Vol. 19 No. 16 · 21 August 1997
pages 14-16 | 4431 words
Taking Bad Arguments Seriously
Ian Hacking on psychopathology and social contruction
The idea of social construction is wonderfully liberating. It reminds us, for example, that motherhood and its meanings are not the fixed and inevitable consequence of child-bearing and rearing, but the product of historical events, social forces and ideology. Mothers who know but fear standard canons of emotion and behaviour may see that the ways they are supposed to feel and act are not ordained by human nature. And if they don’t obey either the old rules of family, or whatever is the official psycho-paediatric rule of the day, they need not feel quite as guilty as they are supposed to feel.
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 18 · 18 September 1997
From Malcolm Carpenter
Is Ian Hacking being ironic when he writes (LRB, 21 August) that the ‘idea of social construction is wonderfully liberating’; the argument being that once we accept its validity and potential range of application, we become free to interpret such unpleasantly real phenomena as child abuse or schizophrenia as concepts, and go on from there to understand the often devious ways in which, as concepts, they are exploited, misrepresented etc. I wonder how real this attractive-sounding freedom is, however, and how many people will ever grasp its possibilities. It sounds to me more academic than pragmatic. It could be argued that the knowledge that the idea of child abuse is a social construct sets us free to argue about the reality rather than do anything to remedy it. And argued also that ‘social construction’ may be just as deterministic an idea as that of the ‘natural’ construction it is required to replace. You can recognise the power of the forces that go to construct a social construction without thereby empowering yourself to deconstruct it in any useful way. I’m reminded of the old, rather likeable Marxist belief that once people realised that the sociopolitical arrangements under which they were obliged to live were a capitalist rather than a divine imposition, they would want to rise up as one and change them. It didn’t happen that way, and I can’t see why the ‘liberation’ promised by the ‘idea of social construction’ should be any more influential.
Malcolm Carpenter
Dundee
