What is socially constructed? | Class vs. Identity, The Big Other and Second-Order Cybernetics

 

The “social construct” is a common buzz-word nowadays. We often times hear that various identity groups or concepts are socially constructed, sometimes with the implied notion that this makes them less important for our attention. But to simply separate all of our experience in a strictly binary way between “real” and “socially constructed” is an extreme oversimplification. For example, money is a social construct, but fiat money (with flexible exchange rates, post-1971) is, for lack of a better word, “more” of a social construct than money that is tied to a gold standard. In other words, there are layers to this.

The aim of this essay is not to provide a complete system, theory or guide on how to separate what is real from what is socially constructed in a way that could explain everything. Rather, we will look at various specific themes of interest for our analysis and how they relate to the topic of social construction: Marxism and ideology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, the relationship between class and identity politics as well as the tools that cybernetics and systems theory can offer us. In the first part of this essay I will focus on Lacan’s theory of the big Other and how it connects with Marx’s and Zizek’s theories of ideology. In the second part, I will connect this to Niklas Luhmann’s sociological theory of second-order cybernetics. In the third part, I will use that gathered knowledge to analyze the implications for class and identity politics.

 

I: THE BIG OTHER AND IDEOLOGY

 

            Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan differentiated early on in his work the way in which every social interaction and act of communication is structured by a double-relation towards the agent whom we are communicating with. On one hand, I am addressing myself towards a “small other”, on the other hand, I am simultaneously addressing myself towards a “big Other”, with a capital O. While the meaning of the small other changed throughout his work, for the purposes of this essay we are defining it as our internal image of the other person¹ – the specific individual human being we are talking to. The big Other, on the other hand, is the locus of the a priori conditions for communication to take place – hence it includes all the unwritten rules and implicit assumptions of any social interaction. The big Other acts as a presupposed “as if” – even if there may be, say, only two people in a room talking, they act “as if” there was a third invisible presence hearing them.

The big Other is present in our everyday “honest lies” and in every act of indirect communication, of hints, euphemisms and ‘redundant censorship’: I am lying to you, you know that I am lying, I know that you know that I am lying and yet we continue to play-pretend (“as if” we were spied on by an invisible presence, even when we aren’t). Here is an example of the big Other in action from Zizek’s introduction to Lacan²: in a group when we all think of a dirty detail and we all know that everyone knows it, we nonetheless may feel embarrassed when someone blurts it out, despite no one learning any new information. Why? Because we lose the freedom to pretend that we don’t know (in Lacanian language: the big Other now knows).

            Whereas the small other is situated in the imaginary order, the register of experience containing inner representations of ‘things’ in isolation from each other (images), the big Other is situated in the symbolic order, the register of experience containing referentiality and connections. The symbolic order is the register occupying language and meaning, since all communication is founded on references (like a pointer in programming or a vector in linear algebra – constantly displacing you from one location to another).

 

             Since the symbolic order of language and communication is founded not upon ‘things’ but between the relationships between them (as creators of meaning), it can be used as a framework for analyzing relationships not only between words but also between people through words. Since a signifier (ex: a word), according to structuralist theory, only has meaning in relationship to all the other signifiers (through contrast), it is the difference between various particulars inside a whole that has priority over their individual identities to create the meaning of that whole. We might say, with a little exaggeration, that the whole is not the sum of its parts, but the “difference of its parts”. Michel Foucault gave in an interview a wonderful analogy for structuralism³: imagine you have a photo of someone on your computer and you apply a negative filter on top of it. All the white pixels turn black, all the black pixels turn white, all pixels of some other color change as well. No pixel is of the same color at an individual level, and yet you can still recognize whose face is in the picture – why? Because while all individual pixels changed their color, they all changed in the same way. Despite “nothing being the same” in the picture, the overall image is nonetheless still easily recognizable, because the relationships between the pixels have remained the same. In Lacanian terms, we can say that while the imaginary register has changed completely (all particular “things” have changed if we analyze them in isolation), the symbolic order has stayed the same. If, in this analogy, we replace pixel with ‘word’ (or more generally, with ‘signifier’) and the overall photo with “language”, then this is how structuralism conceives of communication. If, instead, we replace the pixel with “human” and the overall image with “society”, then we can conceive of a structuralist theory of society. The conclusion is properly anti-humanist: society is not made up of individual human beings, but of relationships between individuals.

            Why does this matter? Zizek gives another example that perfectly illustrates this theory in action⁴: let’s imagine we have a family celebrating Christmas and they all pretend to believe in Santa Claus when they are together. But let’s say that now someone takes them individually, when the other people can’t hear them, and asks them in private whether they really believe in Santa Claus. The parents will reply “Of course we don’t believe, but our children believe in Santa so we also pretend to believe so that we don’t disappoint them and ruin Christmas”. But then if you take the children and ask them privately, they might say “Of course not, we’re not idiots, but we pretend to believe so that we don’t disappoint our parents and we get presents”. The conclusion is counter-intuitive at first: no one believes at an individual level, yet they all believe as a group. It’s enough for everyone to presuppose that someone else might believe, without that presupposition being true, for the belief to function in a group of people. For Zizek, this is how ideology functions in society as well, in our political and social lives. This is why it is not important whether a dangerous ideology is adopted by a ‘vocal minority’ on social media – the force of an ideology is not the number of individual human beings who agree with it, it might as well be believed by no one in particular and it can still take effect (recall the infamous: “I was just following orders” in Nazi Germany, where one can make a compelling argument that the number of individual humans during the holocaust who genuinely believed in the fascist cause was not as high relative to the atrocities it caused).

            For Karl Marx, in his famous analysis of commodity fetishism, the market of goods is not a relationship between commodities, but a relationship between people mediated by commodities. “Capital is not a thing, any more than money is a thing. In capital, as in money, certain specific social relations of production between people appear as relations of things to people, or else certain social relations appear as the natural properties of things in society.”⁵. Can’t we ascribe a similar process of ‘reification’ to ideology? Ideology is not a mere relationship between ideas or beliefs. It is a relationship between people that appears to us as ideas. Belief systems are not just a set of relationships between ideas in each individual human being’s brain, they are a “real fiction” – a very real and material relationship between people that appears to us as a relationship between beliefs. This puts an important twist to our ordinary usage of the term “social construct” – our ideological superstructure is socially constructed only insofar as it is the manifestation of a real and concrete set of social relationships (in the same way that the gestalt that was “the picture of someone’s face” in the pre-mentioned analogy was a “non-real manifestation” of a set of relationships between real and concrete pixels on a screen). In our critique of ideology, we must thus not look for the hidden meaning ‘behind’ the form, the so-called essences beneath the appearances, like in Plato’s allegory of the cave. The real mystery is how the essence hides inside the appearance itself, the content not behind the form, but within the form itself. Thus the task is not to find what hides behind the illusory appearances of our ideology, to take the “mask off” and see reality for what it is, without its social constructs; but instead to ask ourselves what happened in the movement from reality to appearance, why did that content take this particular form out of all forms?⁶

 

II: LUHMANN’S SECOND-ORDER CYBERNETICS

 

            Sociologist Niklas Luhmann used cybernetics and systems-theory to provide a similar theory of “radical constructivism”. Despite Zizek never mentioning him (to my knowledge) in any of his books, their theories have many convergences.

            For Luhmann, society is not made up of humans but of social systems. Various social systems, like the economy, law, politics, art, etc. are each autopoietic and operationally closed. This means that each system produces changes inside its own system and cannot directly interact with other systems. Instead, the entirety of society can be viewed through the perspective of one system. Politics and law can be analyzed economically, the economy, art and love can be viewed through the perspective of the laws surrounding them, etc. By operational closure, we mean that the system produces its own division between itself and its environment. Thus, the classical “subject/object” division inside philosophy is replaced with the “system/environment” distinction⁷. Two systems that are structurally coupled can each irritate each other to provoke changes inside themselves. A system can only directly change itself (by definition); hence structural coupling is when a change inside one system can irritate another system to also change itself.  Political parties can only directly make changes in the system of politics, not directly influencing the economy. For instance, a tax increase is a change by the law system of the law system, and it only irritates the system of the economy to also make changes inside itself. Social activism in academia cannot directly change the system of politics to take measure against, say, climate change - the most it can do is make changes inside itself and hope that the system of politics will also change itself accordingly.

            Crucial to Luhmann’s social systems theory is his definition of an observation: “An operation that uses distinctions in order to designate something we will call 'observation'. An observation leads to knowledge only insofar as it leads to re-usable results in the system. One can also say: Observation is cognition insofar as it uses and produces redundancies - whereby 'redundancy' here means limitations of observation that are internal to the system.”⁸. In other words, an observation is a distinction (between that which is observed and everything else) executed by a system that produces knowledge for the system itself. In order for my visual-psychic system to observe a cat in front of me, I must distinguish it from everything else that is ‘not-cat’: the background, the trees next to it, the asphalt on which it is walking, etc. This information is only valuable when fed back into the same psychic system that did the distinction in the first place. The system of the economy can observe an economic transaction by distinguishing it from everything which it is not, but this already presupposes that we view all reality in economic terms of prices and transactions. My biological system can observe something as part of itself only by distinguishing it from intruders like viruses, which can in turn activate a reaction from the immune system (and through the perspective of my biological systems, all of physical reality is viewed in biological terms). The system of science can observe something as true by distinguishing it from falsity, but this presupposes that all of reality is viewed through the true/false distinction, etc.

            This of course leads to the problem of infinite recurrence that lies at the heart of all transcendental philosophy: if any observation already presupposes that we view reality from a certain perspective, then who we are to say that the ‘blind spot’ from which we view reality is indeed the adequate one? Can’t we have a meta-system of observing the systems from which we observe reality? But who will decide that one, so we can get a meta-meta-system and so on to infinity (recall the infamous ‘if God created the universe, then who created God?’ question which similarly leads to the same infinite loop that was first faced head-on by Kant). For Luhmann, finding an unbiased or “absolute” standpoint that is unmediated by a higher point of observation is not important. The observation of an observation is simply called “second-order observation” – it is a “meta” observation, so to speak. As Hans-Georg Moeller explains: “A first-order observation can simply observe something and, on the basis of this, establish that thing’s factuality: I see that this book is black—thus the book is black. Second-order observation observes how the eye of an observer constructs the color of this book as black. Thus, the simple ‘is’ of the expression ‘the book is black’ becomes more complex—it is not black in itself but as seen by the eyes of its observer.”⁹.

            While the implications for transcendental philosophy of this theory are numerous and outside the purposes of this essay, we can look towards the sociological implications. As society is not made up of humans, but of social systems, and each social system can also observe itself observing reality (through second-order observation), this “meta” standpoint provides further possibilities for the social construction of reality. Economist John-Menyard Keynes unintentionally described second-order observation by trying to explain how the stock market functions through the following comparison:

 

“Professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view. It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.”¹⁰

 

            In other words, in order to gamble on the stock market, it is not enough to try to predict the future value of a stock, the very attempt at this prediction implies predicting how other people will predict as well. Thus, the first-order observation of the future market-value of a stock turns into the second-order observation of other investors’ first-order observations of its future value. Therefore, the question of investment quickly jumps from “what do other people think?” to “what do other people think about what other people think?”. Or, one can take a similar example taken from Moeller’s book on profilicity in the age of social media¹¹: if I present myself the way I would like to be seen on social media, this is an example of first-order observation in action. I post a selfie, a girl looks at it and thinks “he’s so hot!” – she observes me as good looking. But if I present myself the way I would like to be seen as being seen, I move to second-order observation: a girl looks at my selfie and how many likes it already has and thinks “Damn, other girls probably think he’s hot” and likes the selfie as well. In the latter case, no one needs to believe that I look good, everyone just needs to assume that other people believe that I look good and it functions just as well. If this sounds similar to Zizek’s Santa Claus example of how belief works, it’s because it is. We can sum up the connection between Luhmann’s social systems theory and Lacan’s and Zizek’s theories of reality as this: first-order observation works on the level of the imaginary order and the small other, while second-order observation works on the level of the symbolic order and the big Other. At the level of the “animal” imaginary register of experience, I distinguish between various particular (images) in isolation from each other, drawing boundaries that define objects. In the “human” symbolic order, I distinguish between various relationships between particulars (ex: relationships between words in a language), that is, I distinguish between distinctions, which is the definition of Luhmann’s second-order observation. If Lacan was correct in his theory that what separates humans from animals is the capacity to acquire language, and consequently, the access to the symbolic order (society, culture, social norms), then one implication of this statement is that only humans have the capacity for second-order observation while animals are stuck in the imaginary order of first-order observations.

            To conclude this theoretical mess of jargons: the Lacanian big Other is the environment of a system under conditions of second-order observation: “Accordingly, the market is the environment of economic organizations and interactions internal to the economic system, and public opinion is the environment of political organizations and interactions internal to the political system”¹². An abstract notion like “the market” does not reflect the behavior of one particular consumer or producer participating in it, but the aggregate of expectations about what each participant in the market “thinks about what other people think about” something. A similarly vaguely-defined notion as “the public opinion” is the political system’s big Other: not the opinion of one particular voter, but the accumulation of what each voter thinks about what other voters think, and so on.

            With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that the big Other appears as most evident in those social situations in which something changes despite no new information being learned by any particular individual in it. Niklas Luhmann, borrowing from Gregory Bateson, defines information as “any difference which makes a difference in some later event”¹³. However, the very way in which we can distinguish between what is and isn’t a difference already presupposes the particular standpoint of one specific system: a difference in what, exactly? Information for my visual system means a difference in my visual perception that makes a difference for my visual perception. Scientific information is a difference inside academia which makes a difference inside that very same academia. Under conditions of second-order observation however, a system observes its own observations and what counts as ‘information’ is not a change in whatever was initially observed under the conditions of first-order observation, but a difference in first-order observations that makes a difference in first-order observations. Let’s now re-examine our early example of that awkward social situation in which everyone is thinking of a dirty joke, everyone knows that everyone knows, and yet we all avoid saying it out loud. In Lacanian terms, we would say that we don’t want the big Other to know that dirty detail, so we continue to pretend that no one knows. The paradox here lies in how, if we were to say out loud what everyone is thinking, no one would learn any new information and yet the mood would be ruined. With our new definition of information (as a difference which makes a difference), we can understand why: new ‘information’ was nonetheless registered at the level of second-order observation. Every individual in the room observed how other people’s observations changed and ‘the mood’ (that is, the “big Other’s mood”, not the emotional state of any particular human individual) was thus ruined.

            Without the human capacity for second-order observation (that is, the Lacanian symbolic order), no social system can exist, and thus no society and no state. To give a similar example that involves the social system of the law: Where I live in Romania, we also had a Youtuber that was doing a similar version of that “To Catch a Predator” show: he would make fake accounts online where he pretended to be a minor below the age of consent, pedophiles would message his account and flirt with his fake account, they would plan to meet up in person and he would show up and call the police on them. However, now in Romania we do not have a strong law against child grooming, and thus, it’s only illegal to make explicit sexual demands for a minor below the age of consent. The groomers would flirt with his fake account thinking it was a real underage girl while always having the legal precedent that they “technically” did not break the law. This gave rise to the similar social situation in which the police were called, and everyone (the groomer, the Youtuber, and each individual cop) knew what the pedophile’s real intentions actually were, and yet nonetheless they had to go through the entire legal hurdle anyway. If each individual human being in the courtroom knows what the accused individual is guilty of grooming, who are they exactly communicating with when they are trying to find “legal evidence” for such an action? They are interacting with a set of laws created by humans for humans, and yet nonetheless this set of laws “catches a life of its own”, so to speak (in a similar way to Marx’s commodity fetishism) – they are talking “as if” there is an invisible presence in the room that has zero social skills and does not understand the pedophile’s real intentions, and it's that non-existent presence (i.e.: the big Other) that we must prove ourselves to.

            The social system of science has similar functions. When a mathematician ‘proves’ a theorem that everyone already knows it’s true, they are not convincing any particular human being that the theorem is true, but instead the big Other of the mathematical system. In Luhmannian terms, the above examples are instances of the system of law and the system of science working under conditions of second-order observation. No one believes at an individual level that the pedophile was innocent or that the theorems are false, but everyone behaves as if they presupposed that someone else might believe. The belief is displaced onto the Lacanian “subject supposed to (not) know”.

 

III: CLASS VS. IDENTITY POLITICS AS SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION

 

            With our current analysis we can now re-examine our conception of the social construction of reality. When people are making a claim that various group identities (such as those studied by frameworks like intersectionality: race, gender, ethnicity, etc.) are socially constructed, we can view this either through the perspective of first-order or second-order observation.

            For Niklas Luhmann, the claim that all of reality is socially constructed would be meaningless without further context – yes, but constructed by what? In order for us to have any access to an “objective reality”, one must already observe it from the particular standpoint of one specific system. Since each cybernetic system produces its own reality, we can say in our jargon that all my psychic reality is psychically constructed by my brain, all the reality of social systems like law and the economy are socially constructed, etc. This is not a claim that tangible, concrete reality “does not exist” at all. Like Luhmann explains: “Operational constructivism has no doubt that an environment exists. If it did, of course, the concept of the system's boundary, which presupposes that there is another side, would make no sense either. The theory of operational constructivism does not lead to a 'loss of world', it does not deny that reality exists. However, it assumes that the world is not an object but is rather a horizon, in the phenomenological sense. It is, in other words, inaccessible. And that is why there is no possibility other than to construct reality and perhaps to observe observers as they construct reality.”¹⁴.

            Therefore, to say that a group identity is socially constructed would require us to further approach this question from a particular perspective of a system. Identities are socially constructed by the system of law in and for the system of law when they are registered by the specific legislature of that nation. An individual’s psychic system constructs identities by drawing imaginary borders around particular groups and treating them differently (either consciously or unconsciously). When such distinctions are drawn in each person’s psychic system en masse and incentivized through the mechanisms of other systems like law or the economy (perhaps, a manifestation of the popular yet overused terms like “systemic” racism/sexism/etc.) then we can say that those identities are both psychically and socially constructed in a complex interplay and exchange of information between each of the systems.

            There is, however, a problem in putting economic class on the same ‘level of comparison’ like other identity groups such as race and gender, since they do not operate on the same level of observation. Identity primarily functions at the level of first-order observation. To experience homophobia, for example, I do not technically need to actually be gay/bi, as long as a group of homophobes believe that I am gay for some reason I can still experience it. As long as I “pass” as a certain race to a racist, it does not matter whether I literally am that race or not (rather, the question does not even make sense – to “be” something according to what system?) – I will experience racism. We are still on the level of first-order observation here: as long as the discriminating agent acts upon their distinctions, I will be treated differently in society regardless of what I think. Recall here the infamous joke repeated in Lacanian circles about the schizophrenic patient: "a man who believes himself to be a grain of seed is taken to a mental institution where the doctors do their best to convince him that he is not a seed but a man. When he is cured (convinced that he is not a grain of seed but a man) and is allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back trembling. There is a chicken outside the door and he is afraid that it will eat him. 'My dear fellow,' says his doctor, 'you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man.' 'Of course I know that,' replies the patient, 'but does the chicken know it?'”¹⁵.

            Economic class functions at the level of second-order observation. Your economic class is not given by what the small others (individual humans) think you are but by what the big Other believes you to be. Class is, thus, socially constructed, but at another level and in a different way than identity. Class is a relationship between people that cannot temporarily disappear when the psychic system of the “small other” (person) in front of you changes their beliefs. You do not need other people to believe you are ‘poor’, for instance, and to have them change their behavior towards you based on that judgment, in order for you to experience the consequences of your exploitation. In fact, it is entirely possible to hide your economic status from all your peers, to lie to everyone that you are rich, and it is inevitable: it will be impossible to make any purchase on the market as long as you do not have the money. In order for you to become “rich”, it is not enough to convince many individual human beings around you that you are - you have to convince the big Other of the economic system (the “market”) to change the numbers in your bank account. By fighting economic exploitation, we are not merely fighting “classism”: a set of prejudices and stereotypes about poor and/or working class people that causes them marginalization in society (in the same way one would fight bigotry), instead we are referring to the more ingrained and fixed “real belief” of the big Other of the economic system itself – a relationship that structures capitalism as such. Capitalism does not create or “cause” economic exploitation in the same way that it can make use of ideological superstructures like bigotry and religion to perpetuate itself: instead it is the economic exploitation that is the foundation of capitalism. The bourgeoise and the proletariat are not two different classes that first exist, and then they come into conflict. Without one, the other’s existence is impossible: a bourgeoise can only exist with a proletariat to exploit it and vice-versa, and thus it is again the conflict or difference which comes first - initially we have the class conflict not between two particular classes but the conflict-in-itself, and the two poles (classes) gravitating around it like planets around the sun.

We thus come at a properly dialectical paradox: Marxist theory compares the seemingly “concrete and material” relations of production (the base of society) that give rise to economic exploitation to the ideological superstructure of society gathered by people’s beliefs, attitudes, prejudices, stereotypes, culture, etc. Under the premise of Orthodox Marxist historical materialism, one may conclude that in order to change people’s ideas one must first change their concrete material conditions. An (oversimplified, for the sake of argument) example of this is how a materialist might say that “poverty causes racism” while an idealist might say that “racism causes poverty”. If we follow the logic of historical materialism to the very end, to simply raise awareness about social prejudices and change people’s mentalities is useless as long as we do not change their concrete material conditions – solving poverty and homelessness would do much more to help racism and sexism rather than the other way around. The paradox lies here in noticing how what is considered “concrete and material” in the economic bases of society lies under double levels of abstraction: it is the conditions of second-order observation, a belief about beliefs, that constructs the “hard and material” objective reality of money. The Hegelian “negation of negation” here shows its work again: our production of the material, concrete things one can touch (like factory machinery) already are created through a double-negation of this very reality itself – an abstraction of abstraction.

 

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NOTES:

1: I say “internal image” because our inner representation of another person may not match their inner representation of themselves. The Lacanian small other is similar if not identical to the concept of “internal object” in object-relations theory (for a short introduction, see: “N. Gregory Hamilton – Self and Others: Object Relations Theory in Practice).

2: Slavoj Zizek, “How to read Lacan”, p. 25

3: Michel Foucault – The Lost Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzoOhhh4aJg

4: Slavoj Zizek, “How to read Lacan”, p. 29

5: Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy, p. 1005

6: See: Slavoj Zizek – The Sublime Object of Ideology, Chapter 1: “How did Marx invent the symptom?”

7: Niklas Luhmann, “The Cognitive Program of Constructivism and a Reality That Remains Unknown”: “The mistake here lies in the assumption that it is possible to describe an object completely (we won't go so far as to say 'explain') without making any reference to its relation to its environment (whether this relation be one of indifference, of selective relevance and capacity for stimulation, of disconnection, or of closure). In order to avoid these problems, which arise from the point of departure taken, both subjectivist and objectivist theories of knowledge have to be replaced by the system-environment distinction, which then makes the distinction subject-object irrelevant.”

8: Niklas Luhmann, ibid.

9: Hans-Georg Moeller, Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems, p. 72

10: John-Menyard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, p. 100

11: See: Hans-Georg Moeller, “You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity”

12: Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of The Mass Media, p. 104

13: Niklas Luhmann, ibid., p. 18

14: Niklas Luhmann, ibid. p. 6

15: Slavoj Zizek, How to Read Lacan, p. 93