Social construction and difference: A Deleuzian critique

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Volume 22 Numbers 3 & 4, 2012

Social construction and difference: A Deleuzian critique Pietro Barbetta Centro Milanese di Terapia della Famiglia, Milan and Bergamo University, Bergamo, Italy Maria Nichterlein Austin Hospital, Melbourne and University of New South Wales, Kensington, Australia Abstract: Social construction continues to exert significant influence in the social sciences – particularly psychology. As a movement, it has captured the imagination of many in the field perhaps because of its critique of empiricism and its claims of addressing issues of equity and diversity. In this paper, we question the status of social construction using Deleuzian conceptualizations. From a Deleuzian perspective, far from being transformative, social construction is successful only if a number of its core assumptions are left unquestioned.

The idea(l) of social construction Social construction is a concept that has continued to capture the imagination of many within the social sciences. This is in spite of many critical interventions (Hibberd, 2005; i.e., the special later editions of Theory & Psychology edited by Stam, 2001; 2002). One major concern of social construction’s critics has been its consistency. Danziger reviewed eleven titles in the influential Sage series Inquiries in Social Construction and found it hard to specify a consistent set of claims. Danziger argued that, as a concept, social construction [SC] has “fraying boundaries” and can only stand scrutiny in terms of its consistency if “one focuses on the contrast between traditional psychological approaches and that of social construction […] but once one adopts a wider, cross-disciplinary, perspective, the “ism” in social constructionism becomes virtually impossible to pin down” (1997, p. 400). SC has survived such critiques, which demands some reflection by theoreticians and practitioners alike as to the mechanisms and conditions that support this state of affairs. Danziger may have been mistaken to focus on inconsistency: perhaps, despite the apparent inconsistencies, there is indeed an internal consistency within SC. We will argue in this paper that SC is both internally consistent, and misguided. We will attempt to explore some of its mechanisms and to articulate some of the theoretical limitations that arise from these. In particular, we will explore SC under two aspects that, in our view, SC has not considered adequately: the body and the fictional. In articulating these limitations, we are mostly interested in exploring the ways in which a Deleuzian approach proves to have a far more powerful effect in terms of both theory as well as insights into living practices. We will conclude the paper by summarizing the application of these ideas to the clinical setting. There seems to be a general agreement amongst theorists that SC had a distinct origin in the seminal

work of Berger and Luckmann (1984) in 1966. The narrative of the origins of SC would then refer to the landmark (Rychlak, 1992) paper written by Kenneth Gergen for the American Psychologist, a paper that introduced SC to the discipline of psychology. Gergen’s paper – The Social Constructionist Movement in Modern Psychology (1985) – could be defined as a manifesto for SC; a proposal that not only attempted to articulate his increasing disillusionment with the state of psychology in the U.S.A. (Gulerce, 1995, p. 148), but also an emerging “shared consciousness” (1985, p. 266). Gergen was clear that such a proposal constituted a set of “bold conjectures” that – he would cogently argue – “contain implications of substantial significance [that could see us] relinquishing much that is sacred” (p. 266). In this paper, Gergen identified four metatheoretical features that he would claim are constitutive of SC, namely: Radical doubt in relation to taken-for-granted knowledge An awareness that the knowledge and ways of understanding we have are historically and culturally specific An equal awareness that the prevalence and sustainability of any form of knowledge is dependent on the vicissitudes of social processes, and An awareness that knowledge and social action go together. Gergen’s manifesto called for a radical questioning of the dominance of positivist-empiricist methodology in the field. For Gergen, SC not only provided a suitable theoretical frame that was congenial to the emerging post-modern sensitivities (1991, 1994), but also provided a way forward in terms of an alternative methodology that allowed for difference to be accepted as core to social life and where the production of knowledge was subordinated to the social. SC’s presentation, mainly in the U.S.A., was triumphant and full of optimism.[1] It presented the opportunity to engage with social research in ways that escaped the rigid demarcation of traditional research, allowing instead for more creative and respectful conceptualizations. The early disillusionment seemed to give way to a more humane idea(l) of theory-practice.

Problematizing social constructionism: On the material limits of a concept Are we then faced with a similar situation to Fukuyama’s (1992) claim in terms of witnessing the end of social science’s history? It is our intent in this paper to examine SC in ways which stand back from such triumphalism and to problematize its claims from a Deleuzian perspective. We propose that instead of a progressive mindset, SC’s “pragmatism” has a strong association with conservative, neoliberal ideas as shown by its focus on a “free market” of ideas and subjectivities. We will now proceed with this different reading of SC. As an opening for this alternative reading, it should be noted that SC emerged as a movement in North American society. The main proposal of SC is to consider everything we face as linguistic productions that are no longer thought of as “out there” in the world (as in naïve realism), nor in the mind of the transcendental subject (as in Kantianism). True to the liberal tradition of free trade in its place of emergence, society (in the SC conception) is considered a dominion of ongoing negotiation between people. Yet, as with “free” trade agreements, there is the hidden clause: it is open to negotiations as long as the negotiators share a certain amount of consensus about how things are and how they work, and as long as their vested interests are looked after[2]. And here it shows its more dangerous aspect: an uncritical conservatism that characterises many contributions to the field during the last twenty years. SC’s lineage comes from American philosophical pragmatism, social psychology and sociology. Although this is an interesting lineage that has much to offer as one can appreciate in its connections with literature (to be expanded upon later in this paper), from a theoretical point of view, it could be argued that SC is less rigorous than other points of view in philosophy, because it does not engage with the conceptual substance of thought. As Gergen bluntly puts it when responding to critiques to inconsistencies in his theory: “My contribution to the constructionist dialogues [comes from] what is often viewed as a ‘pragmatic standpoint [where I] write as a means to entering into relationships […] I am not trying to ‘get it right’” (Gergen, 2001, p. 419). Perhaps even more provocatively, SC in many ways breaks away from the promise that pragmatism

holds. Yet, as a “pragmatic” stance: it works… “it serves the purposes” that Gergen wanted it to serve. That is its beauty and its potential horror. Take for example: “A primrose, is a primrose, nothing more (or less)”. Social construction scholars can discuss if it is like this because of Linnaeus or Wordsworth. They could even consider other historical articulations of this flower and claim that there are an infinite number of alternative names that could be played with instead of “primrose.” Notwithstanding this playfulness however, it is clear that in their orientation SC prefer the young scientist – for there are many meanings for the word “science” other than positivism – who takes the “real thing” (i.e., the primrose and our experience of it) as irrelevant and who focuses instead on other dynamics. The dynamics that interests SC are the establishing and transforming of relationships. It is because of this emphasis that SC is interested in how identities are shaped within the social world: in the context of mental disorder, racial and gender issues, ageing, childhood or adulthood, medical practice, psychotherapy, justice, families, and so on, in the belief that such dynamics can be considered only in their institutionalized presentation, detached from their context and their material substance and ecology. We could even propose that a ”right wing” SC was already present and actively influencing right wing politics and policies for some time.[3] Who can in fact deny that Talcott Parsons (just to give a provocatively relevant example) wasn't a proto-social-constructionist? Seen from this angle, SC is defined by the need to apply a functional-structural approach (Parsons, 1949, 1951)[4]. So the norm – the unspoken contract implicit in any language game (Lyotard, 1984) in order to avoid the loss of all intelligibility (Gergen, 1985) – is the functional subject, who achieves a good ego-function through primary socialisation, and who tends to achieve goals whilst adapting “him”-self to his social environment, at the same time as integrating his family to the habits and mores of the middle class. The “left wing” SC – the one that officially “registered the mark” – is a more liberal variation of such a conceptualization, where the functional-structural analysis (Parson's AGIL paradigm) – and with it, the problematic notion of normality – is cut from the theoretical apparatus, and is substituted with a variety of other possible options: a functional family vs. multiple family possibilities, mental disorder vs. variations in the way of living a life, ageing vs. positive ageing, Ego vs. multiplicity of selves, and so on[5]. It may well be that that this change carried through by SC has been a significant contribution towards a more equitable social world, supporting change in social politics and practices and that it has helped enlarge the margins of democracy in the Western World. At the same time, paradoxically, it still has an ideological agenda that lays strong claims; claims that can be dangerous to take for granted. There are two claims that we consider particularly dangerous perhaps because of their invisibility: the ongoing ”optimism” implicit in the positioning of people within postmodern language games and the constant search for a ”successful and/or happy” life which implicitly sets purpose and direction. Such a search is still the goal of SC; a goal that resonates with an ironic reading of the United States Constitution on facilitating the pursuit of happiness. The emphasis of SC – through Gergen’s interest in ”transformative” and “generative” psychology (1973, 1978) – moved from critique and theory into action and change. In this movement, what became obscured and simplified was the material dimension. This was partly facilitated by the equation of possibility with chance. By equating these two concepts, perhaps inadvertently possibility turns into a logical exercise of options and probabilities. Alongside these developments within psychology, including the emergence of SC, there has been in recent decades an increasing interest in post-colonial writings, as well as in continental philosophy (Foucault, Derrida, Ricoeur and more recently Deleuze) [6]. These “external” contributions were changing the whole meaning of the word “possibility.” Instead of exploring “possibility” in concrete ways and conceiving it as chance, they explored it in its association with imagination, the virtual and the notion of life as fiction. We see this alternative reading as presenting a profound epistemological challenge to SC. To draw an analogy, Lewis Carroll’s Alice found herself first in Wonderland, with its creative images of “going through the tunnel.” (We will discuss this point later in the paper when we talk about Peirce’s ideas around abduction. See Peirce, 1998.) But in the sequel she is in the land of chess. If we are to understand Alice through the conjunction of both of these readings, the potential of “passing through the tunnel” is restrained/undermined by a “return” – that in fact consolidates – the actual structures, thus restricting existential options to already established patterns. Staying however with the first of the gestures – looking at possibility in its connection with the virtual, with the passing through the tunnel[7] – is a reading of possibility as an opening into the fictional, an opening into what is yet to be explored and lived, into the

future in as much as it is imagined in the present. It is in this space, we argue, that Deleuzian “lines of flight” (1987) exist as existential possibilities. We will discuss this later. Another example of what was lost in this shift that emphasized “transformative” and “generative” psychology was the “Real” materiality of my body. To return to the American Constitution with its reference to the pursuit of happiness, one could argue that in such a pursuit, happiness may be conceptually considered as “something other than the body in pain.” If so this raises questions about those who may look for happiness by passing through “a pain of the body,” as is the case in many anthropological experiences and in some medieval monastic practices as well as in many sexual perversions, such as masochism. Those inclined to seek happiness through such practices may then be relegated to the ostracism involved in labels like “mad,” “stupid” or “perverse.” Is this not a parody of the position of the hyenas in the Disney movie The Lion King – “barbarian” animals forever outside the circle of respectable life?

Bodies that don’t mat(t)er A “left wing” SC – which could also be called Critical SC (CSC) – emerged in the 1960s. It was in this period that Schutz’ The Phenomenology of the Social World (1967) became influential on social scientists in the U.S.A., particularly in the form of Harold Garfinkel’s writings on ethnomethodology (1967, 2002), and Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1984). Schutz had been a student of Edmund Husserl and his main interest was using phenomenology as a frame to understand the social world of everyday life, integrating Husserl’s phenomenology with Max Weber's thought. Schutz, and later CSC, have been for many years influencing sociology and social psychology, helping these disciplines in the development of new methodologies for interpreting the everyday life in social interaction and influencing researchers using qualitative methodologies. Perhaps Schutz’s most important contribution to the social sciences was the invention of the concept “taken-for-granted,” a term he used in the Essay The Stranger (Schutz, 1944) to refer to the “unquestioned scheme of reference [that] determines the strata of relevance for their ‘thinking as usual’ in standardized situations and the degree of knowledge required for handling the tested ‘recipes’ involved.” (ibid, p. 499)[8]. In Schutz’s view, it is the Stranger who is in the best position to do social research because she/he does not take-for-granted the ongoing consensual life that members of a community do take-for-granted on a moment by moment basis in their cultural world. In Schutz’s theoretical work the body is the ground against which the figures of social everyday experience unfold. But in the works of his followers, including CSC, there has been a curious shift in the analysis away from the novelty – even candidness – of the stranger’s observation of the social drama; a shift that progressively abandons the corporeal ground as a constituent of the social experience.[9] Perhaps one reason for this smooth shift away from the body can be traced back to Schutz’s own work. Although he had been a student of Husserl, Schutz did not take the corporeal turn of Husserl’s later works (Husserl, 1989). This turn was however a main influence on the French scholar Maurice Merleau-Ponty. With Merleau-Ponty (1962), phenomenology developed its own interest in investigating the body in a different direction to the developments in America[10]. He did so in connection with Goldstein’s “neurological” approach to the human body (1940). Goldstein’s approach was based on the experiences of patients with brain damage, particularly aphasia, anosognosia, phantom limb, and other strange behaviours. Merleau-Ponty was also studying development in children, and the progressive constitution of body scheme in the first years of life. Merleau-Ponty's theory (1962) argues that our personal bodies are inhabited by a corporeal schema which is the ground of any possible experience in the world; a (virtual) ground that embeds any encounter we can possibly have in this world. Merleau-Ponty’s claim was that we could observe the constitution of such a pre-categorical ground in the constitution of a body scheme by the baby; and its breakdown in the behaviour and experiences of brain damaged people. In terms of maintaining a connection with the body through grounding experience in a corporeal schema, Merleau-Ponty’s approach is a significant improvement compared to the more abstract developments in U.S.A. where abstract – disembodied, even ethereal – selves are seen as being open to infinite negotiability. Merleau-Ponty’s main assumption, however, the body schema as the ground of any normal behavioural experience of the human being, has been extensively criticized in the post-phenomenological thinking of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, of Michel Foucault and of Jacques Derrida, allowing for an

affirmative and material project to emerge. We will take Deleuze's position, supported by Guattari's and some of Foucault’s writing to explore the limits of the concept of schema. In Theatrum Philosophicum (1977), Foucault bluntly states that we can no longer deal with MerleauPonty's idea of body schema after reading Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1994) and The Logic of Sense (2001). The problem was not with the corporeal grounding but with the totalizing tendency behind the notion of a schema. For Foucault, Deleuze's philosophy had definitively broken away from the Platonic conception of grounding philosophy on consistency of being. With Deleuze, the 21st Century philosophy, once and for all, starts with ambiguity: difference, rather than identity, is what takes the centre. Any repetition – what appears to our senses through time – bears tiny differences, variations that make identity a perceptual exercise that requires cutting and distorting. It is not difference that distorts but the search of stability in the guise of identity; a provocative idea indeed and one that promises much in our quest for anti-totalitarian regimes of signs. In Deleuze's and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (1987), the tree of knowledge – the Philosophical Tree, with its accompanying categorical order of roots, a trunk and branches – is substituted by the image of the rhizome. Deleuze and Guattari use this alternative botanical metaphor quite intentionally to challenge the deeply embedded image in Western culture of knowledge as centralized. Unlike the tree, the rhizome is decentralized and unpredictable in its development[11] expanding in all different directions through the constant creation of new roots and flourishing wherever propitious conditions exist. Grasses are rhizomic in nature and any amateur gardener will know how difficult it is to manage them and how easy it is for them to become a weed. Rhizomic thought is wild – although it is far from being incoherent – and cannot be controlled by any abstraction or rational thought; its limits and conditions are not human but ecologically driven: the terrain – including the weather – rather than a rational, purposeful intent is its guiding principle. From this perspective, Western philosophical tradition – starting with Plato – has rather been a distorted attempt to get the wildness[12] and the puissance of thought – and of life – under control[13]. The rhizome, like the tree, is also a type of order but, for Deleuze and Guattari, it is a different type of order altogether to the one of the tree. It is not a transcendental Order to which we must subjugate ourselves – thus establishing docile subjectivities through processes of subjectivation – but is the order that is immanent to the process of living, immanent to a life as a form of organization. This order not only constitutes our emerging existential parameters but also helps to deal with the horror, the gripping fear of the surrounding chaos that constitutes the foundation and the conditions of emergence of our lives. Using Joyce’s notion of chaosmos – “a composed chaos, neither foreseen nor preconceived,” Deleuze and Guattari (1991, p. 204) conceptualize life as an artistic construction of a chaosmos, as an order that emerges out of and is in constant relation with this ongoing chaos. Through this gesture, this chaos is transformed into both, “a threat to coherence but [also] the generative source of new possibilities” (Bogue, 2004, p. 6). This chaosmos takes the shape of a plateau,[14] a direct reference (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 21-2) to Bateson’s ethnographic observations in relation to Balinese ways of life and practices of raising children (Bateson, 1973). Any plateau, in turn, is one amongst many – even a thousand as the title indicates – coexisting in an infinite and chaotic universe of flows, endlessly de/re/constructing possibilities of life, and possibilities of order. A life as articulated in the rhizome is “a self-differentiating difference that unfolds itself and thereby creates a universe” (Bogue, 2003, p. 4). As indicated, order as conceptualized by Deleuze and Guattari is a type of order that is incommensurably different to that indicated by the idea of a tree that imposes a transcendental and, as Deleuze and Guattari would add, an authoritarian and hierarchical order. The rhizome is decentralized and unpredictable and emerges out of the conditions of living in an immanent manner: what constitutes this order is experimental in nature and highly contingent on the unique characteristics of the event at hand. Because of this, the rhizome presents an alternative that is more humane – which is not to be confused with humanistic – in terms of its effects on how we live together. How to understand Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome when applied to the human body? To do so we have to start by using notions of folding and of unfolding. Folding is the metaphor used by Deleuze (2000a, 2006a) in his articulations of life and of subjectivity. Starting from the physical folding that takes

place in the initial zygote, through the morula to the baby, life is the recursive folding of cells. Equally so, Deleuze and Guattari claim, the experiencing subject is a product of acts of folding of the lines of life – the flows – that traverse our body; lines that establish the outside and the inside through its folding. In other words, the body is not an organism that is predefined and pre-determined as it might appear at first glance, but a multitude of components, criss-crossing paths and establishing connections. Correspondingly the experience that emerges out of living through such a body is not a linear, story-like, narrative, but a complexity of fictions and (dis)continued and overlapping storylines, some of them edited for public performance which many never (fully) rehearsed. If we focus first on the constitution of the body, we could call these bits “organs” provided we could be sure such naming does not fall in the trap of reifying these organs in conceptions of essential identity. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari resisted this image choosing instead to talk about the “body without organs.” But they were equally attracted to the Lacanian objet petit a – ironically, itself separated from the rest of Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory – as a reminder that life works through particulars instead of totalitarian and totalizing processes. Acknowledging these tensions, the term “organs” can still be employed. What “is” in the first instance, is a set of disparate organs[15] without organism; a group of a-functional organs playing different kind of games with each other; a set of perverted and polymorphic fragments interacting between themselves and with the outside world in wild ways, connecting randomly and creating a multitude of different combinations in what Deleuze and Guattari called “assemblages” or desiring machines. The only “performance criteria” for these assemblages is “to work,”[16] as in the case of the little desiring machine nipple-mouth-coming milk/stopping milk during the suction, or the tube that connects the oral with the anal orifices, through which passes the milk which is transformed as a result of the productive activity of the assemblage.[17] The unique moment of the encounter has no frame; rather, it appears just before any frame analysis (Goffman, 1974). In this very moment, reality appears as a complexity of lines repeating the dynamics we mentioned in terms of the body and its constitution. The lines that present themselves in the encounter include lines portraying different forces generating different movements: there are movements that they call of (re)territorialization “which tend to fix and stabilise its elements, and ‘cutting edges of deterritorialization which carry it away’” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 88; in Patton, 2000, p. 44)[18]. It is in the latter type of movement where there is an intriguing dynamic that Deleuze and Guattari called “lines of flight.” These are lines that open up the encounter to engagements through parameters that are completely different and external to those already present and familiar. As the Chilean physicist/poet Nicanor Parra would say: sometimes 2 +2 = 4 and sometimes 2 + 2 = apple.[19] These are possibilities that are not pre-existent but emerge from the mystery of the moment of actual encounter. As such, they are powerful reminders that the encounter that constitutes life has only partially to do with (rational and docile) possibilities of negotiations. Social construction, even CSC, has not adequately considered the corporeal dimension of these experiences. Shotter’s own corporeal turn (2005, 2009) has in part addressed such issues, as have Lannamann (1998) and, more recently, Bartesaghi & Castor (2008; 2009). In this context it is not clear if these authors should be classified within CSC. In opposition to a conception of philosophy as a rational and representational activity, for Deleuze the focus and aim of philosophy is to create concepts (Deleuze and Guattari, 1991). Philosophy is not an abstract activity but a positioning activity when facing the idiosyncratic uniqueness of every single moment of living, a position vis-à-vis the endless dilemmas that surround one’s encounter with the other – with another, which is not limited to human beings. This creation of concepts is a call for thought as a response to the problem of living a life. A concept is a creative expression and articulation of the uniqueness of life instead of a categorical ordering exercise. Philosophy is then the activity that helps us to establish a chaosmos as a (soothing) response to the mysterious moment of unpredictability that is present in the corporeal encounter. Philosophy is the activity of honouring such encounter by finding its concepts, by being able to express it in its own uniqueness, a uniqueness that is never to be repeated again. Of course, it can be said that this is impossible. But one has to ask whether it – the Real Ding-an-sich – is impossible or whether it is our (lack of) imagination that makes it impossible? A poet knows that this is not impossible. Take, for example, the famous Spanish poet Antonio Machado: Caminante, son tus huellas el camino y nada más; Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.

Al andar se hace el camino, y al volver la vista atrás se ve la senda que nunca se ha de volver a pisar. Caminante no hay camino sino estelas en la mar.[20] (Proverbios y Cantares XXIX, Machado, 2006) Such a poet will also know that in understanding and living with this complexity doesn’t mean that one needs to express – put into words – all encounters. That is why for Deleuze, the art of life has nothing to do with negotiations done by gentle egos but has much to do with the regulation of intensities that traverse one’s life. This brings us to the next topic.

Marvelous affections: The emergence of the fictional body In 1953, a 27-year-old Michel Foucault was writing the Introduction (1993) of the French translation of Ludwig Binswanger’s Traum und Existenz. Binswanger was a respectable Swiss psychiatrist[21] writing on the possible uses of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenological philosophy in the clinic in what was to be known as Existential analysis – Daseinanalyse (May, Angel, & Ellenberger, 1958). Foucault’s translation is a well-known event amongst intellectuals interested in his ideas because this introduction ended up being significantly longer than Binswanger’s essay. Perhaps today we could also say that it is even more interesting than the original for in it we find Foucault dealing with psychoanalysis in a very intriguing way. In the French Introduction, Foucault makes the following charge against psychoanalysis: Psychoanalysis tends to reduce the oneiric material emerging from the dream into a form of diagnosis. As in the clinical practice in medicine, elements of the dream are treated as symptoms for the diagnostic process. Foucault’s proposal seems to transform the semeiotic clinical process – the observation of symptoms so as to achieve a diagnosis – into a semiotic (psycho)analysis. As with many of Foucault’s claims, this is a powerful gesture where a number of dynamics are traversing in different directions. This constitutes a unique opportunity to engage with an opening in the dominant systems of interpretation. Such an opening runs the risk of turning into yet another variety of chess game; of further subjugation of the event through the construction of yet another regime of interpretation that – rather than helping the encounter – captures it by superimposing itself through pre-established categories, thus working against the possibility of creativity. Interpretation – with its obscured hierarchy of who knows what – smothers the possibility of the encounter with the other and with the outside. With interpretation, the madness and wildness both in the other and in ourselves[22] – and, most importantly, those who inhabit this-moment-here[23] – are domesticated, fenced in within a supposed interiority and within an intellectual apparatus; more often than not, that of the doctor/psychoanalyst. Perhaps we were better off with the Shakespearean mad man who still had some wisdom in his speech and who was thus still allowed into the community[24]. Even so, Foucault’s gesture constitutes a powerful move against the established medical semeiotic and towards increased undecidability: an opening to the ambiguity that presents in the dream that invites for a creative work out of its meaning. Such a gesture moves in the opposite direction of the imprisonment through transcendental interpretations and engages us back in an event-ful relationship based on compassion and solidarity towards the person in suffering – a further gesture in line with the tradition of Pinel. We believe that this was Foucault’s gesture in terms of the possibilities of semiology. In order to understand this gesture, we will use some concepts of Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics (Peirce, 1998). One can consider the three vertices of a triangle as three ways of interpreting the world: trace (contingency), icon (possibility) and symbol (necessity). The more a sign is immediately affecting our body, the less it is arbitrary. Traces, like the remains of a hare’s fur on the ground, immediately affect my sensations and give me the impression that there must be hares, wild rabbits, or some similar animal around the place. This experience – noticing hare’s fur – usually happens suddenly, unpredictably, and only if I am open to notice what is around me[25]. The trace that I’m finding right now is an event: it surprises me. I can tell my friend who is with me now: “Look, there are hare traces over here”.

Unfortunately my friend does not understand English. This alerts us to the fact that “hare” is not just a trace – for my friend has no expectation of my utterance – but also it is a symbol in Peirce’s terms. In order to be recognised, a symbol requires that my friend and I share an arbitrary system of codes that allows us to understand each other. It is in such a system of interpretation that the symbol acquires meaning and it is such systems which afford the symbol its status as a symbol. If we do not share such a system – e.g. because my friend does not speak English – I could attempt a different type of system of codification and take a stick and draw the image of the hare in the ground. The image then becomes a mediation between the trace and the symbol. In order to understand the symbol then, one has to first know the system of rules that govern that system. This can be applied to Foucault’s introduction to Binswanger. This intervention can be seen as an attempt – a strategy – to transform the semeiotic clinical (medical) process into a semiotic (psycho)analytic one. In psychoanalysis we can consider the oneiric material as a trace[26]. Like the hare’s fur, any element of the dream can be referred to the corresponding symbol. Nevertheless there is a big difference between the treatment of the hare’s trace as fur and a dream, because the rules of codification in psychoanalysis are of a very different nature to the ones of the languages we speak. Similarly, medicine presents yet again a different order of discourse. There is a significant difference between a (psycho)analytic semiotics and medical semeiotic, for the later has been codified into a system of interpretation of the body symptoms that attempts to leave out any dimension of undecidability. Medical semeiotic has a clear intention to establish a direct relationship between symptoms and the signs (in Peirce’s language, physical symptoms = traces and medical signs = symbols) so as to eradicate all degree of uncertainty and ambiguity in order to make the “right” diagnosis. This is the goal of medicine starting from the end of the 18th century. So what we have in Foucault’s Introduction, if we see his reading of the emerging Daseinanalyse as a strategic move, is his attempt to avoid this imprisonment of the encounter through the creation of a new system of codification within psychoanalysis. Through this reading he challenges and resists the push of medical semeiotics as well as of a “medicalized” psychoanalysis. His take on psychoanalysis, which was organised around language (langue), was contesting a space vis-à-vis the medical discourse and its influence on psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis had been founded by a group where the majority of members were physicians.[27] Foucault was aware of these tensions. His preoccupation, as a young intellectual trained both in philosophy and psychology, was to confront a scientistic, medical psychoanalysis and to help loosen the stringent associations between sign and symbol. What he was fighting against was a tendency to reify the Oedipus as a scientific system of rules by which dream interpretation was reduced to a set of pre-determined categories and possibilities and where no poetic, or, for that matter, productive space was possible. In that period Foucault was deeply influenced by phenomenology, and in his Introduction to Traum und Existenz he saw Daseinanalyse (Binswanger’s and Minkowski’s conception of psychoanalysis) as a way to liberate psychoanalysis from scientism. Ironically, he probably did not know that this process of transforming semiotic in a medical semeiotic was going to happen in the U.S.A. starting from the influence of Anna Freud on the American psychiatric environment. Neither did he know that the ideas in Daseinanalyse would give impetus – again in the U.S.A. – to the emergence of a third type of interpretation: humanistic approaches. The irony is infinite, for by thus combining the medical discourse and the psychoanalytical discourse, each with its own set of rules of codification – as well as all the later systems of codification – we are given (the illusion of) a possibility of choice that, in effect, bypasses the Real and the connection with the mysterious and yet-to-be-codified. What is bypassed is precisely the possibility of the ongoing encounter with the real which constitutes life. Some call the dimension that is lost in this process “the imaginary” to make reference to that direct – image-like – connection with the object. We have preferred to call it “the fictional”[28] so as maintain its connection with language, at the same time stressing its openness to the mysterious and undecidable element in the Real. The fictional calls for the open space that lies in between interpretations and codes, it calls for the elements that escape all signification and yet are part of the phenomena. The fictional refers for us to the overflow of possibility that is present in the moment-tomoment event that is, for good and for bad, outside of our predictions. As Deleuze says “[w]e cannot even know of what a body is capable” (Deleuze, 1986, p. 36). This third dimension of knowledge has to do with the connection between the fictional and the trace and lies in the intersection of possibility and contingency. Here there is a difference between the position of Peirce on the one hand and that of Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, and Bateson on the other. The term

“abduction,” used by both Peirce and Bateson, can help us to understand this difference. In Peirce’s logic there are three types of syllogism: deductive, inductive and abduction. The deductive syllogism says: “In this bag there are only white beans, if I take some beans from this bag, they are white.” Deduction amounts to certainty. The inductive syllogism says: “I took those beans from this bag, and they are all white, so all the beans in the bag are white.” This type of syllogism amounts to probability. The third type states: “In this bag there are only white beans, I have in my hand white beans, so therefore they come from this bag.” For Peirce, this type of syllogism – abduction – amounts to circumstance and is found in the structure of hypothesis. Peirce arrives at this circumstantial reasoning very much like Sherlock Holmes goes about solving crimes. Peirce goes as far as he can in the analysis of the scientific method giving life to the circumstantial paradigm. But such a method poses a danger that is often invisible: As we had indicated earlier, the problem is not to find a real man behind a monster – like the twice-disguised Baskerville in the Sherlock Holmes story – but to imagine the “wildness” of a beast in the place of a human being[29] which, as a gesture, is more like Poe’s Rue Morgue. Gregory Bateson gives an entirely different example of abduction: “Human beings are mortal, grass is mortal, human beings are grass” (Bateson, 1979; Hui, Cashman, & Deacon, 2008). We believe that this is the way the fictional works and, what is even more important, the way that Deleuze-Guattarian “desiring machines” (1983) work: making bizarre – unexpected, even a-logical – connections. It is this working of the desiring machine that comes out through imagination and the fictional providing an opening for the creation of a life; it is the desiring machine before it has given in – for good and/or for bad – to the process of adjustment to the requirements of civilization. Bateson was interested in these mechanisms. This project was maintained through his cybernetic investigations, investigations with which he engaged as an alternative to and a response to his discomfort with the standard theories of his time (Heims, 1991, p. 58; Lipset, 1980, p. 182). Bateson was aware that the social sciences were trapped in a number of different dead ends and that they needed a way out through a new theory. Social sciences needed a line of flight, thus his interest and his perseverance with the new science of cybernetics. Bateson was not certain if this approach would prove to be correct. Yet to be concerned about “being right” as if we were talking about a direct link between the sign and the trace would be to miss the point, as Foucault has shown us. Bateson knew that too. What does Peirce thinks about possibility? He thinks of possibility in terms of real chance: If Maria had not been living in Australia, she would have stayed in Latin America; if Pietro finds money he will organize a cultural foundation. Maria cannot caress the belly of the moon (Calvino, 1963-4), and Pietro cannot migrate to Maradagàl (Gadda, 1963), or pass through the looking glass (Carroll, 1941). If human beings are grass – we can continue with such logic – they are tiny green blades vibrating in the wind, as they really do in the face of the universe. In our view, within social constructionism, even CSC remains behind this line of flight: It does not give us permission to de-lire/de-literate, to go astray, beyond the lines of a moderate, tolerant, puritan liberalism so as to explore the possibilities of life that our desires call upon. In the present times, in which “going beyond” means doing things that we had not dared instead of imagining possibilities of life that are out of the ordinary – even things that perhaps we cannot or will not be able to do – CSC is an anchoring point that keeps us captured in the establishment, rather than a light of flight allowing for genuine alternatives of existence.[30] But in such compromise the access to possible worlds – genuine alternatives to live a life – are not available; they are left outside of the critical “common and good sense.” Such alternatives are relegated to other domains of human activity, namely the imaginary potentiality of fiction both in literature and in art. This is a serious loss to theory, especially in terms of what it has to offer to the clinic.

How to do therapy with this foolish philosophy? In Deleuze's concept of the Body without Organs (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), the corporeal schema as a set of organs functionally embedded into the organism is criticised in term of ontological primacy: “in the beginning there is the fragment.” With breathing, the baby’s body has to engage with a very different functioning altogether from the one within the womb[31]. When a child is born into the world, (s)he is in the best position to create concepts, or, in Deleuzian terms, to make creative acts, because the baby experiments with the transition from one established assemblage into another: (s)he encounters difference . American SC did not envisage the body as something that matters – as in the title of Judith Butler’s book

Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of "sex" (2011). For them, the body does not matter either in a medical sense or in a neurological sense. CSC does not have an interest in the functioning of the body. Neither is it seriously interested in dance, theatre, not even sexuality as a different way of looking at the presence of the body. What actually matters for SC in general – particularly those who practice it in psychotherapy – is conversation as an exchange of words, strings of conversational exchanges, or phenomenological descriptions. The ground of conversation is a taken-for-granted corporeal schema. Happiness, pain, grief and all the affections that can be produced by the body are reduced to a look-alike Western culturally constructed body. That is the reason why SC therapy may be one of the most effective practices when working with suffering people who have been well trained in Western education, with good intellectual capabilities, and with well-structured Western schemas. But SC based therapies struggle to help and engage with people who inhabit difference either in an actual form – as is the case with migrants, trans-gendered, prisoners and disabled people – or in a virtual form – the so-called schizophrenic, borderline and/or histrionic personality people. Deleuze and Guattari (1983) became notorious with their strident warnings about the dangers of psychoanalysis. These dangers emerged out of the position that psychoanalysis occupied, in responding to the needs and the agenda of a capitalist society by showing how one should keep one’s desires under control through nuanced exercises of domestication. For Deleuze and Guattari, psychoanalytical interpretation, within this context, serves the purpose of domesticating the infinite possibilities of a true engagement with life. Their proposal at the time – as an alternative to psychoanalysis – was schizoanalysis. Rather than using the metaphor of a neurotic sitting in a divan, expanding a subjective interiority, their preferred image was the one of the schizophrenic[32] – inasmuch as it represented neither a totalizing nor totalized psyche – strolling in the park, encountering and experimenting. Schizoanalysis was not interested in domestification but in the expansion of one’s life. Rather than imposing – through an interpretative gesture – a map of the experience of those seeking help, for Deleuze and Guattari the therapeutic moment was that which that helped the client in the creation of a new map, a map that made no totalizing gestures. Rather than arriving at some sort of interpretative closure, therapy was an opportunity for experimentation within a unique process of individuation.[33] Deleuze’s last major project was a series of essays, Essays Critical and Clinical (1997), in which he examined the dimension that we have called “fictional”: the connections between literature and the clinical, between the challenge of living a life and the subtle line that lies between suffering and pathology. Deleuze had a longstanding interest in the clinic: Even before the Anti-Oedipus he wrote an incisive critique on the way how Sade and Masoch were put together as parts of one clinical presentation (Deleuze, 2006b), arguing instead that this was not only a poor observation but a poor reading of very different social dynamics. Sade and Masoch were also studied by Deleuze as authors. Literature was central for Deleuze, for its ability to show us possibilities of existence; for example, the works of Melville, whose character Bartleby (Deleuze, 1997) Deleuze considered emblematic of the dilemmas presented by modernity. What was central to Deleuze was to live a life that was fully engaged with the world outside – with the tribes, the countries, the geopolitics and the ecologies that surround us – and to be part of a unique process of individuation that was larger than the self. In this context, individuation was not a heroic figure of romantic dimensions, but a subtle yet infinitely unique articulation of a life within an equally unique ecology: a gust of wind. Such a life, such an articulation of a multitude of living encounters that constitute a unique individualization, has nothing to do with the negotiations of a trader. The trader is in essence a trickster – who brings with him or her a cruelty that is, again, well portrayed by Melville in The Confidence Man. Deleuze instead is interested in the betrayal that comes with opening up to the new, to the yet to be lived: “[t]here is always betrayal in a line of flight. […] We betray the fixed powers which try to hold us back, the established powers of the earth” (Deleuze and Parnet, 2006, p. 30)[34]. Deleuze and Guattari’s gesture is po(i)etic in nature and has no measure that could be converted into a currency for trade. As such, it has much to say when we reflect on the promise of social construction.

Endnotes [1] We acknowledge Danziger’s (1997) fine distinction between light and dark SC. Further similar distinctions have been made since (i.e., Pearce, 2009).

[2] This distinction already brings forth a major problematization of the model around issues of power dynamic often commented on by ‘developing countries.’ This has also been commented on in the domain of therapy (i.e., Guilfoyle, 2003). [3] Of course, such a movement took place before SC was recognised by its own name, but these ideas – the ideas articulated in Gergen’s manifesto in 1985 (Gergen, 1985) – were already in the air, shaping the space and the conditions in which American theorists – as well as artists and intellectuals – were making sense of the world. [4] It is not surprisingly, then, that for Parsons (1902-1079 American sociologist) the famous AGIL – the acronym that stands for Adaptation, Goal attainment, Integration and Latence – is a good representation – a diagram – of the functioning of the modern social world: permitting the simplification of a caricature, adaptation relates to the Social Darwinist idea that he who wins is more adapted to the social world and, in order to be a winner, one has to establish one’s goals putting care to be socially integrated and having one’s ego in control of one’s unconscious. [5] When seen from this angle one could see left wing SC as a fascicular type of knowledge using Deleuzian (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) conceptualization. Deleuze saw major concerns with this type of knowledge for it gave the impression of being rhizomic; yet this is only a trick, for it is a variation of the tree type of knowledge. [6] These developments were mostly among American literary critics who were less interested in social (control) issues. This difference might have to do with the conditions of emergence and the evolution of American literature where the issue of control and regulation was not as central (when compared with Europe of the time) as the need to articulate the awe (and horror) of the new world. Of course this is a strong reminder that the writers we are referring to are not Native Americans but that such literature is a variation in European literature; a European intellectual exercise that emerges in a new – inhabited and unfamiliar – country. This difference allowed for a writing that was open to the mystery and the exteriority of experience. SC could say very little – if anything at all – about writers like Poe, Melville, Hawthorne and Dickinson. [7] The distinction is indeed nuanced for Carroll who, in many ways, wrote at the limit of both these readings. The emphasis thus needs to be on the gesture of passing through the tunnel without knowledge of what the other side would look like: whether it would be wonderland, flatland or another perhaps Borgesian land. From this angle, there is in fact a multiplicity – an infinity – of possibilities. [8] The notion of a “strata of relevance” is an interesting connection with Bateson’s topological notion of plateau which, in turn is taken by Deleuze and Guattari as we will discuss later. [9] Take for example the variation done by Berger and Luckmann of these ideas. They conceptualized the human body as different to the ones of all other living creatures – a Tomistic gesture – praising the human body for its “emptiness” of defining characteristics. The body is instead paradoxically defined by its “worldopenness” and its ability to have a far more flexible – yet institution based – relationship with the environment (1984, p. 65). The characteristics of the body in its unique functioning are then generalized and “taken-for-granted” – a very different type to the one proposed by Schutz – where the emphasis and complexity is then located into the institution and its social construction. [10] Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the body has been explored by Varela (Varela et al., 1993) which is an ironic twist for these ideas have later been criticized by CSC – particularly in the clinical field (Hoffman, 1990) – as being too individualistic and intrapsychic in orientation. [11] There is a resonance between the rhizome and Maturana’s notion of evolutionary drift (Maturana and Varela, 1984); a gesture within Biology that attempted to balance what Darwinian had done with Darwin in the sense of restoring the original teleological arbitrariness to the his evolutionary model. [12] Stengers makes an acute and quite relevant distinction between “wild” and “savage” (Stengers, 2011, p. xv). It is particularly relevant given the influence of Whitehead in Deleuze. [13] Deleuze (1990) does however comment that there have been exceptions which he used in his own

‘perverse’ philosophical genealogy, including Duns Scotus, Spinoza and Nietzsche. [14] “Some sort of continuing plateau of intensity is substituted for climax”. We have already commented on the changes that this reference has had in its translation into French – in its usage by Deleuze and Guattari – and then back into English (Barbetta and Nichterlein, 2010). [15] That, as we warned before, cannot be identified with the common names we give to organs in the body: stomach, kidney, brain, etc. [16] Thus highlighting their appreciation of the promises held by Anglo-Saxon Empiricism and American Pragmatism. [17] Strangely enough, at least for Deleuze, one of the references for these descriptions is Melanie Klein. Deleuze’s heretical reading of Klein and of Winnicott is exactly the opposite interpretation of psychoanalysis than that offered by Parsons which has been successful in the U.S.A., namely EgoPsychology. For Deleuze and Guattari, there is no Ego, no identity, no sub-jectum. Ego and subject are the by-product of the functioning of life, leftovers of the creative and productive process of the assemblage which, as with the example above is not limited to a body but is radically relational. From this perspective, the subject is not at the starting point of the analysis – as in the case of the CSC Ego that is ready to negotiate – but is a leftover of the delirious – world inventing – functioning of the desiring machine. In other words, the subject – so central to CSC – needs to be de-centered. [18] Thus the importance of remembering that core to this philosophy of Difference is ambiguity and ambivalence. [19] Of course Nicanor knew of the limitations of such descriptions – Borges would immediately comment – but this is the limitations that language imposes on us. That is why for Deleuze (it was important to push language to its limits so as to make it stutter (Deleuze, 2000b, and chapter 13, Deleuze, 1997). [20] “Wanderer, your footsteps are the way and nothing more; Wanderer, there is no path, one makes the path as one walks. When walking one makes the path, and when looking back, one sees the path that one will never walk again. Wanderer, there is no path, only traces in the sea.” [21] His father had established a well-regarded asylum and Freud would refer his clients to Binswanger’s clinic (Fichtner, 2003). [22] For this is the most obscured of the hierarchical elements of the process of interpretation: the Cartesian separation of a dream from madness (Foucault, 2006). [23] Which, as Derrida would say, was the trademark of Deleuzian thought: cette-eventement-ici. (Derrida, 1998). [24] Of course this is only in the fiction of Shakespeare (and many other compassionate yet not as famous people both in his times and in other times), for the relation of the mad in medieval and renaissance society, as Foucault also tells us (Foucault, 2006), was far more problematic. [25] At least if I’m not a Guard of the park or a hunter used to find those traces in that place. [26] Of course this is not a full trace in the sense that a dream is already part of the functioning within the person who is dreaming it. As a dream it is already partially processed, even more so when it is put in words – no matter how liberally – for the listening of the analyst. But we need to simplify the complexities and the lines traversing the act so as to ‘have a point!’ [27] Even though at the time – and particularly in France – there had been attempts of cure of what they were calling Mental Illness through different criteria and methods (like moral cure and hypnosis). [28] Which must not be confused with narrative and storytelling.

[29] This is a direct reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “becoming animal” as a gesture of the need to escape the insidious humanism that has capture our thought (1987). [30] There is no doubt, that as an anchor, it is better an honest CSC than the dominant tea party trend. [31] And so does the womb and the mother who holds such womb but let’s focus on the baby at this point for pedagogical reasons. [32] They make the distinction between the schizophrenic process, which they see as being a better depiction of the functioning of the unconscious and the clinical presentation of schizophrenia which they describe as being a failed schizophrenic process. [33] Of course we cannot claim to know what Deleuze and Guattari would have said about SC, but we are fairly sure that they would have mourned the loss of the pragmatic hope that is present in the SC’s reading of pragmatism. [34] He also writes about this type of gesture when discussing the disfigurement in Bacon's paintings (2003).

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