Totally agree. Post-structuralism is all right-brain: creative, convoluted, without boundaries (and so in Lacanian fashion closer to the only thing you really know: what it's like to be alive). Structuralism is parallel and perpendicular. It's all severe consequences and nuclear explosions. Scientific religion and religious science. Straight-jackets for everybody.

Yeah, they ought to be working together!

Maybe they do most of the time. We just pull them apart like taking a clock apart.

Nah, we'll all be aspies engineering better and better sex bots in the future.

We just need another big monolith to turn us into star-children.

Hmm, I want to contend that it's not 'definition' that is at issue though, although it might seem that way on first blush. — StreetlightX

No, I didn't think you'd agree with that. I went that way because regardless of the speaker's motivation, this is, in part, what it would amount to in practice, changing the way words are used. Of course, you can agree that the way we use words will change without accepting that this is all that changes.

And I don't have to say that either. But I'm looking at how words are used as a social practice, and that practice, being real behavior in the world, can have real effects. Those effects would largely be what we want to call social construction. That's why it's worth saying that a form of conceptual analysis might involve a stipulative definition. Yes, the intent is to illuminate a concept in an interesting way, to spiff up a tool in the conceptual toolbox, but it is also an entreaty to talk differently.

There was a lot of talk earlier in the thread about race, for instance, and whether and in what sense "race" is a socially constructed concept. I'd submit that whether it is or not, the racist behavior we deplore includes talk, and that talk includes stipulative definitions (what is black, what is white, etc.), and one of the key moves of racist talk is to present the stipulative definition as if it is not stipulative, but only limning a natural kind.

You can ignore that question and say that whatever the status of "race", whatever we believe about it, we can still choose how we act on those beliefs, and call on other beliefs to guide our actions.

But you can also attempt to attack the doctrine itself:
(1) There are natural kinds, but "race" isn't one of them. (The scientific approach.)
(2) There are no natural kinds, and therefore "race" can't be one. (The constructionist.)

(1) can lead to squabbling over genetic markers and ethnicity and the definition of "race" all over again; (2) requires bolstering of some kind to have any effect, either from the ethical considerations above, or perhaps from a genealogical critique -- here's why you have the beliefs you do about "race" -- which leads to squabbling over that. Both hope to gain strength from facts, one scientific, one historical.

Another thing I found myself partly saying and partly implying in my last post was that if a definition is introduced, it is sustained by the existing language in which it is introduced, and since we should be able to substitute in either direction, a definition cannot result in an increase in expressive power, in an ability to say things you could not say before. That's true insofar as definiens and definiendum are tied together.

What can happen though is this: definitions don't always follow a word around as it is used. Once the word, or the new usage, is out there, if it's taken up, its usage will become its own justification. This is another point that both (1) and (2) will attack: (1) would attempt to show how the word could be used in a scientifically precise way (and perhaps having an empty domain, or not connecting to other scientific concepts like intelligence, or perhaps not being precisely specifiable at all); (2) would try to attach current to historical usage -- you say x because these other people said x for y reasons, thus x always carries a trace of y.

One oddity is that (1) and (2) will critique each other's approaches in their own terms: (1) finds (2) scientifically suspect, (2) finds (1) ignorant of its history. What's more, they will judge each other's success at fighting, say, racism, on those terms: (1) thinks (2) leaves truth a free-for-all, (2) finds (1) insufficiently engaged, even naive. But what's even more: (1) will generally take the view that their debate with (2) does not turn on how successful they are at fighting racism, say, but that claim is a common if not universal move for (2).

Too many 'isms for my tiny brain; time for a break. But when your bridge/river collapses, who you going to call - a social engineer, or a structural engineer?

Which is not to deny that an architect is an amateur of both disciplines.

I don't see rivers, lakes, oceans or estuaries -- I just see water.

Gaps need bridging. The lonely humanless world never needed such. But in honor of your hard work and expertise starting this thread: yes: somebody ought to call an architect.

Social engineering is a leftist thingy. It's a very precarious activity. It tends to go forth building bridges in places nobody ever goes.

What can happen though is this: — Srap Tasmaner

This whole paragraph is essentially stuff you already said, @StreetlightX, but you were presenting a more or less happy version (spiffy new concepts) and I'm thinking of the not-so-happy here (you can't get the "race" toothpaste back in the tube).

But when your bridge/river collapses, who you going to call - a social engineer, or a structural engineer? — unenlightened

Who y'gonna call? Structure-busters.

I think I may be in a bit of a frivolous mood at the moment.

the coolness of post-structuralism — Mongrel

I'm grateful to un for starting this thread, it has at the very least sent me back to a book on my shelves, 'The social construction of what?' by Ian Hacking. Hacking dislikes on the whole the language of social constructionism but he has great sympathy for many of the issues raised by the people who use such terminology.

One phrase he conjures up in talking about 'science wars' - between the Weinbergs and the Kuhns, say - is that those of a (natural) scientific cast of mind usually believe in 'inherent-structurism'. In the natural sciences, that is to say, we have arrived at something like the facts about how the world is put together, which has an inherent structure. So we may debate the 'construction' of the idea of quarks as Pickering did, say, but all the same, it turns out that quarks are there, performing spins and so forth, even if we may remain 'nominalist' about them. And, in Nelson Goodman terminology 'irrealist' about worlds, a word I've always liked because it means you can tick a box that few other people even notice is there in realism vs idealism surveys.

How does your version of post-structuralism deal with quarky worlds and inherent structures in natural science?

Have you read anything about how music and language are linked? — Mongrel

Yes I have, although at the moment to be frank I've become more interested in how language and action are linked: how spoken language is integrated into how we act with each other. But I could easily be diverted back into music at a moment's notice :)

I'm grateful to un for starting this thread, — mcdoodle

Me too.

How does your version of post-structuralism deal with quarky worlds and inherent structures in natural science? — mcdoodle

I don't think I could talk about that without going off on some weird, pointless tangent. How do you think about it?

Once the word, or the new usage, is out there, if it's taken up, its usage will become its own justification. — Srap Tasmaner

And the model for this, what Goodman called "entrenchment", is over here.

I don't think I could talk about that without going off on some weird, pointless tangent. How do you think about it? — Mongrel

No, I'd be tangential too :)

Right. In my view this is a misunderstanding of the normal meaning of 'social construct', which does not mean 'stuff we made together'. I'm happy to call it a constructed river to distinguish it from a Nile type river, though that too is constructed in places. What makes something a social construct is that it is made of society, not by society. The artificial river enables a certain structure of human relations, and that structure of relations is a social construct, not the river itself.

So the pyramids are constructions that were provoked by a social construct of religion and government that has passed away, and they now partake of a completely different social construct called 'tourism'. — unenlightened

There are two characteristics about of social entities which are, at first blush, seemingly difficult to resolve. One is that social entities are real, and the other is that they are mutable by us. In the first instance social entities are part of our environment, in the second we are the artists of products and tools. So how is it that any entity has both of these characteristics? How can an entity be both unchangeable and changeable? How is it that we are able to manipulate something which, at the same time, manipulates us? How is it possible for the same entity to have this double character which is seemingly a contradiction?

What the standard notion of social construct emphasizes is one aspect of this character -- its mutability. But it leaves out the very real part where social constructs take on a reality of their own, influence us, and aren't immediately reconfigurable (and, potentially, *can't* be reconfigured).

Maybe there's another way of resolving this tension, but this is what I have in mind when proposing looking at social entities in terms of genesis and mechanism. The birth of social entities occurs in a different manner from the life of social entities.


When you say "of society", what are the parts? I have tourism, here, made of society. It seems to me that the normal understanding of society is that we are the parts. So if I were to dismantle tourism then I wouldn't go see the pyramids on vacation, for starters, and I'd do what is in my power to stop others from doing so as well. I might write appeals, pass laws, set up blockades, and enforce them with ground to air missiles if necessary.

But I'd say this picture misses on the real parts of social entities -- that they aren't something where we just do stuff and have happen. Those in charge, those purportedly in power, are often caught up within social entities just as those without power are. They don't have the power to change the entities they live within -- they act within the institutions that already exist.

But what would you propose instead, then? Or does this just seem like something which isn't a real issue, to you?

But I'd say this picture misses on the real parts of social entities -- that they aren't something where we just do stuff and have happen. Those in charge, those purportedly in power, are often caught up within social entities just as those without power are. They don't have the power to change the entities they live within -- they act within the institutions that already exist. — Moliere

Of course. Indeed the politician is more caught up in the construct of power and governance than the peasant. When the buffalo are stampeding northwards, the one at the front cannot turn west without being trampled. The one at the back is the one with some freedom to stop or turn

When you say "of society", what are the parts? — Moliere

We know what a hurricane is, that it is real. We know that the 'parts' are air molecules. But that doesn't help us much. It is more useful to consider that a hurricane is made of movements than to say it is made of air. A stampede is likewise made of movements rather than of buffalo, and social constructs are mass movements rather than static arrangements.

If you want to stop a stampede that you are part of, the first thing to do is to stop trying to get to the front. And that's all you can do, except whatever occurs to you when you are well and truly left behind.

I'm going to try something here that might be a divergence, and it might help to bridge our understandings too. It's long-ish. Sorry. Consider it a play of ideas, ideas that influence why I'm saying what I'm saying, but to which I am not married. I'm open to retooling them.

Here I think the primary point of difference is:

If you want to stop a stampede that you are part of, the first thing to do is to stop trying to get to the front. — unenlightened

Where I would say there is no outside to the stampede, when it comes to social movement. Or, perhaps, the stampede is just one movement within a grander dance of movement, so there is an escape from the *stampede*, but not from the social world (hence why it really and truly is a world).


I have in mind movement, constant movement. I have in mind machines, in particular -- large, intricate machines, like a rube goldberg machine, but machines which reproduce and retool themselves. To use Deleuze, there are desiring-machines, organs placed on a body without organs (attempting to eliminate the body without organs), made of partial objects and flows. The flows are coded, chained. The machines produce, and are themselves connected to other machines through the flows.

I only refer to him as a kind of way of looking at social ontology, not as an answer. I think Deleuze is a bit too abstract for my taste -- it kind of reads in a way that doesn't seem specific enough to particulars. It's attempting to reach for something too universal. But he does propose mechanisms for social movement. He proposes entities which are not us. He proposes something which is both us and isn't us, which seems to be the right way of looking at society to me. It is and is not our movement. We all move within, and there is no stopping the stampede. There is no outside of the stampede, the hurricane, or social movement. (or, again, there may be an outside to the stampede, but not to the social world -- sort of depends on how you meant "stampede" or "hurricane" in your metaphor)

My preference is more rooted in historical method, which itself is already multiple. Also, it seems to me that Deleuze is too rooted in psychology for my taste. This misses out on some of the nuances of social entities which are more alien to us than a psychological theory can capture. But what I like is his focus on flows, break-flows, coding and re-coding and surplus code. It's this bizarro synthesis between Marx and Freud which simultaneously rejects them both. I am somewhat skeptical of him, and at times don't really make a connection in what he is writing, but the flows of production makes sense of a good deal of particular social situations, from my perspective -- and not just at the workplace, but also within the state (and other social entities).

Since there is no escape, and yet we can still influence what rules over us, how can we account for that?

Social entities are birthed by collective action. And then we live within them, like children with more power than their parents, or young gods who have yet to find all their powers.

Hannah Arendt has a useful theory about the social for this purpose in The Human Condition. She divides the human condition up into labor, work, and action. The latter, action, is what I have in mind in terms of genesis.

From the beginning section on Action:

With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance. This insertion is not forced upon us by necessity, like labor, and it is not prompted by utility, like work. It may be stimulated by the presence of others whose company we may wish to join, but it is never conditioned by them; its impulse springs from the beginning which came into the world when we were born and to which we respond by beginning something new on our own initiative

Later, in On the Process Character of Action...

In this aspect of action...processes are started whose outcome is unpredictable, so that uncertainty rather than frailty becomes the decisive character of human affairs. This property of action had escaped the attention of antiquity, by and large, and had, to say the least, hardly found adequate articulation in ancient philosophy, to which the very concept of history as we know it is altogether alien. The central concept of the two entirely new sciences of the modern age, natural science no less than historical, is the concept of process, and the actual human experience underlying it is action.

This uncertainty I'd attribute to the reality of social entities. We create them and they take a life of their own. So to stop a stampede, a social movement, since to be who we are is to be social beings and to remove ourselves from said movement is to kill ourselves, rather than removing ourselves -- becoming the body without organs, the subject whose ephemera forever hangs outside of the chains of production -- we build other machines. But rather than desiring-machines, I think it would be safe to say that social movements are social-machines whose production can take place outside of the codes of desire.

What might they be? Well, they're novel, as per Arendt. So it's not something we can answer in the abstract, but only together. And then we sort of have to just see what happens, too. Like a child is a part of ourselves, it also has a mind of its own and develops into something outside of our intents.


Hence why I'm saying that social entities -- social constructions -- are made by us, and then what they are made of is determined by the historical method. It just depends on the particular entity -- white supremacy operates in its own fashion, capitalism operates in its own fashion, patriarchy operates in its own fashion, private property does as well, and we see how these things operate by attending to their history.

this is, in part, what it would amount to in practice, — Srap Tasmaner

Ah, but 'in practice' definitions rarely figure into our use of words. Definitions are always derivative, they're still captures, snapshots frozen in time, of language-at-work. Of course 'in practice' pretty much every word is 'define-able' - every 'scene' is 'picture-able' -, but this is always a kind rear-guard action, one that takes place a posteriori. When it comes to concepts, one needs to be in situ instead.

And this is why, while it may be true that definitions don't/can't increase the expressive power of language, the introduction of a new concept, can; and if it is a good concept, it ought to do exactly that. This is why concepts involve stakes; they ought to introduce a difference that makes a difference. Race is a construct and not a...? If so, this implies... ? And not ...? Definitions don't have this implicative structure, they don't point out beyond them to a series of cascading implicative commitments.

This is also why neither history (to which the 'constructionist' appeals - and a faux-constructionist at that, I might add), nor the appeal to 'natural kinds' (that of the 'scientific approach') are of any relevance when evaluating a concept. In a slogan: one evaluates a concept on the basis of the problem to which it responds. Nothing else - natural kinds or history be damned.

Again, Deleuze is my muse here: "There is no point in wondering whether Descartes was right or wrong.... Cartesian concepts can only be assessed as a function of their problems ... A concept always has the truth that falls to it as a function of the conditions of its creation ... Of course, new concepts must relate to our problems, to our history, and, above all, to our becomings. But what does it mean for a concept to be of our time, or of any time? Concepts are not eternal, but does this mean they are temporal? What is the philosophical form of the problems of a particular time? If one concept is "better" than an earlier one, it is because it makes us aware of new variations and unknown resonances, it carries out unforeseen cuttings-out... [distinctions! - SX]".

In the first instance social entities are part of our environment, in the second we are the artists of products and tools. So how is it that any entity has both of these characteristics? — Moliere

I think perhaps the more pertinent question - and I think - I hope! - you agree - is what on earth would make anyone think these two characteristics are in any way incompatible. As if we and our creations do not in the first instance belong to the environment!

On a totally side note, there's nothing less less alien to Deleuze than any kind of psychologism but I won't kick up too big a fuss about this : P

I think perhaps the more pertinent question - and I think - I hope! - you agree - is what on earth would make anyone think these two characteristics are in any way incompatible. As if we and our creations do not in the first instance belong to the environment! — StreetlightX

That is a good question....

I think it's something to do with how we tend to think about things. I certainly think about the world as something "outside", at times, even while believing that it isn't! :D The play between outside/inside, outside of my power and within my power, world and self starts to look fuzzy when it comes to our social world.

In a classically scientific picture, I have my beliefs about the world. I support or refute my beliefs with reference to either logical consistency or with respect to the facts. I act on the world of which I am a part, but through said action -- through experiment -- I discover the contours of the world which are "outside" of action, "outside" of belief.

Also, I think it has something to do with our political tradition. Nature vs. Nurture, and the state of nature being concepts which seem to oppose ourselves to our environment -- and environment, as a concept, is often set up in opposition to the individual... though I suppose that it is often done does not actually answer, why is it done?



I will say that I am not a naturalist, so we may also differ somewhere on that point. But, as per what I've been saying previously, I think that one's ultimate metaphysical position can be "passed over" in investigating the social.

I think it's something to do with how we tend to think about things. — Moliere

I agree, but then, I also tend to think that 'the way we talk about things' is laden so heavy with metaphysical prejudice that we ought to trust none - not one - of the classical distinctions we are so used to working with, including and especially those between world and self, nature and nurture, inside and outside. If the social is where these distinctions begin to 'look fuzzy', then so much the worse for these distinctions! In any case, part of what I'm trying to do in this thread is get people to be careful about merely paying lip service to the 'realness' of 'social constructions', only to slip in it's 'unreality' through the back door, drawing it up, in the last moment, against 'nature', 'environment', 'non-life' or whathaveyou.

Part of what's so hard about doing this is precisely the prejudices of 'the way we talk about things', which erects a double barrier - that of thinking the social as the 'unnatural' on the one hand, and that of thinking nature as 'the immutable' (to use your term), on the other (or, to use another stricken dualism - between 'the constructed' and 'the found'). This double barrier renders each side of the pseudo-divide all the poorer for it. And I think your question - how to 'reconcile society and the environment' - brings this to the fore quite nicely. And of course, as they say, this is not a problem to be solved, but rather one to be dis-solved.

Finally, part of the resistance to postmodern thought similarly arises from these prejudices, which, when confronted with statements that declare things to be 'social constructions' (a vulgar understanding of postmodernism at any rate...), continue to operate under essentially pre-modern understandings of what a 'construction' is. But of course the whole point is not only to revise our understanding of the thing so declared to be a 'construction', but the very meaning of 'construction' itself.

Your language is a bit emancipatory. Nothing wrong with that, but just note that your anchor isn't about addressing problems. You are a spokesman for your era.

When the buffalo are stampeding northwards, the one at the front cannot turn west without being trampled. — unenlightened

But it can turn west. What does being trampled stand for in your analogy?

Where I would say there is no outside to the stampede, when it comes to social movement. Or, perhaps, the stampede is just one movement within a grander dance of movement, so there is an escape from the *stampede*, but not from the social world (hence why it really and truly is a world). — Moliere

If that grander dance is the social world, what is the stampede? Also, common sense says that there is always an option, in this case a way out of social world, even if the solution is irrational and too radical to be considered by most.

Here I think the primary point of difference is:

If you want to stop a stampede that you are part of, the first thing to do is to stop trying to get to the front.
— unenlightened

Where I would say there is no outside to the stampede, when it comes to social movement. Or, perhaps, the stampede is just one movement within a grander dance of movement, so there is an escape from the *stampede*, but not from the social world (hence why it really and truly is a world). — Moliere

Well there is no outside to society for humans, just as there is no air outside the atmosphere. But there is air outside a hurricane, and there is an outside to a stampede - there must be for it to be heading somewhere. It's an analogy, so there's no point in pressing too hard, but I think it is a fairly apposite image of the condition of society at the moment and not necessarily throughout history, that it is heading somewhere (a cliff?) at full tilt with everyone trying to be at the front.

I think perhaps the more pertinent question - and I think - I hope! - you agree - is what on earth would make anyone think these two characteristics are in any way incompatible. As if we and our creations do not in the first instance belong to the environment!
— StreetlightX

That is a good question....

I think it's something to do with how we tend to think about things. I certainly think about the world as something "outside", at times, even while believing that it isn't! :D The play between outside/inside, outside of my power and within my power, world and self starts to look fuzzy when it comes to our social world. — Moliere

Perhaps it is fuzzy, and we are seeing it aright. I always start every thread with a chant of 'all-is-one' for half an hour. And then I get out the machete, for the purposes of filling the internet with complications. Since all is one, I am only hacking at myself.

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, although I am stuff and the environment is stuff and other people are stuff, and society is my environment and I am society and so on, still it is good to talk about woozles and where they aren't. Distinctions cannot be maintained, but they have to be made nonetheless, on an improvised basis. Here is a story about how the individual is moulded by the social constructs that make up the environment. And yet some herd-defying maverick manages to write the critique of the society that made him.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. — J. Krishnamurti

It's not all about you. — unenlightened

When the buffalo are stampeding northwards, the one at the front cannot turn west without being trampled.
— unenlightened

But it can turn west. What does being trampled stand for in your analogy? — BlueBanana

Don't contradict my fantasies, peasant! Being trampled stands for what happens to you when you deny a social construct, which is that society rides roughshod over you.

But it doesn't. Leave the society, and it pretty much ignores you while moving onwards. To try to deny a social construct while staying in the society is a bit trickier, but I think the person would either succeed or end up outside the society (or further from inside, as being on the in/outside of the society is a spectrum more than a yes/no kind of thing).

Well there is no outside to society for humans — unenlightened

May I disagree? If you have no contacts to other human beings (or whatever we want to define society to consist of) you aren't a part of any society.

May I disagree? If you have no contacts to other human beings (or whatever we want to define society to consist of) you aren't a part of any society. — BlueBanana

No you may not. Every little philosopher has a Mummy and a Daddy.

Doesn't mean you have to have contact to them. Is a dead person outside the society? What about one that doesn't exist?