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Good evening. This is
Radio Free Beszel. I
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am Alphonse. Tonight:
social construction.
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When people say that something
is socially
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constructed, like capitalism
or race,
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they're usually implying
that in some
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sense it's not real
- it's artificial,
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made of some kind of
social stuff that is
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in the consciousness of
the minds of people.
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But if social constructions,
like race for
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example, aren't real,
how is it that they
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are so stable, they're
so long-lasting, and
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they have such a large
impact on our lives?
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Social things often seem
to have a bigger impact
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and be more powerful than
physical things.
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I'm going to talk about
the answer of Bruno
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Latour in his book, Reassembling
the Social,
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but I'm going to start by
illustrating that with money.
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I'm hoping that we can
agree that money is
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socially constructed - that
we can't eat bills or
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coins, we can't shelter under
them. The question
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is, why does money have
so much value for us?
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Well, we could say
perhaps that it's
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because there's some
kind of agreement,
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there's some kind of
consciousness that we have
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that we've decided that
money is valuable and
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can be exchanged for
goods and services.
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So it exists, in a sense,
in our minds.
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It's made of that kind
of social stuff that
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other socially constructed
things are made of.
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And a thought experiment
would seem to support
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this. Imagine that we all
went to bed one night,
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and when we woke up the
money was still there,
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but we had no recollection
of what it was for.
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We'd forgotten what money
was. Well, then
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it would lose its value,
wouldn't it.
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So that suggests that
its value really
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does come from inside
our minds.
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But consider a second thought
experiment. Again
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we go to sleep. Again we
all wake up and the
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money is still there. And
we remember what it's
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for - but the banks don't
exist. There are no
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cash registers, the tax
department isn't there
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anymore, and the tax department
demands payment
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in the currency which
is one of the things
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that forces people to
use it. And we can't
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use the websites to buy
things because they're
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gone too. Then the money
would also lose its
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value. That suggests that
part of the value of
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money actually is embedded
in physical things.
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But I'm going to go
one step farther.
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Imagine a third instance
we go to sleep,
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we wake up in the morning:
the money's still
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there, we know what it's
for, the banks are
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still there, the cash registers
and so forth - but
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nobody's exchanging money.
People aren't making
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transactions, or at least
they're not making many
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of them. Maybe it's some
sort of economic crisis.
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Well in that case, the
value of money goes
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down. It goes down because
it's not moving.
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It turns out that much
of the value of money
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comes from its movement
through the economy,
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what economists call the
velocity of money.
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The point I'm trying to
make is that if we
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agree that money is a
social construction,
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much of that construction
actually
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is material. It is
actually anchored
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in real things - but not
only in real things, in
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interactions of people and
technology and things.
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This is my attempt to
outline Latour's idea
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of what actually makes
something social.
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I'll give a second example -
Google and the World Wide Web.
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I think we can agree that
Google is one of the
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most important, if not the
most important site
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on the Web. I'm talking
about the search engine here.
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What makes Google so valuable
or so important? Is
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it the number of pages they
have? I don't think
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so. There's an unlimited
number of pages that
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Google can generate - but
that's true of many
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sites. Is it the value of
the content that Google
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has? Not so much, because
the content is actually
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on the sites that they link
to. It's not in Google
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itself. Is it all the links
to Google or the links
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from Google? Well, in part.
The fact that Google
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is highly connected to the
rest of the Internet
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is surely part of what
makes it important.
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But the thing that
really matters
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is traffic. If people
stopped going to
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Google it would cease
to be important,
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even if it maintained all
those linkages, even
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if it was able to generate
all of those pages.
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This, Latour says, is what makes
something social. This is what
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social means. It has to do
with the associations
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of things and people and
their interactions.
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But sociology, and social
science, he says,
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has made a mistake. Because
sociology - most of
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it - treats the social as
if it's not material.
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What sociologists do, he
says, is they look at
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behavior, activities, phenomena
in the world,
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and then they replaced
them with their set of
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categories that they already
have - things like
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capitalism and power and
oppression and so
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forth. And then they treat
those categories
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as though they're forces
in the world that make
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people do things. The extreme
case he describes
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is what he calls critical
sociology, or critical
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social theory. What critical
social theory does,
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Latour says, is first it
replaces phenomena in
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the world with its set of
categories - things like
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racism and oppression and
power and capitalism
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and so forth. And second,
it ignores the protests
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of the people involved
in those practices
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who say, Hey, that's not
what we're doing!
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And third, it takes that
as proof that it's
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right, saying that those
people are unable to
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face the reality of what they're
really doing, and
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that's why they claim to
be doing something else.
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For example, say someone says
something to someone
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else. And the sociologist
looks at it and says,
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"That's racist. You're
perpetuating racism."
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And the person who said
the thing says,
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"No that's not what i
intended at all." But
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the sociologist says,
"Aha, now yes you are
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you really are racist
and that's why you're
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saying that you're not."
This maps one to one
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to Latour's description
of how critical
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social theory operates
more generally.
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But he's not making an
ideological criticism. He's
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not complaining that their
politics are wrong.
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He's saying that this
is something more
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deep-seated in how the
field operates.
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Latour says that sociology
is a relatively
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young discipline. The
natural sciences
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were already well-established.
They were high
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profile and high status.
So social scientists,
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when they came along, wanted
similar status. And
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to try to achieve that they
carved out a space
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for themselves. Where
natural scientists
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were concerned with
the material world,
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sociologists would be concerned
with something
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they would call "social."
And it wouldn't be
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material, it would be separate.
This would be
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a special domain where
they were the experts.
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And then sociologists
went about the world
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studying phenomena. But
they almost always
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studied down. They would
study what at the time
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would have been considered
as primitive beliefs
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and myths. They would study
religion. And they
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would reveal that what these
people believed was
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false - and in fact the
sociologists themselves
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had special knowledge above
and beyond. They had
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a kind of God's eye view
of the truth, and they
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could inform those people
and others as to why
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those people were mistaken
in their beliefs, and
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the real forces that it were
at work behind them.
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Which isn't to say that
these sociologists were
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entirely wrong. There certainly
are myths there
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certainly are reasons that
people do things that
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don't comport with the
claims that they made.
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But the sociologists became
too confident in
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their method. And Latour
says the moment he
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realized it was when he saw
their encounter with
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science. Because when
sociologists encountered
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the natural sciences and
tried to explain them
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the same way that they'd
explained religion,
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they got it wrong. The
idea that science is
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just a social construction
just a myth like
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religion or other myths,
and that its claims
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to its ability to explain
the natural world
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are not true was a bridge
too far for Latour. And
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when he looked at that failure,
he figured that
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if sociology couldn't explain
science, perhaps it
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had problems explaining a
lot of other things too.
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It had worked when it
was studying down but
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it had failed when it
tried studying up.
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Its idea of social phenomena
is somehow uniquely
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human and existing in
consciousness and thought
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and not actually material
entities in
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the world effectively
meant that it was
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inventing a metaphysics.
Go too far down
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that road and that's not
a science at all.
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And it has real implications
for human free
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will, because if forces like
capitalism or racism
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are operating in the world
and making people
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do things, then people
become like puppets.
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And because these forces
aren't material,
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there's not much we
can do about them.
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Latour says, I quote,
"if you have to
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fight against a force
that is invisible,
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untraceable, ubiquitous
and total, you
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will be powerless and
roundly defeated."
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If we actually want to
change or challenge
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things like racism or capitalism
and so forth,
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we actually have to
understand how
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they exist in the
material world.
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We have to understand
what social
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constructions are constructed
of. And Latur
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says that they are constructed
of real things
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- people, technology, objects,
relationships,
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interactions. To understand
them we need to come
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down from the God's eye view,
down to the ground
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level view where people
operate, and not simply
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ignore what they have to
say about what they do.
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Meanwhile, sociology and
the categories it has
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created, things like racism
and capitalism and
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so forth, although they may
not be abstract forces
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out there in the world like
gods or angels that
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are influencing human behavior,
they do in fact
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influence human behavior
because they themselves
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are social constructions.
And like other social
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constructions they are made
of things. They are
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made of tenure committees.
They're made of
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universities. They operate
in buildings.
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They're in journals. People
make money and careers
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publishing them. They are,
in other words, real:
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but they're real on a
level with the things
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that they describe, not
above them. Brought
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down to that level they're
an obvious target
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for studying using exactly
the same techniques
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that they use on other
phenomena. But Latour
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does caution that the categories
that they use
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are not useless. In fact,
they are very useful
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as descriptions, not as
forces in the world.
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In other words, when
people trade and act
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in markets we call that
capitalism. We use
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capitalism as description
to capture a wide
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variety of behaviors that
have similarities.
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And as a description it's
a very useful term.
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But to treat it as something
that acts on its
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own doesn't make sense.
That's like taking Adam
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Smith's invisible hand
a metaphor intended to
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illustrate the action of
the market and turn
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it into an actual force
in the world. There is
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no invisible hand that makes
buyers and sellers
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agree on prices. It's just
a useful description.
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And these are very useful
descriptions.
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But where they fall
down, Latour says,
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is in dealing with new
phenomena. Because when
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behavior changes, when
interactions change, when
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people construct social
things differently, if
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we stick with the same old
catalog of categories
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then we're going to be misled,
and we're not going
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to understand how things
happen. And of course
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we're not going to be able
to change them. This
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is Alphonse for Radio Free
Beszel, www.beszel.ca.
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Good night.
