I’d like to call a moratorium on the use of the word “constructivism” (or “constructionism”) to refer only to social constructivism.
(This post was prompted by Tim Morton’s Object-Oriented Strategies for Ecological Art, but his point there is somewhat differently directed and mine addresses a more general issue that can still be found in a lot of writing in social and ecological theory, and which concerns what’s at stake when we speak of “constructivism.”)
Ecological thinkers like Michael Soule and Gary Lease, Anna Peterson, and others have argued that social constructivism — the idea that all our ideas about the world are products of our social and discursive practices — doesn’t provide an ecologically adequate way for understanding the nonhuman world or our relationship with it.
Their critiques have tended to follow in a more general line of criticism of social constructionism by defenders of science like Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, Alan Sokal, and others. The general point in these critiques, put nicely, is that social constructivism claims too much for itself; it may account for some of the social dimensions by which people make sense of phenomena, but it in no way accounts for their material or biological realities. These debates are all rather old and stale by now, and I mention them only to put a broad frame around the comments that follow.
The use of the word “constructivism” to mean social constructivism, however, takes away one of the best tools we have for understanding a universe that is always in the process of being constructed — or co-created, or orchestrated, or collectively improvised; choose your favorite creative-verb metaphor — by all the effective entities that make it up.
I’ve criticized “construction” myself in the past (e.g., here and here) for its limited usefulness as a metaphor for what eco-social theorists are interested in. Constructing things is clunky; it’s done brick by brick, piece by piece, like Lego blocks, not like the slippery, complex, and thickly relational sorts of processes that characterize the universe. (Words like “systems,” “networks,” and almost any other way of depicting the “building blocks” — ha, there’s another one — of the universe all have their limitations.) A similar critique has been made by Ian Hacking, Anna Peterson, and others.
However, the term is not entirely inappropriate, at least not all the time. Far from it, even: birds construct nests, beavers construct dams, ants construct cities, and humans construct civilizations, commodity markets, megaton bombs, and cities and dams and maybe occasionally nests, too. Each of these is recognized as what it is by other birds, beavers, ants, and humans (respectively). That means that each is both social and material — which is precisely the point of a more generalized eco-constructivism.
The point is that there is a very important difference between the social constructivism that has been used, quite effectively at times, to understand the social sources of ideas, discourses, and power-laden institutional practices — everything from “normalcy” to “madness” to “religion” to “the social” itself — and, on the other hand, the generalized constructivism, sometimes called relational constructivism, heterogeneous constructivism, co-constructivism, discursive-material or material-semiotic constructivism, radical constructivism (which gets confusing as that term is used to refer both to the social and the much-more-than-social kinds), artifactual constructivism, evolutionary or biological constructivism, constructive empiricism, etc., by which the universe is crafted into existence by its many participants. (See here for some of these varieties.)
It is the latter (Latourian-Deleuzian-Stengersian-et al.) kind of constructivism that gets elided when the word is used to mean only the first kind.
One of the implications of a generalized constructivism is that all of our knowledge practices contribute to constructing their objects; none are so innocent as to be entirely passive and neutral, observing without being somehow registered in the world that they observe. Laboratory settings are intended to create that kind of pure state of observation; but ecological reality does not take place in laboratories, and in the field, that kind of purity is always somewhat elusive.
So I would like eco-theorists, at least, not to follow sociologists in assuming that “constructivism” is only social constructivism, but to acknowledge that there are constructivisms… and there are constructivisms. It’s important to specify which kind we mean.
Do you like composition better? Seems to be Latour’s new word. Though “compositionism” is kind of clunky too.
its funny, cause when I think constructivism, the first thing I think of is Russian constructivism! You know, a lil Rodchenko and all . . .
Adam – I like Latour’s Compositionist Manifesto. I actually wrote something years ago (“De/composing (in) the postmodern soundscape,” published in Musicworks No. 64) where I tried to argue something along the lines that decomposition would be a more ecologically attuned method than deconstruction. Decomposition is, after all, what happens to all living things eventually. But I also argued that composition was a bit too modernist: it’s the thing done by composers (individual-creative-genius-minds), whereas the more universal model for music-making is a kind of comprovisation (a mixture of composition and improvisation) – improvising together to create things that may withstand the ravages of time, for a while.
Chris – Yes, Tim refers to Rodchenko et al in his post, which I was happy to see, since their art epitomizes the way I think (social) constructivism’s critics envision constructivism. It’s also a kind of decomposition of art to its most basic elements (colors, shapes). But even some of the constructivists betray their Russian Orthodox (and/or Jewish and/or Catholic) roots more than you might think. Malevich, for instance, would hang his “Black Square” in the corner of the room where the most important religious icon was supposed to hang. (I write a little about that here: http://www.yorku.ca/soi/_Vol_6_1/_HTML/Ivakhiv.html).
Adrian might you be confusing constructivism (the aesthetic strategy eg Naum Gabo) and CONSTRUCTIONISM (what some accuse some STS folks of)?
Tim – I suspect the differences are somewhat discipline-specific. Certainly the artistic movement (that began in Russia in 1919 or so) is called “constructivism” (though the Soviet artists would sometimes use the term “construction”, i.e. «конструкция», for their works). But I see “constructionism” and “constructivism” both being used a lot in social/cultural/educational theory, the latter (“-ivism”) probably more with educators and developmental theorists like Piaget and Vygotsky, the former (“-ionism”) probably more in sociology (Berger & Luckmann et al) and in critiques of Foucault, et al. Do you think the difference is germane?
On second thought, Tim, since I’m the one asking for care in our use of these terms, I should be more careful myself. I’ve just done a few google searches on these terms (not that these are in any way authoritative of course, but just to provide a bit of rough-and-ready statistical ground-truthing):
Berger Luckmann + constructionism 147,000 / constructivism 43,000
Foucault + constructionism 112,000 / constructivism 284,000
Derrida + constructionism 103,000 / constructivism 389,000
postmodernism + constructionism 174,000 / constructivism 595,000
Piaget + constructionism 68,000 / constructivism 177,000
Gabo + constructionism 2,000 / constructivism 78,000
Tatlin + constructionism 689 / constructivism 40,000
(the latter two being good ways to check the truthiness of the others, since Gabo & Tatlin are almost never, to my knowledge, called “constructionists”)
So, by Google, Berger & Luckmann are the constructiONists, while Foucault, Derrida, Piaget, the “postmodernists” (whoever they are), *and* the artists are all constructiVists.
Interestingly, in Google Scholar (to get a more scholarly sample) the results become more ambivalent:
postmodernism + constructionism 18,300 / constructionism 20,400
Foucault + constructionism 16,400 / constructivism 13,900 (a reversal!)
Piaget + constructionism 5900 / constructivism 20,400
I guess my original insight (previous comment) is still fairly accurate.
Interesting post, glad I ran across it, since this is what I’ve been writing about all day long! 🙂 So here’s a question coming out of your post. You suggest the debate between science folks, ecologists and constructivists is old and stale, hence you call for the moratorium. But I can’t help but wonder if it is in fact old and stale?
Case in point, I am writing a critique of Paul Wapner’s new book, Living Through the End of Nature: The Future of American Environmentalism, in which he argues from a social constructivist position that we have now reached the empirical and conceptual “end of nature” and this, the dual dreams of naturalism and mastery, which are his two main foils, no longer make sense. It seems to me in reading through this book that the end of nature=social constructivism position is still quite alive and thriving in some circles.
So I guess my question more generally would be how do we go about evaluating any social constructivist arguments in the context of ecological debate where the thingness or materiality of nature, at least in my mind, needs defended against this purely theoretical view of nature as social construct?
My initial reaction is to agree that there is a social construction of the concept of nature, but not of the actuality of nature as an empirical reality. I’m perhaps more sympathetic to the social constructivist argument about wilderness, but even there I think it is messy at best.
Seems like folks here have probably thought about this at least in some depth, so I’d love any thoughts.
Horatio – You raise a good point, which is that “the debate between science folks, ecologists and constructivists” may not in fact be “old and stale.” While I think it’s old (i.e., it’s been around for at least a couple of decades now), news of its vintage hasn’t reached everywhere yet.
But my point wasn’t that social constructivism isn’t useful; it is. I just think we need to be more careful with terminology. If we mean social construction, we should say so; if we mean some other kind of construction (such as the more “generalized constructivism” I refer to), we should say that. The two shouldn’t be equated, because we have too much to lose when we give up “constructivism” to the “social”ists. (Not the socialists, just the “social”-ists.)
Similarly, to argue that we’ve reached the “end of nature” conceptually is quite different from arguing that we’ve reached the “end of nature” empirically. Either version requires a definition of “nature.” If nature is the nonhuman world as an autonomous entity apart from humans (as McKibben defines it in his book The End of Nature), then one could make a solid argument that we’ve reached its end, at least relatively speaking. I don’t think it’s true, but it’s an argument with a certain rhetorical force. But if nature is a concept and social/discursive construct, then what does it mean to say that it’s ended? That construct arose at some historical point, and now it’s declined, perhaps to the point of no return (though I doubt it), but that’s no big deal, since it’s only a concept.
Conflating the two – the conceptual and the empirical ends of nature – is sloppy thinking, or merely a rhetorical ploy. But then to say anything about the “real,” “empirical” *nature,* the thing in itself, is also tricky, and to be precise and analytical about it, one has to define what one means. Do we mean the entirety of everything? Do we mean the entirety of everything *except for humans*? (That’s just silly.) Do we mean the essential organization of everything, or something like that?
I read Wapner’s book, but honestly don’t remember his arguments about nature and/or its end. (As I recall, I thought it was a pretty good book – a good distillation of themes that might reach a wider audience than those ideas typically reach.)
I agree with you that we need to be able to evaluate social constructionist arguments from an ecological (/materialist) perspective. But more importantly I think we need to get some clarity about the arguments that are made about “nature” and its “construction,” and the limits and boundaries of those arguments.