Why it is important to overcome the red-caping of social constructionism.And obviously, Jews don’t want their deceptive games exposed.
While the gas-lighters try to deny accurate inferences that I’ve made independent of academic enforcement, in addition to lived, experiential perspective and various disciplinary perspectives, the disciplinary perspective that I am mainly coming from is a communicologist perspective (interaction unit of analysis); nevertheless, the sociologist unit, the social group concept is more than valid; it does not have to be the only unit of analysis, but when it comes to race and anti-racism, it is central, highly relevant, if not most relevant…and already there in nature, not denying any worthwhile science where it is worthwhile sociology….nobody is saying that we don’t also need biologists looking through microscopes, etc. or “ordinary people” contributing their deep experiential knowledge – in fact, that cannot be replaced. Social constructionism is bolstered by the input of different perspectives and disciplines.
See this response to manciblack:
mancinblack: What is new, is that we are being told sex is more or less a social construct and that for this “the scientific evidence is incontrovertible”.
But mancinblack:
“Social constructionism” is an important concept which has been Red Caped.
But mancinblack: “Social constructionism” is an important concept which has been Red Caped. It has been red caped as “solipsism” which is the idea that an individual can make of themselves or a group whatever bizarre speculation that they like. How’s that “social”? It isn’t; not for long. That’s the red cape that the right wing altercast chases, as characteristic of “the left”…57 genders from outer space to choose from, “race is an optical illusion”, etc. However, to allege that sex differentiation and gender are mere solipsistic choices, a mere social construct, is not socially warranted – it is Cartesian, as it denies the empirical reality of sex differentiation and the practical complementarity of gender roles (a reality which the vast majority of people will subscribe to for the sake of their survival, if nothing else).
But as Cartesian it is not social constructionist. It reverses the raison d’etre of social constructionism, which is to deal with the modernist, Cartesian estrangement, detachment that doesn’t deal with our social interactive reality, attentive defense of our groups – e.g., the genders and race – against ravages of modernity, particularly as (((weaponized))), etc. Rather, social constructionism corrects this by engaging the interactive process and lets add, emergence, to include GW’s important non-Cartesian emphasis (though emergentism was never shunned by social constructionism proper). Social constructionism proper, maintains that there are four aspects of social construction, always entailing at least a modicum of agency:
1. The more literal: as in constructing a building together. 2. The metaphoric: as in parents “constructing” a child, with the help of some sort of input from any number of people around them at present and historically… 3. The hermeneutic: to manage the non-Cartesian process of inquiry between rigor and imagination as need be to facilitate systemic maintenance (individual and group). Hermeneutics is necessary for the liberation from modernity’s mere facticity and the arbitrary episode into coherence and accountability for both individual and to follow the historical expanse and temporal systemic breadth of our people. 4. The post hoc attribution as to how facts count: That guy may think he’s a woman, but he has a weenie and a Y chromosome, that’s a fact and for us as sane people, that means that he cannot use the ladies room. Of course the bizarre gender stuff is a red cape to make the concept of social constructionism didactically repulsive to Whites, to dissuade our people from it. It’s what “the left does” “those social people” “from their sociology classes” …“those social justice warriors”… But to overshoot, to overreact to the red cape, to react to the deterministic extreme of scientism reduces our agency, keeps us rigid, rationally blinded, susceptible to infiltration, low on social accountability and correctability and thus manipulable…
..extreme reaction also serves our enemies by frightening away normal people as its anti social lack of balanced, real world judgement (phronesis), humaneness and accountability threatens them (‘that’s just the way it is’) .. scientistic reaction can, in fact, become a living nightmare as it can become an impervious/unaccountable founding principle in the case of dictatorships and misdirected war.
This White post modern concept properly understood is meant to provide some agency, but it comes at the price of social accountability (meaning you cannot simply make of yourself or a group of people just anything, not having any empirical lines of distinction – indeed, how is that social?); with that properly managed, it entails coherence through hermeneutic liberation from the mere arbitrary facticity rife of modernity, providing instead coherence, correctabilty (homeostasis is self corrective systems), agency, warrant; including to negotiate niche ecology.
It is important for both individuals and groups to have this concept in order to maintain what capacity for systemic homeostasis (self correction/governance) that we do have – even an authentic (as opposed to arbitrary reaction to moment, episode, relationships) holding fast to emergence, being’s authenticity is facilitated. It is an especially necessary concept for White people to understand given our susceptibility to social group dissolution in propensity for individualism and to take on natural, scientific challenges rather than social group challenges (e.g., trickery).
It is necessary to fight off deterministic concepts thrown at us by our enemies (the opposite of social constructionism, our adversaries will also use determinism against us), such as “migration flows” which happen like a “force of nature” that must be accepted as a mere fact about which nothing can be done other than acceptance… acquiescence to deterministic arguments where it serves adversarial interests – “(((we)))’re vastly over-represented at Harvard because of our I.Q.”, “HBD” (not because of group nepotism).
It is also necessary to fight off the allegation that our freedom is being threatened as such: “they’re trying to take away our individuality”, when our individuality will be destroyed without a group structure to facilitate it somewhere along the line.
Our enemies have red caped social constructionism so that right wing reactionaries chase after the misrepresentation and miss its facilitation of social interactive agency and the vital social organizing function. The YKW are always looking to disrupt functioning organizational homeostasis. They keep right wingers chasing after the misrepresentation and right wingers might even feel clever: “see, scientists can look at a skeleton and determine what race and sex it is immediately” as if they’ve disproved social constructionism… what they’ve done is disproved the red cape and helped the YKW to obfuscate the important concept, which would not deny that factually, there are empirical differences between the races and the sexes.
Addendum
From a comment that I made 6 August 2021 over at Majorityrights…
The fortune of the boomer’s position will apparently not allow them to see this lesson in what is required in responsibility, the social corrective, as their good fortune allows them to prefer focus, for their ego’s sake, on what they’ve done by themselves and ignore their social indebtedness – worse, subscribe to the likes of “Uh”, in chasing after the Jewish (((redcaping))) of sociology, its eminently relevant unit of analysis, the group (i.e., species systemic) – along with chasing after and away the (((red caped)), eminently relevant resource of post modernity proper, social constructionism, hermeneutics; chasing away these resources as properly understood and necessary to White homeostasis, with its governance though the emergent communications perspective; and its advance over the transmissions model of communication, which von Forester discusses in his statement that I will post below.
I have become reluctant to introduce this kind of thing here because GW is not honestly concerned for understanding and will treat this rather as an executive toy to display his superiority and to feed his ego, only able to see it from his boomer perspective as a perspective that has been exploited by Jewry, not seeing the neglect of what is being suggested here – that Europeans need to take responsibility for social construction and advocacy – to take the post modern turn from Cartesian estrangement and its vulnerability / mechanism as opposed to the exploitation of and from others, as it were.
But since James invoked Heinz von Foerster, I wanted to add this little tidbit…
While both Heinz von Foerster and Bateson were a bit more sympathetic to the mechanics of sheer cybernetics, they are both pointing the way to social constructionism and aware of its necessity for the European perspective in order to introduce homeostasis, systemic corrective for the species.
Von Foerster is of course pointing to the need of Europeans for a social constructionist take …true that it can be exploited if whites fall asleep at the wheel in search for the innocence of mood signs below language as it were as GW seems to be doing, remaining in his boomer take, where he can make believe that he deserves all credit and all he has achieved is through his iron will in adherence to “the permanence of the transit” ..final stop, of course, his unmerited, gargantuan ego and the ascription of all permanent significance to himself, while each stop in the transit is a strawman excuse to deny any significance to anything that anyone else, save his narcissistically selective understanding of Heidegger has to offer, as the transit makes its gaslighting way back to his unmerited, gargantuan ego.
GW is too stupid and self absorbed to appreciate what is being said here by von Forester.. and the boomer will not stand corrected as his egotism is egged on by Nazis, Jesus freaks, Jews, scientistic reactionaries searching for pure warrant/foundation and sundry conspiracy theorists… who prefer the (((red caping))) of post modern philosophy proper, White Post Modernity, as it, the (((red caping))), provides instead the comfort of a security blanket, or a simple coloring book, as it were; simply fill in the the colors – red cape, “the left” …no need to take responsibility, agentive, social responsibility …no account necessary, “the left” is a found object and all that social advocacy stuff, just what the Jews are saying it is now too. They tell us how it counts, they would never lie. Just ask Nathan Cofnas. He would never use his skills and motivation to distract from the fact that “contradictions” in Jewry are not necessarily at odds on a systemic level, that perhaps Jews operate on different parts of an overall biological system in its overall interests, not always consciously, and not always in apparent unison with other parts of the system….no, we have the truth and science on our side, justifying our gargantuan ego and the spoils that have accrued to us… or do we?
…yes, our innate high i.q. is the sheer explanation of our disproportionate influence in 7-10 power niches and those critical are mere, jealous anti-semites. Anyway, we’ll pay the right wingers off to join us in staving off the “left” in case Whites get any upstart ideas, and we’ll allow the increased licentiousness of the liberals, whose license is already significant in the rupture of European systemic homeostasis.
…….
What is language? Or better, what is “language”? Whatever is asked here, it is language that we need for the answer. Hence, if we did not know the answer, how could we have asked the question in the first place? And if indeed we did not know it, what will an answer be like that answers itself?
How would a dictionary handle this case that is so different from most others? At the instant it is to tell what is language, it must turn mute for reasons we know now well. I am particularly curious how my favorite dictionary, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, would do it. After the entry “language” will it leave, say, two inches of blank space? Or will it have a small mirror pasted at this place so that I can see my own puzzled face? Or what?
Apparently the editors decided against employing such warnings. After an account of the noises (or scribbles) associated with language spoken (or written) they adopted the following definition:
The transmission of meaning, feeling, or intent by significance of act or manner.
If one had no idea about “meaning”, “feeling” or “intent”, one could think of these nouns to stand for some sort of commodity that could be packaged and transmitted. (In fact this seems to become now a popular belief. Take for instance, “information processing,” “information storage and retrieval” and other ailing metaphors). Hence I was going to check on “meaning.” I get:
meaning (me ning) n. 1. that which is signified by something; what something represents; sense; import; semantic content: “Pending a satisfactory explanation of the notion of meaning, linguists in the scientific field are in a situation of not knowing what they are talking about.” (Willard V. Quine)
This precisely was (and approximately still is) the state of affairs when Gregory Bateson and a small group of people sensed that certain pathological disorders of an individual could be treated to linguistic pathologies of this individual’s social environment and that these disorders resisted all orthodox approaches because the attempted therapies themselves suffered from the same linguistic pathologies.
To me it seems that the crucial step toward the success of Bateson and his co-workers was that at the outset they rejected a terminology that would admit notions of “transport”, “transfer”, “transmission”, “exchange” etc. in an epistemology of communication and instead returned at once to communication’s underlying process, namely, to interaction.
Shifting attention from a specific to a more general form of behavior, and, at the same time, brushing aside the semanticists problem of “meaning” seems, at first glance, to be trivial and naïve.
Not so!
There is indeed a fundamental difference between the orthodox and the interactional view, a difference Bateson must have seen very early and which he put in various ways in his many writings. Let me demonstrate this, and the power of this view, on one of Bateson’s charming vignettes called Metalogues, fictitious (or perhaps not so fictitious after all) conversations of a father (I hear Bateson talking) with his inquisitive daughter. Here is the one entitled:
What is Instinct?
D. Daddy, what is instinct?
If I had to answer this question, I may have been easily seduced—as perhaps many among us —to come up with sort of a lexical definition: “Instinct is the innate aspect of behavior that is not learned, is complex, etc…..” Bateson, however, ignores semantic links (they can be found easily somewhere else) and alerts us to the, shall I say, strategic, political, functional, “interactional” consequences when “instinct” is evoked in a conversation. Thus father replies:
F. An instinct, my dear, is an explanatory principle.
I like to refer to this contextual somersault as “The Batesonian shift from Semantic to Functional Significance.” Of course, it does not satisfy Daughter.
D. But what does it explain?
F. Anything—almost Anything at all. Anything that you want it to explain.
I wish to invite the reader to reflect for a moment what it means to arrive at something that explains “almost everything.” Does something that explains anything explain anything at all? Perhaps there is nothing that explains anything? What has Daughter to say about that explanatory principle that explains almost anything?
D. Don’t be silly. It doesn’t explain gravity.
Excellent! How will father get out of this?
F. No. But that is because nobody wants “instinct’ to explain gravity. If they did, it would explain it. We could simply say that the moon has an instinct whose strength varies inversely at the square of the distance.
D. But that’s nonsense, Daddy.
F. Yes, surely. But it was you who mentioned “instinct,’ not I.
Okay, so father got himself out alright. However, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to two points: (1) in contrast to the great didactic dialogues of our literary heritage, for instance, the Socratic dialogues, or Galilei’s Dialoghi (delle nueve scienze) etc., etc., in which the partners mutually support one another by assent, confirmation, complement, agreement, etc., (semantic continuity), this metalogue, by kicking the semantics around, thrives on a personal involvement (functional continuity); (2) explanations—should we like to have one—are in the descriptive domain.” ….“we could simply say that the moon….” More of this later. Right now, lets hear Daughter again:
D. All right—but then what does explain gravity?
F. Nothing my dear, because gravity is an explanatory principle.
D. Oh.
Who would not join in Daughter’s exasperated “Oh”? But she recovers quickly and I shall not interrupt now the fast exchange that follows, I only ask the reader to contemplate the profound consequences of Bateson’s insistence on seeing explanations, hypotheses, etc., purely in the descriptive domain. Watch his use of “say”: “If you say there was a full moon….” etc.
D. Do you mean that you cannot use one explanatory principle to explain another?
F. Hmmm….Hardly ever. That is what Newton meant he said, “hypotheses non fingo.”
D. And what does that mean? Please.
F. Well, you know what “hypotheses” are. Any statement linking together two descriptive statements is a hypothesis. If you say that there was a full moon on February 1rst and another on March 1rst; and then you link these two observations together in any way, the statement which links them is an hypothesis.
D. Yes—and I know what non means. But what’s fingo?
F. Well, “fingo” is a late Latin word for “make.” It forms a verbal noun from fictio, from which we get the word, “fiction.”
D. Daddy, do you mean that Sir Isaac Newton thought that all hypotheses were just made up like stories?
F. Yes—precisely that.
D. But didn’t he discover gravity? With the apple?
F. No, dear. He invented it.
D. Oh.
With the epistemological somersault, the Laws of Nature become inventions, rigor is married to imagination, and Nature is fiction, made up by us acting together. Interacting. Ultimately, this means, seeing one’s self through the eyes of the other.
Heinz von Forester
Pescadero, California
March, 1981
Particularly as I have yet to resolve the formatting issue that this comment section has, I am adding this commentary to the post above as an addendum.
As Bowery commented (at Majorityrights) on his having Heinz von Foerster as a teacher at one time (and looking at someone von Foerster suggested, though not necessarily appreciating von Forester himself), this seemed like a good occasion to take GW, in particular to task over his intransigent refusal to appreciate the sources, reasoning and proper understanding behind social constructionism, I thought this would be an opportune occasion to take GW to task, as it really is an important issue.
See the Addendum added above…