reproduced, or challenged.
To suggest that all meaningful accounts of reality are socially constructed does not
imply that things are simply relative. Nothing is simply relative. “Relativism is a way of
being nowhere while claiming to be everywhere equally, … a denial of responsibility and
critical inquiry (Haraway, 1991: 191).” Instead of being simply relative, social
constructions are relational and complexly systemic. Social constructions may be relative,
but only to things that are natural and historical at the same time. Social constructions are
relative to complex dynamics of power in the here and now, and to ritual filters that shape
human perceptions and stories about things in some ways to the exclusion of others.
Just as it is incorrect to state that social constructions are simply relative, it is wrong
to argue that, because social understandings of reality are constructed, reality as such
doesn’t exist. The social construction of reality is never equivalent to the complexities of
the real world of which it is but a part. But neither is the creative artifice of construction
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ever entirely separate from what is real. To suggest that social reality is constructed
means only that, from a human point of view, reality is forever dependent upon the
natural-historical and psychic-social contexts in which selective knowledge of the real
world is assembled. This is not to dismiss the role of bio-chemical processes, global
economic circumstance, or brute physical forces in also influencing the character of
human perceptions and knowledge. It is, however, to insist that such factors never operate
independently of the ways in which our notions about the world are mediated by
powerful cultural and historical constructions. This morning in Iraq three U.S. soldiers
were killed by IRDs (improvised roadside devices). This is reality. But the meaning and
ethical-political implications of this reality vary with the constructs used and the stories
told to make sense of this event. Did the soldiers die at the hands of freedom-hating
terrorists? Or, were they killed by insurgents fighting an army of unlawful foreign
invaders? The answer depends on how this tragic loss of human life is framed and
filtered, transformed by powerful interpretive screens, mediated by social constructions.
The Social Construction of Sociological Reality
Like many other sociologists, my initial engagement with social constructionist
thought was sparked by both empirical and theoretical concerns. As a university student
in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was troubled by fierce disputes over what to do about
the contested realities of white supremacy, gendered hierarchy, structured economic
differences between entire classes of people, and the geopolitical meaning of the Vietnam
War. Theoretically, constructionism helped me to glimpse how seemingly well-meaning
people could arrive at decidedly different viewpoints on such matters. Peter Berger and
Thomas Luckmann’s book The Social Construction of Reality (1966) was particularly
important. Influenced by the social phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, Berger and
Luckmann urged sociologists to suspend judgment about the objective reality of social
life in order to describe reality as it is constructed in the minds of everyday people.
Schutz (1970) viewed the experience of everyday life as filtered through a set of
categorical definitions or “typifications” about what the world is and how people should
act within it. Typified stocks of meaning and recipes for action were said to provide
people with a common sense about the nature of reality. For Schutz, common sense is
graced by the natural attitude— a sense of the everyday world as taken-for-granted and
structured independently of one’s immediate experience. Commonsensical reality is also
organized in accordance with the belief that—for all practical purposes—other “normal”
people experience the world in more or less the same way as I do. Combining Schutz’s
theories with ideas drawn from philosophical anthropology and the sociologies of Max
Weber, Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and George Herbert Mead, Berger and Luckmann
arrive at a dialectical approach to the construction of social reality. Their treatise begins
with the suggestion that—unlike other species of animals—humans lack in-built or
imprinted biological instincts capable of providing a stable sense of social order. To
compensate for this lack we rely on an evolved central nervous system that enables us to
use symbols and language to construct an artificial world order.
The first step in this process is externalization— reaching out with words and
images to classify the world around us. But soon the names we affix to things take on a
life of their own, and we become prisoners of the artificial worlds we create. In this, we
are positioned, not unlike Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s terrifying novel, as
creators whose lives come to ruled by creatures we ourselves construct. Berger and
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Luckmann use the term objectification to denote the process whereby humanly created
symbols are transformed into constraining social realities. Forgotten, or pushed outside
common sense, is the fact that taken-for-grant symbols are, in actuality, nothing but
arbitrary and conventional ways of naming the ebb and flow of things in time.
Congealed into forceful social institutions by habit-forming “reciprocal
typifications,” the perceptual constraints of social constructions are taken inside the self
through the rituals of socialization. When socialization is effective, artificial symbolic
constructs are experienced as if natural realities. Objectification is extended by
legitimation, an envelopment of typified constructs by a higher or more encompassing
level of symbols. Legitimations are, in turn, backed-up by social control mechanisms of
various sorts. Although artificial, institutionalized social constructions come to
selectively frame what counts as reality, shaping human perception, judgment, and
habitual courses of action in the world.
Berger and Luckmann’s treatise in the sociology of knowledge did much to expand
the nature and scope of this subfield of sociological inquiry. It also helped “move the
sociology of knowledge from the periphery to the very center of sociological theory
(Berger and Luckmann, 1966: 18).” The notion of socially constructed reality appealed
widely to sociologists concerned with the effects of symbolic interaction and with the
historical shaping of cultural meanings and action. Moreover, in addition to its relevance
to an empirical sociology of ideas and science, constructionism resonated with critical
questions about how some actions, but not others, came to label as deviant or viewed as
social problems. Radical and constructivist criminologists asked why certain forms of
harm were criminalized and other harms ignored. Questions pertaining to the power of
interest groups and dominant social classes in shaping commonsensical worldviews and
ideological ways of seeing also became associated with the constructionist perspective.
One area of inquiry, however, was explicitly excluded from Berger and
Luckmann’s early formulation of constructionist thought. This concerned epistemological
and methodological questions pertaining to the reality of social science constructions. It
is not that Berger and Luckmann saw no problems in this realm. Indeed, they remark that
“the sociology of knowledge, like all empirical disciplines that accumulate evidence
concerning the relativity and determination of human thought, leads toward
epistemological questions concerning sociology itself as well as any other scientific body
of knowledge.” Likening problems posed by the sociology of knowledge to related
“trouble for epistemology” generated by history, psychology and biology, Berger and
Luckmann contend that the “logical structure of this trouble is basically the same in all
cases: How can I be sure, say, of my sociological analysis of American middle-class
mores in view of the fact that categories I use for this analysis are conditioned by
historically relative forms of thought, that I myself and everything I think is determined
by my genes and by ingrown hostility to my fellowmen, and that, to cap it all, I am
myself a member of the American middle class (1966:12)?”
While recognizing the importance of such problems, Berger and Luckmann contend
“that these questions are not themselves part of the empirical discipline of sociology.
They properly belong to the methodology of the social sciences, an enterprise that
belongs to philosophy and is by definition other than sociology (1966:13).” As such,
efforts to develop a reflexive sociology of sociology are deliberated excluded by Berger
and Luckmann. In their discussion of the social construction of reality, they “firmly
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bracket … any epistemological or methodological questions about the validity of
sociological analysis (1966: 14).” Despite the generative character of Berger and
Luckmann’s work, this strikes me as a problematic exclusion, and one that unwarrantedly
transfers to another discipline (philosophy) crucial questions about the reality and scope
of sociological analyses of the social constructions of others.
In what ways are sociological constructions of reality also social constructions? In
what ways are sociological constructs conditioned by the power-charged and historically
specific social contexts in which they are produced? What, in other words, is the nature
and scope of the reality produced by sociologists and other social scientists who deploy a
constructionist perspective? What, moreover, distinguishes the constructions of
sociologists from those of other social actors in history and everyday life? To address
these questions is to take up the challenge of issues deliberately excluded by Peter Berger
and Thomas Luckmann in their influential formulation of a constructionist framework
forty years ago. This essay takes up such a challenge.
In exploring the reality of social constructions, and specifically those produced by
social analysts, I ask you to imagine the ritual labor of social construction as situated at
the crossroads of four interdependent vectors of influence— natural historical
materiality, psychic social subjectivity, power, and knowledge. These vectors both shape
and are energetically shaped by the social constructions they together beget. Each vector
is real, yet restricted in scope by the way that it contributes selectively to the social
construction of what is taken-for-granted by specific cultures in history. By examining
each vector in turn I hope to demonstrate sociological complexities that bear on the
character of reality implicated in the work of social construction. Together, these vectors
partially shape the ritual labor involved in producing hegemonic social constructions and
what these constructions sacrifice. This raises questions about similarities and differences
between hegemonic social constructions and reflexive sociological accounts. Is it
possible for social constructionists to attend to how their own categories, frames, and
stories are partially shaped by the complex systems of reality to which they belong? The
essay concludes with a discussion of power-reflexive approaches to constructionist
theory and methods.
The Natural Historical Materiality of Social Construction
This first vector of influence pictures the reality of social construction as a
constitutive material feature of human animal nature itself. Three considerations are of
particular importance— (1) assumptions pertaining to species survival, (2) the restrictive
economic character of a given society’s dominant mode of production, and (3) the
general economy of living energetic matter. Each plays a part in any natural history of
social construction.
With regard to species survival, it is vital to recognize that, like all other living
species, we human animals need relative stability in relation to our environments in order
to maintain ourselves and reproduce. Without some modicum of stability we would be
swept up in chaos, unable to effectively secure food, nurturance, shelter, and ordered
approaches to governance, social exchange, and sexual procreation. In other words, we
would not know how to interact with our environments in ways that enable species
continuity across time and the spaces we cohabit with other species and our fellow
humans. Nevertheless, as Berger and Luckmann suggest, when it comes to survival,
unlike virtually all other species of animals, humans enter the world with a deficit.
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Despite the complexities of our genetic inheritance, we are not born with in-built or
instinctual technologies that enable us to secure the rudimentary conditions of species
survival. Nor are we biologically imprinted at an early age in ways that guarantee a
repetition of stable action patterns over the course of our lives. In this sense, our bodies
are not structured for the purposes of survival by biology alone.
Despite our precarious human condition, our lack of instinctual technologies for
survival is compensated for in another bodily realm. Over the course of evolution, we
have acquired a highly developed central nervous system. This is a material basis for the
world-constructing artifice of human language. It enables us to engage productively with
the world around us through signs, symbols, images, and gestures. Rooted in our bodily
capabilities, language is also historically situated. Its constructs, classifications, and
narrative possibilities are rooted in specific interactions between people who learn to
exchange words for things and make meanings. In this sense, language is a constitutive
feature of human nature, a material technology that enables us to compensate with words
for what we lack in the biological realm alone. Through the symbolic constructions of
language, humans act economically to reduce the chaos of material flux to relatively
stable categories of meaning.
Technologies of linguistic artifice are a constitutive aspect of any society’s material
survival. Language constructs are also central to what Karl Marx called the mode of
production— the organization of species survival in keeping with historically specific
forms of restrictive economic exchange. Social constructions of meaning and value are
crucial to this task. As Marx declares in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,
humans “make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not
make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly
encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead
generations weigh on the brain of the living…. In like manner a beginner who has learnt
a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated
the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself in it only when he finds his
way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new
(1992: 97).”
Just as figurative social constructions help shape the mode of production, the way in
which society organizes economic survival also constrains the forms of meaning
available to its members. The reciprocal interplay between linguistic technologies and the
mode of production is a key determinant of the scope of reality articulated by a given
society. The location of individuals and groups within a regime of production also shapes
the standpoint from which people make meaning of things. People subordinated by a
given economic order typically construct meanings about that order that put them at a
distance from those this order privileges. As such, standpoint must be taken into account
when attempting to discern how specific social constructions illuminate (or obscure)
reality. Antagonism typically walks a thin blue line between one standpoint and another.
Species survival and a society’s dominant mode of production are crucial to
understanding the natural history and scope of reality implicated in the labor of social
construction. Also influential is what Georges Bataille (1988) refers to as the realm of
general economy. Bataille extends Marx’s theoretical framework by refusing to limit the
analysis of economic matters to the restrictive economy— an economy organized int
terms of useful or instrumental human production. Unlike Marx, Bataille does not view
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human animal existence as governed exclusively by contests over the control of
productive labor. While essential to human survival, restrictive economic practices, and
the social constructions that accompany them, are not in themselves the essence of human
life. Productive labor is but one aspect of our being. Equally important is the general
economy — a realm where boundaries surrounding what is distinctively human yield to
the vibrant movement of living energetic matter. In the general economy, reality extends
beyond words, pulsating in radiant web-like connections in excess of language. Here,
instrumental productivity is subordinated to the more expansive realities of cosmic
material interconnectedness.
The restrictive productivity of an effective social construction is purchased, then,
not only at the expense of subordinated classes of humans, but also by our temporary
exile from open-ended participation in the infinite variety of the general economy. This is
to acknowledge that there is more to reality than survival-oriented economic production.
Human existence comes into being first and foremost as a gift of nature. Nature is the
source of life, or mother, the web of energetic materiality from which we come and to
which we return. Nature is the matrix within which human animals are nourished and to
which we owe our breath, our flesh, and our blood. Thus, despite the dominant social
constructions of nature produced by our society, we humans are never really outside of
nature looking down. We are, instead, dynamically situated within the relational fluxes of
living matter, an immanent aspect of nature’s own energetic history. We are participants
in nature’s dynamic evolution, just as we productively carve out a time and place for
ourselves by the material linguistic technologies of social construction.
The social constructions we produce about nature and our relations with one
another are parasites. They feed upon a living energetic host that is always infinitely
more complex and more real than the scope of reality offered by even the most expansive
of social constructions. As such, reflexive attunement to the general economic realm
facilitates discernment of the scope of reality implicated by a specific social construction.
Social constructions are real. But their reality is also limited. Social constructions are
never as real, or far-reaching in scope, as the general economy from which they draw
their energy. Nor are social constructions ever really separate from the world they claim
to represent. Social constructions are, at once, representations of the real world and a
dynamic aspect of the world’s natural history.
When we act in the world on the basis of social constructions by which we picture
the world, the effects are material and sometimes long lasting. Social constructions may
alert us to problems that, while real, may have never been put into words. Feminism, for
instance, today provides names and narrative constructions for a reality that, while sensed
and suffered by women, had long eluded the realm of words. At other times, the material
effects of social construction can be more catastrophic. An example involves dominant
U.S. constructions about what constitutes an acceptable source of energy. Constructions
guiding major U.S. energy-consuming institutions continue to barter off the future by
legitimating unsustainable carbon-based technologies of industry, consumption, and war.
These technologies, and the social constructions that justify their excessive use, are
literally killing the planet. Here, socially constructed reality rubs tragically against the
reality of the general economy.
Sometimes the reality of the world pushes back against the grain of our social
constructions. This creates anxiety, particularly for those who mistake the restrictive
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economy of social constructions for what is real (in the general economic sense of the
word). Do you believe in global warming as a social construct? Regardless of what you
believe, the world of living energetic matter appears to be communicating the truth of the
matter, independent of how we think and act. This, we need to remember when
attempting to discern the scope of the reality for both the social constructions we analyze
and those we use as tools of analysis. Attunement to the movement of the general
economy—being in touch with the web of living energetic matter in which we
participate—can also prove a canny resource in the process of power-reflexive analytic
discernment. I will return to this matter in the closing section of this essay.
The Psychic Subjectivity of Social Construction
A second vector of influence on the reality of social construction involves the
subject position of those engaged in the labor of construction. In The Alchemy of Race
and Rights, Patricia Williams, an African American law professor and critical legal
theorist, writes, “Since subject position is everything in my analysis of the law, you
deserve to know that it’s a bad morning. I am very depressed (1991: 3).” Williams alerts
her readers to constructed historical matters that bear upon her depression. She is
preparing a lecture on laws pertaining to redhibitory vice— “a defect in merchandise
which, if existing at the time of purchase, gives rise to a claim allowing the buyer to
return the thing and to get back part or all of the purchase price (1991:3).” Williams’
lecture analyzes an 1835 court decision from Louisiana. The redhibitory vice in question
concerns the alleged “craziness” of a slave named Kate. Kate had been purchased for
$500. But after judging his slave insane, Kate’s master wants his money back. Dominant
social constructions concerning the meaning of property and racialized ideas about who
counts as a human come together in this case. The brutal associations between these two
realms haunt William’s tale. “I would like to write,” she declares, “in ways that reveal the
intersubjectivity of legal constructions, that forces the reader to participate in the
construction of meaning and to be conscious of that process (1991: 7).”
Dominant social constructions at the time of Kate’s enslavement viewed her as a
unit of property, and not a human being with unequivocal rights. Thus, after being
“satisfied that the slave in question was wholly, and perhaps worse than useless,” the
Louisiana court ruled in favor of the plaintiff, stating he had a right to get his money
back. With this as background, it is hardly surprising that Professor Williams is “very
depressed.” But “on this bad morning,” in foregrounding the psychic social position from
which she reads (and rereads) the 1835 case, Williams also invites her readers to consider
the relation between her subject position and theirs. “It always takes a while to sort out
what’s wrong,” suggests Williams, “but it usually starts with some kind of perfectly
irrational thought such as: I hate being a lawyer (1991: 3).”
Effective social constructions pave the way for meaningful action in history. Yet, as
Marx points out, although people make history, they never do so just as they please, or
under circumstances entirely chosen by themselves. Thus, although a crucial component
of social construction, subject position is never truly the beginning or end of socially
constructed reality. Berger and Luckmann make a related point. Although produced by
subjective efforts to classify the world (externalization), social constructions can also take
on a life of their own, limiting the intelligibility of experience and restricting the future
actions of their creators (objectification). An analogous distinction is made in the social
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psychoanalytic teachings of Jacques Lacan (1977). For Lacan, social psychic
constructions of the world are simultaneously real, imaginary, and symbolic.
For Lacan psychic constructions are real because the subjects that create them are
part of the realm of living energetic matter. What Lacan calls “the real” is irreducible to
either the realm of projective imaginary identifications or the objectifying symbolic
confines of language. The imaginary realm is constituted by phantasmatic identifications
that misrecognize the complexities of reality, reducing reality to the restrictive psychic
economy of the Ego. Lacan pictured the dominant phantasms at play in contemporary
Western (or Northwestern) society as resulting in a narcissistic imagination of oneself as
if autonomous of the actual material dependencies and social interconnections that shape
our existence. Psychic misrecognition institutes a “gap” between imagined subjective
existence and what is real. This begins with a refusal of the debt we owe to our mothers, a
debt to the living energetic matters from which we come and to which we return. This is
Egoism—a form of subjectivity that mistakes a self-enclosed mirror image of itself for
the actuality of one’s (natural historical) relations to others. Lacan suggested that the
psychic social misrecognitions beget by Egoism were most acute in the United States.
Nevertheless, and despite its perceptual derangements, there is no getting around the
Imaginary. As human animals we neither passively receive nor simply perceive the
world. We, instead, actively hallucinate or project an ordered place for ourselves,
substituting an imaginary point of view for what is complexly real and reciprocally
dynamic.
It is important to reckon with the constitutive force of the imagination when
thinking about the reality of social constructions. While providing us with an image of
ourselves, the imaginary realm also generates the phantasm of being separate from and
even on top of the world. This is an aggressive gesture of psychic departure from what is
real. In this, the world to which we belong is judged from the standpoint of the “I” and
projected as an object to be assessed at an eye’s distance. Yet, despite its illusory quality,
we can never entirely exit the imaginary realm. This is a constitutive aspect of our
psychic social subjectivity. We are fated, however, to repeatedly double back in language
upon our phantasmatic misrecognitions, replaying narcissistic projections in the key of
collectively orchestrated words.
As subjects of language, we exist in the field of what Lacan, following structuralist
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963), calls the Symbolic Order—the objectifying
realm of normative linguistic constraint. In the Symbolic Order the phantasmatic desires
and fears we experience are never ours alone. They are hooked up to a network of sliding
cultural and linguistic signifiers. Within this network we are pushed and pulled by
forceful constructed loops of meaning, but also by what the network excludes or keep
from consciousness. As such, when we communicate with one another, we never speak
entirely person-to-person or in the here and now. Whenever we speak to each other we
are also addressing the Other of our culture’s dominant linguistic system. This is a
socially constructed Other— an abstract Other standing between us and toward whom we
direct even our most intimate thoughts.
The Imaginary and Symbolic realms forever interact, dynamically contributing to
the shape of our subject positions in history. Sometimes interaction balances one realm
with the other. At other times, the effect is to suppress one realm or repress the other. But
regardless of outcome, each realm is steeped in artifice. In the Imaginary, artifice is
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projective and phantasmatic. In the Symbolic Order, what is socially constructed appears
almost “second nature” and governed by laws. But narcissistic or normative pretense
aside, neither the Imaginary nor Symbolic realm is truly real. In Lacanian thought, the
Real assumes a paradoxical status, akin in many ways to Georges Bataille’s notion of the
general economy. And, just as the general economy provides an energetic material
context for restrictive economic actions, so does the brute materiality of the Real provide
a foundation for all that is subjectively imagined and linguistically symbolized. The Real
is an aspect of all subjective constructions of reality, even as attempts to imagine and
symbolize it fall short of capturing its complexity and fullness of being. As such, from
the vantage point forged by psychic social constructions, what is real is always at least
partially unconscious.
This distinguishes Lacan’s Freudian phenomenology of social construction from
Berger and Luckmann’s. Some portion of the real is repressed every time it is imaginarily
or symbolically represented. Although repressed, the Real, however, is never actually
rendered void by the psychic work of social construction. The opposite is true. What is
real forever haunts psychic social constructions of reality, if in unconscious ways. For
this reason, grappling with unconscious tensions between the Real and the reality of
social construction is crucial for critical analyses of socially constructed reality. In
Lacanian theory, this analytic imperative resonates, not only with Freudian notions about
the inevitably repressive character of representational systems, but also with Baruch
Spinoza’s (1985) imagination of thought and extension as complementary attributes of
human nature itself.
With thought, humans make constructs of the natural world to which we belong.
But thoughts, representations, and social constructs, while rooted in the human body, are
never equal to the material complexities of nature, of which human subjective life is but
an extension. Spinoza refused philosophical distinctions between mind and body, thought
and material reality, social constructions and the realm of being, declaring each an aspect
of the other. At the same, Spinoza contended that the realm of thought was more limited
than the realm of nature that thought extends (Lloyd, 1996). As such, he advocated what
today might be called a reflexive epistemological approach to the inevitable limits of
conscious thought or constructed ideas. As a young student, Jacques Lacan papered his
bedroom wall with diagrams depicting Spinoza’s Ethics.
Lacan’s discussion of unconscious dimensions of socially constructed reality also
resembles key aspects of Émile Durkheim’s study of “totemic” social constructions or
collective representations. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim (1995)
conceptualized the representational power of the totem—a “primitive” linguistic
signifier—as a ritual social substitution of a word, emblem, iconic image, or figure of
speech for the otherwise undifferentiated metamorphosis of material reality-in-flux. Like
Lacan, Durkheim (1993: 81) was deeply influenced by Spinoza, hailing Spinoza as a
pioneer in the theoretical study of the unconscious (Nielson, 1999: 32-37). When
discussing the dual character of totemic representations (the prototype of all social
constructions), Durkheim declared that human reality is double (homo duplex). This
repeats, in a sociological register, Spinoza’s distinction between thought and extension as
complementary attributes of a singular underlying state of being.
For Durkheim, representational reality participates in, but is never equivalent to, the
physical reality from which it derives its energy (1995: 15). In discussing the dual
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character of representational constructs, Durkheim likens socially constructed reality to
delirious hallucinations or delusions, insisting that linguistic artifice inevitably reduces or
deforms the nature of reality. But Durkheim is equally insistent that representational
artifice (social construction) is itself never entirely outside reality (1995: 74-75).
Although distorting or screening reality, representations also participate in reality. As
such, they always bear traces of what is real, if in unconscious ways. According to
Durkheim, artificiality enters into collective social representations as “constructed
concepts.” Nevertheless, the “artifice” that “enters … constructed concepts … is artifice
that closely follows nature.” This is the case, suggests Durkheim, because socially
constructed representations are “part of the natural realm” and it is impossible that nature
… should be radically different from itself.” In this sense, “the social realm” is viewed by
Durkheim as “a natural realm, which differs from the others only in its greater
complexity Durkheim, 1995: 17).”
Although close to the natural reality they artificially distort, representations also
“repress the original state into the unconscious and … replace it with other states through
which the original one is sometimes not easy to detect (Durkheim: 1995: 17).” In this
way, unconscious aspects of social construction play a constitutive role in the social
dynamics of psychic subjectivity. Following William James, Durkheim depicts “psychic
experience” as “a continual stream of representations that blend into each other so that no
one can say where one begins and another ends (1974: 12).” Yet, when caught up in a
particular stream of social constructs, “Our judgments are influenced at every moment by
unconscious judgments; we see only what our prejudices permit us to see and yet we are
unaware of them (Durkheim, 1974: 12).” Moreover, in language closely resembling
Sigmund Freud’s, Durkheim suggests that unconscious psychic aspects of
representational life manifest themselves through such “signs of mental activity” as
“hesitation, tentativeness, and the adjustment of movement to a [repressed but]
preconceived idea (1974: 20).” The connection between unconscious psychic activity and
representational constructs is amplified in the work of Jacques Lacan. Lacan
acknowledges an intellectual debt to the Durkheimian tradition of thought on these
matters, stating that “the unconscious is structured like a language” and “what organizes
this field” and “inscribes its initial lines of force” represents the “truth of the totemic
function”—“the primary classificatory function (1981: 20).”
Spinoza, Lacan and Durkheim’s thinking about psychic social subjectivity is
complex and provocative. But when linking questions about the reality of social
construction to the subject positions from which constructions arise, several key lessons
may be drawn from this general tradition of thought. First, all constructions involve
imaginary or phantasmatic projections that forge a gap between the artifice of psychic
existence and what is real. Second, all constructions, no matter how subjective or
imaginary, are also mediated by social conventions governing a given Symbolic Order or
system of language. Third, all constructions—imaginary and symbolic—are
unconsciously haunted by a real order of natural historical relations, repressed in the
social constitution of psychic subjectivity itself. These lessons are given a decidedly
political twist in the writings of critical social theorists Louis Althusser and Teresa
Brennan.
Althusser (1971) pairs Lacan with Marx, describing how psychic subjectivity is
socially “hailed” or “interpellated” into existence in the ritual materiality of linguistic
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performance. This clothes the subject from the inside out in a garb of ideology,
substituting normatively sanctioned “imaginary relations” for “the real conditions of
social existence (1971: 162-165).” In this process, artificial social constructions take on
the accent of naturalized reality. In Teresa Brennan’s reconfiguration of History After
Lacan (1993), the work of Melanie Klein and feminist social thought are added to the
mix. Brennan extends Lacan’s story of the aggression involved in substituting imaginary
social relations for real relations by theorizing the historical emergence in the modern
Northwest of an “era of the ego.” The era of the Ego is characterized by a collective
“social psychosis” that imagines, first our actual mothers, then the wider realm of
energetic nature as a whole, not as the source of life, but as dependent upon the
controlling will of an intensely masculine form of psychic subjectivity. In denying its
debt to others and nature as a whole, this historically specific form of subjectivity
objectifies everything that moves.
The collective social psychosis described by Brennan begins to take shape in the
seventeenth century. Analyzing a wide range of historical data, Brennan identifies social
forces enabling the realization of a long-standing “foundational fantasy” about matter
(and mothers) as destined to be exploited as “natural resources” by men, “denying any
notion of indebtedness or connection to origin (1993: 167).” Forces facilitating the social
construction of this aggressive fantasy include the ascendance of profit-driven capitalist
logic and new technologies of measurement, manufacture, and transportation. Together
these forces permit an increased objectification and appropriation of earth’s energies. In
this, “fantasy is made into reality, as commodities are constructed to serve their human
masters, to wait upon them, at the expense of the natural world. These commodities are
objects to be controlled: they are nature transformed into a form in which it cannot
reproduce itself, nature directed toward human ends (Brennan, 2000: 9).”
Brennan describes the psychic subjectivity privileged by the “era of the ego” as
psychotic because it is literally out of touch with material actuality. The technological
realization of this subject’s foundational fantasy also begets a haunting collective feeling
of paranoia— a repressed awareness of the violence enacted by modern men of power in
the name of economic and scientific progress. This paranoia leads to defensiveness—fear
that the objectified “other” of modernity will retaliate in kind—and further cycles of
aggressive cultural projections and action aimed at domination, locking the modern
Northwest into a self-enclosed death culture of masculine and imperial violence. While
hardly the only form of psychic subjectivity associated with the social constructions of
modernity, Brennan may be correct in positing a fateful correspondence between this
deranged subject position and dominant forms of modern social power. This leads to a
consideration of power as the third significant vector affecting the reality of social
construction.
The Power of Social Construction
A third vector affecting the reality of social construction involves the field of
power. From the early twentieth century until the present, sociology’s most consistent
understanding of power is derived from Max Weber. Weber (1964: 152) defined power
as the ability of one set of social actors to exert influence over others, despite the
resistance of others. This definition has proved useful in underscoring inequalities in the
ability to influence social actions that are derived from the hierarchical organization of
social resources.
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Weber’s perspective on power has long been a feature of social constructionist
approaches to the shaping of reality. This is particularly the case for research on matters
pertaining to deviance, crime, and social problems, where power is typically viewed as a
tool in the construction and application of labels separating what is normative from what
is problematic. But this is also a limited imagination of power and one that assumes that
power is itself a resource that can be owned or controlled by persons or groups who wield
it as a weapon against others. In what follows, I supplement Weber’s instrumental
approach to power in several ways: first, by conceiving power as a constitutive field of
overlapping social forces, rather than simply a resource or possession of the powerful;
second, distinguishing between hegemonic and coercive forms of power; and third, by
situating contemporary forms of power—including all economic, gendered and racialized
fields of power—as also mediated by what might be called a global coloniality of power.
Power is a term that has undergone significant transformations in recent social
theory. The word power is derived from the Latin verb potere, meaning, "to be able." A
dynamic characteristic of all productive human relations, power is the ability to make
things happen. Power enables and constrains. It permits us to act toward each other in
socially patterned ways, influencing what we are attracted to or repulsed by. Power opens
the door for effective social constructions that make sense of the world, while closing the
door on others. This is what gives power its transformative social force. Functioning as a
dynamic and historically contingent field of forces, power gives our knowledge of the
world its socially constructed form. This is to imagine power as a complex “network of
relations” in dynamic tension with each other (Foucault: 1979: 26-27). Sometimes
relations of power converge and amplify the force of one another. At other times, power
relations contest and resist one another.
This vision of power and its relation to socially constructed knowledge finds its
roots in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s ideas about power might be
described as a kind of social physics. For Nietzsche, power is not something that
someone or some group could possess. Power is, instead, pictured as a constitutive field
of forces or “dynamic quanta” affecting everything we do. This field of forces, “in a
relation of tension” to all other forces, conditions human historical actions and socially
constructed truths (Nietzsche, 1968: 339). It burns memories and forgetfulness into the
flesh of people ensnarled in social institutions and provokes lines of flight and resistance
Nietzsche, 1967: 61). In this sense, as a field of forces—some dominant and others
dominated—power sets the scene for social action and the interpretive construction of
human meaning and morals. Power is also reshaped by the effective history of action at
every moment in time. The influence of Nietzsche’s conception of power is particularly
evident in the writings of Michel Foucault. Following Nietzsche, Foucault (1977a)
pursued a genealogy of socially constructed discourses pertaining to madness (1965),
medicine (1973), penal practices (1979), sexuality (1980), and the figure of Man in
modern European science and culture (1970). Each was portrayed as emerging out of and
feeding back upon fields of historically specific power. The goal, declared Foucault, was
to create a “common history of power relations and object relations (1979: 24).”
As Mark C. Taylor observes, Foucault made use of Nietzsche’s approach to
culture and power “to develop a sophisticated analysis of the construction of knowledge
and construction of social and culture codes…. [Moreover], since the constitution of the
knowing subject and known object occurs in a field of fluctuating powers, subjects,
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objects and their interrelation are always changing and thus ever incomplete (2001: 5758). Key to Foucault’s approach to social construction involved the power of what he
called “discursive practices.” While articulated by flesh and blood human beings,
discursive practices are never simply the product of creative human agents alone. Neither
do discourses act mechanistically as causes of human action from the outside. As
interactive networks or fields of power, discursive practices are ritually “embodied in
technical processes, institutions, in patterns for general behavior, in forms for
transmission and diffusion, and in pedagogical forms which, at once, impose and
maintain them (Foucault, 1977b: 200).
Foucault likened discourses to both micro-political “technologies of the flesh” and
“techniques of the self” (1979, 1986). Like fields of power in general, discourses are
viewed as simultaneously depending upon and partially autonomous of the human actors
who ritually enact them. Discourses productively mobilize a wide range of material and
psychic habits and sensibilities, fascinations and fears, desires, imaginings, and bodily
dispositions. At the same time, discourses are recurrently transformed by the everyday
actions of people in history. In addition to Foucault, Nietzsche’s social physics of power
resonates in important ways with the constructionist thought of theorists as diverse as
Donna Haraway (1991), Pierre Bourdieu (1977), Patricia Williams (1991), Patricia Hill
Collins (2000), Avery Gordon (1997), Paul Gilroy (1993), and Judith Butler (1977).
Power sets into place and continually replaces the fields of force in which we are
constructively positioned alongside or against others. As a “multiplicity of force
relations” immanent to the social fields in which we are situated, “power is everywhere;
not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere (Foucault,
1980: 92-93). An omnipresent feature of social life, power is also structured differently in
various times and places. Moreover, while it is possible to imagine relatively equal or
reciprocal forms of power, such forms seem far from our historical present. As such,
power is a contradictory (and often unequal) feature of everyday life, an aspect of our
ritual relations to others that transforms fluid open-ended possibilities into things that
appear timeless, fixed and objective. Power works through, upon, and between our
bodies, ceaselessly constructing and reconstructing the boundaries and limits of what we
experience as real. But just as it works in this fashion, power also provokes resistance;
compelling those it subordinates to push back against the fields of force in which power
circulates (Foucault, 1980: 95-96; Weedon, 1997: 104-131).
Power assumes both coercive and hegemonic forms. Coercive fields of power are
brutal. Whether deployed by authoritarian religious forces, gangs of thugs, bloodthirsty
conquerors, or supposed democratic governments, such as the United States in places like
Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo Bay, coercive power propagates certain socially constructed
worldviews, while smashing others apart. Violence, the threat of violence, terror, and
torture—these are all weapons in the arsenal of coercive power. Hegemonic forms of
power, on the other hand, involve the seduction or social engineering of consent.
As developed in the prison writings of Antonio Gramsci (1971), hegemony refers
to the ritual production of what passes for social consensus or common sense. Hegemony
also always involves social struggle. Sometimes this takes the form of direct political
contestation aimed at seizing control. At other times hegemonic struggle is more indirect
and involves jockeying for position. In either case, hegemony results in a contested
equilibrium between those who are divided by power’s unequal blessings, but united by a
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common sense about particular social constructions (Hall, Lumley and McLennan, 1977).
Why do people who are oppressed or damaged by hierarchical fields of power sometimes
embrace social constructions that constrain them? Inquiry into this matter is crucial for
critical analyses of the place of reality in constructionist thought.
Coercion and hegemony bend or distort reality. So does what Peruvian sociologist
Aníbal Quijano (2000) calls the “coloniality of power.” Quijano contends that no aspect
of contemporary culture or economy is ever entirely free of the continuing shadows of
colonial domination. In this sense, the legacies of colonial formations of power impact
upon all other social processes—from definitions of success and pleasure, to ideas about
value, cost-effectiveness, preemptive warfare, and pain. As Ramón Grosfoguel states—
“Quijano uses the notion of ‘coloniality’ as opposed to ‘colonialism’ in order to
call attention to the historical continuities between colonial and so-called ‘postcolonial’ times…. One implication of the notion of ‘coloniality of power’ is that
the world has not fully decolonized. The first decolonization was incomplete. It
was limited to the juridical-political ‘independence’ from the European imperial
states. The ‘second decolonization’ will have to address heterarchies of entangled
racial, ethnic, sexual, gender and economic relations that the ‘first
decolonization’ left untouched…. A key component of Quijano’s ‘coloniality of
power’ is his critique of Eurocentric forms of knowledge. According to Quijano,
the privileging of Eurocentric forms of knowledge is simultaneous with the
entangled process of core-periphery relations and racial/ ethnic hierarchies….
Subaltern knowledges were excluded, omitted, silenced and/ or ignored. This is
not a call for a fundamentalist or essentialist rescue mission for authenticity. The
point here is to put the colonial difference … at the center of knowledge
production (2006: 495-497).”
As a constitutive field of transformative social relationships, power—in both its
coercive and hegemonic modes—functions as an energetic material terrain in which
forceful social constructions are produced, impose themselves, and are resisted.
Understanding the complexities of power is critical for efforts aimed at grasping the
reality of a given regime of social constructions. What realities are fostered by a given
regime? Which remain in excess of the commonsensical constructions that dominate our
perceptions and thoughts? Related questions are posed by the coloniality of power, as it
casts long shadows upon the knowledge of reality produced by world historical
institutions and people in everyday life. This brings us to a fourth vector of influence
affecting the reality of social construction— the realm of knowledge.
The Knowledge of Social Construction
Power and knowledge are reciprocal. Each shapes the form and content of the
other. As Michel Foucault points out, “there is no power relation without the correlative
constitution of a field of knowledge, or any knowledge that does not presuppose and
constitute at the same time power relations (1979: 27). And, just as multiple forms of
power influence the reality of social construction, so do multiple forms of knowledge. To
know something is to apprehend, perceive, or understand the reality of a given
phenomenon. For the most part, however, analytic discussions of social construction
picture knowledge in cognitive or categorical terms. The social construction of terrorism
is a case in point. What are terrorism’s defining characteristics? Although a contested
matter in today’s “global war against terrorism,” cognitive constructions of terrorism
typically refer to something like the creation and use of terror (intense states of fear) as a
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political weapon aimed at intimidating or subjugating an opponent. Other social
constructions of terrorism are more limited, restricting it to categories of warfare that
violate lawful “rules of engagement,” such as deliberate attacks on civilians.
While important, by themselves, cognitive approaches fail to do justice to the
multiple dimensions of knowledge evoked by powerful social constructions. In this sense,
restricting the study of social construction to the realm of cognition limits our analytic
appreciation of the complex operations of knowledge by which effective constructions
wield their power. For this reason, I ask you to consider other modalities of socially
constructed knowledge that supplement the dynamics of cognitive apprehension. These
include narrative, emotional, bodily, moral, aesthetic, sacrificial, and haunted dimensions
of knowledge. In combination with cognition, these additional ways of knowing provide
a more holistic sense of the reality and power of socially constructed frameworks of
meaning. Sometimes these multiple forms work in concert, strengthening the force of a
particular social construction. At other times, they may be at odds with each other,
weakening a construction’s overall power.
In order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the role of knowledge in
shaping the reality of social construction, I will briefly discuss each of these supplemental
forms of knowledge. I will also illustrate the analytic value of these multiple forms by
connecting aspects of each to social constructions of terrorism. Many other examples
could be selected as well. Indeed, social constructions of marriage, AIDS, global climate
change, normal business practices, and the origin of the species today all represent
contested constructions that mobilize multiple levels of knowledge. Terrorism is selected
simply because so much of social life today—from the meaning of international law to
definitions of privacy, patriotism, and torture—are affected by powerful constructions
associated with the current “war on terrorism.”
In addition to framing constructs in cognitive terms, social constructions typically
cast the meaning of things in the form of a story or narrative (Riessman, 1993,
Polkinghorne, 1988). As the sociologist and dissident surrealist writer Georges Bataille
once observed, “To a greater or lesser extent, everyone depends on stories … to discover
the manifold truths of life. Only such stories, read sometimes in a trance, have the power
to confront a person with [her or] his fate (1978: 153). Narrative forms of knowledge
inform us about why things are the way we categorically apprehend them. Why, for
instance, do those “we” know as terrorists defy the conventions of international law and
attack civilian populations? In keeping with social constructions of terrorism that are
hegemonic in the U.S.A. today, the story goes something like this. Terrorists attack
civilians in countries such as ours because they hate freedom and have no respect for
human life.
This simplistic narrative about terrorism told repeatedly by top U.S. officials in
the Bush administration renders null and void a great many other interpretations as to
why militants might possibly wage war against the U.S. and those America considers its
allies. In addition, for those who buy into it, another powerful story may block American
soldiers from being perceived as terrorists, even when U.S. troops deliberately target
civilians. This is because Americans are said to love freedom and respect human life. In
this way, narrative forms of knowledge may overwhelm what is merely cognitive,
reshaping categorical perceptions of factual matters to fit a story that is commonly
accepted. Thus, when American troops attack civilians it must be by accident. If not, then
15
a few aberrant individuals must be responsible, because surely it can be taken-for-granted
that—unlike “real” terrorists—freedom-loving U.S. soldiers respect the sanctity of
civilian life.
Emotional forms of knowledge are also at play in powerful social constructions
(Brennan, 2004; Katz, 1999). For instance, when critics of the current war offer
narratives that contest the dominant story about how terrorists attack us because they hate
freedom, such counter-hegemonic stories are often met with a dramatic outpouring of
angry affect. To suggest, for instance, that the actions of militants who conduct
operations against the West have something to do with the contradictions of global
capitalist domination or a continuing coloniality of power is to open oneself to the
emotional wrath of those believe the dominant story. For many patriotic Americans,
counter-hegemonic stories about the war on terrorism may be literally experienced as an
assault on a heart-felt truth. As such, effective social constructions of terrorism typically
combine cognitive and narrative understandings with strong emotional doses of fear.
Emotional apprehension is an important dimension of socially constructed
knowledge. The same holds for bodily ways of knowing. As a material vector of power in
history, knowledge sometimes enters the flesh in ways that defy words (Grosz, 1994;
Mellor and Shilling, 1997). In particular, recent feminist scholarship encourages us to
attend to the “body’s innate capacity for knowledge (Brooks, 2006: 50),” for complexly
sensuous understanding and communication (Longino, 2000; Jaggar and Bordo, 1989).
As such, constructionist theories must take people at their word when they say that
simply seeing a picture of a reputed terrorist, such as Osama bin Laden, makes them sick.
When most powerful, social constructions of terrorism assume the form of carnal
knowledge, stiffening one’s back, creating a pain in the neck, arousing states of
nervousness or irritability. Even one’s eyesight may be shaped by powerful social
constructions, leading social control agents or frightened American civilians to literally
see signs of potential terrorism in people they perceive as South Asian or Middle Eastern
(but not Israeli).
Moral and aesthetic dimensions of knowledge are also aspects of the reality of
social construction. When social constructions draw boundaries around specific classes of
people, action, and things, they inevitably shade what they frame with moral strictures
and tones (Pfohl, 1994: 411). Sometimes the strictures are explicit. The war against
terrorism, it is said, is a war between good and evil. At other times the moral meanings of
social constructions may be less direct. In politically polarized America, when
conservatives decry an opponent as liberal, this social construction is likely to carry
significant moral tones, suggesting, for instance, that a particular person or group is soft
on matters of security or acting in ways that support terrorism. But whether explicitly or
implicitly, all effective social constructions mobilize an edge of moral judgment,
rendering what falls inside the construct as either good or bad, something to be supported
or something to be opposed.
The halo of morality may, however, be an obstacle to the reflexive recognition of
the historically contingent and artificial character of socially constructed realities. By
bestowing certain objects and social practices with an aura of sanctity and goodness, the
moral boundaries help naturalize or normalize the taken-for-granted character of certain
ways of doing things to the exclusion or subordination of others, This is why Friedrich
Nietzsche criticizes unreflexive submission to dominant forms of morality as reactive,
16
utilitarian, and laced with resentment (Nietzsche, 1969). The ritual construction of moral
boundaries between what a society values and what it condemns is also a key aspect of
Émile Durkheim’s theorization of the social functions of crime (Durkheim, 1964) and
George Herbert Mead’s “psychology of criminal justice (Mead, 1918). For both
Durkheim and Mead, moral revulsion contributes to collective social solidarity, while
reinforcing dominant forms of social knowledge.
Aesthetic judgment operates in a related way. Some social constructions attract
us, fitting beautifully into forms that command our respect. Others strike us as repulsive
and even ugly. Aesthetic judgment, which often operates at an unconscious level, is
another realm where power interacts with knowledge (Berger, 1972; hooks, 1992). In the
throes of the current war against terrorism, multiple levels of hegemonic knowledge may
converge in blurring the aesthetics of Islam and terror. As such, while traditional Islamic
garb, language, and song may strike people in many regions of the world as beautiful,
caught up in a hegemonic force field of fearful social constructions, many Americans
today ridicule traditional forms of Muslim apparel. Others may find the sound and
rhythmic structure of Arabic verse repugnant or difficult to listen to. This is further
evidence of the complex power of social construction as it bends and shapes what is
experienced as real.
Since all social constructions are selective, it is important to attend to what is
sacrificed by particular constellations of power and knowledge when drawing boundaries
around specific regimes of cognition, narrative, affect, bodily feeling, morality and
aesthetics. This is to suggest that what is sacrificed by a given social construction
invariably contributes to the experience of that construction itself. This is certainly true in
the current war against terrorism. It may be difficult, for instance, for people under the
spell of shadowy Northwestern constructions of “Islamic terrorism” to recognize the
spiritual complexities of the Muslim world. Nevertheless, what is sacrificed or repressed
by a dominant order of social construction does not cease to exist. The opposite is true.
What is repressed commonly returns to haunt those same constructions. This can disturb
or subvert the seeming “naturalness” of the constructions in question. As Avery Gordon
suggests, “haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething
presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities (1997: 8).” As
such, to faithfully discern the reality of social construction, in addition to the other modes
of knowledge discussed in this essay, it is vital to consider the sacrifices and hauntings
brought about by the ritual labor of construction itself.
Power-Reflexive Attunement to the Reality of Social Construction
Produced at the ritual crossroads of natural historical materiality, psychic social
subjectivity, and complex fields of both power and knowledge, social constructions
participate in what is real. At the same time, ritual constructions reduce the experience of
reality to binding figurations graced with energy and a halo of belief. By repetitively
enacting ritual constructions of the world we sacrificially transform what is real into a
kind of virtual reality— a “second nature” managed by the social constructions we
invent. In this sense, rituals of social construction produce the appearance of an
objectified world that those enchanted by these rituals misrecognize as reality itself (Bell,
1992). Ritual removes things from the natural historical context in which they are socially
constructed and provides them with the aura of being timelessly real. If the terms I am
using to describe the power of social constructions—terms such as ritual, crossroads,
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sacrifice, grace, halo, aura, and belief—carry religious connotations, this is no accident.
When most effective, social constructions super-naturalize the worlds they symbolize,
blessing social realms of artifice with the strictures of common sense and a taken-forgranted character.
The term ritual also underscores the performative dimension of social
construction. Social constructions are, after all, socially enacted artifice. To be effective
they require the “ritualized repetition” of coded symbolic interactions and a captivating
suspension of disbelief (Butler, 1993, x). But artifice performed at the ritual juncture of
the vectors of force discussed in the previous section is not artifice produced by human
agents alone. Each field of force actively shapes and is shaped by the others. The material
and psychic effects—although often unevenly distributed—are reciprocal. Each feeds off
and back into the constitution of the other. In this exchange, the wide-awake reality of
conscious human action is important, but not king of the hill. Indeed, even the innermost
realms of our psyches are touched by what Judith Butler (1997) calls “the psychic life of
power”—a doubled space where interior subjectivity simultaneously comes into being
and is ritually subjugated by spell-binding forces that enter the self from the outside.
Critical analyses of social construction endeavor to deconstruct this process,
returning the labor of reality construction to the fragile exigencies of everyday life. This
demands more than showing the supposed relativity of social constructions. As suggested
at the outset of this essay, relativism—being nowhere, while claiming to be
everywhere— is not a viable option. Recognizing that sociological constructions are also
ritual social constructions, the challenge is to engage the labor of social construction in
ways that foreground the socially situated work of the analyst her or himself. This invites
readers to dialogue about the advantages and limitations of one’s methods and
conclusions. It also situates the reality of social analysis by displaying its material and
psychic links to history and the subject positions of those who perform this work. This
helps optimize the objectivity of our theory and research. With this in mind, I conclude
this essay, by briefly discussing several power-reflexive methods aimed at situating the
objectivity of the constructions we produce and are partially produced by.
To be power-reflexive is to engage critically with the circuits of power and
knowledge in which we are located in history (Pfohl, 1994: 7-9, 470-475; Pfohl, 2005:
484-488). Power-reflexive analytic attunement is forever partial and provisional. It
endeavors to fold back upon the psychic social and natural historical terrains in which
power and knowledge are shaped and forever reshaped. Power-reflexive attunement is
vigilant in recognizing socially constructed knowledge as an active intervention within
the world. It views knowledge as participating in the world’s real constitution, and never
a mere description of the world’s reality. Power-reflexive forms of knowledge aim to
materially transform—rather than idealistically transcend—existing global matrices of
domination. To accomplish this, it is necessary to understand the ritual labor of social
construction in holistic geopolitical and ecological terms. This is to partially reverse the
disembodied flight of knowledge enacted by leading professional sectors of
contemporary social science. By contrast, power-reflexive knowledge imperfectly mirrors
back upon the ways in which our analytic constructions of the world are situated within
historical knots of power.
Power-reflexive approaches to social construction entail attunement to the
energetic material effects of both natural history and psychic subjectivity. In so doing,
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they act as a supplement to the rigors of other forms of critical social inquiry. How are we
as analysts attracted or repulsed by multilevel assemblages of knowledge and power in
which we are employed? How might we tune into the impact on knowledge production of
the vast global institutional and interpersonal networks into which we are hailed or
interpellated? Although often more sensuous than the abstractions guiding mainstream
sociology, in reckoning with the effects and exclusions of hegemonic forms of social
construction, power-reflexive methods seek to augment, rather than entirely replace,
more traditional forms of analytic work.
Power-reflexive strategies resemble, in part, what Avery Gordon, in homage to
Walter Benjamin, calls profane illumination. “These illuminations can be frightening and
threatening; they are profane but nonetheless charged with the spirit that made them.
Sometimes you feel they are grabbing you by the throat, sometimes you feel they are
making you disappear, sometimes you are willing to talk to them…. Whether it appears
unexpectedly or whether you cultivate and invite its arrival, the profane illumination is a
discerning moment. It describes a mode of apprehension distinct from critique or
commentary when … ‘thought presses close to its object, as if through touching,
smelling, tasting, it wanted to transform itself Gordon: 1997: 204-205).’” Gordon
connects profane illumination and another component of critical sociological inquiry—a
willingness to reckon with figurative ghosts, whose seething presence haunts all regimes
of reality construction. In power-reflexive terms, reckoning with what haunts us, widens
the expanse of reality grappled with by sociology. It also changes the sociologist. “To be
haunted and write from that location … is about making a contact that changes you and
refashions the social relations in which you are located (Gordon, 1997: 22).”
Donna Haraway’s discussion of “situated objectivity” also inspires a powerreflexive approach. Haraway argues for a “practice of objectivity that privileges
contestation, passionate construction, webbed connections, and hope for transformations
of systems of knowledge and ways of seeing (1991: 191-192).” Haraway recognizes that
we are never “immediately present to ourselves,” and calls for strategies of “mobile
positioning” and passionate “attunement” to the resonances of power. Guided by
historical specificity and “loving care” for the viewpoints of others—especially for those
subjugated by dominant forms of power—Haraway invites a “power-sensitive
conversation” with the world, including the natural world (1991: 192, 196). This is to
converse with the world through which we are diffracted, the real world we name nature,
but are never in charge of.
Power-reflexive attunement widens the scope of reality reckoned with by
constructionist theory and research. It recognizes that power and knowledge feed back
into one another at the ritual crossroads of natural historical materiality and psychic
social subjectivity. Despite its ritual repetition, the reality that is constructed at these
crossroads is never entirely objective. Constructed reality never fully transcends or stands
free of the world in which it is situated. At the same time, even when most imaginary,
constructed reality is never entirely subjective. This is because the psychic subjectivity of
those involved in the labor of construction is affected by its ritual position in a system of
language, and by what is real, but which escapes the confines of language. These
complex processes are all aspects of the reality of social construction. The challenge,
then, for power-reflexive analysis is to enter analytically into conversation with the
19
world, while simultaneously mediating upon the nature and effects of this communicative
engagement.
In concluding, I leave you with a short list of modest methodological suggestions.
There is nothing exclusive about this list. It is intended to supplement, not entirely
replace, the technologies of inquiry deployed by more conventional forms of sociology.
Nor is this short list exhaustive. Maybe it will inspire you to add a few methodological
offerings of your own to the conversation. The strategies I have in mind include:
historical specificity; (dis)autobiographical analysis; and subreal ethnography.
Historical specificity. It is important to locate the constructions we work with in
historical terms. This demands attention to how even the most insightful performances of
sociological construction are restricted by a continuing coloniality of power and by
sociologists’ professional complicities with complex global matrices of economic,
gendered and racialized dominations. History is an ally of critical constructionist
analysis. More challenging yet is grappling with how our work is affected by our location
within entangled historical webs of both restrictive and general economic power. At the
present moment in time we face another challenge as well. This concerns how to
understand social construction within a historical context increasingly structured by what
Jean Baudrillard (1983) calls hyperreality. Hyperreality is media-engineered reality—an
ultramodern form of social construction set in motion by high-speed communicative
feedback loops between humans and machines, and by the fascinations and fears of being
immersed in a wash of electronic imagery and cybernetic information systems of all sorts.
In the hyperreal world, social constructions are based less on the reductive
copying of reality, than on virtual realities generated from technologically powered
stereotypical schemas. Here, world-changing models of reality precede socially
constructed representations. Rather than copying the real world, hyperreal constructions
copy a prefabricated model—a preprogrammed double of the real—its abstracted code.
Constructions based on simulations engage in ceaseless interaction with the world they
code. In so doing, what is imaginarily modeled in simulation materially alters the world
and what is experienced as real about the world. In this way, what is fascinating or fearful
at emotional or aesthetic levels of knowledge often eclipses the reality and restrictions of
cognition. This, suggests Baudrillard, is to travel a slippery “slope of a hyperrealist
sociality, where the real is confused with the model” and where “hyperreality and
simulation are deterrents of every principle [of reality] and every objective (1983: 53,
43).” At the same time, hyperreal society routinely covers over traces of the
transformations in reality it induces. Baudrillard cites Disneyland as an example,
stating—
“Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of the
‘real’ America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact
that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral).
Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is
real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no
longer real. It is no longer a question of a false representation (ideology), but of
concealing the fact that the real is no longer real (1983: 25).”
The so-called global war on terrorism provides, perhaps, an even more disturbing
example. Following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on
September 11, 2001, the social construction of the “war on terror” orchestrated by the
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Bush administration resulted in a highly aestheticized and flexible simulation of
terrorism. This deceptive simulation has proved capable of absorbing cognitive
dissonance generated by counter-factual evidence and other inconvenient truths.
Dominant constructions of the “war on terror” may be thought of as simulations because
the claims they make about reality are based, not on observations that can be verified or
disconfirmed, but on predetermined, abstract, stereotypical, and generally erroneous
models of what constitutes terrorism. As mentioned previously, these simulated
constructions picture terrorism as the jealous actions of “uncivilized” groups said to hate
freedom and care little for the value of human life.
When most effective, these simulations appear capable of bypassing cognitive
dissonance almost entirely, appealing, instead, to emotional modalities of knowledge,
fueled by fear and the fascinations of (orientalized) evil. Within the United States, for the
most part, this has insulated the U.S. military from accusations of acting in a terrorist
manner itself, even when it targets predominantly civilian populations. Simulations of
terrorism were key weapons in the arsenal of mass persuasion deployed by the Bush
administration in making its case for war against Iraq. In one speech or orchestrated
media performance after another, the constructed reality of terrorism produced by such
simulations blurred Iraq with Al Qaeda and the horrors of 9-11 with the need for
preemptive war. Under the spell of such simulations, much of the American public
appeared unable to differentiate social phantasm from fact. Saddam Hussein became
virtually equivalent to Osama bin Laden and most of the public was convinced that Iraq
possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and on the verge of unleashing them
against the United States.
The reality constructed by of all this showed up in polls. But by feeding the public
statistical images of its own simulation-based construction of reality, polls only furthered
hyperreal aspects of the march to war. Shortly thereafter, “59 percent of Americans were
in favor of the war, 90 percent believed that Hussein was developing WMD, and 81
percent thought that Iraq was a threat to the United States (Berman: 2006: 207).”
Moreover, despite being falsified by the actual events of the war, the reality effects of the
simulated constructions of reality used to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq were
slow to fade. “A poll taken by the Washington Post just before the second anniversary of
9/11 revealed that 70 percent [of Americans] thought that Saddam Hussein had been
directly involved in the attacks, and that the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis, and that Hussein
had used chemical weapons against our troops. Another poll, taken in June 2003,
indicated that 41 percent believed that WMD had been found (or they weren’t sure), and
75 percent thought Bush showed strong leadership on Iraq (Berman: 2006: 212).”
While the results of these polls resonate with Baudrillard’s analysis of historical
changes in the nature and scope of constructed reality, as journalist Ron Suskind notes,
not everyone was as clueless about the process as the public-at-large. When interviewing
a Bush aide about communication strategies guiding the war on terror, Suskind reports
the following exchange.
“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based
community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from
your judicious study of discernable reality.’ I nodded and murmured something
about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the
way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. “We’re an empire now, and
when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—
21
judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you
can study too (Suskind, 2004: 51).”
Despite the admonitions of the Bush aide, it is hard to imagine a better reason to
couple the study of social constructions with the exigencies of history. In an age of
media-driven simulations, it is also important to pay reflexive attention to the multiple
forms of knowledge in which the reality of things reveal themselves. Even when seeming
to nullify cognitive dissonance, simulations remain haunted by realities they exclude.
This is a reason to engage with forms of knowledge that exceed cognitive logic.
(Dis)autobiographical analysis. As a second strategy of power-reflexive
discernment, (dis)autobiographical analysis reckons with how our subject position in
history shades what we know. The goal of (dis)autobiographical work is not to tell a
solipsistic or narcissistic story about oneself as a sociologist. Moreover, although
attentive to the singularity of the analyst’s subject position, unlike autoethnography and
other recent experiments with first-person writing, (dis)autobiographical analysis does
not tell sociological stories from a strictly subjective viewpoint. While autoethnography
fosters a valuable “emotional exposure” of sociologists’ positions within “local
institutional sites” of knowledge production, it typically falls short of situating the labor
of sociology within complex global histories of power (Clough, 2000: 180-181).
(Dis)autobiographical analysis, on the other hand, aims to double back upon the
imaginary and symbolic frameworks and vectors of power guiding social science
viewpoints on what is real.
In addition to examining how “the knowing subject” is embedded in
“intersubjective relations of knowledge production” and “face to face communities” of
inquiry, (dis)autobiographical analysis also explores what Patricia Ticineto Clough refers
to as our “embeddedness in environments of ‘knowledge objects,’ where agency and
reflexivity refer as much to an ‘interobjectivity’ or ‘the sociality of objects’ as it does to
intersubjectivity (2000: 154).” This is no easy matter, particularly when confronting selfknowledge that has become commonsensical, taken-for-granted, or unconscious.
Working reflexively with multiple levels of power and knowledge is a beginning. Indeed,
we often learn more about the constructions we inhabit by being mindful about our
emotions and bodily sensations, than we do by attending to cognitions alone.
One method used to facilitate (dis)autobiographical analysis involves “techniques
of collage/ montage writing. Rooted in the disruptions of Dada and surrealism (and
incorporated today into all kinds of popular culture forms, including advertising and
prime-time TV shows), collage can be one performative strategy for telling more than
one story at a time, bringing together on the same textual surface—and outside …
common sense or sensations of linear time—pieces of history, fiction, ethnography,
dream, and autobiography in a noticeably constructed, suggestively surreal evocation of
social realities (Orr, 2006: 29).” When most effective, collage writing may reveal the
artificial character of social identities and the cultural constructs we take to be most real
(Pfohl, 1992: 97-101). As Jackie Orr suggests, “performing sociology” in this way “is not
simply a strategy to foreground how the borders between science and literature, fact and
fiction, evidence and affect, social reality and psychic fantasy are far more permeable that
‘normal’ science wants to recognize.” It is “also and most immediately about critical,
creative responses to struggles over what gets to count as, and who gets to make, public
knowledge and collective memory 2006: 27).”
22
Subreal ethnography. As a power-reflexive strategy, subreal ethnography is
energetically inspired by surrealism. Although commonly misunderstood as a “modern
art movement,” surrealism is better imagined as a radical assemblage of social criticism
and poetic agitation. In the words of Robin D.G. Kelley, “surrealism is about making a
new life (2002: 158).” Kelley connects the “freedom dreams” of surrealism to radical
African diasporic thought and poetics, showing how surrealism was “animated” as much
by the “revolts of the colonial world and its struggles for cultural autonomy,” as by
“reading Freud or Marx (2002: 160).” Surrealism dreams of ways of knowing that exceed
the limits of commonsensical realism. “Surrealism finds realism deficient in its estimate
of reality. Ignoring dreams and the unconscious, … realism inevitably bows to the
accomplished fact…. Surrealism introduces … an expanded awareness of reality. It
demonstrates not only the continuity between internal and external reality but their
essential unity…. Surrealism, a unitary project of total revolution, is above all a method
of knowledge and a way of life; … an unparalleled means of pursuing the fervent quest
for freedom and true life beyond the veil of ideology (Rosemont: 1978: 24, 5).”
Like surrealism, subrealism represents an inquiry into the intersection between
wide-awake consciousness and the dream world. Advertising and the allures of popular
culture already cull this terrain in manipulative and profit-driven ways. But, taking its cue
from surrealism and other social movements aimed at culture subversion, subrealism
seeks, instead, to uproot constructed realities based on modern, Eurocentric, masculine
and instrumental forms of rationality. Like surrealism, subrealism celebrates the
marvelous, the poetic, and erotic. With imagination and laughter it artfully engages with
matters of pleasure and terror. Yet, unlike surrealism, subrealism does not attempt to
transcend the boundaries between wide-awake reality and the reality of dreams. It strives,
instead, to maintain provocative tension and dialogue between these distinct realms. In
this sense, subreal ethnography displaces the data-driven desires of a realist epistemology
by performing social science fiction. In the words of the Black Madonna Durkheim,
“Subreal ethnography conjures up a spiraling dance with monsters, phantoms, and ghosts.
These uncanny creatures weave their way between what's real and what is culturally
abstracted from the real. This involves a magical play of passion and mirrors, enabling
the subreal ethnographer to take flight from the force field of dominant social
constructions, expanding the reality of social construction from the outside in (Durkheim,
2006: 2.”
Energized by critical historical inquiry, (dis)autobiograhical analysis, and subreal
ethnography, power-reflexive methods direct attention to how the labor of social
construction at once illuminates and conceals the nature and scope of reality. This
suggests a different aesthetic for social science storytelling than that which governs the
professional mainstream. The challenge is not simply to discover better ways to account
for the social construction of reality, but to enable a more attentive conversation with the
real world itself. “Accounts of a ‘real’ world do not, then depend on a logic of
‘discovery,’ but on a power-charged social relation of conversation…. Objectivity is not
about dis-engagement, but about mutual and usually unequal structuring, about taking
risks in a world where ‘we’ are permanently mortal, that is, not in ‘final’ control
(Haraway, 1991: 198, 201).”
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