the treatise on out-there-ness
Preface: Just kidding. This will not be the treatise on out-there-ness. That, of course, can be attributed to Bruno Latour (and Wooglar). Turns out, I thought I understood things but I started writing. That said, I do find this notion of "out-there-ness" very intriguing and an interesting way of conceptualizing what DP "does." End preface.
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Since the dawn of Y624, we've contemplated the purpose of DP. Very (very) generally, we arrived at two sides to the story: DP reconceptualizes psychologized constructs (it ain't called discursive psychology for nothing) and DP does "more" than that. I am not sure that I have come to my own conclusion. While I would like it to tend toward the "more" side, I think this week's readings have provided two interesting perspectives on what DP "can do."
First, we have the Hepburn and Wiggin editorial. Beyond being super helpful in summarizing the state of DP writ large, it also helped further provide ground for what DP is. For one, "DP investigates how 'psychology' and 'reality' are produced, dealt with and made relevant" (p. 595). To me, this is the one-sentence synopsis of Edwards and Potter (1992) and allows for broader concerns of DP beyond the psychological. That is, DP critiques traditional psychology, but also provides an analytical approach to understand how and why realities are made stable in discourse. While the original intent of the field was the former, the latter justifies the methodology for investigating a variety of contexts wherein "reality" lives. That is, "we take 'practices' rather than 'cognition' as primary" (p. 595).
Second, there was "Death & Furniture" by Edwards, Ashmore, & Potter. This article was clearly 50% out-there (pun intended) and 50% incredibly insightful. While the fact of the matter is that I admit to sometimes enjoying such incomprehensible academic writing (this paper was also very funny), I do think it helped make sense of DP and social constructionism.
In brief, Edwards and company use out-there-ness to describe the objective existence of "stuff" regardless of society, discourse, or human interaction. Furniture arguments state that objects, like rocks and pebbles, exist in reality for humans to bump into and trip over and you can't argue with that. The irony is that this is a realist person made of straw, at least I suspect it so. Yet, relativism provides DP with an epistemological (ontological?) footing to understand social practice. Who tripped on the rock? Was it observed or self-reported? Did it end in a lawsuit or laughter? Was the tripped in a legal suit or clown suit? Rocks certainly have relatively high levels of "out-there-ness." Yet there "realness" is a matter of social construction -- tripping on a diamond is certainly a different experience, in hindsight and in the moment, than tripping on a poorly laid brick. Still, I don't think the point is simply that material things exist, but the meaning of material existence is shaped by social purpose.
“Gravity waves have to be constructed as discoveries, but rocks are just there. ”
So, what's in it for DP? I'll admit that I don't know. However, I see two potentially useful ideas. First, consensus and commonsense are fundamentally interesting topics of study (p.31). We can all agree to agree or agree to disagree, but how we "do" so is a practical matter. DP analytically treats day-to-day as a situated reality and the discursive construction and reconstruction of "facts" as socially purposeful. For example, I ate 0.66 of the avocados I purchased this week. This is "true" in the sense that I bought three avocados and ate two (that's my story and I'm sticking to it). However, does it matter that I tweeted this? What does this "do" for me socially? Well, one interpretation is that I understand that avocados are a fruit that tend to ripen quickly. Another is that I am of a socioeconomic position to buy food that I might have to throw away. And another is that I am in a social community of people who've shared the experience of buying bad avocados from Lucky's. Like death and furniture, I could go on. The point is that we would all agree on the consensus "reality" but might disagree on what "reality" does socially (and a DP researcher would attend to an individual's orientation toward this "reality").
Second is this notion of out-there-ness, which DP appears to take stock in. My reading of it is not without uncertainty, but I think I have made practical sense of it. Take science: gravity is discovered and rocks are just there. They are both out-there (in the scientific sense), but gravity had to be "discovered." Considering the pursuits of science, this distinction is commonsensical as a children "discover" rocks exploring their backyard and Einstein "discovered" ripples in spacetime. That said, the point is that gravity (or a rock) is not a fact of nature but a fact constructed by science. Its "realness" is not up for debate (or even a part of the debate). The concern is how and why it is socially constructed. Put differently, we find social consensus in out-there-ness, but it is not independent of the social process of its construction.
Timeout: this blog appears to have turned into me trying to make sense of out-there-ness and its analytical underpinnings in DP. At this point, and for my own sake, I wonder if I can simply swap "objectivity" with "out-there-ness." Is this an oversimplification or analytically important?
Okay, a final lingering thought: Edwards, Ashmore, and Potter admit that the distinction between realism and relativism is esoteric. Their response is that "we are academics, for whom it is proper, essential even, to care about the epistemic and ontological status of claims to knowledge. And it is far from inconsequential. If even ostensibly bottom-line instances of brute reality are demonstrably social accomplishments...Relativism is the quintessentially academic position, where all truths are to-be-established" (p. 37). Beyond the hubris, I think this ties to the purposes of DP described by Herburn and Wiggins -- not to attend to the obvious but to reconceptualize the taken for granted, the psychological, and the "real."