MARK BAUERLEIN
Social Constructionism: Philosophy for the
Academic Workplace
N
OTWITHSTANDING THE DIVERSITY
trumpeted by humanities
departments these days, when it comes to conceptions of
knowledge, one standpoint reigns supreme: social construc–
tionism. 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 sit–
uation, a language, an ideology, or some other social condition . Its
catchphrases circulate everywhere, from committee meetings to confer–
ence 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 wag–
ing a culture war against the Right live and work by the credo "Always
historicize!" Neopragmatists, post-structuralists, Marxists, and femi–
nists insist upon the situational basis of knowledge, taking the con–
structionist 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 human–
ities professors from their colleagues in the business school, the labora–
tory, 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 epis–
temology, 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 evi–
dence 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 mak–
ing arguments in their favor, the reader's report by Richard Ohmann
