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demanding work of laboratory experimentation springs from a sense
(confirmed by a wide range of teachers) that I possessed a world-class
math block, and that I would not likely push the scientific envelope one
smidgen. Add the unhappy fact that I happen to be a diabetic and you
can easily see how it is that I cheer, positively cheer, any researcher hard
at work on a cure for what ails me.
I take a measure of solace, however, in reminding myself that many
combatants in the science wars know even less about hands-on science
than I do. Small wonder, then, that genuine scientists, the ones who
work with Bunsen burners and chalk up on the blackboards, often
regard the culture studies crowd with such contempt. That's where I
may have something of an advantage because the same attacks now
being mounted on scientific authority are old hat to those of us in liter–
ary studies who watched our discipline become systematically destabi–
lized. Bashing Shakespeare, either as Exhibit A in the hegemony of dead,
white, European writers or, more recently, as an apologist of empire,
became a way to ask, again and again, questions beginning with
whose:
Whose greatness? Whose excellence? And most important of all, whose
interest is being served? Dressed up in the impenetrable language that
may well be postmodernism's defining feature, the agendas of identity
politics rolled over those who talked about novels and poems (rather
than "texts") and who believed, on aesthetic grounds, that some books
were better than others. Such innocents often found themselves con–
temptuously dismissed as under-theorized, or worse.
As someone who has suffered these slings, these arrows, I know full
well how cultural warfare works-and also how a spongy term such as
"social construction" can easily be applied to everything from authorship
to Zulu nationalism. That's why Ian Hacking's
The Social Construction
of
What?
is such a gratifying book.
It
covers a wide range of clashes
about everything from how best to treat mental illness, child abuse, or
anorexia, to the current research being done in sedimentary geology–
and always with an eye on the specific "what" in question. My hunch
is that Hacking has little patience with much that currently travels
under the wide umbrella of social construction (" both obscure and
overused," he snorts), but also that he recognizes useful thinking when
he sees it:
Social construction has in many contexts been a truly liberating
idea, but that which on first hearing has liberated some has made
all too many others smug, comfortable, and trendy in ways that
have become merely orthodox. The phrase has become a code.
If
