To follow up on our "uncontroversial" class discussion yesterday, I wanted to offer some thoughts that will hopefully lead to greater analytical synergy between the two majoritary viewpoints being expressed, namely, a) dominant systems of representation (of which language is one example) are exclusionary insofar as they prohibit the expression of positions (identitarian, political, etc.) that diverge from normative standards, versus b) systems of representations always reflects the proclivities of their agents (e.g., humans who use language) and therefore present deficiencies will necessarily work themselves out—or in its inverse formulation, if present deficiencies don't work themselves out, then they weren't even deficiencies in the first place.

Curiously these positions don't seem formally incompatible, which begs the question: What was at stake in the in-class debate? On the whole, the dividing wedge came down to discrepancies apropos of the question of agency—how much control does the individual have over the systems of representations that she uses to express her positionality in the world? How much does the onus to change systems of representation reside with the individuals impacted by their putatively "adverse" effects? The pure libertarian response would be "completely," whereas the pure social constructivist response would be "not at all." The polemical stand-off between these two positions can, of course, proceed ad infinitum (indeed, without much to show for it), but I think it's worthwhile to consider qualitative differences between the distinct modes by which discourses, institutions, and social practices produce our self-reflexive individuality. There is an important difference between 1) social construction that stops individuals from expressing themselves, and 2) social construction that depicts an "illusory" field of social relations in such way as to obscure concrete antagonisms.

The former is basically what's up for grabs in the agency v. social determinism debate, to which, again, it's hard not to respond with copious yawning. The latter, however, is indispensable for making sense of what it means to excercise one's agency in the world. One discursive thread from the libertarian side in class yesterday was that culture and sociality define our systems of representations and not vice versa. However, considering that systems of representation inevitably delimit the ways that we conceptualize precisely what constitute "culture" and "sociality," our ability to discern and grapple critically with concrete antagonisms will be limited at best. How can we claim, for instance, that gender neutral pronouns will "emerge" (by some magically transmutive process, it seems) exactly when gender confusion becomes a socio-cultural issue if no systems of representations are in place to alert people who remain unaffected by gender confusion of its problematic status? In other words, there might be problems, at one level, for gender-queer individuals who want to express their position but can't find the semiotic tools to do so. Much more acute, however, is the meta-level problem: that without active changes in the language, no semiotic channels exist to facilitate other people's awareness about the social antagonisms borne out of gender confusion. How can we possibly expect, e.g., English speakers to transform their language in order to reflect concrete antagonisms if the language itself is constantly working to systematically obscure such antagonisms?

A final thought: It misses the point of social constructivist criticism to fall back on the "we can never account for all minority positions [so therefore we shouldn't even try]!" narrative that has become nauseatingly commonplace in discursive backlash against so-called "identity politics" (it's more than slightly ironic that purveyors of such backlash tend to employ the same "victimizing" language that the purport to despise [e.g., it shouldn't be the labor of white people to account for EVERY SINGLE minority status imagineable --> white people have become the victims [!]). Destabilized libidinal matrices notwithstanding, I'm sincerely unsure what "threat" this narrative is responding to, since no one's demanding that EVERY SINGLE minority status become the object of collective sympathy, some brand of social reparations, etc. If normativity and marginality are bound in an inextricable dialectic to one another, then certain positions will always be majoritary and others minoritary. The important point of social constructivist theory is to underscore the ideological arbitrarity of what has come to occupy the center and margin respectively—and in terms of social practice, to continually explore how seemingly "natural" hierarchies are, in fact, arbitrary, and furthermore, how they reinforce socio-historically specific power arrangements. Surely we can keep such a space of interrogation open without it amounting to an insurmountable burden for majoritary subjects. Indeed, it is difficult to see anything beyond the crude and puerile re-inscription of traditional White-hetero-normative domination in chest-pounding arguments to the contrary.