{"id":3770,"date":"2011-04-30T09:18:16","date_gmt":"2011-04-30T14:18:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=3770"},"modified":"2011-05-20T20:35:07","modified_gmt":"2011-05-21T01:35:07","slug":"for-a-moratorium-on-constructivism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/04\/30\/for-a-moratorium-on-constructivism\/","title":{"rendered":"For a moratorium on “constructivism”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’d like to call a moratorium on the use of the word “constructivism” (or “constructionism”) to refer only<\/em> to social<\/em> constructivism.<\/p>\n

(This post was prompted by Tim\u00a0 Morton’s Object-Oriented Strategies for Ecological Art<\/a>, 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.”)<\/p>\n

Ecological thinkers like Michael Soule and Gary Lease<\/a>, Anna Peterson<\/a>, and others have argued that social<\/em> 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<\/em> our relationship with it.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, 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<\/a> and stale<\/a> by now, and I mention them only to put a broad frame around the comments that follow.<\/p>\n

The use of the word “constructivism” to mean social<\/em> constructivism, however, takes away one of the best tools we have for understanding a universe that is always in the process of being constructed<\/em> — or co-created, or orchestrated, or collectively improvised; choose your favorite creative-verb metaphor — by all the effective entities that make it up.<\/p>\n

I’ve criticized “construction” myself in the past (e.g., here<\/a> and here<\/a>) 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<\/a>, Anna Peterson, and others.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> social and material — which is precisely the point of a more generalized<\/em> eco-constructivism.<\/p>\n

The point is that there is a very important difference between the social<\/em> 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<\/em> constructivism, sometimes called relational<\/em> constructivism, heterogeneous<\/a><\/em> constructivism, co-<\/em>constructivism, discursive-material<\/em> or material-semiotic<\/em> constructivism, radical<\/a> <\/em>constructivism (which gets confusing as that term is used to refer both to the social and the much-more-than-social kinds), artifactual<\/em><\/a> constructivism, evolutionary<\/a> <\/em>or biological<\/a><\/em> constructivism, constructive empiricism<\/a><\/em>, etc., by which the universe is crafted into existence by its many participants. (See here<\/a> for some of these varieties.)<\/p>\n

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<\/em> kind.<\/p>\n

One of the implications of a generalized constructivism is that all of our knowledge practices contribute<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

So I would like eco-theorists, at least, not<\/em> to follow sociologists in assuming that “constructivism” is only social<\/em> constructivism, but to acknowledge that there are constructivisms<\/a>… and there are constructivisms<\/a>. It’s important to specify which kind we mean.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4415,688977],"tags":[4434,4442,17873,17871,4420,17872],"class_list":["post-3770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ecophilosophy","category-geo_philosophy","tag-biology","tag-biosemiotics","tag-constructionism","tag-constructivism","tag-ecology","tag-social-constructivism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-YO","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3810,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/05\/02\/more-on-constructions-gun-hammer-or-scaffold\/","url_meta":{"origin":3770,"position":0},"title":"More on constructions: gun, hammer, or scaffold?","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"May 2, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"The comments on this previous post resulted in my doing a bit of quick research (methodology: googling) on how often the terms \"constructivism\" and \"constructionism\" get used in relation to certain theorists and theoretical terms. Here are the results. I've put the \"winning\" terms in bold: Berger Luckmann + constructionism\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3126,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/04\/08\/eco-onto-politics-2-integralism-climate-change\/","url_meta":{"origin":3770,"position":1},"title":"Eco-onto-politics 2: Integralism & climate change","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 8, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"This is the second post in a series on the intersections between ecology, ontology, and politics. (The first reviewed Andrew Pickering's The Cybernetic Brain.) Here I focus on integral ecologist Sean Esbj\u00f6rn-Hargens's article An Ontology of Climate Change: Integral Pluralism and the Enactment of Multiple Objects. 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Immanence passed its tenth anniversary last month and somehow failed to celebrate it. (The actual anniversary, May 11, marks the posting of\u00a0this two-line fragment.\u00a0Regular posts took another seven months to appear, or at least to take on a permanent form.) 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