An Excerpt: “Constructivism
at the Crossroads; or, the Problem of Moderate-Sized Dry Goods”
by Nicholas Onuf in International Political Sociology 2016:
10, 115-132
Constructivists are those scholars whose common ground is
“the social construction of knowledge and the social construction of reality
(Adler 2002, 111).”
Constructivism has both slowed down as a theoretical project
and spread out as a research enterprise.
In this paper, I ask why constructivism in IR has slowed
down as a theoretical project. One answer is that slowing down is normal (as in
normal science); there is no problem. I propose a second answer, to the effect
that constructivism has reached a crossroads… The slowdown and the crossroads
point to a central feature of constructivist thinking. As constructivists, we
do systematically what ordinary people do routinely—we furnish our world with
moderate-sized dry goods. By now we have plenty of furniture; there must be
something else we can or should be doing.
Metaphorically speaking, we can investigate the social
construction of “stuff” that is either small, granular, and slippery or large,
shapeless, and gassy, but in both instances hard to grasp. Either way, we grant
materiality to appearances. Either choice has political implications, as does
going ahead, however slowly, with the construction of moderate-sized dry goods.
The politics in question is not, however, what most constructivists have taken
it to be.
Going Places, Doing Things
The journey starts in people’s heads.
What, then, do people do in their heads? I suggest that they
routinely engage in three highly generalized cognitive operations.
These cognitive operations are metaphorical constructions—social constructions—(re)produced in my
head, (re)assembled as a simple model, and (re)drawn from familiar sources in
Occidental philosophy and social theory. Kant is one inspiration for my model,
Aristotle another. Of the three general cognitive operations that I choose to
emphasize, the first comes first—has priority—at least for the purposes of the
model. I draw it from Kant’s discussion of primary mental faculties in the Critique of Pure Reasons.
In Kant’s construction, the mind selectively simplifies
sensory experience, puts its diverse elements together as a seamless whole, and
projects the whole as the unity of consciousness—self-consciousness. This general operation is not itself
consciously undertaken. Yet, it produces our naïve conviction that the world as
sensed—as consciously experienced—is really and truly out there. Apperception
gives us a world, a full-stuffed world at that. To say more about apperception
would take us to phenomenology and its focus on intentionality (directedness
and aboutness)—tasks for another occasion.
The second cognitive operation I have in mind makes
discriminant things—objects—out of the “sensible intuitions” that our sensory
experience produces in the mind. This operation depends on the faculty of
judgment. Confusingly, Kant called sensible intuitions and the objects that
judgement produces from such intuitions “representations.”
In my view representation is necessarily collective,
intrinsically social; through representation we give each other some sense of
what is on our minds.
Representation operates in three general ways that take
form, and are thus distinguishable, as representations, even if they variously
combine in my simple model of the mind at work. The first two Aristotle
identified in the relations of parts and wholes: every whole has parts that are
themselves wholes… By implication, the largest possible whole is the
apperceived world in our heads.
The third form of representation as a cognitive operation is
less clearly documented in Occidental thought than the other two. In my
judgment, it is, however, the most important one for understanding how social
construction works. It is implied in the relation of wholes or, more precisely,
an asserted relation between wholes not
dependent on the asserted relation of any part common to both. Neither
Aristotle nor Kant identified a form of reasoning corresponding to the relation
of wholes. It remained for C. S. Peirce to do so. “The whole operation of
reasoning begins with abduction…”
If, as I have argued, reasoning relies on representation,
and representation is a language-dependent operation, then abduction takes
place in, or through, language. More specifically, I would argue that abduction
links or “fits” (Aristotle’s term) wholes to wholes through the use of
metaphors… As an operation, abduction and its realization through metaphor are
the likely source of creativity as a “leap” in thinking (to revert to
metaphorical journeys) and theory’s claim on our attention.
I turn now to the third of my generally formulated
operations.
Making things whole would seem to be related to imagination,
abduction, representation through metaphorical language. Making whole things
moderate in size picks up where representation leaves off. I take it to be an
autonomous cognitive operation—in
this context, a moderate-sized good—and not just a generalized sensory propensity.
Turning the ineffable into the prosaic—into moderate-sized
dry goods—is in my model a primary cognitive operation.
We might call this third cognitive operation scaling. In conjunction with
apperception and representation, it gives meaning to individual experience and
furnishes the world that we dwell in together. In Adler’s terms, scaling is
indispensable to the subjective appreciation of reality and its social construction
as an apparently objective condition. In other words, constructivism is
distinctive by virtue of its emphasis on the problem of scale, scaling as a
cognitive operation, and social construction as the making of things to human
scale.
Construction Projects
International Relations is a field of study because we
already think that the world sorts into fields of study; International
Relations is a domain of social activity, or a subject of study, or a topic for
discussion because we have already scaled the world’s contents in such a way as
to be able to sort them into domains, subjects, and topics.
From now on in this essay, constructivism is a theory,
approach, framework, frame of reference—a moderated-sized good—located in a
field sized as it is for our collective convenience.
I prefer not to call constructivism a theory, since this term is either too gassy to be anything more
than suggestive (social theory, for example) or so narrowly construed, as a set
of logically related statements (rational choice theory, for example), as to
exclude anything we might want to say about social construction in
International Relations. Instead, I call constructivism a framework—not least for the term’s metaphorical associations… A
framework constitutes a metaphorical place, a bounded whole, within which to
examine the ways in which we—scholars, policymakers, ordinary people—turn the
stuff of International Relations into the middle-sized dry goods that we know
how to use for our respective, overlapping purposes. Within this frame,
constructivists have concentrated attention on four topics… These topics are
(1) identity, (2) rules and norms, (3) the paired logics of consequences and
appropriateness, and (4) the co-constitution of agents and structures. I
discuss them in turn, as they relate to the human disposition to scale the
world’s contents for use, in order to point up constructivism’s strengths and
raise questions about its limitations.
Identity
If positivists start off with small, hard things, then
constructivists are disposed to put relations first.
Just how the mind manufactures a moderate-sized dry good
called identity is a question to which constructivists have given a great deal
of attention. Their answer is, quite simply, that it takes two minds… both
minds must scale their apperceived sense of selves to fit the other’s sense of
what another human being is, namely, a moderate-sized good. These goods take
the form of a container stuffed with liquids, slimly things and, most
elusively, ideas about other moderate-sized goods.
Extrapolating this interaction process to collectiveness is
untenable. Collectivities do not have minds…
In short, minds “see” out into a world of moderate-sized dry
goods better—more clearly and cogently—than they can “know” themselves. Only
when we see ourselves as if from the outside (and this takes work) can we find
identities for ourselves and put them to use. Identities are observers’
constructs. Scholars who find them useful constructs find them everywhere.
Norms and Rules
While norms would seem, then, to constitute the regime and
rules to regulate behavior… Rules and norms perform a constitutive
function—with language as a rule-governed activity, they contribute to the
ongoing social construction of reality in the process of, or in addition to,
regulating what Boulding’s behavior units do.
When constructivists talk about normative phenomena, at
least in IR, most of them have focused on what they call norms, not rules.
For reasons addressed above, most constructivists are ill
disposed to look at rules, even when they are easy to see.
If we locate rules, not in minds as storage lockers, but in
the institutions that these rules constitute, then they are always available
for someone’s selection and use… In my view, socialization is always about
rules, and rules function as they do precisely because they are dry goods that
we have scaled for our use—just as we scale all of what we then take to be the
contents of the world.
Logics
Citing constructivists in IR (among others), they go on to
say: “Identities and rules are constitutive as well as regulative and are
molded by social interaction and experience” (March and Olsen 1989, 951, 2).
The problem here is not—as it might seem—one of reducing
identity to rules, but of thinking that rules, even when they are binding,
leave no choice.
It would seem, then, that the twinned logics of consequence
and appropriateness “are not mutually exclusive” (March and Olsen 1998, 952).
We need “theories of the middle range” (Merton 1968,
39-72)—theories about the middle
range—that are themselves quite likely to be “middle-range,” moderate-sized
theories.
Co-Constitution
Agents constitute
structures; structures constitute agents; both processes operate simultaneously
and continuously… The co-constitution of agents and structures is general… In
IR, many constructivists, myself among them, accept the co-constitution of
agents and structures as a guiding concern. Yet, this seemingly simple formula
has engendered debate from the time of its arrival in the late 1980s.
The term epistemology
is code for philosophical idealism, and ontology
for philosophical realism (and methodology
for positivism as a species of philosophical realism).
If structure is a
term so gassy, so misleading, for me to wish for its disuse and disappearance,
I recognize that institution is a
clumsy alternative when, for example, talking about gravity or rainbows.
In other words, people are not just institutions.
To say that the co-constitution of agents and structures
depends on language and rules, functioning as constitutive media, to shape or
“structure” the process (as I always have) is to replace agents and structures
with rule complexes, or institutions, and (my critics will say) turn people
into structural dopes stuffed into moderate-sized containers. Nevertheless,
co-constitutive processes have us dopes acting in and on a world that we
have together made to size and furnished for our use.
The Way Ahead
By studying the social construction of selected
moderate-sized dry goods, we are as much use as we can hope to be.
For those for whom going ahead not very much, if at all, is
not enough, there are two alternatives. To extend the metaphor, we carry the
crossroads on our backs; we can always turn left or right. Staying the course,
turning one way, or turning the other look like rational choices among three
moderate-sized dry goods. These choices are often presented in methodological
terms.
The social construction of moderate-sized dry goods is never
politically neutral.
A fully realized constructivism—one
that is fully articulated as a framework and thus a moderate-sized dry good—has
many uses and (switching metaphors yet again) somewhere to go, but only when it
joins up with micro-physics or global sociology (either works) and negotiates
the space between them (both senses of negotiate,
both metaphors). In the process, a fully realized constructivism affirms the
postmodern inversion of politics of left and right. I would even propose that
politically speaking, constructivism turns itself inside out. Attention to
moderate-sized dry goods looks like a
centrist policy, a politics of moderation. Fully realized, constructivism can show how moderate-sizing enables the
skewed distribution of all those moderate-sized dry goods.
When
we talk, we make rules. Where there are rules, there is rule appropriation
(talking what the rules say is appropriate), exploitation. Where there are
rules, there are institutional remedies. As moderate-sized dry goods, these
remedies are not always appropriate, but they are always subject to
appropriation and exploitive use.
