MARK BAUERLEIN
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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 fac–
ulty 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 wide–
spread 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 evi–
dentiary 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 acknowl–
edge 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 entail–
ing a method of enumerating historical particulars and their conver–
gence 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 construc–
tion. 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 bene–
ficial. Although it put the author in the position of purveying Lacan's
