Let us use the example of the discussion between Carl Ratner and Pascal Dey. Carl Ratner is a social psychologist who aggressively attacks social constructionism as a dangerous and intellectually degenerative current of thought. The gist of his argu-ments revolves around several major critiques (Ratner 2005). Firstly, that episte-mology of social constructionism is like cultism or dogmatism, because it denies the status of final objective truthfulness to any claim or statement, which leads to
the consequence that no opinion or attitude can be refuted or disproved. He claims that social constructionists reject all views of social or natural reality different from theirs as incommensurate interpretive conventions, which leads to the situation that social constructionists can never be wrong, because they do not even try to describe anything that is a part of reality as such. Furthermore, Ratner accuses social con-structionism of subjectivism and nihilism. Even though he advocates the rejection of naïve realism, Ratner thinks critical realism should be accepted as it can otherwise easily be fallen into the dangerous trap of justifying every opinion, which has ethi-cally dangerous consequences and aims to justify one’s own (bourgeois, says Ratner) interests rather than socially responsible attitudes.
Moreover, Ratner considers the social constructionists’ conception of human ac-tivity and the relationship between culture and knowledge simply wrong. Because values and beliefs are based in cultural concepts and depend on active interpreta-tion, social constructionists think (according to Ratner 2005, paragraph 21) they cannot objectively deal with the real world i.e. that culture and human activity are antithetical to knowing the real world. Ratner says this dichotomy is false and con-tains a fallacy, because it seriously misses to correctly grasp the meaning of culture and activity of people, failing to see that culture itself may contribute to objectivity.
Although some cultural constructions are mythical, some are objective – genes for example are constructions, but reflect the reality in a correct manner and have real effects. Accordingly, some interpretations are biased, while some are not. Physicists interpret X-rays and astronomers light waves in order to reveal real properties of the matter. Even the 2000-year-long hermeneutic tradition, from ancient Greeks to Dilthey, is founded upon the possibility of rigorous and objective interpretation of textual meaning – it was interpretations that connected the observer with the outer world and enabled him (or her, although rarely ever) to understand it. To conclude the anti-constructionist argument by Ratner: knowledge is mediated by culture and interpretation, but this does not mean that knowledge necessarily lacks objectivity or that reality cannot be reflected in it.
Ratner agrees with Dilthey, Marx, Durkheim and Vygotsky that a cultural base can be known in an objective fashion (cf. Ratner 1997; 2002; 2004; 2007). He thinks that social constructionists like Barbara Zilke or Ken Gergen, who he often debates and argues with, live their lives based on the evidence of real things. Their real life action and thinking refutes the tenets of social constructionism that they advocate in their academic discourse (Ratner, 2005: paragraph 26). Therefore, he thinks, a
subjectivist turn in social sciences in general represents a dangerous path we should confront and oppose (Ratner 2005, paragraph 31), and he aggressively criticizes so-cial constructionism for reflecting soso-cial disintegration and supporting intellectual degeneration (Ratner 2005, paragraph 32).
Layers of meaning of social constructionism can maybe be better understood through the reply to this criticism, for instance by Dey (2008). He claims that Rat-ner constructs a certain reality of social constructionism and produces a certain truth that can have real effects (Dey 2008, paragraph 1). According to Dey, Ratner’s construction of social constructionism produces a hyperreal illusion that social con-structionism is unique. Ratner’s monological reading has in this way joined a choir of scientists who claim that social constructionism is an anti-rationalist, subjectiv-ist and nihilsubjectiv-ist feat, which denies the possibility of truth, reality and meaning. Dey concludes that this way Ratner in fact conveniently illustrated that the truth (about social constructionism) is an effect of knowledge production. By claiming that the question of truth (separated from the question of validity of knowledge) does not mean much to social constructionists (because all truths are on the same level), Rat-ner creates a paradox on the hiatus of what he really says and de facto does in his text.
Even though he speaks from the position of a declared anti-constructionist, Ratner plays the role of an imaginary constructionist – because the truth (about social con-structionism) that his description contains is not defined based on the correspon-dence with an irrevocably real Reality. This is how Ratner does a magician’s trick of transforming social constructionism into a sui generis reality. Thereby he conceals the “real truth” of social constructionism (understood as what has so far been writ-ten about this topic) and establishes his own truth, which in return conceals the fact that there is no one truth. Irony is according to Dey contained in the fact that Ratner’s criticism serves as a good illustration of relativism, a perspective Ratner was striving hard to criticize (Dey 2008, paragraph 7). This is to say that Ratner does not focalize the question of the wrong representation, but the understanding that truth is never actually real (stable, objective, a priori determined). Ratner thereby turned from an anti-constructionist into a constructionist, because he creates the conditions in which the distinction between the real and the virtual implodes.
Dey suggests, following Baudrillard, to look at the text as simulacrum or a hyperreal construction (2008, paragraph 8). The hyperreal has no direct reference to the real, it is a copy without the original (Deleuze, 1990). A convenient illustration of the hy-perreal nature of Ratner’s article can be found in the fact that his article (2005) is a
reply to the argumentative attack by Barbara Zielke (2005) on his previous article Social Constructionism as Cultism (2004), which in turn is a reply to Gergen’s crit-icism etc. Copies, interferences and influence are this way multiplied to the extent of overly complex opacity (born in search for the original). Even if someone claims to have found the beginning, it will turn out to be fake, because it most frequently relies on the confrontations that never really took place but present replies to arti-cles published in different journals and it is often the case that several years go by between two replies or articles. Dey concludes that social constructionism is in the ontological sense of the word only what it does and what is done with it (2008, paragraph 10). Although Ratner defines a unique truth of social constructionism, excluding layers and pluralism of different phenomena, or in other words although he haunts the ghost not knowing whether it is dead or alive (Derrida, 1994: 6), there remains the question of textual authority or the effects that such interpretation of social constructionism might have, as it instructs theoreticians and scientists about what good or bad is, what to ignore and what to take into consideration (Dey 2008, paragraph 13).
In this or similar accounts of social constructionism, denoted as hyperreal truth-telling or mimesis without the original (Dey 2008, paragraph 15), there is a lot stuffed under the carpet. Even though Ratner’s understanding of social constructionism is amiss, his text “works” or “is active doing something” and can thus continue to create a negligent way of reading and performing academic practice in general. There are moments in which hyperreality can become a more powerful version of reality (Baudrillard 1988).
If the situation with social constructionism were simple, as suggested by Ratner, we would probably know it, there would probably be a consensus that social construc-tionism is singular and that it can be understood and practiced effortlessly (or without close reading). The dangerous possibility is that it could seem to many a future reader and researcher, based on Ratner’s account of social constructionism, that they can use abstracts and summarized accounts to understand everything important about an ob-ject of interest, and this possibility is often seductive. The ethos of reading in the sci-entific community (if such community can be said to exist) should on the contrary be quite different, similar to Foucault’s recommendation that a writer should read and do research on everything in the course of his analysis (1996, 14). A new ethos of reading, besides, implies enamored reading (Deleuze 1995, 9), which never seeks speed of verti-cal browsing or possession. Such reading implies an escape from the desert connected with second-hand denotations and obliges us to go back to the “sources”. It is the only
way we can enter the details of the text, small imperfections and possible good qualities of whatever is at hand, including social constructionism. Otherwise, whenever there is the smallest trace or reference of the notion “social constructionism”, a new magician will be able to enter the field and use this term as an umbrella to make variety level out into sameness (Dey 2008, paragraph 20).
The main mistake interpreters of social constructionism make is that of reduction-ism. The mentioned ethos of reading implies one step further – to make an author an unknown margin, which would force critics to deal with a completely anonymous production (Foucault 1996, 302). Indeed, the entire discourse of social construc-tionism should be made not only free from authors, but also separated from disci-plinary boundaries (important and inevitable academic traditions). Foucault even suggests that social constructionism presents a category that exists for others, the ones who are not social constructionists – that we can say that social constructionists are such and such only from the outside. In other words, only when we declare that people are social constructionists can the idea be supported that they constitute a coherent group and a whole, even though its members do not perceive it and do not declare membership in it (1996, 53).
Of course, the reflection on reading brings us to the reader, who has obligation and responsibility to read in a way that focuses on multiple lines of exegesis of social con-structionism rather than reveals the absolute truth about it. Putting variety into the center assumes we accept that every text has a margin of play and that re-reading directed at erasing the boundaries of the label does not confirm the identity of the previous label but only confirms internal variety (Deleuze 1994). Reading is an ac-tive process, not passive consumption. The heritage of writing about social construc-tionism, whether critical or affirmative, is not something given, but a task; it simul-taneously assumes (inherits) and re-examines it, which is why the readers themselves participate in the processes of forgetting and/or remembering the heritage. Also we, yes, you and me, as the readers of theory, participate in a similar process and are shaped by similar processes at the same time. Each interpretive process is necessarily marked by selectivity, defined by pragmatic purposes of action at hand.
The disturbance of the fit between reality and representation, which is customarily assumed as necessary for a successful epistemic activity, challenges the so-called nat-uralism. The following chapter aims to look at debates on the social construction of nature in relation to gender and use of language.