Decoding Constructivism – Part I
I turn to Nicholas Onuf’s deceptively simple titled ‘Constructivism’ from his World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and Constructivism (1989) (Columbia: University of South Caroline Press).
Onuf summarized:
Onuf’s objective, clearly, is to pave the way for the inclusion of social theory philosophy into the realm of the philosophically desert (and deserted) field of International Relations (IR).
How does he do this?
By the invocation of the word ‘deed’. Indeed, Onuf and most constructivists work hinges on the human ability to imagine and frame new ‘worlds’, which requires thought and action. But not any action, a specific kind of action: the ‘deed’.
Deeds are not simply actions, they are, as the dictionary informs, an action, which is performed intentionally or consciously. Or as Onuf describes it, a ‘deed’ is intelligible only as jointly a social construction and natural event, produced by the mind, yet phenomenal in its own right.
The point is that constructivism begins with ‘deed’ because it collectively conjoins several constructivist occupations at once: social construction (language) and intended action (deed), which enables the imagination of another world. Deed sits comfortably between the ‘word’ and the ‘world’ without privileging one over the other. (On a private note, why shouldn’t one privilege one over the other? Possibly because Onuf is decidedly anti-binaries and explains why he almost reluctantly ‘associates’ with Giddens structuration theory. More on that towards the end).
The word and the world are therefore equal, and neither is privileged over the other. And it is for this reason that constructivism cannot reconcile with deconstruction. Deconstruction, ‘wages a war’ on words and as a consequence, is logocentric. Logocentricism, in opposition to Eros, stakes a claim on the ‘rational’ and is the rational principle which governs and develops the world. A constructivist is distanced from this cognitive activity which is based on reason and favours the phenomenal as much as the logos.
So far, what we have is this:
Language is based on certain cognitive abilities humans and on reason. Humans perceive the world through language, and therefore, ‘through the medium of language, the mind subordinates the world’.
Onuf is uncomfortable with these clear and clean lines, and therefore, brings in Wittgenstein.
Why Ludwig?
According to Onuf, W is one of those rare philosophers, who simultaneously straddle social theory and philosophy. Onuf also attributes W’s prestige to the latter’s ‘unsystematic, slender and gnomic’ texts, but we can ignore this.
W is necessary to constructivism. This is because, that even though W for the first bit of his career was very ‘logocentric’, (which simply means that language provides a distance between us and the world; language with its rules, rationalizes the world that we see). The word comes first. Later, Wittgenstein ran a ‘guerilla campaign’ (Onuf’s words!) against this and subsequently argued that its not the word which constitutes the world as much as the deed.
W argued essentially, that ‘to speak a language is an activity’. The shift to activity meant the acknowledgement that all activities are essentially games, and games always have rules. Activity-games-rules: W is a social theorist, because social theory revolves around the thesis that humanity gives rise to customs and institutions. Language is one such rule based activity and using its rules and speaking a language amounts to ‘language games’.
This brings us to the common denominator of constructivist studies: rules. W describes language as a rule based activity, is ‘rule governed’; is a game and is therefore co-opted as a constructivist. This does not mean, however, that everything human is rule governed. (This is the argument put forward by Peter Winch (The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy), which Onuf is quick to dismiss, on the ground that if everything was rule based, rules would tantamount to causes, which they are not. According to Onuf, this would make humans automatons, which of course, we are not).
Thats it. The rest in Part II.
Coffee. Now!
