Lecture 8 outline

1. Looping effects: the story so far.

2. The role of expert knowledges.
3. The difference ways of being a person make:
Enacting that way of being
Resisting that way of being:
Transvaluation.
Rival knowledge generating communities.
Category busting.
4. Returning to our conceptual map.
5. Review of this section; some questions to take
from it to the remainder of the course.
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 Hacking on making up people
Examples: multiple personality disorder, obesity, autism
spectrum disorders.

Distinguish two sentences:

A. There were no multiple personalities in 1955; there were
many in 1985.
B. In 1955 this was not a way to be a person, people
did not experience themselves in this way, they did
not interact with their friends, their families, their
employers, their counsellors, in this way; but in
1985 this was a way to be a person, to experience
oneself, to live in society.
And in 2009 it became the subject of a TV series.

IDENTITY Semester 1, 2012

 What Hacking isnt saying
Not taking a stance on whether multiple personality
identified a coherent clustering of psychological traits,
such as might be captured in a diagnosis, prior to a
certain period in time. (Though he is skeptical: thats a
different issue. Note now MPD is replaced by the
concept: dissociative identity disorder)
Compare a similar claim: prior to C19th medicalization and
regulation there were no homosexuals.
Does not mean that a new form of human sexual behavior
emerged at that time.
Does not mean that there were no same-sex attracted
individuals.

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 What Hacking is saying

It makes a difference to who we can be when start

using classifications of
behavior/attitudes/capacities to divide people into
kinds.
Have available scripts we can choose to enact or resist.

Question: can you come up with classifications for

which Hackings B is true?

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 The role of expert knowledge

Hackings claim: science plays a large role in the

construction of at least some important identity
classifications.

Not saying that this is the only way these kinds of

identities are constructed, or that all socially
constructed identity classifications have science as
a mechanism of construction.

How can science work as mechanism of construction?

IDENTITY Semester 1, 2012

 The role of expert knowledge

Science is given authority over some classifications.

(Compare those with authority over cool).
The things we choose to count and the correlations we
seek to explore help explain what we find normal
and what deviant.
Normal and deviant can be merely variance
notions: departures from an average by such and
such an amount.
But they can also be/become normative notions: the
ways people ought to be; normal functioning
against which something is a disability/deficit;
normal weight etc.
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 The role of expert knowledge

Experts then have two jobs:

explain why people deviate from the norm
(medicalization, biological determinism).
Work out ways of fixing people so that they return
to the norm.

Questions: For which, if any identity categories is this

kind of story plausible? For which implausible?
Gender? National identities? Religious identities?
Are there other kinds of knowledge practices
involved in these? What are other mechanisms of
construction?
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 The difference it makes to have available a
way of being a person
Can provide individuals with ways of understanding
themselves and their experience. Can provide
stories for how to be a person of that kind.

Can also prompt resistance:

1. Transvaluation: when a category is set up in

opposition to a norm, it is often disvalued with
respect to that norm. Can try to reverse or
otherwise disrupt these valuations.
Example, gay pride.

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 Resistance

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 Resistance

Insist that the known become the knower: rival

knowledge claims. http://www.gros.org/

Category busting: Unmask the forces of social

construction; inquire why we are making these
distinctions, instead of others, whether they are
misleading in important respects.

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 Revisiting a conceptual map

Culturally variable
Artificial malleable

Socially constructed
Contingent
Made up

Not real/less real Non-essential

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 Looking back and looking forward
What weve done:
1. Got a grip on the notion of biological determinism (aka
essentialism, reductionism) and done one detailed case
study (neuroscience).
2. Explored the notion of social construction:
Distinguished between the construction of ideas and of
things.
Challenged the assumption that socially constructed things
are less real -- discursively constructed things are very real.
Understood the role of feedback loops, which occur happen
when the thing that is classified can itself understand the
classification.
Introduced the idea of resistance and the forms it can take.
Only relatively simple examples in detail: meat, cool.
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 Looking back and looking forward

Identified questions to ask in evaluating any social

constructivist account of an identity category:
Who or what does a theory claim constructs what
and how is it constructed?
Is there are role posited for expert knowledge?
Who are the relevant experts?
What else does the work of construction? Lots of
candidates: built environments, political and social
institutions, linguistic practices, features of our
psychology, etc, etc.

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 Looking back and looking forward

Are there looping effects in play?

What does the theory imply about the reality or
malleability of that which is constructed?
What avenues of resistance does the theory posit?
How do I participate in construction and/or
resistance?

IDENTITY Semester 1, 2012