Social Constructionism:
Philosophy for the Academic Workplace

Mark Bauerlein

Notwithstanding the diversity trumpeted by humanities departments these days, when it comes to conceptions of knowledge, one standpoint reigns supreme: social constructionism. It is a simple belief system, founded upon the basic proposition that knowledge is never true per se, but true relative to a culture, a situation, a language, an ideology, or some other social condition. Its catchphrases circulate everywhere, from committee meetings to conference programs. Truisms like "knowledge is a construct" and "there is no escaping contingency" echo in book prefaces and submission requests as if they were prerequisites to publication. Professors still waging a culture war against the Right live and work by the credo "Always historicize!" Neopragmatists, post-structuralists, Marxists, and feminists insist upon the situational basis of knowledge, taking the constructionist premise as a cornerstone of progressive thought and social reform. Graduate students mouth watchwords about subject-positions and anti-essentialism as if they were undergoing an initiation ceremony, meeting admissions requirements, and learning the tools of a trade. The standpoint functions as a party line, a tribal glue distinguishing humanities professors from their colleagues in the business school, the laboratory, the chapel, and the computing center, most of whom believe that at least some knowledge is independent of social conditions.

This is why it is a mistake to treat social constructionism as preached in the academy as a philosophy. Though the position sounds like an epistemology, filled with glib denials of objectivity, truth, and facts backed up by in-the-know philosophical citations ("As Nietzsche says. . ."), its proponents hold those beliefs most unphilosophically. When someone holds a belief philosophically, he or she exposes it to arguments and evidence against it, and tries to mount arguments and evidence for it in return. But in academic contexts, constructionist ideas are not open for debate. They stand as community wisdom, articles of faith. When a critic submitted an essay to PMLA that criticized constructionists for not making arguments in their favor, the reader’s report by Richard Ohmann rejoined that since constructionism is universally accepted by academic inquirers, there is no need to argue for it anymore. A phrase from Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet nicely encapsulates this credulousness. Referring to Foucault’s argument that "Western culture has placed what it calls sexuality in a more and more privileged relation to our most prized constructs of individual identity, truth, and knowledge," she proclaims she will proceed "in accord with Foucault’s demonstration, whose results I will take to be axiomatic. . . ." This is a strangely empirical language to apply to Foucault. Only those already adopting a Foucauldian outlook would judge the speculations in The History of Sexuality to mark a "demonstration" that yields "results." No matter how controversial are Foucault’s contentions, or how frequently historians, anthropologists, and philosophers have disputed them, to Sedgwick they are axioms, starting points for inquiry. Though Sedgwick suggests that Foucault’s ideas have only a provisional justification–"I will take," she says–she still places them first, and never stops to ask, What if they are wrong? Such constructionist notions are so ingrained in the humanities mindset that nobody bothers to substantiate them at all. Save for a few near-retirement humanists and realist philosopher holdouts, academics embrace constructionist premises as catechism learning, axioms to be assimilated before one is inducted into the professoriate. To believe that knowledge is a construct, that truth, evidence, fact, and inference all fall under the category of local interpretation, and that interpretations are more or less right by virtue of the interests they satisfy is a professional habit, not an intellectual thesis.

One can prove the institutional nature of social constructionism by noting how easy it is to question. The weakness of social constructionism as an epistemology lies in the fact that one can agree with the bare premise that knowledge is a construct, but disagree with the conclusion that objectivity is impossible and that the contents of knowledge are dependent upon the social conditions of the knower. Of course, knowledge is constructed. It must be expressed in language, composed methodically, conceived through mental views, all of which are historically derived. Constructionists extend the fact that knowledge materializes in cognitive and linguistic structures which have social determinants into the belief that knowledge has no claim to transcend them. That knowledge cannot transcend the conditions of its origination stems from the notion that cognition is never innocent, that cognition has designs and desires shaping its knowledge-building process, that knowing always has an instrumental purpose. This human dimension is local and situational, constructionists argue, a historical context for knowledge outside of which the knowledge has no general warrant. Even the most ahistorical kinds of knowledge, the principles of logic, mathematics, and science, have a social basis, one obscured by thinkers who have abstracted that knowledge from its rightful setting and used it for purposes of their own. Thus Martin Heidegger claims in a well-known illustration, "Before Newton’s laws were discovered, they were not ‘true’. . . .Through Newton the laws became true" (Being and Time). We only think the laws preceded Newton’s conception because, Heidegger explains, that is how entities "show themselves."

But even though Newton’s laws arose at a particular historical moment, in one man’s mind, why assume that the laws are inextricable from that moment? There is abundant evidence for believing that the truth of Newton’s laws is independent of Newton’s mind, language, class, education, etc. The simple fact that persons of different languages and cultures implement those laws effectively implies their transhistorical and cross-cultural capacity. Engineers and physicists confirm the laws daily without any knowledge of Newton’s circumstances. Three hundred years of experimentation and theory have altered Newton’s laws only by restricting their physical purview. In short, Newton’s laws have been justified in vastly different times and places. Yes, scientists and engineers have de-historicized Newtonian knowledge, pared it down to a few set principles (nobody actually reads the Principia). But though abstract and expedient, the laws of Newtonian physics still have a truth-value, and that value is related not to Newton’s world, but to how well the laws predict outcomes, how reliably they stand up to testing, how useful they are in physical domains.

To think otherwise is to deny the distinction between the contents of knowledge and the context of their emergence. This is an old logical mistake, namely, the genetic fallacy: the confusion of a theory’s discovery with its justification. Social constructionists overlook this distinction between discovery (the circumstances of a theory’s origin) and justification (the establishment of its truth). To them, the idea of separating truth from origin depletes thought of its historical reality, and ultimately smacks of formalist methods and mandarin motives. Constructionists grant that the discovery/justification point may be logically correct, but in slighting historical context, it can lead to a kind of neglect, whereby the abstract consideration of theories like Newton’s laws allows us to forget, say, the race, class, and gender privileges that freed Newton to excogitate upon falling bodies. Epistemologists counter by saying that historical inquiry is one thing, truth-determination is another, but for scholars raised on Foucault and Rorty, the division is never so neat and clear. The history of scholarship itself reveals too many instances of ideas once thought to be true later exposed as alibis for social inequities, as having more institutional-use value than abstract-truth value. Only a punctual inventory of a theory’s historical entanglements has saved scholars from misusing the theory, from fomenting its implicit and perhaps malignant politics. That is the real animus behind social constructionist commitments–not a philosophical belief about knowledge, but a moral obligation to social justice.

Take another familiar example, the popular study of literary theory by Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, first published in 1983. The preface to Eagleton’s readable discussion declares, "This book sets out to provide a reasonably comprehensive account of modern literary theory," and the chapter headings–"Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Reception Theory," "Post-Structuralism," "Psychoanalysis"–suggest that a survey of competing schools of thought will follow. But in fact, the conceptual analysis is thin, the methodological description hasty. Instead, the book reads like a textbook case of commentary by genetic fallacy and ethical consequence. To the patient exposition of terms and concepts Eagleton prefers the oblique adumbration, as when he writes, "Leavis and Husserl both turn to the consolations of the concrete, of what can be known on the pulses, in a period of major ideological crisis [the post-World War I revolutions]." Expounding the poetics of this or that theory, Eagleton minimizes intellectual heritage and reckons ideas by their political affiliations. He attributes New Criticism to a Southern agrarian reaction to Northern industrialism, calling it "a full-blooded irrationalism, one closely associated with religious dogma. . .and with the right-wing ‘blood and soil’ politics of the agrarian movement." The intellectual fathers of New Critical aesthetics–Kant, Hegel, and Coleridge–play no role in this genesis. In the chapter on post-structuralism, Eagleton spends little time detailing the arguments of founding tests like "Différence," and instead strings together deconstructive platitudes–"Meaning, we might say, is thus never identical to itself"–and then summarizes, "Post-structuralism was a product of that blend of euphoria and disillusionment, liberation and dissipation, carnival and catastrophe, which was 1968." Again, a political context stands as source and explanation.

In turn, when assessing these theories, Eagleton focuses on their ethical results. New Critical method he reduces to "a recipe for political inertia, and thus for submission to the political status quo," one that licenses practitioners not to "oppose McCarthyism or further civil rights." Post-structuralism comes down to "a convenient way of evading such political questions [as Vietnam, Guatemala, Stalinism] altogether." How the definition of a poem as a verbal icon or as a play of signs kept one from storming the Columbia University administration building Eagleton does not say. But the fact that one could draw parallels, however factitious, between a formalist analysis that asked no political questions and a general political quietism suffices for Eagleton to indict New Criticism and deconstruction as reactionary bad faith. How one reads a poem and how one engages in political life are all of a piece. Daniel Bell may claim to be "a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture," and the art historian Anthony Blunt may have counseled students to downplay politics in their studies, all the while serving as a postwar Soviet operative in England, but ultimately, Eagleton presses, inquirers have no latitude to modulate their actions, for there is no real disjunction between scholarship and social conduct, between teaching and voting. One cannot be a progressive on issues of, say, gun control and abortion rights and a conservative in matters of scholarly method.

Literary Theory: An Introduction hardly counts as a serious discussion of literary theory, but its tactics have come to dominate humanities criticism. Commentaries on ideological origins and ethical results far exceed conceptual analyses and logical expositions. Evaluating concepts and arguments by their political backgrounds and implications has become a disciplinary wont, a pattern of inquiry. It is the natural method of constructionist epistemology, the outlook that will not distinguish between a truth and its origination, which is to say the outlook that is not really an epistemology at all. It speaks an epistemological language, but it has no epistemological principles. This is one of the curiosities of social constructionism, and why people err in attacking it on epistemological grounds, that is, on grounds of truth, evidence, and objectivity. Constructionists affirm that truth is a construct, dependent upon the conditions of its discovery. This is a flat contradiction, since truth by definition is independent of the means by which it is discovered. If constructionists mean by "truth" merely "what passes for truth," then the contradiction disappears, but now we are no longer talking about truth in epistemological terms, but in historical terms, that which is accepted as truth in this or that time and place. The acceptance of something as true is one thing, the truth of that belief is another. Establishing the latter is a routine epistemological task. Documenting the former is a traditional historical endeavor, carried out by Gibbon as well as by Sedgwick. In this distinction lies the novelty of social constructionism: in a word, constructionism disregards it, mingling history and epistemology, fusing what is true and what passes for true, identifying discovery with justification.

For this reason, inquirers sensitive to such distinctions accuse constructionism of philosophical confusion and methodological incorrectness. Philosopher-antagonists like John Searle and Susan Haack express contempt for the logical credentials of constructionist arguments, while conservative critics like Roger Kimball mock their sophomoric relativism. But the continued popularity of the school of thought in the academy indicates that those charges, however accurate, miss the point. They rest upon standards of coherence and clarity that constructionists delimit as themselves constructs not binding to their own way of thinking. Besides, advocates aim to convince not by their dubious logic or their relativist beliefs. They do not subscribe to any foundations except the one which rules "There are no foundations." The concepts and distinctions that opponents attack them for mishandling, social constructionists have already negated. They commit the genetic fallacy time and again, but so what? Since they define knowledge as bound to the context of its construction, the genetic fallacy is not a mistake–it is a policy.

The real questions to put to social constructionists are not those of truth, but of tactics. Acknowledging the irrelevance of philosophical disputes, we must ask: If canons of logic do not apply to constructionist thinking, on what does it base its assertions? If all knowledge is bound by time and place, how does constructionist persuasion work outside its time and place? If discovery and justification are one, how does constructionist inquiry justify itself?

One answer may be found in the rhetorical patterns of constructionist statements. Because constructionist maxims are decreed so ritualistically in academic discourse, they tend to assume a customary verbal form, one whose import is often borne by seemingly non-substantive words and locutions. For example, in the following two citations, notice the word "surely." First, in a roundtable discussion on evidence in PMLA (1996), Stephen Orgel comments, "Surely historical evidence depends on interpretation. Even scientific evidence does." Second, in a Christian Science Monitor review of a book on the acceleration of modern life, Tom Regan writes, "Faster [the book under review] will help us think about the way we ‘construct’ time–for it surely is a construct" (August 26, 1999). Time and evidence are the main objects in these sentences, but "surely" does most of the work. That historical and scientific evidence are interpretive and that time is a construct are, to say the least, complicated propositions. But the "surely" rules out any clarification or debate, and does so not on logical or definitional grounds, but on the grounds of the unfaltering surety of the speakers. "Surely" signifies not a premise or a piece of evidence, but an attitude. Orgel and Regan believe in what they say, and believe in it with certainty. Added to each proposition is a state of mind, an assurance that disallows objection. Marking the statements as dubitable only by wrongheaded people, "surely" automatically dismisses those who believe otherwise. Anybody who disagrees with the propositions faces the task of refuting them and surmounting the certitude of Orgel and Regan.

This excess of confidence is a key to social constructionist argumentation. The "surely" here is an explicit instance of the tacit, blank temerity of expression typical of the idiom. Given the breadth of constructionist ideas, proponents might submit them tentatively as speculations, hypotheses, or opinions, but in fact, this spirited confidence phrases them as bare simplicities whose contradiction is intellectually indefensible, and perhaps politically motivated. The aplomb turns the issue from the truth or falsity of the premises to the mindset of the antagonists. Since no enlightened mind would doubt the premises, dissent from them can only stem from the wrongheadedness of the dissenters. As the intentions of the other side come under scrutiny, the premises themselves remain untouched. A philosophical quarrel becomes a psychological speculation. Consider, for example, how these two statements take constructionist ideas for granted, and cast doubt on the temper of those who do not:

. . .nothing in today’s colleges seems to have enraged traditionalists more than the idea of the contingency of knowledge.

For after all, the pragmatist believes in the sufficiency of human practices and is not dismayed when those practices are shown to be grounded in nothing more (or less) than their own traditions and histories; the impossibility of tying our everyday meanings and values to meanings and values less local does not lead the pragmatist to suspect their reality, but to suspect the form of thought that would deny it.

The first citation, by Paul Lauter, comes from an afterword to the instructor’s guide to The Heath Anthology of American Literature, in which Lauter reflects upon the canon, undergraduate education, and the contingent status of knowledge. Nowhere in the piece does Lauter demonstrate the contingency premise, nor does he mention any arguments against it. He simply assumes the former and pigeonholes anti-contingency responses as rage. Again, the opponent’s attitude substitutes for his reasoning, and because rage implies helplessness, Lauter’s characterization suggests that there is no valid reason to counter the contingency premise. That someone would deny contingency dispassionately on epistemological grounds is out of the question.

The second citation, by Stanley Fish, appears in the afterword to a collection of essays on neopragmatism, and recites the same shift from philosophical debate to psychological inspection. The remarkable thing about the passage is how breezily Fish affirms this bullying maneuver. First, he asserts the impossibility of meanings and values transcending their locale. This "no transcendence" thesis is a logical necessity and/or an empirical given, period. Next, anybody who fails to recognize this fact is not just mistaken or confused, his entire "form of thought" is "suspect." When challenged by those who think that local meanings and values are "unreal," Fish’s pragmatist does not counterargue for the reality of local meanings and values, but instead wonders whether his antagonist is ideologically blinded or psychologically disabled.

What could lead otherwise responsible academics to implement such narrow-minded, accusatory, cocksure tactics when it comes to constructionist ideas? How has constructionism licensed inquirers to abandon protocols of debate, specifically, the civility that requires learned combatants to listen to each other? Constructionist notions have become so patent and revered that their articulation need no longer happen, except as reminders to professors who stray from the party line (many utterances begin with "We must remember that. . ."). Those who raise objections soon find themselves trapped in debates shaped by us versus them forensics, enunciated in an idiom of brazen philosophical avowals and insinuations about the character of adversaries. Non-constructionists feel not so much refuted, as ostracized. The humanities become a closed society, captive to a weak epistemology with a mighty elocution.

This polarizing, personalizing rhetoric indicates that social constructionism has an institutional basis, not a philosophical, moral, or political one. It tramples on philosophical distinctions and practices an immoral mode of debate. Though it declares a political goal for criticism, it is not a political stance, for no political movement has issued from constructionist thinking. It has won few converts outside literature and "studies" departments, much less outside the university walls. Instead, what has emerged from social constructionism is not a philosophical school or a political position, but an institutional product, specifically, an outpouring of research publications, conference talks, and classroom presentations by subscribers. For many who have entered the humanities as teachers and researchers, social constructionism has been a liberating and serviceable implement of work, a standpoint that has enhanced the productivity of professors. It has provided academics with axioms and assurances necessary to their labors. Herein lies the secret of constructionism’s success: the critical method that follows from constructionist premises has proven eminently conducive to the exigencies of teaching, lecturing, and publishing. In a word, it is the school of thought most congenial to current professional workplace conditions of scholars in the humanities.

The most obvious advantage constructionism provides lies in its territorial nature, for by undermining truth and objectivity, constructionism bolsters the humanities as an academic whole, carving out a space in the university for practices of interpretation and subjectivity. One can witness this turf function in critiques by literary and cultural theorists of their institutional competitors–the scientists. This cultural critique of science often goes by the name of "science studies," a project directed at the political subtleties of scientific practices–for example, the presence of ideologically charged metaphors in scientific discourse. Its goal is to reveal science itself as a construct, one especially dangerous in that it casts scientificity as neutral and non-constructed. The institutional goal of science studies is to delimit the sciences to one knowledge domain, to show that they speak not for reality, but for certain constructions of reality. If the university is to reflect the different knowledges of the universe, then containing the purview of scientific knowledge to empirical practice preserves the humanities as a distinct way of knowing.

But while the defensive position of the humanities in the university promotes the use of social constructionism as a stock in trade, in fact, the pressures favoring constructionism are often more quotidian and prosaic than that of arts versus science competition. They affect professors individually, not as representatives of a department or an outlook; I mean the circumstances of graduate student aid, grant-giving, job-hiring, tenure, leave time, teaching load, and salary increases. Professors and graduate students have papers to grade, lectures to prepare, applications to evaluate, books to read, undergraduates to meet, and most importantly, essays and chapters to write. Their success rests in how well they handle students, maintain collegiality, and meet research expectations, with wellness frequently being measured by the number of students they attract, the number of committees on which they serve, and the number and girth of publications they produce. A school of thought whose practice accords neatly with the times and money, numbers and paperwork of academic labor becomes a material resource, especially in a field trading words and ideas. If the methods of research and argument that follow from a set of terms and principles fit the schedules and competitions of professional life, subscribing to them marks an intellectual belief and a career decision.

At first sight, this attribution of an intellectual standpoint to institutional demands may appear reductive and tenuous. The hypothesis denigrates the reasons academics believe in this or that system and forecloses questions such as that of the genetic fallacy. But the goal here is to explain the popularity of constructionism, not its truth. Social constructionism as academic common sense needs to be analyzed. One prefers an institutional explanation to an intellectual one because this school of thought has settled into a critical dogma and adopted ad hominem tactics. Indeed, it is the fact that questions like the genetic fallacy one are not deliberated openly, that the cards are all stacked in favor of a constructionist answer, that makes one wonder about the state of the institution in which they are posed. When a school of thought has become so popular that it succeeds without really trying, it is time to interrogate the polity supporting it. The thing to do is to find concrete institutional situations that uncover how social constructionism helps professors function within academe.

One of the more intense and complicated moments of academic life is the tenure meeting. There, behind closed doors, senior faculty decide the fate of a junior colleague. The candidate looks upon the decision as a do-or-die threshold, with success meaning security for life, failure meaning years of scrapping at adjunct posts, or expulsion from the teaching ranks forever. Senior faculty regard their vote as a vote on the livelihood of a colleague, in comparison to which any objections they have to the record shrink to pettiness. Outside reviewers asked to evaluate the research materials all too often treat their task with obvious distaste, sending to the department perfunctory letters filled with the standard clichés about brilliance and potential. Administrators oversee each step of the process with one question in mind: "How will this look in a courtroom, or in a Lingua Franca article?" Economic hardship, legal fears, professor burnout, and personal feelings all conspire to make the tenure meeting a dreadful affair, in which supporters overpraise and sentimentalize the candidate while critics descend into a surly skepticism. Meanwhile, the candidate huddles in a paranoid freeze, six years of graduate school and six years of junior teaching adjudicated by a two-hour colloquy down the hall.

Of course, people and institutions always find ways of coping. Of late, at many universities senior faculty and administrators have discovered a mechanism that frees the decision-makers of responsibility and isolates for the aspirant the hurdle for advancement: the book. As long as the candidate proves an inoffensive teacher and a reasonable department member, only one question sits on the meeting room table: Is the research project finished? If the junior colleague has a book in hand or an acceptance letter from the director of a university press, tenure is a fait accompli. If the work remains in manuscript, promising but incomplete, no promotion. That is the employment equation. Tenure has boiled down to a six-year composition scheme. Junior faculty now face a demystified production schedule, and senior faculty enter the tenure meeting with a one-checkbox form in their heads. No more messy discussions about quality. No more anxiety about whether the department has enough discernment, or too much. Administrators have an objective criterion to point to should any outsiders challenge the proceedings. Judgment has been externalized, handed over to university editorial boards. The assistant professor has inherited a job task that takes priority over teaching students, that is, marketing his revised dissertation to academic press editors.

While the book criterion has clarified the tenure process, it has fundamentally altered the nature of scholarship in the humanities. The system discourages research that is time-consuming, that involves tracking down information secreted in libraries and archives, that may yield numerous dead ends before a discovery occurs. Junior faculty must envision book-length projects that can be executed well in advance of the crucial tenure meeting, which takes place in the middle of the candidate’s sixth year of employment. With university presses sometimes taking two years to decide upon a manuscript, pre-tenure scholars have three and a half years from the time of their hiring to complete their opus. Books that require lengthier inquiries do not get written. Recent hirees acclimating themselves to a new campus, building up their teaching repertoire, and learning the ropes of department service do not have time to bury themselves in manuscript collections or to pursue dubious trails of evidence. Clear-sighted professors will avoid empirical methods, aware that it takes too much time to verify propositions about culture, to corroborate facts with multiple sources, to consult primary documents, and to compile evidence adequate to inductive conclusions. They will seek out research models whose premises are already in place, not in need of proof, and whose exercise proceeds without too much deliberation over inquiry guidelines. Speculation will prevail over fact-finding, theory and politics over erudition. Inquirers will limit their sources to a handful of primary texts and broach them with a popular academic theory or through a sociopolitical theme. In sum, facing a process that issues in either lifetime security or joblessness, junior faculty will relax their scruples and select a critical practice that fosters their own professional survival, a practice that offers timely shortcuts to publication and still enjoys institutional sanction.

Social constructionism is one such expedient method. It has widespread support in the humanities, and so practitioners need waste no paragraphs validating it. It scoffs at empirical notions, chastising them as "naive positivism" and freeing scholars from having to prove the truth of constructionist premises and generalizations. It lightens the evidentiary load, affirming that an incisive reading of a single text or event is sufficient to illustrate a theoretical or historical generality. Objectivity as an ideal collapses, for while objectivity requires that one acknowledge opposing arguments and refute them on logical or empirical grounds, constructionism merely asks that inquirers position themselves as a subject in relation to other subject-positions. True, constructionism proposes to study phenomena as historical constructs, a proposal entailing a method of enumerating historical particulars and their convergence in this or that object. But in fact, constructionist analysis typically breaks the object down into theoretical, political, and (a few) historical constituents, most of which are common currency in academic parlance. In analyzing the text or event as a construct, inquirers suspend the whole question of the reality of the thing and the truth of the construction. All that counts is the particular version of the thing, and with no objective standard by which to measure the version, the laborious process of justification dissolves.

Last month a scholarly journal asked me to assess a submission on Jacques Lacan’s adoption of certain semiotic principles of Charles Sanders Peirce. After reading the essay, I recommended publication, but added that Lacan largely misconstrued Peirce’s arguments and that the author needed to discuss the misrepresentations. He replied that whether Lacan was right or wrong was beside the point. He was only interested in how Lacan "appropriated" Peirce. To focus on whether Lacan understood Peirce correctly would sway the discussion from Lacan’s creative uses of Peircean ideas, he said. Of course, the author’s defense was epistemologically dubious, but it was institutionally beneficial. Although it put the author in the position of purveying Lacan’s misconstruction of Peirce uncritically, it simplified his task enormously, saving him the trouble of checking Lacan’s appropriations against Peirce’s voluminous, difficult corpus. If only conservative evaluators would agree to the constructedness of Lacan’s notions, not their truth, then the essay could proceed to publication.

Apologias like this one are rampant in the humanities, and the books and articles that they enable flood the scholarly marketplace. University press catalogues, booknotes and ads in periodicals, and "list of contributors" pages in journals announce these publications as breakthough efforts and necessary reading, but despite the praise, most of them soon disappear into the library stacks never to be heard from again. They are hastily conceived and predictably argued, and notwithstanding the singularity promised on their dust jackets, they are all of a type. They begin with approved constructionist premises, bolster them with arguments from authority ("According to Richard Rorty. . ."), and attach them to standard generalities about power, race, and gender. They vary only in their subject matter, the texts and events selected for commentary. They also suffer from the stylistic and design flaws characteristic of scholarship pushed into production too quickly. Last year, I read six book-length manuscripts for university presses, five of them by junior faculty. All five I returned to the press with detailed instructions for developmental editing. The authors possessed considerable intelligence and earnest motives, but they obviously tried to compose too fast. Sentences were unpolished and contained uniform expressions. Transitions were jumpy and casual, as if the chapters succeeded one another with "Now, let’s look at. . . ." The introductions were elliptical and rambling, as if the authors had not yet settled the question of what concerns the projects were aimed at resolving.

But however rough and incoherent, such manuscripts often make it into print and the authors win promotions. This is the research result of the productivity requirements of the profession. Junior faculty scramble to get dissertations published before their time, and the market is saturated with scholarly ephemera. Younger humanities professors no longer spend ten years investigating a subject, sharpening their theses, and refining their prose. Lengthy archival studies and careful erudite readings no longer appear. Career trajectories of figures like René Girard, M. H. Abrams, Paul de Man, and Meyer Shapiro are eschewed, for none of those talents produced enough work early in their professional lives to merit tenure under the present system. Penalized for selecting long-term projects, assistant professors have too little time to embark upon studies such as The Mirror and the Lamp.

This book-for-tenure requirement affects professors at the top fifty to seventy-five research institutions alone, but the general trend it represents–the acceleration of scholarship–reaches into all areas of academic life. Whenever faculty observe annual salary increases tied to their productivity for the year, and whenever graduate students face tuition support packages due to expire after four years, they will opt for a method of inquiry that ensures their professional livelihood. Whenever academic press editors favor topical culture studies over archival research, ambitious scholars will follow practices that help them keep pace with intellectual current events. Whenever hiring committees and funding agencies emphasize their interest in innovative, non-traditional forms of inquiry, applicants will fashion themselves accordingly, mindful of the ever more tenuous line between the avant-garde and the old hat. In each case, a commitment to painstaking induction and catholic learning proves disastrous.

This is the bare and banal advantage of social constructionism: it saves time. Truth, facts, objectivity–those require too much reading, too many library visits, too much time soliciting interlibrary loan materials, scrolling through microfilm records, double-checking sources, and looking beyond academic trends that come and go. A philosophy that discredits the foundations of such time-consuming research is a professional blessing. It is the belief-system of inquirers who need an alibi for not reading the extra book, traveling to the other archives, or listening to the other point of view. This is why constructionism is the prevailing creed in the humanities today. It is the epistemology of scholarship in haste, of professors under the gun. As soon as the humanities embraced a productivity model of merit, empiricism and erudition became institutional dead ends, and constructionism emerged as the method of the fittest. Scholars may have initially embraced constructionism as a philosophical position, but the evolution of constructionism into a brash institutional maneuvering indicates that it now functions as a response to a changing labor environment. How unfortunate that humanities faculty did not fight back against the productivity standard as soon as it arose and insist that scholars need time to read, time to reflect, time to test ideas in the classroom and at conferences if they are to come up with anything lasting. What a shame that they were able to concoct a mode of thought that cooperated with the quantification system, a plan of survival that now stands as the academic wisdom of the age.