Introduction to Social Constructionism

Content

Introduction to Social Constructionism

1. Introduction - What is Social Constructionism?

2. Where do you get your Personality from?

3. Does Language affect the Way we think?

4. What is a Discourse?

5. What does it mean to have Power?

1. Introduction - What is Social Constructionism?

1.1 Is there a Definition of Social Constructionism?

There is no clear definition of social constructionism, but there are four elements which characterise its basis:

1. A critical Stance towards taken-for-granted knowledge
2. Historical and Cultural specificity ( it depends in which place and what time you are born)
3. Knowledge is sustained by social processes
4. Knowledge and social action go together (e.g. attitude towards alcohol(illness))

1.2 How is Social Constructionism different from traditional Psychology?

1. Anti-essentialism: There are no essences inside things or people that make them what they are.
2. Anti-realism: There can be no such thing as an objective fact.
3. Historical and cultural specificity of knowledge: The theories and explanations of psychology are culture and time-bound and cannot be taken as a once-and-for-all description of human nature.
4. Language as a precondition of thought.
5. Language as a form of social action: When people talk to each other, the world gets constructed.
6. A focus on interaction and social practices: Explanations are to be found neither in the individual psyche nor in the social structures, but in the interactive process between people.
7. A focus on processes, not structures. Knowledge is something a person does, not something a person has.

1.3 Where did Social Constructionism come from?

There are many influences and there is no clear history. here are some of the influences.

Sociological influences: Berger Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality. They show how the world can be socially constructed by the social practices of people, but at the same time be experienced by them as if the nature of their world is pre-given and fixed. Postmodernism : intellectual movement form the arts side (art, architecture, literature). Postmodernism is a rejection of both the idea that there can be an ultimate truth and of structuralism, the idea that the world as we see it is the result of hidden structures. It also rejects the idea that the world can be understood in terms of grand theories or metanarratives, and emphasises instead the coexistence of a multiplicity and variety of situation-dependent ways of life.

2. Where do you get your Personality from?

Social constructionism challenges our traditional views and attitudes. The concept of personality doesn’t just fit in our existing framework of understanding.

2.1 The traditional View of Personality

Individual differences and stability are two aspects of what we mean by personality. We also expect someone’s personality to be consistent and coherent. There is also a relation between our personality and our behaviour.

2.2 Problems with the traditional View of Personality

There is still no evidence that there is a personality at all.

We argue in a circular way: form a behaviour we conclude to someone’s personality and from this we justify the behaviour again. This suggests that the idea of personality is a tool for us to try to make sense of the things that other people do in our every day life. This concept helps us to explain and anticipate other’s behaviour but it is no evidence for the existence of personality. Not all cultures use the concept of personality. If personality really existed, all humans would have it all over history. Many cultures do not regard personality like the western world does. This shows that personality is a concept of certain societies at a certain point in time. Human nature is a product of the particular social and economical structure we are born into.

Personality is not stable over time. We behave, think and feel differently depending on whom we are with, what we are doing and why. Theories like the role theory and the social learning theory seek to explain this phenomenon.

A person is not a system of coherent elements. Just the way be behave differently in different situations, we are talking of a conflict within ourselves, the traditional conflict of our heart and our mind. There are also different attempts to explain this, may it be with the unconsciousness or with a role conflict. This shows us, that there is a need for explanation.

2.3 The Social Construction of Personality

Personality exists not within people, but between them. Characteristics only come out when you are with others, not on a lonely island. Characteristics become meaningless once the person is removed from the relationship with others.

Your personality depends on whom you are with. There are different versions of your personality, they are a product of your interaction with others.

Conclusion: Rather than view personality as something which exists inside us, in the form of traits and characteristics, we could see the person we are as the product of social encounters and relationships - that is, socially constructed. This means that we create rather than we discover ourselves and other people.

Instead, then, of people having single, unified and fixed selves, perhaps we are fragmented, having a multiplicity of potential selves which are not necessarily consistent with each other. The self which is constantly on the move, changing from situation to situation, is contrasted with the traditional view of the stable, unchanging personality. And our view of ‘human nature’ becomes historically and culturally bound rather than fixed for all time. What we have traditionally called ‘personality’ begins to look more like a theory that we are using to try to make sense of the patterns we see in our experiences rather than a fact of human nature.

Problems: Are we living under an illusion? In saying that you have no true self, it does not imply that the selves we inhabit are therefore false. It is possible to say that we have no true self, but that we have a number of selves which are equally real.

Why are we feeling sometimes as a single unified self? This feeling is provided by our memory. Our memory looks for patterns and repetition in our behaviour, which make us feel as consistent. Instead of the concept personality we can use the term Identity. It is you that is doing the identifying, and the identity you confer has more to do with your purposes than the nature of the thing itself. This also applies to the things that make up human identities. (sane/insane..) These may be seen as socially bestowed identities rather than essences of the person.

The heart of social constructionism is the multiplicity and fragmentation of selfhood, its changeability, and its cultural and historical dependence.

3. Does Language affect the Way we think?

This chapter will show the view that the construction process I s rooted in language.

Language is unique to human beings. Unlike the stable signs of animals, the human language can change over time. The very nature of ourselves as people, our thoughts, feelings and experiences, are all the result of language.

3.1 The Social Constructionist View of Language

People use language to give expression to things that already exist in themselves or in the world, but the two are essentially independent things. Common-sense use of language is that it is just a medium, just like a telephone line.

Poststructionalists say, that the person cannot pre-date language because it is language which brings the person into being in the first place.

Language itself provides us with a way of structuring our experiences of ourselves and the world, and that the concepts we use do not pre-date language but are made possible by it. Sapir says, that language determines thought and that if there is no way to express a particular concept in a language, than that concept can not be used by people who speak that language (Language is not transparent). There are two implications of this:

1. Human characteristics like emotions, will etc. are not something essential to humans, but become available only trough language.
2. There is always a possibility of alternative constructions of the self and other ‘events’ in one’s world, trough language.

Psychoanalysts would say that humans are programmed in a certain way and language just helps to express it.

According to social constructionists the words for emotions etc. and the concept behind it pre-date anyone’s entry in the world and in the process of learning to talk we have no choice but to come to understand ourselves in terms of these concepts. The way that language is structured therefore determines the way that experience and consciousness are structured. Two examples: Descartes introduction of the division between mental and physical. This changed the way we look at illnesses. The existence of this division in our language leads to a particular kind of understanding of human beings, their experiences and their potentials. The second example shows how when we turned the adjective homosexual in a noun, we suddenly can talk about a person instead of what this person does. (this shows the general move towards looking at people in terms of what they are rather than what they do.)

3.2 Language and Structuralism

Structuralism: The structure of language determines the lines along which we divide up our experience.

Saussure¹: Signs are things that populate our mental life. All signs have two parts: the signifier

(spoken sound) and the signified (thing referred to). The link between these two parts is arbitrary². Also the concepts themselves are arbitrary divisions and categorisations of our experience. (not all languages have the same vocabulary and the same differentiation). Arbitrary doesn’t mean accidental or random. The concepts we operate with are tied in with the kind of society we live in and are therefore not random. The meaning of a sign resides not intrinsically in that sign itself, but in its relationship (differences) to other signs. Language does not reflect a pre-existing social reality, but constitutes a framework to that reality for us. It is the structure of language, the system of signifier and signified and their meanings as constituted in the differences between them, which carves up our conceptual space for us.

Once words become attached to their concepts, they become ‘fixed’, which explains how all the users of the same language can communicate. This doesn’t explain how words can change meaning over time and that its meaning can depend upon who uses it and in which situation.

3.3 Language and Poststructuralism

The fundament of poststructuralism is that the meanings carried by language are never fixed, always open to question and always temporary. It has major implications for our understanding of the person, his identity and the possibilities for personal and social change.

Two points shared by structuralism and poststructuralism:

1. Language is the prime site of the construction of the person. The different selves are produced trough linguistic exchanges with other people.
2. The constructive force of language in social interaction ensures a fragmented, shifting and temporary identity for all of us.

With the postconstructionalist view of language we are drawn into a view of talk, writing and social encounters as sites of struggle and conflict, where power relations are acted out and contested. A sentence can change its meaning in different situations. ”Does he take sugar?” is fine if you ask the parents of a child, where it is insulting hen you ask the wife of a blind man. An answer can serve to contest the assumptions made in the question.

In may conversations, the parties are engaged in a linguistic struggle to build, maintain or reject the identities on offer in this situation. If you feel trapped in your identity, postconstructionalists see language as the major site where these identities can be challenged or changed. If you challenge a question, you can start to raise awareness. This is an aim of discourse³ analysis. If language provides structure and content of our thought, then what we say is what we think and arguments about different word-forms get a new meaning.

4. What is a Discourse?

One way of how language is structured is the idea that language is structured into a number of discourses, and that the meaning of any signifier depends upon the context of the discourse in which it is used. There are different uses of the term discourse.

4.1 Two Approaches to the Study of ‘Discourse’

The first approach is interested in issues of identity, selfhood, personal and social change and power relations. The ideas come from structuralism and poststructuralism. Sometimes psychoanalytic concepts are involved.

The second approach focuses upon what people are trying to achieve with their talking or writing and how they are achieving it.

Firstly the book will focus on the first view, the second will be considered in a later chapter.

4.2 What is a Discourse?

There are difficulties to define the term. A discourse refers to a set of meanings, metaphors, representations, images, stories, statements and so on that in some way together produce a particular version of events. Since there are many alternative versions of an event , there are also different discourses over the same event (e.g. foxhunting as pest control or animal torture). Each discourse brings different aspects into focus, raises different issues, different implications. Each discourse claims to say what the object really is, claims to be the truth. Claims to truth and knowledge are the issues that lie at the heart of discussions of identity, power and change, but more of this in the next chapter.

Attitudes and opinions are left from the discussion since they are essentialist concepts of the ‘personality’ kind. They refer to structures inside the person which determine the actions, thoughts etc.

A social constructionist sees things that people say and write not as manifestations of some inner, essential condition such as personality, temperament or attitude. They are manifestations of discourses, outcrops of representations of events in social life. They have their origin not in the person’s private experience but in the discursive culture that those people inhabit. Words or sentences do not of themselves belong to any particular discourse, in fact the meaning of what we say rather depends upon the discursive context. There is a two-way relationship between discourses and the actual things people say and write: discourses show up in the things that people say and write, whose meaning depends again upon the discursive context in which they appear. Anything that can be ‘read’ for meaning (texts, paintings, clothes etc.) can be thought of as being a manifestation of one or more discourses and can be referred to as ‘text’. Given that there is virtually no aspect of human life without meaning, everything around us can be referred as ‘textual’, and ‘life as a text’ could be said to be the underlying metaphor of the discourse approach.

4.3 Discourse and Identity

We can now say that our identity is constructed out of the discourses culturally available to us, and which we draw upon in our communications with other people. People’s identities are achieved by a subtle interweaving of may different ‘threads’, characteristics like age, class, gender etc. Each of these components is constructed trough the discourses that are present in our culture. We are the end-product, the combination, of the particular ‘versions’ of these things that are available to us. The different components have implications for each other. (youth & employed, white vs. youth & unemployed, black) For each thread there is a limited number of discourses on offer which we might fashion ourselves. We have to fit into one of the discourses offered.

Sometimes the threads don’t fit together too well (e.g. student after retirement, women in science). For each of us, a multitude of discourses is constantly at work constructing and producing our identity. Our identity therefore originates not from inside the person, but from the social realm, where people swim in a sea of language and other signs, a sea that is invisible to us because it is the very medium of our existence as social beings.

But to say that identities are socially constructed trough discourse does not mean to say that those identities are accidental. Although identities are not fixed or determined by some essential nature, this doesn’t mean that they have been arbitrary or randomly built.

4.4 Discourse, Social Structure and Social Practices

The discourses that form our identity have implications for what we can do and what we should do. But why do some versions or ways of representing people or events appear as ‘truth’ and others as ‘fiction’?

Discourses are not simply abstract ideas. The discourses that form our identity are intimately tied to the structures and practices that are lived out in society form day to day, and it is in the interest of relatively powerful groups that some discourses and not others receive the stamp of ‘truth’. We live in a capitalist society, with institutions such as law, church, etc. so it positions attributes there like employed, married etc. All of these social structures and social practices are ensured and encouraged by the law and other state controls.

There are two points of caution: Firstly: Prevailing discourses are not ensured their dominant position for eternity. Secondly: Discourses do not simply ‘map on to’ particular political agreements.

4.5 Problems: Personhood, Agency and Reality

The extremist view of social constructionists is that language is all there is, nothing has any existence outside of language, discourse is all there is. Foucault has the same opinion and will be heard of more in the next chapter.

There are some problems with this view which have to do with personhood, personal agency and reality:

1. We are accustomed to thinking of ourselves as having a certain kind of personality and that our ideas, experiences opinions and beliefs, upon which we act, have originated in our own minds, we are their ‘author’. We also assume, that we exercise choice and make decisions and we fashion our lives and take responsibility for the kind of person we have become. Trough the use of terms such as ‘personality’, ‘attitude’, ‘skill’ and so on we were brought to believe that we were having these characteristics, weather they are inborn, learned or acquired by experience. Together they contribute to the discourse of individualism, a way of referring to people as unique combinations of psychic material which determine the kind if life a person is likely to lead. The discourse makes it possible for us to think in terms of personalities and attitudes, it brings these phenomena into view for us but the words do not in themselves refer to real entities or psychological properties. But why are there so many different points of view in different persons? The idea that our subjective experience is provided by the discourses in which we are culturally embedded gives the answer for the social constructionists. It is as if we internalise the ways of representing human life present in discourses and our subjective experience flows from that. Language provides our subjective experience of the world. But there is still a question mark over the nature of personhood and subjectivity.

2. The second problem is that of human agency⁴. If people are products of discourse, and the things they say have only status of manifestations of these discourses,, in what sense can we be said to have agency? The actions, words and thoughts of human beings appear to be reduced to the level of by-products of bigger linguistic entities of which we may be unaware. Our hopes, desires and intentions become the products of cultural, discursive structures, not the product of human agents. We see the world changing and imagine that human intention and action is at the root of it but this is an illusion. But the problem of human agency has not been resolved yet by social constructionists.

3. Another Problem with this view is how you conceptualise reality and truth. All that language can do is refer to itself, it is a self-referent system. Any sign can only be defined in terms of other signs in the language. Whatever the nature of the ‘real’ world is, we cannot assume that the words in our language refer to it or describe it. Given that there are numerous and conflicting discourses surrounding any ‘object’, we are left with no notion of truth. The claims of each discourse are simply relative to each other, and cannot be said to be either true or false when compared to reality. Some writers prefer to conceptualise discourse as a very powerful formative influence upon our thought and experience but falling short of entirely constituting that experience for us.

5. What does it mean to have Power?

We can begin to see that discourses are embedded in power relations, and therefore have political effects. If we have not fixed and pre-given identities, why do some identities ‘stick’ to us and others are hard to ‘bring off’? According to the social constructionists, a large part of the answer to this lies in the fact that representations of people can serve to support power inequalities between them, while passing off such inequalities as fair or somehow natural. Power can be thought of as the extent of a person’s access to rare resources, as the extent on which they have effect on their world or an impact upon other people’s life. According to this some people in society have more power than others.

Although these structural inequalities are very real, they are only part of the story. To understand these power inequalities in society properly, we need to examine how discursive practices serve to create and uphold particular forms of social life. If some people can be said to be more powerful than others, we need to examine the discourses and representations which uphold these qualities.

5.1 Foucault and Power

Our common-sense⁵ understanding of the relationship between knowledge and power is the notion that knowledge increases a person’s power. But Foucault’s conception is a bit different from this. From all the different views and versions of events some will have a greater tendency to be seen as common-sense or truthful than others, though this depends on the different cultures, the place in history and the structure of the society. Like this, what we call knowledge then simply refers to the particular construction or version of a phenomenon that has received the stamp ‘true’ in our society. For Foucault, knowledge is intimately bound up with power. Any version of an event brings with it the potential for social practices, for acting in one way rather than the other, and for marginalising alternative ways of acting. The power to act in particular ways, to claim resources, to control or to be controlled depends upon the ‘knowledge’ currently prevailing in a society. We can exercise power by drawing upon discourses which allow our actions to be represented in an acceptable light. Foucault therefore sees power not as some form of possession, but as an effect of discourse. For him, knowledge is a power over others, the power to define others.

Since there are always different discourses over one event, the dominant or prevailing discourse is

constantly challenged and needs to resist. If we were sure that something is the ‘truth’ there would be no need to keep asserting it. For Foucault power and resistance are the same, since the power implicit in one discourse is only apparent from the resistance implicit in another. Repression is used when the limits of power have been reached.

5.2 Disciplinary Power

Foucault rejects the view of power as an essentially repressive force, seeing it instead as at its most effective when it produces knowledge. He believes that over the last hundred years or so we have seen the rise of a number of institutional and cultural practices that have as their product ‘the individual’ that we know today in the western industrial society.

This ‘knowledge’ is very powerful, in that it manages the control of the society and its members efficiently and without force, trough what he calls ‘disciplinary power’, in which the population is effectively controlled through their own self-monitoring process. For a concrete example turn to page 65.

Foucault believes that there has been a radical shift in the way western societies are managed and controlled. It has been a shift from ‘sovereign power’ in which the sovereign controlled the populace by the power to punish, coerce or kill them, and towards a ‘disciplinary power’, in which people are disciplined and controlled by freely subjecting themselves to the scrutiny of others (esp. ‘experts’) and to their own self-scrutiny. Disciplinary Power is a much more effective and efficient form of control.

5.3 Disciplinary Power and Psychological Science

With this background, the position of psychology itself becomes highly dubious. It looks not like a help for people to improve their lives, but like a part of the machine of social control. The practice of surveillance requires information about people, which can then be used to establish norms for ‘healthy’ or ‘morally acceptable’ behaviour. Products of this like intelligence tests constitutes the production of knowledge which can be used to control people while making it appear as though it is in their own interests, and with the stamp of science to authorise such knowledge.

5.4 The Archaeology of Knowledge

Foucault does not see the emergence and the rise to dominance of particular discourses or knowledge as a result of intentional machinations by powerful groups. The practical and social conditions of live are seen as providing a suitable culture for some representations rather than others, and their effects may not be immediately obvious or intended. But once a discourse becomes available culturally, it is then possible for it to be appropriated in the interests of the relatively powerful. Historically, then, we can trace back the emerge of a discourse and try to search for the breeding ground for it. But there are no social conditions to necessarily produce particular discourses. It is possible to look into the past to see how a discourse has emerged, but it is not possible to look into the future. Foucault’s prime focus was on the analysis of the ‘archaeology of knowledge’ in order to understand the origins of our current understanding of ourselves. So we can start to question their legitimacy and resist them. He aims to bring fore the previously marginalised discourses. These marginalised voices and discourses are seen as important sources of resistance for us all in challenging the legitimacy of the prevailing ‘knowledge’. Foucault has come up with some original ideas about the development of institutions such as prisons, asylums and schools. Unfortunately there are no standards by which to judge such work, so there is no way of measuring the accuracy of an analysis.

5.5 Discourse, Power and Identity

Here are some examples of how power has been thought to operate trough discourse.

Discourses offer a framework to people against which they may understand their own experience and behaviour and that of others and can be seen to be tied to social structures and practices in a way which masks the power relations operating in society.

If people really understood that they were being controlled, they would not stand for it. Foucault: ”power is tolerable only on condition that it masks a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanism.”

The example of one discourse is on page 72. (The discourse of ‘romantic love’ serves to re-cast the economic arrangement between man and women (women works for free) into a narrative of mutual benefits, personal and emotional reasons.)

Discourses are not monolithic, they do not interlock neatly with each other. There are weak points, places where they might be attacked, and points where other discourses pose a real threat, discourses are always being contested by others - Where there is power, there is also resistance. The discourse of the individual is central to our present social and economic organisation and as such it is a rich source of material for those who wish to use it to represent themselves in an acceptable way.

There are some conclusions from interviews with a minority in our society (p.75ff): Firstly, the process of constructing and negotiating our own identities will often be conflict ridden, as we struggle to claim or resist the images available to us trough discourse, especially if it explicitly challenges existing social institutions.

Secondly, power is always relative, even those in marginal positions can gain some validation by drawing upon suitable discourses.

Thirdly, power is a two way street, as explained above.

Discourses can operate to obscure the power relations operating in society. This seems to imply that, by taking on board particular discourses as ways of representing our experience to ourselves, we are living under an illusion. But what, if we are really happy in our illusion?

6. Is there a real World outside Discourse?

The concept of ideology is often used by social constructionists to talk about the way in which discourse obscure such power relations. Ideology⁶ has a variety of meanings and we need to think about what implications the various meanings have and which is the most useful to social constructionism. We will focus on four of them.

6.1 Ideology as ‘False Consciousness’

A very widespread understanding is the classic Marxist view. The basic assumption underlying this view is that there is a real, material state of affairs, but that people do not recognise this reality because it is obscured by widely accepted ideas and beliefs. People are thus said to be living in a ‘false consciousness’ because their understanding of their position is distorted. (Lower cast in religion) Ideology serves to mask the contradiction in society.

Implications for social constructionism : This version of ideology enables us to take a critical stance on the discourses and narratives prevalent in society and ask what effects they are bringing about, but it also brings some problems for social constructionism.

Firstly The image of the person that it imports: human beings become potentially irrational creatures committee to a way of live which is not in their best interest. How is it possible for people to be self- deceived in this way? If discourses mask an underlying reality of which people are kept ignorant, what kind of status do individuals’ accounts of their feelings, motivations and desires have? ->Discourses are held to form the conceptual frameworks against which people make sense of their lives and their personal experience is offered as some account of how discourses come to be lived out’ in the consciousness of us all form day to day. But it says nothing about the psychological process by which this is achieved; the issues of psychology and subjectivity within discourse analysis of the person have not been adequately addressed.

Secondly, the ‘false consciousness’ notion of ideology raises the issues of reality, truth and relativism. By saying that people are living in a false consciousness, we are assuming that there is a ‘reality’ which lies outside of their understanding of the world, i.e. it is a version of events that is more valid and truthful, which is in the direct opposition to the central idea of social constructionism. This involves an assessment of what is truly in a person’s interest and raises questions about who has the right to make such judgements.

Foucault insisted that the term ideology assumes that there is a truth, and we should instead speak of ‘regimes of truth’, where one regime is no more correct than another.

Thirdly, if all accounts are equally valid, how can social constructionists accounts justifiably have any special claim to truth? The best we can do s perhaps to use the insights offered by social constructionism and put up with the consequences.

6.2 Ideology as Knowledge in the Service of Power

A more useful way of thinking about ideology, for the social constructionist, is to see it as knowledge deployed in the service of power. This view detaches ideology form questions of truth and falsity. A version of events is only ideological to the extent that it is used by relatively powerful groups in society to sustain their position. Ideas in themselves cannot be said to be ideological, only the uses to which they are put. The study of ideology is therefore the study of the ways in which meaning is mobilised in the social world in the interests of powerful groups.

Implications for social constructionism : This view allows us to say that discourses may be used ideologically. The discourse themselves can therefore be said toe be neither oppressive nor liberating.

Foucault said, that just about any discourse could theoretically be used to good and bad ends, and that there was no way of predicting the final outcome of the struggles in which discourses may be deployed. Every discourse us potentially dangerous.

6.3 Ideology as lived Experience

This view helps us to go behind the assumption that ideology is concerned only with what people think. For Althusser⁷, ideology is a ‘lived experience’ and therefore it is present not only in what we think, but what we think about, what we feel, how we behave, and the pattern of all our social relationships. The term ‘ideological state apparatuses’ refers to the mechanisms by which people are manipulated and controlled by ideology (schools, the church etc.). The ideas and ways of thinking that these apparatuses entail cannot be separated from their practices, they offer a ‘package deal’ of material things, practices and ideas that are woven into each other. An ideology always exists in an apparatus and its practices.

Implications for social constructionism : Althusser is surely right to widen the scope of the concept to the ways in which ideology pervades everyday life. We can therefore think of the ideological workings of discourses as located not only in our language, but also in the social practices in which we engage as a society.

6.4 Ideology as Dilemmatic

This view says, that our thought, its concept and processes are provided by wider, socially shared concepts and issues. Thinking itself is characterised by this ‘dilemmatic nature’, it takes the form of a dilemma, a two-sided question to which there is no easy answer, we think therefore in dilemmas. ‘Ideological dilemmas’ refer to thinking which is shaped by prevailing ideologies in our society. For Billig, ideologies are like all other ideas dilemmatic, they are not a coherent unified system of ideas. Implications for social constructionism : It suggests that, although the content of our thoughts is provided by wider social concepts and values, we do not simply absorb them uncomplicatedly and live them out in our lives. Firstly, ideologies are not unified systems anyway and since they are two- sided, they do not present a story that can be lived out in this way. Secondly, the person here is an active thinker, someone capable of exercising choice and making decisions about the strengths and weaknesses of her or his society’s values and ideas.

Conclusion: Taking the useful aspects of all of these views of ideology, then we can think of discourse as systems of meaning, ways of representing ourselves and our social world, which constitute not only what we think and say, but what we feel and desire and what we do. Discourses can be seen as having the potential to be deployed ideologically, that is, in the service of power and in the interests of relatively powerful groups in society, but may at the same time allow room for people to exercise some degree of choice in the discourses they take up and use. Science itself has been analysed as an ideology which is constructed trough various rhetorical devices and linguistic practices and which is used to serve relatively powerful groups in society.

6.5 Discourse and Reality

The absence of truth seems to be the foundation upon the theoretical framework is built. Since the extreme relative position is claiming that nothing exists except as it exists in discourse, it is difficult to conceptualise the relationship between discourse and reality.

Parker’s concern is to come up with some conception of a ‘reality outside of the text’ that still allows to tenable constructionist position. He suggests, that we think of ‘things’ as being endowed with one of three ‘object statuses’: ontological, epistemological and moral/political.

In the ontological⁸ realm are objects which form the material basis for thought and give us something to think about (brain, bodies etc.). These things exist independently of human thought processes and language. We cannot have direct knowledge of them.

In the epistemological⁹ sphere are things which have entered discourse; they are things we have given meaning to and talk about.

In the moral/political realm are things that have a special category of things in the epistemological status. They are things that can be called into being trough discourse and thus given a reality which can have real effects upon people. Some of these things have also ontological status (electricity) and others are invented trough discourse (personality). The danger is then that objects having only moral/political status are treated as if they had the same kind of reality as ontological things. Parker suggests that we should extend the status of ontological things to include all the aspects of our physical and social environment that structure our action. So for Parker, there is a reality that exists outside of discourse which provides the raw material from which we may structure our understanding of the world trough discourse. Form this the idea emerges, that while reality does not determine knowledge, it lays down important restrictions on the variety of ways opento us to ‘construct’ the world. Knowledge must to a certain extent be a function of what is real, not simply the product of ideas and imagination.

Parker’s arguments rest upon the idea, that things may really belong to one category and are ‘passed off’ as belonging to another for political ends. Now this raises the issues of how we are to distinguish the members of the different categories and who is in a position to make such judgements. Edwards is at the other end of the spectrum and argues, that nothing exists beyond ‘text’. We cannot step outside language and perceive aspects of the world that we have not constructed through it. The major thrust of social constructionism is the claim that human beings, and all the other ‘things’ consciously present to us, are socially, discursively produced. People thus have become puppets of the ideas they believe to be their own and their actions are determined by the underlying structure of ideas and language rather than by their own choices and desicions.

6.6 Agency and Change

The question as to whether social constructionism allows us any notion of human agency is again a problem which arises from the fundamental conception of the social world offered by this theoretical framework. If humans are really only a manifestation of the prevailing discourses, then they can really not change their situation. But this is the extremist view.

Even Foucault says, that although the person, is constituted by discourse, this subject is yet capable of critical historical reflection and is able to exercise some choice with respect to the discourses and practices that it takes for its own use. Foucault proposed that change is possible trough ‘opening up’ marginalised and repressed discourses, making them available as alternatives from which we might fashion alternative identities. This form of ‘consciousness-raising’ has as its main purpose to free us from our usual ways of understanding ourselves.

Gergen had the idea of ‘warranting voice’ According to him, we are all motivated by the desire to have our own versions of events prevail against competing notions. We therefore present constructions of ourselves that are most likely to ‘warrant voice’. Some versions of events ‘warrant voice’ more than others, and this may be because those in relatively powerful positions have both the resources and the authority to make their versions ‘stick’. In ordinary life too, we are all engaged in this process with each other, and in this context, ‘voice’ is determined by how skilful a person is at using the warranting conversations belonging to her or his particular society. On the everyday level, one may justifiably make a claim to voice on the grounds of possessing privileged mental representation or experience. IN each of the cases, then justification for voice rests in the declaration of an allegiance to a different mental process, entity or characteristic: observation, rationality, intention, passion and moral value (”I know, because I saw with my own eyes.”). If they were to be accepted by others, this would signify that those others had given up their claim to voice. People who are skilled ‘discourse-users’ have at their disposal the means to bring off their desired identity construction for themselves and to resist those offered by others. Like this, the person is a user and manipulator of discourses, not only a product of them.

There are three implications of this view: Firstly, it gives us an insight into why different people or groups may employ different constructions of events, and why the same people may use different constructions of the same event on different occasions. This would include the tendency of those in power to legitimate and endorse constructions or discourses which maintain and justify their position.

Secondly, it suggests that the agency of human beings lies in their ability to manipulate discourse and use it for their own ends, it implies, that personal change is at least a possibility. Thirdly, it implies that this ability is in the nature of a skill and therefore could be improved, thereby increasing the agency of the individual.

Social constructionism gets also the critics, that it is a top-down theory which makes it impossible for the individual to change something. More of this in the next chapter(Abbildung in dieser Leseprobe nicht enthalten)

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^[1] Saussure, Ferdinand de (1857-1913), Swiss linguistics scholar. He is one of the founders of modern linguistics and his work is fundamental to the development of structuralism. He emphasised the importance of a synchronic approach, treating language as a system of mutually dependent and interacting signs. He also made a distinction between langue (the total system of language) and parole (individual speech and acts), and stressed that linguistic study should focus on the former.

^[2] arbitrary: decided by or based on chance or personal opinion rather than facts or reason.

^[3] discourse: connected language in speech or writing.

^[4] agency: 2a active operation; action. b intervening action; means

^[5] Foucault, Michel (1929 -84), French philosopher. He was mainly concerned with exploring how society defines categories of abnormality and the manipulation of social attitudes towards such things by those in power.

^[6] ideology: 1 the system of ideas at the basis of an economic or political theory. 2 the manner of thinking characteristic of a class or individual.

^[7] Althusser, Louis (1918 -90), French Philosopher. His work in reinterpreting traditional Marxism in the light of structuralist theories had a significant influence on literary and cultural theory from the 1970s. He sought to reassert an anti-humanist approach to Marxism and develop into a structural analysis. Found guilty of murdering his wife, he spent his last years in a mental asylum

^[8] ontology: study of the nature of things or of existence.

^[9] epistemology: study of knowledge.