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 1

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 14

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

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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,

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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

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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—

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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).”

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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).” References

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