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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 6/99
Stories of Social Construction
Social Dynamics and Political Change Series
4 December 1997
Revised 6 October 1998
Lecture for the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 4 December 1997.
Abstract
Critics of realist approaches to social analysis have placed social construction high on the agenda of social science, but have not provided convincing explanations of the social constructions that people actually produce, accept, and use. In the course of social interaction, people produce, negotiate, register, and respond to stories having remarkably uniform logical and ontological structures, a fact that poses serious analytical and pedagogical problems for social science. Reflection on conversation as a model and vehicle of social processes suggests partial solutions for the problems and fascinating opportunities for research.
The next time you need to compose a letter explaining why you haven’t replied to urgent messages recently, hire Subcomandante Marcos of Zapatista fame as your scribe. The self-styled Subcomandante led the guerrilla force of Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest and southernmost state, that began to attract world attention in January 1994. The guerrilleros called themselves EZLN, for Zapatista Army of National Liberation, thus claiming succession from the famed peasant leader of the Mexican Revolution, Emiliano Zapata. Writing to “all the large, medium-sized, small, marginal, pirate, buccaneer, and etcetera presses who are publishing the communiqués and letters of the EZLN and have written asking for a prologue for your respective publications, or have requested an exclusive of some kind or other”, he first itemizes the immense difficulties his newly-recruited guerrilla band has encountered in the mountains, then tells the following story:
On one of these days of exploration, we returned to camp, as always, completely wiped out. While the rations of pinole and water were being distributed, I turned on the short-wave radio to catch the evening news, but out of the radio came only the strident song of parrots and macaws . . . But I didn’t let such a small incident bother me, as I was accustomed to seeing in these mountains things as apparently absurd as a little deer with a red carnation in its mouth (probably in love, because if not, why a red carnation?), a tapir with violet ballet shoes, a herd of wild boar playing cards and, with their teeth and hooves, tapping out the rhythm of “we will break down the house to see Doña Blanca” . . . I wasn’t much surprised and I moved the dial looking for another station, but there wasn’t anything but the songs of the parrots and macaws . . .When I opened the back of the radio, I found the logical and dialectical cause of this irregular transmission: a bunch of parrots and macaws flew out, screaming with joy at regaining their freedom. I managed to count 17 parrots, 8 female macaws and 3 males, as they all scrambled out. After a rather tardy self-criticism for not having cleaned the apparatus, I prepared to give it the maintenance it required. As I was taking out the feathers and droppings (and even the skeleton of a little parrot the others had taken care to give a Christian burial, and above whose tomb shined a carefully made cross and a stone with the inscription in Latin? Requiescat in Pace), I found a little nest with a grey egg, speckled with green and blue, and beside it was a little envelope, that—with barely concealed eagerness—I quickly opened. It was a letter, addressed “To whom it may concern”. In a tiny script, the little parrot had written her sad and melancholy story.
She had fallen in love with a young and elegant macaw (so said the letter) and he loved her back (so said the letter). But the other parrots, concerned about the purity of their race, did not approve of such a scandalous romance and absolutely prohibited the parrot from seeing the handsome young macaw (so said the letter). And so the great love that united the couple (so said the letter) obliged them to see each other clandestinely, behind one of the transistors of the radio . . . (so said the letter), and soon one thing led to another and this little egg that I now had in my hands was the forbidden fruit of their illicit relation. The parrot requested (so said the letter) that whoever should find the egg should protect it and support it until the little one would be able to take care of itself (so said the letter), and finally there was a list of maternal recommendations for care, and a tearful lament for her cruel fate, etcetera (so said the letter) . . .
Following the often cited maxim that “There is no problem so big that you can’t walk away from it”, I abandoned the egg, putting it by the side of my hammock, and got myself ready to enjoy a well-deserved rest. It was useless; my guilt feelings (deep down, very deep down, I actually have a good and noble soul) would not let me sleep and soon I picked up the little egg and found a comfortable spot for it on my belly. At midnight, a very unfortunate hour, it began to move. At first I thought it was my stomach protesting the lack of food, but no, it was the little egg that was moving and beginning to break. With an inexplicable maternal instinct I made myself ready to witness the sacred moment when I became a mother—I mean—a father. And how great was my surprise to see come out of the shell neither a macaw nor a parrot, nor even a little baby chicken or a dove. No, what came out of the shell was—a little tapir! Seriously, it was a little tapir with green and blue feathers. A plumed tapir! In a moment of clarity . . . I understood the true meaning of this sordid little story . . .
What had happened was the parrot . . . had a liaison with a tapir, they sinned, and she was trying to frame the macaw. But everything had now fallen apart . . . Having figured out the mystery, the only thing left was to decide what I was going to do with the bastard tapir—and I am still trying to decide. For the time being I carry her hidden in my knapsack and give her a little of my food. I don’t deny that we like each other, and my maternal instinct (excuse me, paternal) has given way to an insane passion toward the tapir, who throws me ardent glances which don’t have much to do with polite gratefulness but rather with a badly controlled passion. My problem is severe: if I fall into temptation, I will not only commit a crime against nature, but also incest, because, after all, I am her adopted father. I have thought about abandoning her, but I can’t, she is more powerful than I. In short, I don’t know what the hell to do.
As you can see, I have too many problems here to be able to attend to yours. I hope that now you will understand my continued silence in regard to the questions that you insist on putting before me . . .
Salud, and please send me a veterinary manual for wild animals of the tropics (Ross et al. 1995: 23-25).
Ever the revolutionary dialectician, Marcos offers his materialist analysis as thesis and the plumed tapir as antithesis, but leaves his synthesis for future work. When I’ve finished talking forty minutes from now, if you complain that I haven’t solved all the problems my topic raises, I will offer my reply in the style of Subcomandante Marcos.
The guerrillero’s letter exemplifies, if fancifully, a series of problems that have risen higher and higher on the agendas of historians and social scientists over the last twenty years: When it comes to describing and explaining social processes, do any credible versions of realism remain? If many or all social processes entail discursive construction of the entities within them, must interpretation replace description and explanation as central activities of social science? Is discursive construction itself accessible to systematic description and explanation? Is it possible to make falsifiable statements—descriptive or explanatory—about social processes? Can we incorporate narrative processes into a viable vision of realist social science? Or, in the last analysis, is the effort to explain human story-telling just a tale of macaws and plumed tapirs, another awkward foray into magic realism?
Since leaving Michigan thirteen years ago, I have come to think that failure to address these pressing questions directly, instead of shrugging them off as impertinent distractions, has cramped the credibility and fruitfulness of what could be a rich renewal of relational realism. It is time to rediscover the centrality of social transactions, ties, and relations to social processes and to investigate connections between social relations, on one side, and social construction, on the other. Structural realism stands as the thesis, social construction as the antithesis—the seductive plumed tapir—and relational realism as the hoped-for synthesis.
I stumbled into these problems myself along two paths that first diverged, then converged again. Both started with participation, beginning in the 1950s, in the Marxist-populist drive to construct a “history from below” that would somehow introduce the voices of ordinary and oppressed people into accounts of political processes. The first path from that starting-point was an effort to comprehend and respond to a critique of the structural realism my own work had forwarded for many years. I first heard that critique’s muffled drumbeat as rhythms of Habermas, Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault reached Ann Arbor during the 1970s, then experienced it as roaring tympani at the New School for Social Research during the 1980s. Although such figures as Albert Soboul, Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, and Alberto Caracciolo certainly disagreed sharply about many historical issues, by and large they (and the rest of us populist historians) assumed that popular entities, identities, and interests formed more or less automatically in the course of social change, then constituted observable realities. The chief analytical problem, it then seemed, was to identify processes that promoted shared consciousness of objective interests and organizational capacity to act on those interests. A new generation of analysts, however, challenged that sort of structural realism in the many names of social construction. My first path toward today’s topic, then, took me through consideration of that challenge.
The second path was different. As I finished my youthful analysis of the 1793 counter-revolution in France, I took up a longer-range examination of relations between what I then thought of as “social change and political upheaval” in France. Involved in cataloging conflict-filled events, I soon borrowed from Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé a distinction between pre-political and political, between traditional and modern, between old and new forms of protest, and almost as soon started recognizing inadequacies in my whole formulation of the problem. It took me years to correct those inadequacies—enough years that critics still sometimes identify my work with long-abandoned trichotomies such as primitive-reactionary-modern or competitive-reactive-proactive.
Here we need not retrace that whole tortuous itinerary, but need only pull out two related strands: reformulation of ideas about repertoires of contention and about contentious identities (see Traugott 1995, Calhoun 1991, 1993). By a repertoire of contention I mean a set of performances by which members of any pair of politically constituted actors make claims on each other, claims which, if realized, would affect their object’s interests. By contentious identities I mean collective answers to the question “Who are you?” offered by participants in such claim-making. Over the years, I have frequently studied repertoires and contentious identities by means of systematic catalogs enumerating strikes, violent incidents, revolutionary situations, contentious gatherings or other similar sequences of events within well-defined time-place settings. Anyone who tries to relate such events, individually and collectively, to their social contexts eventually recognizes the interactive, negotiated, contingent, culturally-shaped character of repertoires and identities—in short, begins to modify the simplest structural realist position in the direction of social construction.
Of course many historians and social scientists had moved in that direction long before me. They criticized structural realists for reifying social categories, organizations, and interests; for exaggerating the ubiquity, homogeneity, directionality, and power of large-scale change processes; for neglecting cultural variation; for failing to take phenomenology seriously. To the extent that they led to radical phenomenological reductionism or to solipsism, as they often did, these criticisms did not advance our inquiries into social processes. Short of those extremes, however, they identified serious weaknesses of populist history as commonly practiced from the 1950s onward. Intelligent consideration of these weaknesses can produce an effective dialectic, with populist history as thesis, constructivist skepticism as antithesis, and relational realism as synthesis.
The problem as a whole requires attention to the interplay between cognitive processes and social transactions; to questions of epistemology and ontology; to the influence of social networks on political action; to the tension between individualistic and collective accounts of social processes; to the relative importance of deliberate means-end action, on one side, and indirect, cumulative, unanticipated, and environmentally-mediated causes in social life, on the other. Here I will bypass these issues, which much of my recent writing pursues obsessively, in favor of an illustrative focus on contentious politics. By contentious politics I mean collective, public making of claims which, if realized, would affect the interests of those claims’ objects. Within that vast zone, furthermore, let us concentrate on just two phenomena that the Zapatista mobilization dramatizes: first, the formation, assertion, and transformation of contentious identities; second, the creation, deployment, and alteration of contentious repertoires.
To see more clearly what is at issue, we can return momentarily to Chiapas. Emerging from the Lacandona jungle in Chiapas on New Year’s Day 1994, subcomandante Marcos and his Zapatistas made their first public declaration from the balcony of the governmental palace in San Cristóbal. In that text, they told a different sort of story from Marcos’ yarn about the parrot and the tapir. The story related how a long-suffering people had suffered centuries of oppression and deprivation, but finally HOY DECIMOS ¡BASTA!—today, we say Enough. The text’s authors identified themselves variously as:
- a product of 500 years of struggle
- poor people like us
- people used as cannon fodder
- heirs of our nation’s true makers
- millions of dispossessed
- “the people” as described in Article 39 of the Mexican national constitution
- the Zapatista Army of National Liberation
- responsible, free men and women
- patriots
They denied that they were “drug traffickers, or drug guerrillas, or bandits, or whatever other characterization our enemies might use.” They opposed themselves explicitly to:
- the dictatorship
- the political police
- the coterie (camarilla) of traitors who respresent the most conservative and anti-national groups
- the Mexican federal army
- the party in power (PRI) with its supreme and illegitimate leader, Carlos Salinas, installed in the federal executive office
(Declaración de la Selva Lacandona, 1994, www.ezln.org/primera-lacandona.html)
For all its splendid eccentricities, notice the classic properties of the Zapatistas’ collective self-presentation. Through the mouth, pen, and battered Olivetti portable of Subcomandante Marcos, they declare themselves to be the local manifestation of a popular movement extending back to the Spanish conquest, the enemy of a corrupt national power structure, the worthy, unified, numerous, and committed ally of all Mexicans that corrupt power-holders are oppressing. Their identity resides not in the sum of their common attributes, not in their shared consciousness, but in their collective relation to Mexican power. Or rather their relations, plural. For they exist as allies of the region’s Mayan campesinos and of liberation movements elsewhere; as articulate interlocuters of journalists, media personalities, and computer users throughout the world; as military opponents of the current national regime. To each of those relationally-defined identities, furthermore, corresponds a distinctive repertoire of claim-making means, ranging from press conferences through land occupations to armed attacks on government buildings.
I will resist the temptation to trace Zapatista politics across the years since the Lacandona Declaration. Their colorful example leads almost without effort to my main arguments. Here is a quick summary: Critics of realist approaches to social analysis have placed social construction high on the agenda of social science, but have not provided convincing explanations of the social constructions that people actually produce, accept, and use. In the course of social interaction, people produce, negotiate, register, and respond to stories having remarkably uniform logical and ontological structures, a fact that poses serious analytical and pedagogical problems for social science. Reflection on conversation as a model and vehicle of social processes suggests partial solutions for the problems and fascinating opportunities for research. Within the study of contentious politics, the analysis of identities and repertoires as conversation provides an opportunity to tunnel under linguistic and culturalist reductionism by treating construction and deployment of relevant stories as objects of explanation.
With few pauses for plumed tapirs or jungle declarations, let me lay out that line of reasoning in simple chunks. So far students of social construction have produced competing specifications of its locus and character—in autonomously-evolving mentalities, in language, in mental processes, or elsewhere. They have divided less explicitly but just as deeply on the amenability of social construction to systematic, falsifiable description and explanation. At one end of the seesaw we have a Jacques Rancière urging social historians to recognize their enterprise frankly as poetry, at the other John Mohr and Roberto Franzosi devising precise methods for describing discourses, then attaching them to their social settings. Even those who consider social construction coherent and explicable have not offered systematic accounts of its operation that identify significant causal analogies from one situation to the next.
One way to open the way toward a systematic account is to consider the place of standard stories in social construction. For reasons that lie deep in childhood learning, cultural immersion, or perhaps even in the structure of human brains, people usually recount, analyze, judge, remember, and reorganize social experiences as standard stories in which a small number of self-motivated entities interact within constricted, contiguous time and space. Although prior and externally imposed conditions enter standard stories as accidents, facilities, and constraints, all meaningful action occurs as consequences of the designated actors’ deliberations and impulses. The actors in such stories range from you and me as we work out how we missed our scheduled appointment yesterday to all downtrodden Mexicans and their oppressors through five centuries of history. Both Marcos’ whimsical account of a parrot’s illicit romance and the Zapatistas’ identification of themselves with centuries of heroic resistance come to us in the form of standard stories. Indeed, one refers obliquely to the other, since the plumed serpent, a frequent motif in Aztec statuary, represents the Aztec demigod Quetzalcoatl.
People’s construction, negotiation, and deployment of standard stories do a wide variety of important social work. That work certainly includes the formation of Mexican national history and the histories of particular dissident movements, but it also includes autobiography, self-justification, social movement mobilization, jury deliberation, moral condemnation, cementing of agreements, and documentation of nationalist claims. Literary critic Dan Hofstadter puts it well:
It is sometimes believed . . . that if one shapes events into a story, this shaping will somehow bind or heal them, make sense out of occurrences that are essentially wounded and without hope of meaning (Hofstadter 1996: 296).
Stories emerge from active social interchange, modify as a result of social interchange, but in their turn constrain social interchange as well. They embody ideas concerning what forms of action and interaction are possible, feasible, desirable, and efficacious, hence at least by implication what forms of action and interaction would be impossible, impracticable, undesirable, or ineffectual. Even if the individuals involved harbor other ideas, embedding of stories in social networks seriously constrains interactions, hence collective actions, of which people in those networks are capable.
Although people store standard stories in their brains person by person, anyone who listens carefully on the subway, in a bar, or on a city street will soon recognize their incessant creation, employment, and social reconstruction in conversation. People package arguments in stories, reply to queries by means of stories, challenge each other’s stories, modify or amplify their stories as the flow of conversation dictates, and sometimes even construct collective stories for presentation to third parties. They recast events after the fact in standard story form. We observe interim products of the collective version in social movements and other varieties of contentious politics; political organizers spend a significant part of their effort on the creation and broadcast of collective standard stories that will facilitate communication, coordination, and commitment on the part of participants, allies, bystanders, and even objects of collective claims. When antagonists settle conflicts, they typically create retrospective accounts of what was at issue, and how it got resolved. “Stories, stories, stories!” exclaims E. Valentine Daniel early in a moving study of recent violence in Sri Lanka. “I have never known for sure if I am their prisoner or their jailer” (Daniel 1996: 4).
What is more, the presence of a certain story constrains social interaction, defines an array of possible interactions and their likely outcomes, and thereby limits what can happen next. Stories play a significant part in the path-dependency of conversation and of social interaction as a whole. Once the Zapatistas found a worldwide audience for their claims to speak for the Mexican dispossessed at large they received support from a wide variety of dissidents outside of Mexico, but also incited counter-claims from other Mexican activists who denied Zapatista priority—and sometimes even Zapatista authenticity—in these regards.
The prevalence of stories poses critical analytical and pedagogical problems for social science. Few social processes actually have causal structures that conform to the logical requirements of standard stories. Most social processes involve unanticipated consequences, cumulative effects, indirect effects, and effects mediated by their social and physical environment, none of which fit the causal structure of standard stories. Even those few that correspond roughly to the formats of standard stories - for example, chess matches and some kinds of bureaucratic decision-making - typically rest on extensive if usually implicit institutional foundations and previous histories. The fact that stories change though negotiation and retrospective recasting means that even when the causal structure remains plausible post hoc collectors of stories must respect them as social constructions rather than as faithful chronologies or reliable explanations.
Analysts of social processes who wish to explain them must therefore translate material that comes to them largely in the form of standard stories created in the course of social interaction—and consolidated after the fact—into other idioms that better represent their actual causal structure. Every skilled survey researcher implicitly recognizes this condition both by interrogating the stories respondents tell and by breaking up interview schedules into non-story interchanges. Following programs called by such names as interpretation, discourse, narrative, and cultural analysis, however, many historians and social scientists have committed themselves to the view that standard stories do provide viable explanations of social processes, that the principal responsibility of social interpreters is the construction of superior standard stories, or even that nothing accessible to analysis exists beyond the limits of the standard stories participants in social processes tell.
Teachers and writers of history and social science who wish to communicate non-story explanations of social processes thus face audiences whose members have extensive training and strong investments in packaging social processes as standard stories. Teachers and writers of non-story history and social science therefore have a choice between working within the stringent limits set by standard stories and instructing their audiences in the analysis of causal mechanisms and sequences that do not correspond to standard stories.
However they resolve that dilemma, teachers and writers of history and social science also confront the challenge of describing, explaining, challenging, and altering both the stories that participants in social processes tell about what is happening to them or others and the stories that analysts, critics, observers, and even fellow professionals tell about particular social processes, situations, and outcomes. Thus the hermeneutic circle becomes a spiral of description, explication, explanation, critique, and back to description.
These problems pervade the study of social life in general. We could pursue them into description and explanation of inequality, sexuality, population change, or work. Within the field of contentious politics where we began, they clearly reappear in the analysis of collective identities and repertoires. Standard stories locate identities within individual bodies as some combination of attribute, experience, and consciousness, then derive collective identities from attributes, experiences, and consciousness shared by many individuals. In political life, however, collective identities always form as combinations of relations with others, representations of those relations, and shared understandings of those relations. The identity Zapatista combines relations to many others including fellow Zapatistas and the Mexican state; representations of those relations by means of names, symbols, practices, and stories; shared understandings grounded in the relations and their representations.
Collective identities activated in contentious politics vary along a continuum whose poles we can call embedded and detached. At the embedded pole we observe clumps of relations, representations, and understandings that pervade a wide range of routine social interaction as well as forming the bases of collective claim-making. Under most circumstances the identities woman, Nahuatl-speaker, neighbor, and peasant fall toward the embedded end of the continuum. At the detached pole we observe clumps of relations, representations, and understandings that constitute identities in contentious claim-making but rarely appear explicitly in routine social interaction. Under most circumstances the identities citizen, worker, American, and socialist fall toward the detached end of the continuum.
Political organizers, to be sure, often work to detach previously embedded identities by creating connections among fragmented populations (as when residents of many urban neighborhoods come to identify themselves as victims of the same corrupt city administration), or to embed currently detached identities by installing them in a wide range of routine social relations (as when promoters of a certain ethnic identity create ethnic institutions, exclusionary practices, and privileges). Whether embedded or detached, a wide range of contentious politics includes crucial performances in which people not only demand, request, attack, petition, or otherwise make specific claims on power-holders, but also act out statements of the type we are Alpha, we speak for Beta, or we insist on being recognized as Gamma. In the public performances of twentieth-century social movements, indeed, far more collective effort goes into assertions of the type “We are worthy, unified, numerous, and committed Xs” than into the specific presentation of concrete demands.
Further pursuit of that observation would take us to a number of topics dear to my heart: the interdependence between prescribed and unruly forms of politics, the emergence of the social movement as a distinctive and now perhaps fading vehicle of claim-making, and so on. Here, however, I simply want to call your attention to the analogy between identity-deployment in contentious politics and conversation in general. It is not just that identity processes involve conversations, although identity-oriented conversations often have the richness we have seen in the Zapatista self-portrayal. More important, the striking, jazzy combination of improvisation, innovation, and constraint that characterizes conversation also characterizes interactions among parties to collective identity work. The previous histories of relations among the parties, previous representations of those relations, and previous shared understandings all channel collective assertions of identity, but stereotyped repetition of old stories decreases credibility and viability of the identities thus invoked, just as strictly grammatical and formulaic speech (except when offered in jest) typically marks the speaker as a suspect outsider—perhaps even as a humanoid computer.
Similar reasoning applies to contentious repertoires. Whether in the ritual executions, processions, celebrations, and militia marches of the early French Revolution or the public meetings, petition drives, lobbying, demonstrations, and association-forming of contemporary western social movements, we witness the conversational combination of incessant improvisation, innovation, and constraint. Claim-making repertoires center on relational transactions: relations with fellow participants, relations with objects of claims, relations with audiences, often relations with authorities who intervene forcefully or otherwise. They involve strategic interaction. They modify in the long run as a result of changes in the parties, in relations among them, and in their settings, all of which proceed in partial independence of contentious politics. But they also modify in the short run as a consequence of contention itself, as when Cuban revolutionaries imprinted models for bearded, cigar-chomping guerrilleros or black Americans established the sit-in as a standard way of making claims. Here, too, analogies with conversation—serious, high-stakes conversation—strike the eye.
Before everything becomes deadly serious, let us recognize that conversation, contentious politics, and social life in general often center not on strategic interaction for high stakes but on persiflage, seduction, concealment, and play: parrots, macaws, and plumed tapirs matter to sociability, offer pleasure that reinforces social ties, and provide contexts for the interpretation of political contention. I hope only to have shown that social construction pervades contentious politics, critically involves stories, and presents a deep, engaging explanatory challenge to the next generation of social researchers, here or elsewhere. Now you know what sort of beast I found one night, emerging from a handsome speckled egg, and what I propose to do with it.
Note
As if to illustrate the orderly, socially-constructed contingency this paper emphasizes, I learned of Subcomandante Marcos’ fanciful letter through quotations in the article by Gerald Sider cited below. Most likely I would never have seen the article had Jürgen Schlumbohm not given me the recently-published book in which the article appeared when I spoke to Schlumbohm’s group in Göttingen while I was making plans to write the present paper. I am therefore grateful to Schlumbohm (and indirectly to Sider, whom I don’t know personally) for a windfall. The paper I gave in Göttingen appeared appropriately, under Schlumbohm’s editorship in the next volume of the series that published the Sider paper.
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