Lucris Carina A.

Paraan
Professor J. Neil C. Garcia, Ph.D.
CL 350
15 February 2013

The Social Construction of Postcolonial Studies by David Scott: A Report Outline

1. The Introduction: Ian Hacking, in his book The Social Construction of What?, inquired into
“the ways in which social constructionist claims are established…and to judge their
usefulness and salience”. In short: “Don’t ask for the meaning, ask what’s the point”.
1.1. Taking off from Hacking’s question, Scott articulates his own concern: the “career of a
critical strategy”: what questions are asked, what targets confronted, what stakes
claimed? At what point does it go from criticism to method? Scott then articulates his
aim in this essay: “to explore some aspects of the suspicion” that postcolonial studies
has lost its critical force.
1.2. Hacking asked other important questions, to which he also provides answers:
1.2.1. What is supposed to be socially constructed? Is it the action, or the classificatory
ideas about the action? What seems to be relevantly socially constructed is not the
action or the individual people being described, but rather the classification (e.g.
women refugees)
1.2.2. Does the idea of social construction continue to be a liberating one? No, it’s
moment has passed.
1.2.3. Does social constructionism still have the same critical bite? Well, if we are now
all anti-essentialists and social constructionists, there is no longer the “contrast
effect”, no need for confrontation, which means that social constructionists may well
have lost their bite.

2.0. Scott‘s “quibbles with Hacking” :

2.1. that Hacking misses critical points and does not explore the complexity of the
debate on explorer James Cook’s death that goes to the heart of the culture wars
in the late 70s and 80s)
 2.2. that Hacking seems to believe that social constructionism’s understanding of the
relationship between concepts and action was misconceived from the beginning.

3.0 Scott chooses neither to believe Hacking nor dispute him, but instead pursues Hacking’s
idea that “social constructionism once had, but has now lost, critical bite”.
3.1. using Collingwood’s “logic” of “question and answer”: we cannot fully understand
the meaning of statements merely by studying them; we must also know what the
question was that the statements are answering. “To understand any proposition,
it is necessary to read it not for its internal cognitive consistency, but for the
question to which it purports to be an answer”.
3.2 using Skinner’s “linguistic moves” (as influenced by Austin, Searle, and
Wittgenstein): each utterance is an act, and so words cannot merely be
understood trough semantics, but also by what they are trying to do.”Propositions
should be thought of as linguistic moves in an ongoing argument; and to
understand what the author was doing in them, it is necessary to reconstruct the
ideological and conceptual context into which they have been inserted”.
3.3. We see then, that both Hacking and Skinner are focused on the significance (or
“import”) of theoretical activity

4.0 Scott now tackles a further implication, one that is strategic.

4.1. If it is the problems of the present that are the target of critical activity, then the
critic should see to it that the underlying questions continue to be relevant, and
that they “continue to be questions worth having answers to in the present”. Scott
believes that the questions have changed.
4.2. Scott believes that the questions have changed, and that the demand has altered.
4.3. He then muses whether postcolonialism has lost its point and has “become
normalized as a strategy for the mere accumulation of meaning” (following Kuhn’s
idea on how a revolutionary paradigm becomes normal) such that criticism,
essentially, has become method. To Scott, “normalization has been the fate of
social constructionism generally, and of one of its prinicipal branches, postcolonial
studies, in particular”.
5.0 To illustrate, Scott discusses the Stoler & Cooper argument that the “Manichaean
conception of colonialism that characterizes colonial studies”, which takes Europe and
its colonies, the colonizer and the colonized, as discrete entities occupying separate
frames of reference is mistaken.
5.1. The “Empire” is not made up of discrete entities or one-way effects: the literature
produced by the African diaspora alone provides much evidence that there was a
great deal of ambiguity, contestation, and negotiation in the empire than the binary
and unidirectional model would have us believe.
5.2. The Manichaean concept is also ideologically misguided. To think in a binary way is
“theoretically crude” and “wrong”…”it is the dominant power—rather than
subaltern resistance to it—that produces conceptual and ideological divisions.”
6. 0. Scott is not persuaded by the Stoler & Cooper argument, pointing out that it rests on “at
least one unexamined assumption…of the epistemological equivalence of colony
and metropole as objects of inquiry”. He raises more important questions, which he
feels are important (and shows how they are important by discussing Memmi’s
definition of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized):
6.1. If colony and metropole make for equivalent epistemological objects, are they then
equal ideological objects, such that the moral-political stakes involved in the way
they are constructed in a critical discourse the same?
6.2. What is the connection between the meaning and the point in the critical exercise?
This is where he feels Stoler & Cooper erred: in that they failed to take into
consideration the “labor of inquiring into what the point is”. He closes by saying
that in his view, “ postcolonial studies needs to be more self-conscious of the style
of reasoning that characterizes it”…so that those who wish to still pursue critical
studies in this area could “attempt to identify the relevant features of the
postcolonial problem space in which our investigation takes place”. This way, we
will be able to answer the question of whether it continues to be relevant, whether
the questions we ask are worth asking, and whether we are meeting a salient
demand or not.