2017년 9월 30일 토요일

An Excerpt: “Constructivism at the Crossroads; or, the Problem of Moderate-Sized Dry Goods”

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.

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