everyday essentialism: social inertia and the ‘münchhausen effect’

Everyday EssentialismSocial Inertia and the ‘Münchhausen Effect’

Dick Pels

Virtual Realities

RISING TO a classical challenge in theorizing the materiality of thesocial world, this article revisits the venerable conundrum of social‘thingness’ in order to argue for a radically performativist view of the

ontological facticity of social relations, patterns, and institutions. Its aim isto make-believe that social orderings are (maintained by) self-fulfillingprophecies which are stabilized by the reality effect of what I call ‘everydayessentialism’. The ‘stickiness’ of the social, in other words, can in part beexplained by a circular bootstrapping operation which is often misrecog-nized as such in order to produce an effect of autonomous facticity and onto-logical transcendence: the ‘Münchhausen effect’.

The argument sets out from the familiar constructivist and ethno-methodological (some would say: irredeemably subjectivist) view, accord-ing to which all social facts have a precarious, instantiated and virtualcharacter. Which is not to say that they don’t exist. Rather, they are imagin-ary objects which continually hover between fact and fiction; partial realitieswhich are not present in any rounded or fully accomplished manner, but areimplicated at each and every instant in processes of realization and dere-alization. Social institutions and collectives are not transcendentally givenentities but collective fictions which produce a reality effect as long as theyare confirmed in their existence by means of recursive acts of belief andpractical investment.1 They are made to happen in and through the practicalwork that is done here and now, in real time and on the spot; they are in apermanent state of inauguration, and are incessantly at stake in attempts torender them a little bigger or a little smaller. There is no hope for a finaldefinition or spatial overview of their ‘actual’ structure, because from the

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moment of last observation they have already changed into somethingdifferent from what they were (cf. Shotter, 1993: 103–4). Everythinghappens in principle within the local face-to-face situation in which indi-viduals do their practical construction work and mutually account for therealities they are bringing into being. In between the human bodies and theperspectives they embody there is ‘nothing’ apart from the material things(the buildings, the letterheads, the traintracks, the glass fibre cables, theorganization charts, the budget figures) in which this virtual reality hasnested itself, and which lend it a (false) appearance of fixity, singularity, andnatural presence.2

This brand of constructivism is equally critical of everyday forms ofrealism and essentialism as of the way in which mainstream social sciencehas tended to copy and epistemologically ratify them. Everyone, includingthe social scientist, is in the business of constructing social realities andacting performatively upon them; everybody inflates or deflates, enlarges ordiminishes the reality status of what is described or explained. Sociologists,as much as ordinary actors, are interested in ‘acting at a distance’, inmobilizing absent, invisible entities in concrete settings of local interaction,with the purpose of bending these situations to their will (Callon and Latour,1981: 296–9). ‘Society’ is not the referent of an ostensive definition of socialscientists which is affirmed against the ignorance of their informants; it isperformatively accomplished by everyone’s attempts to describe it. Likeordinary actors, sociologists define what keeps us all together; social‘factors’ or ‘determinants’ are the special offering of social scientists whomake an effort to render their definitions (and consequently themselves)indispensable to the largest possible number of others (Latour, 1986: 273;1988: 161). They set themselves up as privileged ‘spokespersons of thepeople’, recounting how ordinary people live, who they are, how theybehave, what their true motives and interests are, how they must be rankedin statuses and classes, how the social space must be carved up in fieldsand figurations, sectors and subsystems. Because these structures andsystems are identified and named in an authoritative way (e.g. by scientificmeans), they grow in their reality. They become thicker or thinner by virtueof the success which sociologists enjoy in imposing their specific concep-tions of sociality upon lay publics and upon their scientific rivals.

In view of this incessant work of action-definition, social institutions,and social orderings in general, appear to function in more or less the sameway as the (non-PC but endearing) Dutch collective fiction of Sinterklaas,the bishop who reputedly arrives each year on a ship from Spain accom-panied by a small army of negroid helpers (‘Black Peters’), in order to cele-brate his birthday on 5th December and magically distribute presentsthrough the chimneys to please all ‘good’ children. This is a time when allparents and half of all the children collectively act ‘as if’ in order to let thered-mantled bishop exist as the only giver of the gifts that people give them-selves and each other. The traumatic awareness that Sinterklaas does not‘really’ exist matures so slowly precisely because all the words and deeds

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of those around you conspire to reconfirm the fiction. The belief in otherbishops and placeholders of God likewise erodes only slowly as a result ofthe speaking and acting power of all those who continue to believe in Him.Dostoyevsky’s anxiety that ‘if God does not exist, everything is permitted’,is hence doubly refuted. He exists because other people believe in Him andhave wrought objects, rules, and institutions which constrain and stand inthe way of unbelievers like myself. This of course puts Him in the samecategory as UFOs, unicorns, fairies, goblins, and demons; who all enjoy amaterial existence to the extent that other people successfully force theirbeliefs upon me. And their ontological status varies, is built up and brokendown as such entities manage to bind or unbind other forces and entities,enlarge or diminish their remit of action, become further institutionalizedor fall into destitution.

As Bakunin and other anarchists knew, the belief in God does notdiffer essentially from the belief in the State (or in Science, Truth, and theIntellectuals). Marx, Bakunin’s great political and intellectual antipode,merely repeats an old anarchist piece of wisdom when announcing in aforgotten footnote in Capital: ‘One man is king only because other men standin the relation of subjects to him. They, on the contrary, imagine that theyare subjects because he is king’ (1969: 540).3 But such a performative sensi-tivity is atypical for a consummate realist such as Marx, and uneasily sitswith the materialist tenor of his analysis of commodity fetishism (and of hissecond-order fetishization of scientific truth). It more nearly agrees withBourdieu’s account of political fetishism: a process of reversal in the courseof which the political spokesperson substitutes himself for the group,considering himself the real creator of the reality of the group, since allthose involved misrecognize that his power depends at each and everymoment upon the belief and recognition of the group members. This ‘charis-matic illusion’ lets the value of the hypostatized person emerge as an ungras-pable, elusive charm, a mysteriously objective property of the personhimself (Bourdieu, 1991: 203ff., 248–50). But power is not an essence or athing, or a personal quality or property of powerful persons, but a socialrelationship which needs to be accomplished from one moment to anotherby means of acts of belief and tokens of recognition. Power relations requirethe hard work of all concerned, both the powerful and the powerless, inorder to substantiate and deliver them and render them true and valid.According to Barnes, it is therefore almost true when Durkheim states thatsocial facts are things which are exterior to the individual. His example isthat of a gang in which each individual member observes that John is theleader by taking notice of the actions of all the others, and derive from itwhat the others know or believe about John’s position. The power relation-ship constitutes a virtually closed circle of self-fulfilling action. It is definedby all involved as a whole, and at every moment fixed and certified as aworking social order. The ‘error’ of conceiving of the social fact of John’sleadership as external is then so extremely small that it does not havepractical validity, even though a small portion of John’s authority is in fact

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‘interior’ to each individual, since it depends upon his own belief in thelegitimacy of John’s leadership. For most practical purposes, Barnesassumes, the individual may safely neglect his own small contribution tosocial reality (Barnes, 1988: 51).4

Things and ReificationsThe idea of power balances which exist in ‘a hollow ring of belief and action’(Barnes, 1988: 50) re-focuses the more general paradox which centrallyoccupies this article: that of the extremely light and fragile but simul-taneously extremely heavy and solid character of all social patterns, collec-tives, and institutions.5 Indeed, if all social facts are fictions or‘well-founded illusions’, from whence issue their remarkable intractabilityand inertia? How can these momentaneous local productions explain thesheer span and durability of social orders, their heavy-handed grip on theindividuals who ‘make them happen’, and the mechanical routine whichensures their transgenerational re-creation? A radically constructivistaccount of social reality equally radically confronts us with what has beencalled the ‘genetic paradox of institutionalization’, according to which socialinstitutions are inextricably both ‘works of freedom’ and ‘works of imprison-ment’ (Beerling, 1964; cf. Giddens, 1984). How does it come to be, to recoupa classical version of this paradox, that the relations between individualsacquire an autonomous existence over against them? That the powers oftheir own life become all-powerful against them (Marx and Engels, 1969:540)? How can this strong form of epistem/ontological subjectivism carrythe dead weight of collective reality? A constructivist here appears to gethimself entangled in a rather acute Münchhausen dilemma.

There is no simple escape route out of this dilemma, and in the follow-ing I shall merely suggest a few elements towards its possible resolution.Let me enter as an initial hypothesis that institutional fictions (or ‘factions’)are routinely stabilized because (or better: insofar as) we casually reify orfetishize them, i.e. because in the routine conduct of everyday life we tendto consider social facts as things and behave towards them as such. If thisis the case, Durkheim’s first rule of sociological method is crucially misdi-rected. While purporting to separate the illusions of the ordinary under-standing from the reality judgments of science, it merely reiterates andreinforces the ‘natural attitude’ which ordinary actors adopt most (but notall) of the time towards the institutional world which envelops them. Thefetishization of social reality is duplicated on the second-order level ofscientific analysis. More sceptical approaches such as phenomenology orethnomethodology, which incline towards the opposite view (consider socialfacts as fabrications), have highlighted this naive imprisonment of estab-lished social science in the mundane rhetoric of truth and reality, empha-sizing that the everyday labour of representation and definition (the work ofaccounting and reflexive monitoring of action) crucially preconditions thereproduction of durable social worlds (cf. Pollner, 1987; Hilbert, 1992).However, while they admit reflexivity and performativity on the first-order


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actorial level, such approaches appear also in some way to confirm the‘natural attitude’ of everyday sense-making, insofar as they embrace anagnostic descriptivism which is unwilling to ‘ironize’ or critically ‘remedy’the work of everyday reification, preferring to view it as a remarkableaccomplishment of subtly operating and highly competent actors (cf. Button,1991; Lynch, 1993; cf. Pels, 1996, 1999, 2000b). In this fashion, both struc-turalist and phenomenological approaches unnecessarily take for grantedsome of the objectivist features of endogenous (knowledge) practices, whilethe latter still underestimate the reflexive ingenuity of actors who are ableto playfully negotiate and stage their reifications (e.g. by ‘acting as if’).

This train of thought introduces the anti-realist ‘rule’ that social factsmust not be considered as things but as reifications (Pels, 1990b; Taussig,1993: 226); they are fetishes and black boxes, and everyday realism andessentialism are crucially important in consecrating them as such andsealing them off. This also implies that social reality acquires its transcen-dent aura as a result of performative activities which are routinely misrec-ognized for what they are. Fetishization, for example of positions ofauthority, consistently results from the forgetting or leaving out of subjects’own imaginative power and constructive contribution to whatever they stabi-lize as reality. This formulation revives a classical figure of the critique offetishism and reification, which in postmodern quarters may sound old fash-ioned and passé, but which I like to replicate here: people erect false idolsin order to kneel before the products of their own handiwork; the productsoutgrow and rise up against their producers; social relations and definitionsbecome independent and posit themselves as thing-like foreign powers overagainst the acting and defining individuals themselves. The shape whichthis classical formula adopts here is the following: because and insofar aspeople consider social facts as things, because and insofar as they experi-ence and describe them as natural, failing to recognize that they casuallyreconfirm their matter-of-factness and transcendent singularity, theyrebound upon the individuals with the force of things, which carry real andhard consequences for their everyday behaviour.6

This hypothesis largely determines the further search plan of thisarticle. There are two issues which need to be more fully addressed. First,we need to look more closely into the performative grammar of everydayrealism and essentialism, which will necessitate a brief excursion intospeech act theory. If descriptions fulfil numerous functions over and abovethe naked reporting of the social world, and actively perform states of reality,they partly bring into existence what they describe. If so, the realist analyti-cal style may precisely serve to conceal such knowledge-political effects,which unfold the more prolifically as a result of it. Secondly, we need to re-examine the linguistic machinery of the self-fulfilling prophecy, which mycritical formula reiterates in sharpened epistemological form. On the onehand, I wish to argue that the circular logic of the self-fulfilling prophecyhas a much larger action radius and is much more constitutive of collectivepatterns of action than its classical formulations are ready to accept. I


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suspect not merely that most social facts take the shape of self-fulfillingprophecies, but also that it is precisely through the impact of everydayessentialism that definitions of the situation rebound so massively andpainfully upon the definers themselves. This incidentally presumes that myown critical approach does not itself slip back into the realist mode, anddoes not re-stage the traditional opposition between fact and fiction or know-ledge and belief which grounds the traditional ‘unmasking’ or ‘denuncia-tive’ form of ideology critique. What is needed is a critique of reificationwhich does not revert to new reifications, or merely undertakes to smashone fetish with the aid of another (cf. Latour, 1996a, 1999). In contrast tothe lingering naturalism of both structuralist and interpretive analytics, thenew critique must not hesitate to reflexively duplicate the logic of perfor-mativity for the critical observer him/herself.

Magical RealismFollowing Wittgenstein’s famous aphorism that ‘words are also deeds’, andAustin’s view that one can do (all sorts of) things with words (Wittgenstein,1998: 140; Austin, 1962), the idea of the performative infrastructure oflanguage has been adopted across a broad front of analytical approaches,which include the semiotics of Perelman, Burke, Barthes and Greimas,performance studies in the tradition of Turner, Goffman, and Schechner,Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality, Skinner’s contextualisthistory of ideas, Bourdieu’s sociology of language, Butler’s analysis ofgender, and the science and technology studies of Latour, Pickering, andLaw. Criticizing the tendency to understand linguistic utterances exclus-ively in terms of their propositional meaning as a ‘descriptive fallacy’,Austin has familiarly identified performatives as forming a class of utter-ances which do not so much reflect or mirror reality but actively constructor create (part of) it, since the described state of affairs only exists as soonas the utterance is made (e.g. ‘I declare this court to be in session’). But asAustin’s own analyses tended to bring out, performatives did not so muchconstitute a separate class of utterances over against constatives, but ratherdefined a constitutive element in all linguistic communication, includingformally neutral descriptive statements. Austin himself increasingly focusedupon utterances which curiously wavered between descriptive and perfor-mative modes (1962: 85), which suggested that the descriptive fallacy wasperhaps more deeply anchored in everyday language use than originallypresupposed. Performatives often appeared to operate under a mask,dressing up as constatives, in order to ‘ape’ factual propositions (1962: 4).This might be taken to imply that the performative energy of statements isoften discharged through a semantic detour, being actively disguised by thefactually constative linguistic form. The reification then performs a magicalreality effect: what is identified as a fact is surreptitiously confirmed in itsfactuality and strengthened as an entity which is naturally and objectivelypresent.7


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There is no need to search far and wide in order to encounter everydayexamples of this linguistic-epistemological sleight of hand. All domains ofsocial action feature an endless game of reality construction and destruc-tion, in the course of which social objects, positions, statuses or identitiesare rendered bigger or smaller by describing, naming, or classifying themin a naturalistic way. Modern politics, which depends so intensely uponcredibility, presentation, image, and spin (and hence upon an intricatecollusion with the modern mass media), offers a first stream of examples.On a daily basis, politicians claim and journalists report that the credibilityor image of a minister, of the cabinet, or of the political enterprise in itsentirety has been ‘damaged’, ‘tarnished’ or ‘hurt’, that the position ofparticular individuals has become ‘compromised’, ‘doubtful’ or even ‘unten-able’, that the government’s policies have ‘received a painful setback’, orthat the opposition party has now ‘completely lost the plot’. In reverse, apolitician may have ‘scored well’ in debate, the cabinet may have ‘emergedfrom the crisis in strength’, while the opposition, after having previously‘slumped’ and ‘roamed in the desert’, may presently be demonstrating a ‘newélan’. All these descriptions add or subtract a bit of performative energy toor from the situation at hand, enabling the spokesperson to add his or herown small contribution to the perceived strength or weakness of thepositions which are initially represented as existing independently of suchinterested judgments (‘Chirac heads for fatal fall’; ‘In Washington, Albright’sstar is dimming’, ‘Blair’s magic starts to fade’; Labour MP’s fear that he has‘lost his touch’; Brown is a ‘colossus’, ‘a big hitter’; ‘polls deal fresh blow toPortillo’s hopes’; ‘The Hinduja affair may leave a permanent cloud overPeter Mandelson’s name’; ‘Mayor Giuliani is God’). Recall the not untypi-cal scene of a trade union leader announcing on the national news that ‘hethinks that the threat of industrial action has now become very real’, whilethis public statement by an authorized spokesperson of course itself consti-tutes a threat to initiate strike action. Neither need one be bemused by thestrange habit of officially ‘conceding’ an election defeat, as if the defeat didnot really exist prior to the very instant at which one is prepared to publiclyacknowledge it. A similar Münchhausen logic determines the diplomaticattitude towards allegedly ‘criminal’ regimes whose existence is stubbornlydenied, so that they exist a little less solidly than when one would officiallyrecognize them. Such performative circularity may for example explain whythe breakthrough in the Middle East peace process of a few years back onlybecame feasible as soon as the Palestinian side promised to scrap a raft ofarticles in the Palestinian Charter which pretended or implied that the stateof Israel did not exist.

Other domains of action likewise display such underhand performa-tivity as a matter of everyday routine. One inevitable example is the worldof sports, where the never-ending contest about honour, credibility and one’sgood name similarly plays a reality-constituting role. ‘Bergkamp loses creditwith players’, according to an old newspaper report about the Dutch nationalteam:


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The player who used to paralyze three opponents and appeared to be radi-ographically steered by his mate Wim Jonk, does no longer exist. In Inter-nazionale, the tandem which so successfully operated for the Ajax side wasalready split up. In the San Siro, Bergkamp has lost his self-confidence andeven in England, where the Amsterdammer is revered as a demi-god, he hasnot been able to recover his earlier form . . . The man who last year stillcommanded a market value of 20m guilders and earned 50.000 a month,looked in the match against Scotland like an average striker [obviously, thesegloomy lines were written far in advance of Bergkamp’s subsequent successeswith Arsenal, which initiated a remarkable reversal of his reputational build-up].

‘England loses faith in Hoddle’, the Guardian headlined in early 1999,after the FA had sacked the England coach for offending the disabled andthereby threatening ‘to stain the reputation of the national game’. Tony Blairhad previously added his own not inconsiderable drop by declaring that, ifHoddle had actually said what he was reported to have said, ‘it would bevery difficult for him to stay’.

Another typical incident which allegedly ‘blemished’ or ‘cast a slur’upon the sports world recently involved the chairman of the national sportsassociation in the Netherlands. His position was widely seen as havingbecome ‘untenable’ after a few uncouth remarks about the Dutch CrownPrince’s inclusion in an ‘undemocratic’ organ such as the IOC. Thechairman’s arch-rival, a former judo world champ and a long-standing IOCexecutive member, claiming that his good name had become tarnished,reverted to a classical performative conjuration which often poisonseveryday brouilles: ‘As far as I am concerned, he does no longer exist’ (seeSharon’s recent ‘de-realization’ of another chairman, Arafat). The advertis-ing business, of course, is another enterprise which opens up a can of perfor-matives on a daily basis. ‘Heineken Beer: draughted the most’. ‘You feelmore comfortable in a Peugeot’. ‘There’s more and more fun at V&D’, it wasclaimed in the midst of unfavourable financial reporting about the Dutchdepartment store. As a publicity agent commented: ‘They apparently sensedthat it was high time to introduce more fun at V&D and decided theircampaign to say that it was becoming more fun every day’.

Examples such as these indicate that sometimes people are perfectlyaware of what they are doing when they wield performative language andconjure up a social (some)thing out of nothing. In contrast, it is rather poorlyappreciated how profoundly performative mechanisms are rooted in asupposedly more distanced and methodologically purified practice such asscience, and how intellectual power positions are continually built up andbroken down by describing them as strong or weak (‘that argument is not astrong one’; ‘that thesis is untenable’), more or less prestigious (‘he has beento Harvard’), or as more or less adequate to reality (‘parapsychology is apseudo-science’). Titles such as Knorr Cetina and Cicourel’s Advances inSocial Theory and Methodology or Eric Wright’s Class Counts are equally‘political’ and conjurative as allegedly scientific descriptions of what used


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to be advertised as ‘really existing socialism’. Incidents and scandals rackthis apparently more peaceful and secluded world with similarly cata-clysmic effects: ‘The cold fusion episode has dealt a severe blow to the repu-tation of the university of Utah’; ‘Dr Pusztai’s scientific standing has beenirreparably damaged by the controversy over GM foodcrops’; ‘David Irving’sreputation as a historian lies in tatters after the High Court conviction’. Moreordinary descriptive judgements likewise perform their creative work: ‘Marxis dead (but still not buried)’; ‘The postmodernist hype is now finally on theway out’; ‘Bhaskhar’s critical realism must be considered a veritable revol-ution in philosophy’; ‘Together with Joyce’s Ulysses, Kafka’s Metamorphosis,and Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, Petersburg by Byelyi belongs tothe four greatest prose works of the twentieth century’; ‘this book is alandmark, a pioneering work of vital interest to . . .’; ‘Pierre Bourdieu iswidely recognized as one of the most important sociologists of the postwarperiod’.

The Power of WordsIt is Pierre Bourdieu, indeed, who has explicitly elaborated speech acttheory in terms of a critical theory of symbolic power exercise (Bourdieu,1991). He follows Austin’s lead in castigating traditional ‘intellectualist’linguistics for being insufficiently aware that relations of communication areinvariably relations of power, that there are no neutral propositions, and thathow things are classified and named is incessantly at stake in socialstruggles. While Austin is commended for his sensitivity to the contextualframing of language use, he is also criticized for his tendency to locate thepower of words exclusively in linguistic forms and insufficiently in the insti-tutional conditions of language use. The magically generative force oflanguage, which creates what it states, precisely unfolds through the socialweight of authoritative spokespersons, which varies with the extent of insti-tutionalized recognition of their authority. Performative effectivenessimmediately derives from the capacity of spokespersons or ‘authorities’ toenforce collective recognition and hence to realize their representations withthe aid of an accredited and therefore credible language. Performatives areacts of institution which presuppose the presence of specific social insti-tutions in order to do their magical work. What is the effect if I, an ordinarycitizen, proclaim a general mobilization in the middle of Trafalgar Square?The actual source of the performative magic therefore lies in the ‘mysteryof ministry’, i.e. the delegation by means of which an individual (a king, apriest, a spokesperson) is officially sanctioned to speak and act in the nameof a group, which is simultaneously constituted in him and through hisactions. The power of the word is nothing but the delegated power of thespokesperson (Bourdieu, 1991: 72–5, 105–9).8

Let me note three critical points about this sociological account ofperformativity. First, Bourdieu’s criticism of Austin’s sociological naivetéappears somewhat overdrawn. The latter does clearly introduce his‘conditions of felicity’ for performative speech as social and cultural


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conditions, and demonstrates a fair grasp of the impact of authority relationson linguistic action (cf. Austin, 1971). Secondly, Bourdieu appears in turnto underestimate the extent to which the illocutionary power of languagemay be induced by particular linguistic-epistemological structures whichactively disguise the performative charge – as is typically the case in realistor essentialist modes of speech. Of course, the reality effect is enhanced tothe degree that representations are better authorized or command a widersocial recognition. But the power of language does not merely originate fromthe social ‘outside’ but also from the ‘inside’, because it is inscribed in theperformative grammar of the utterance itself. It is not exclusively socialauthorities which lend words their weight; words are also linguistically orgrammatically empowered. Bourdieu, to be sure, does recognize themasking of performatives as constatives as a token of symbolic violence,irrespective of whether this masquerade is perpetrated by ordinaryspokespersons or is sealed by institutionalized authorities; in both cases,spokespersons make themselves ‘scarce’ in order to hide behind their reifi-cations. This reificatory urge also clarifies the routine ‘collaboration’ whichlocks together the dominant and the dominated parties in a power relation-ship. The language of authority never rules without the complicity of thosewho are subjected to it. This double bind becomes a little less intractableas soon as it is realized that subjects not only continuously need to recog-nize their authorities for what they ‘are’ and, in this sense, to contribute totheir own domination; but also that they tend to wrap this everyday recog-nition in the same reificatory language which the authorities themselvesemploy in order to legitimize their positions of power. From both sides, therelationship of dominance is enacted and confirmed through a misrecogni-tion of the performativity of everyday realism.

My third comment is the most critically ponderous one, since it marksthe crucial lack of reflexivity in an approach which takes great pride in itsunique reflexive sensibility (cf. Pels, 2000a). With an uncanny sharpnessof sociological wit, Bourdieu has traced the performative magic of everydayrealism and essentialism, demonstrating how authorized representationsactively shape the world which they describe or classify. His fine-grainedanalyses of e.g. institution rituals show how people attribute a particularsocial essence to each other, which frames and fixes who they are and hencehow they must behave. ‘You are a little girl, aren’t you’? The parent doesnot tell the child what it should do but who she is; as a result of which thechild becomes what she is, i.e. what she is described to be. A social essence‘is the set of those social attributes and attributions produced by the act ofinstitution as a solemn act of categorization which tends to produce what itdesignates’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 51, 120–1). In his analysis of the regionalistand ethnic discourse of identity, Bourdieu similarly highlights the perfor-mative force of practical classifications which contribute to the productionof what they describe (1991: 220). Every objectivity claim with regard tothe actual or potential existence of a region, an ethnic group, or a socialclass, represents a claim to institute which enhances their chances for


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survival. Political and juridical classifications likewise make or breakcollective identities to the extent that they succeed in imposing legitimatedivisions and boundaries. In this regard, the statement ‘there are twoclasses, i.e. bourgeoisie and proletariat’, does not differ principally from thestatement: ‘the meeting is opened’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 134). Even academicconflicts, which are to a larger degree swaddled in euphemization, regularlyfeature essentialist accusations which are dressed up as classificatoryconcepts: so and so is a ‘Marxist’, a ‘theoretician’, a ‘functionalist’ etc.(Bourdieu, 1988: 781).

In this light, it is curiously disappointing that Bourdieu, while effec-tively tracing the ‘theory effect’ of performative logic on the level of political,juridical, and everyday speech, is ultimately disinclined to reflexively dupli-cate it for (his ideal of) social science itself. Representation and performa-tivity are primarily conceived as political labour (1991: 127, 243–6), whichanswers to a logic which principally differs from the work of science. Eventhough sociology finds itself heavily implicated in symbolic struggles ofclassification, and often arrogates the authority to draw boundaries betweenclasses, regions, or nations in order to proclaim whether they do or do notexist (1990: 179–80; 1991: 106, 242–3), it must not become enmeshed inthis struggle but should instead objectify it:

If social science is not to be merely a way of pursuing politics by other means,social scientists must take as their object the intention of assigning others toclasses and of thereby telling them what they are and what they have to be. . . they must objectify the ambition of objectifying, of classifying fromoutside, objectively, agents who are struggling to classify others and them-selves. (Bourdieu, 1991: 243)

Sociology needs to shift to a metalevel where the total space of thisclassificatory struggle can be observed, including the position which isoccupied by the sociologist, who is deemed capable of telling the truth abouta struggle where the major stake is the truth about the social world. But thisobjectivist pretension of totality implies that, ultimately, the performativelogic must be banned from sociological discourse itself which, althoughnever neutral in its impact, is constative and explanatory in its primaryepistemological drive (1990: 181–4; 1993: 10–11). The critical analysis ofeveryday essentialism is only achieved on the object level (and generouslyapplied to all sociological rivals), and not reflexively extended towards aself-consciously performative conception of sociological practice. Socio-logical realism, however, by authoritatively proclaiming what does and doesnot exist, contributes to the realization or derealization of what it describesor explains in a manner which does not differ essentially from the perfor-mative politics of everyday life – even though it is a continuation of thesepolitics by the different means of science.


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The Natural Proximity of Facts and ValuesAn intriguing and central feature of the logic of performative realityconstruction is that descriptive and prescriptive strands of judgmentcrossover and mingle in almost ‘natural’ fashion. Performative statementsare not purely descriptive, because the described state of affairs only comesinto being when the statement is made; but neither are they purely prescrip-tive, because they do something rather than say that something should bedone; instead of calling for action they themselves constitute the action. Thisprimordial entanglement of fact and value supplies one of the sources ofenergy which engender the knowledge-political construction effect. Factualstatements often display a crypto-normative infrastructure, because theyidentify ‘normative facts’ which are indirectly productive of reality preciselyon account of their subdued and unacknowledged normative tension. A self-consciously performative theory, in other words, should discard the classicalepistemological split between analytical and normative theory and its atten-dant postulate of value-freedom, in order to acknowledge and cheerfullyaccept this internal mix or ‘natural proximity’ of facts and values for its ownepistemological practice (Pels, 1990a, 2003: ch. 4).

Both in Austin and Searle, speech act theory is already stronglytempted to disavow any stringent dualism between facts and values,allowing for a far greater continuity between ‘ought’ and ‘is’ than isconsidered appropriate in more traditional social methodologies andphilosophies of science. Austin’s detailed examination of speech actsreflected his intention ‘to play old Harry with two fetishes which I admit toan inclination to play old Harry with, viz. (1) the true/false fetish, (2) thevalue/fact fetish’ (1962: 151). In a familiar analysis of the making ofpromises and other institutional facts, Searle argued that the naturalisticfallacy itself perhaps originated in a fallacy, since it is quite possible toderive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ on logically defensible grounds (Searle, 1969:175). Neo-Aristotelian approaches to virtue likewise dismiss the idea thatthe fact/value opposition is grounded in timeless logical truth because,among other things, any conception of the good life logically entails a state-ment about a factual state of affairs (cf. MacIntyre, 1984: 57). Even the mostinnocuous functional concepts (‘watch’, ‘farmer’) already delineate a goaland hence cannot be defined independently from their good, valid orvirtuous incarnations.9 ‘That is not (good) English’; ‘This is no longerfootball, this is all-out war’; ‘Only in the second half Ajax stopped playinganti-football and began to play real football/football as it was meant to be’;‘Now that’s true philosophy/democracy/science!’; ‘This is not how anexciting action film looks like’; ‘The San Siro did not glimpse the realRonaldo until just past the half hour when he sold Stam an exquisite dummyonly to see his shot blocked by Berg’.

Other than e.g. Aristoteles, Hobbes and Durkheim assumed, defi-nitions do not guarantee access to the objective essence of things, but estab-lish normative facts which simultaneously describe and evaluate the object.With Popper and other philosophers of science who swear to a strict


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separation between normative and explanatory theory, the normative defi-nition of (true) science nevertheless coincides with a description of itssupposedly most elevated form: the actual practice of great thinkers andinventors. This mixture also characterizes accounts of other professions,functions, social roles, identities, or activities. ‘X is simply not a parlia-mentarian. He is a real administrator, that is what he does well. But it is adifferent line of work’. ‘There are no good artists any longer, Walter, thereare artists with money and there are artists without money and the artistswithout money are no artists at all’ (Joost Zwagerman, Gimmick!). Mountainclimber Simpson to his colleague Naar: ‘The ordinary public that doesn’tknow a thing about climbing may perhaps accept such statements as true.But real climbers know what it is like’. Naar: ‘Have you ever been at 8000m?I don’t think so. So who is the real mountaineer here?’

As suggested, performative judgements often tend to suppress thisintrinsic meshing of value and fact. ‘The Spice Girls are now definitively ontheir way out’: the evaluative assessment is packaged as a constativedescription. Despite first appearances, this is not quite what is traditionallytargeted as the ‘naturalistic fallacy’, which illegitimately passes off valuesas facts or derives the latter from the former. Indeed, insofar as it ‘merely’forbids any categorical reduction of values to facts or vice versa, theclassical formula of the naturalistic fallacy continues to lean upon a priorepistemological separation between them; it does not issue in the (presum-ably absurd and dangerous) epistemological advice to consciously andcheerfully throw them together. In the critical approach favoured here, reifi-cation and naturalization instead emerge because an originary fact/valuemix is split and halved to leave only a factual constative in which never-theless the normative or knowledge-political element continues to burrowand proliferate. In this process, the ‘normative fact’ is stripped of all subjec-tive and context-referring modalities and neutralized into a descriptionwhich lacks an identifiable purpose, standpoint, or spokesperson (cf. Potterand Wetherell, 1988). This view enables us to retain the general purpose ofthe naturalistic critique, without forcing us back into the dualism that stilldominates its original formulation (Pels, 1990a).10

Essences are norms, as Bourdieu has lapidarily stated (1992: 410;1993: 263). In his analysis, everyday essentialism entails a shift from factto norm whenever one authoritatively proclaims who a person ‘is’ and hencewhat (s)he ‘should be’. The indicative functions as an imperative: ‘becomewho you are’; ‘A real man wouldn’t back down from something like that’; ‘APels would never do such a thing’. But the preceding account invites us tobe more precise: essentialism always commingles facts and values, in orderto project both into a transcendental realm from which their spokespersonsare forever exiled. Essences are also normative facts which are stripped oftheir spaced and timed character in order to operate as supposedly externaland objective constraints. In this fashion, both performativism and essen-tialism consider facts and values to be intrinsically interwoven; their crucialdifference is located not in the mixture itself but in the way in which


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essentialism reifies and ‘certifies’ the mix by extrapolating it towards a trans-historical world of things.

Realist sociology usually disparages what it calls ‘common sense’ forits intolerable mixture of facts and values, while itself claiming to generateneutral descriptions and explanations (e.g. Elias, 1978, 1987). Or asBourdieu argues: ordinary language never describes the social world merelyas it is but simultaneously as it should be, and hence virtually alwaysgenerates performative effects; which is why sociology, which in his viewintends to operate only constatively in order to take the world ‘as it is’, hasevery likelihood of being itself perceived as performative (Bourdieu, 1990:182; 1993: 22; 1996: 25). But this is putting the cart before the horse! While‘common sense’ is normally (although not universally) drawn towards objec-tivistic description, sociology involuntarily enacts a performative logicbecause it reiterates this everyday objectivism on a more sophisticatedmethodological level. However, the demarcation between scientific ‘truth’and common-sense ‘error’ cannot be drawn in terms of an idealized philo-sophical distinction between facts and values. This epistemological contrastrather emerges between approaches (both on the level of ‘science’ and thatof ‘common sense’) which actively embrace the inseparability of descriptionand evaluation and hence reflexively acknowledge the performative realityeffect, and those accounts (everyday essentialism, realist sociology, objec-tivist epistemology) which separate themselves from the performativity oftheir own constructions, and actively work to eliminate it.

The Self-Fulfilling ProphecyIn conclusion, I like to focus more intently upon the curious phenomenonof the ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’, as it has been classically defined by Thomasand Merton. Austinian performatives indeed appear to operate exactly likeself-fulfilling prophecies; while Bourdieu’s analyses of everyday, political,and legal discourse similarly identify performativity with the peculiarly self-supporting, circular logic of situational definitions which help to create whatthey state. The ‘Thomas theorem’ (‘If men define situations as real, they arereal in their consequences’) at least offers one familiar rule of thumb in ascience which is otherwise poorly endowed with such widely shared apho-risms. Merton considers it a crucial theoretical insight which is relevant tomany if not all social processes (1973: 421). Giddens likewise views it asa special case of a more general social phenomenon (1984: xxxii); but hefails to elaborate it as centrally as e.g. the interpretivist or labelling theoryof deviance, which has familiarly argued that social outsiders are in a sense‘made’ by the environment which defines them (cf. Becker, 1963). Phenom-enological, symbolic-interactionist, ethnomethodological, and discourse-analytical approaches accord the ‘definition of the situation’ an even morecrucial theoretical status (cf. Berger and Luckmann, 1966; McHugh, 1986;Filmer et al., 1972; Potter, 1996; Hutchby and Wooffitt, 1998). Barnesprovisionally stakes out the most radical claim when he describes societyas a division of knowledge which is based upon practical knowing and


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recurrently confirmed belief, and accordingly views social reality as ‘asublime, monumental self-fulfilling prophecy’ (1988: 52).

The Thomas theorem therefore varies on a broad range from ratherquiet to more radical epistemological interpretations. In the constructivistconception which is favoured by Barnes – and which I like to support here– the performative logic of situational definition plays a much larger role inthe everyday (and scientific) construction of reality than was originallyenvisaged by either Thomas or Merton. That its far-reaching impact wentunrecognized is once again accountable to the objectivist or realist complex-ion of the theorem in its original form (Krishna, 1971; Barnes, 1983).11

Merton’s famous examples of the run on the Last National Bank and natu-ralistic racial prejudice consistently maintain a separation between theobjective features of the situation and the variable interpretation which onemay attach to them, so that the self-fulfulling prophecy emerges as a ‘real’consequence of an ‘unreal’ definition of the situation; an initially erroneousaccount elicits new behaviour which transforms the originally misguidedpicture into a true one (1973: 422–3). Following Merton, it is a mechanismwhich translates unfounded, fear-inspired images into cold, hard facts; atragically vicious circle which can only be breached by discarding theoriginal definition itself. Merton’s analysis hence presumes that one mayconsciously and planfully halt the workings of this vicious performativity onthe basis of insights which are deliverable by scientific sociology (1973:424, 435).12

As a result, the critical analysis of reification once again relapses intosociological realism and its pertinent distinctions between fact and value,fact and fiction, knowledge and belief, or reality and representation. But the‘perversity’ of this circular social logic is more widespread and intense, andthe epistemological circle is far more closed (but simultaneously far lessvicious) than would be acceptable to Merton, who continues to take forgranted that there exist true and false definitions of the situation which areindependent of what people actually think or believe about it (Krishna,1971). If consciousness, belief, imagination, and values instead constitutethe reality of social situations in a more immediate and integral fashion, onemay legitimately question whether the self-fulfilling prophecy can in fact beabolished or needs to be combated with such vehement scientific resolve.Does Merton’s realist analysis not offer another disguise in which the perfor-mative prediction announces itself? Barnes similarly argues that the limitedapplication of the Thomas theorem results from the persistence of an objec-tivistic theory of representation which mistakenly turns the self-fulfillingprophecy into a pathological phenomenon. But the phenomenon of ‘boot-strapped induction’, as he prefers to call it, is ineradicable. Social liferepresents a gigantic bootstrap operation in which circular, self-validatingdefinitions of the situation routinely render these situations true or untrue(Barnes, 1983: 536). As with Merton, naturalization and reification resultfrom the erasure of the feedback loop, of the circularity of perspectivistreality construction. But the essential difference is that Barnes reflexively


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duplicates this insight for sociology itself; which is likewise seen as continu-ally engaged in ‘bringing off’ bootstrapped inductions which cannot findtheir grounding in an autonomously accessible social world.

Next to Sinterklaas, this view therefore elevates the famed Baron VonMünchhausen to new heroic status in social theory. We approach a perfor-mative conception of social (dis)order which focuses the intricate mechan-ism of the self-fulfilling prophecy as a central and universal principle ofsocial constitution. This mechanism is no longer seen to rely on traditionalforms of social realism, but conceives of social (dis)order as a virtual realitywhich is continually brought off in situ, in real-time local contexts, by meansof practical attitudes and actions which are linked to symbolic represen-tations (definitions, or perhaps better: intuitions) of the situation at hand.These situated orders never exist sui generis, since every actor totalizes themdifferently, interprets their unity or diversity and their coherence (or lackof it) from his/her specific position and perspective. They are fictions thatcarry very real consequences. No one ‘reflects’ a pre-given structure: everyone pushes and pulls at it, works upon it, modifies it, in order to render ita little more solid or a little more fluid. This view also reflexively appliesto social scientists, who likewise operate upon the social order from aperspective which is dictated by the peculiar temporality of their slow-pacedor ‘unhastened’ professional practice. Social facts must not be consideredas things but as reifications, which come into being because (and insofar as)actors fail to calculate their own performative contribution to them, and asa result continue to define and treat them as things. This performative circleis only vicious as long as it is not recognized for what it is and cheerfullypractised as such. Liberated from the metaphysics of sociological realism,the Thomas theorem might therefore be rewritten in the following way: ‘If(wo)men reify their definition of the situation, it will act back upon them-selves and upon others as if it were a thing’. Or in reverse: ‘If – and to theextent that – actors reflexively include themselves in their performances ofthe social world, they will be able to play with (rather than succumb to) theirreifications, and will believably “act as if” (rather than fully believe) thatthese things “really exist” ’.

Notes

1. See also Harré (1975) and Knorr Cetina (1994) on fictionality as a routinecomponent of social life. Bourdieu similarly advances that ‘It can be said withoutcontradiction both that social realities are social fictions with no other basis thansocial construction, and that they really exist, inasmuch as they are collectivelyrecognized’ (1996: 20). See further below for a critical view of Bourdieu’s residualsocial realism.2. This is not to diminish various important and suggestive arguments about ‘inter-objectivity’ (Latour, 1996b), postsocial ‘objectualization’ (Knorr Cetina, 1997,2001) or the performativity of objects (Turnbull, Law, this issue), which similarlytake their cue from a strong nominalistic conception of social facticity. However, itseeks to qualify such accounts by reaffirming a more traditional view of the


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‘stickiness’ of the social as resulting from symbolic reification. I like to extend thenotion of ‘relative existence’ (Latour, 2000) once again from scientific facts andtechnological objects to re-cover ‘Durkheimian’ institutional facts, which some ofthese accounts consider too weak to hold the social world together. Another ‘non-objectual’ candidate factor of social cohesion in individualizing consumer societiesis offered by the increasing salience of celebrities as ‘audience-subjects’ (cf.Marshall, 1997). Such public individuals act and function like social institutionsand in this respect effectively bridge the micro–macro divide.3. See e.g. Godwin’s conviction that ‘government rests entirely upon opinion’ andonly exists by the grace of ‘confidence’ (1976 [1793]: 148, 181–2, 247–8). Thisclassical anarchist insight prefigures interactionist and reputational conceptions ofpower exercise such as offered by Collins: ‘Power, as well as fall from power, is aself-fulfilling prophecy, which operates along mutually reinforcing chains of conver-sation’ (1981b: 104; 1981a: 994). This micro-logic is generalized towards the socialstructure of property and authority (Collins, 1981a: 1004, 1009). Cf. also Abrams’sview of the state as an ‘essentially imaginative construction’ (1988: 76–7, 82) andTaussig’s similar notion of ‘state fetishism’ (1993: 219).4. On this last point, I like to register some disagreement. Precisely because socialreality is stabilized through the contributions of all individuals concerned, it isessential to maintain a permanent awareness of its incessantly constructed andaccomplished character. It is intriguing to notice how closely an ethnomethodolo-gist such as Hilbert, who tends to bracket all belief in social structures, underwritesa virtually Durkheimian conception of the social world as a sui generis phenom-enon (1990: 796n). Ethnomethodology ‘retains, without reification, all of the exte-riority and constraint a Durkheimian could ever ask for’ (Hilbert, 1992: 163, cf.57, 162, 165). This at least partly results from the fact that ethnomethodologistsappear unwilling to critically correct the everyday reification of social facts, but aresatisfied to ‘merely’ describe in full detail how skilfully ordinary actors operate in‘bringing off’ (and getting away with?) such reifications.5. Cf. also system-theoretical approaches to the legal person or ‘corporate actor’,who as a persona mystica peculiarly hovers and tacks between fiction and reality(e.g. Teubner, 1988), or Anderson’s familiar view of nations (and possibly all collec-tives larger than primitive groups in face-to-face contact) as ‘imagined communi-ties’ (Anderson, 1991).6. This proposition closely parallels Butler’s critical theory of gender as a perfor-matively and rhetorically produced effect – which Butler herself, following Laclauand Zizek, already generalizes to ideological and political signifiers such as God,Class, Country, and Party (Butler, 1993: 99). Acts, gestures and enactments whichproduce an effect of transcendence or causal substance ‘are performative in thesense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabri-cations manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursivemeans. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontologicalstatus apart from the various acts which constitute its reality . . . (it is) a construc-tion that conceals its genesis’ (Butler, 1990: 136, 140). The materiality of sex resultsfrom ‘a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect ofboundary, fixity and surface we call matter’ (Butler, 1993: 9, italics omitted). OnButler and performativity see also Bell (1999). On the critical linkages betweenlinguistic performativity and performance studies in the line of Turner, Goffman,and Schechner, see e.g. Carlson (1996) and Schieffelin (1998).


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7. The indicative mode is the least clearly marked speech mode, behind whichmay lurk all kinds of ordering and prescriptive intentions. ‘There is a draught here’,‘the water is boiling’, ‘the door is ajar’, ‘the washing is still in the sink’ etc. are asmany statements about an undesirable state of affairs which express a request oractivate a duty. The indicative actually functions as an imperative (Bourdieu, 1991:120). This cover-up effect of realist description is also evidenced by the fact thatit is often resorted to in situations of tension and conflict. This is the gist of thefamiliar example elaborated by Potter, in which Diane says to Alan, after havingheard a suspicious noise which may be caused by a burglar: ‘you’ve got your shoeson’. Once again, the descriptive mode is far from neutral or coolly objective, but ismanifestly anxiety-ridden and action-oriented, offering a means to divert attentionfrom oneself and to put pressure upon others (Potter, 1996: 108–9). Cf. also Potterand Wetherell (1988).8. I provide a more extensive discussion of representation and spokespersonshipin science and politics in Pels (2000b).9. Cf. also Searle (1995: 22) on concepts such as ‘husband’ and ‘citizen’, andBourdieu (1996: 20) on the concept of the ‘family’. Functional descriptions alwaysinclude both an upper and a lower threshold which are connected by means of anormative continuum.10. Bourdieu’s mixture of constructivism and social realism notably retains this‘dualist’ infrastructure of the anti-naturalistic critique.11. This judgment also appears valid for labelling theory and for Berger andLuckmann’s phenomenological approach to social constructivism (cf. Pollner, 1987:111, 118–19; Thomason, 1982: 127–8).12. Elias’s ‘figurational’ sociology puts a similar trust in social realism and in scien-tific ‘knowing better’. Mennell even refers to the self-fulfilling prophecy as an‘oddity’, a fascinating but ultimately trivial phenomenon which represents an excep-tional and special case of a more general phenomenon with a far greater theoreti-cal significance: that of the unintended consequences of intentional human action:‘Much more clearly than Merton, Elias recognizes that people’s knowledge of thefigurations in which they are caught up is virtually always imperfect, incompleteand inaccurate. So unanticipated consequences are not a curious footnote to soci-ology but nearly universal in social life’ (1989: 258).

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Dick Pels is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Human Sciencesat Brunel University and a Senior Research Affiliate of the AmsterdamSchool for Social Science Research. He is the author of Property and Power.A Study in Intellectual Rivalry (Routledge, 1998); The Intellectual asStranger. Studies in Spokespersonship (Routledge, 2000); UnhasteningScience. Autonomy and Reflexivity in the Social Theory of Knowledge(University of Liverpool Press, forthcoming 2003) and co-editor (with JohnCorner) of Media and the Restyling of Politics (Sage, forthcoming 2003). Heis an associate editor of Theory, Culture & Society.


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everyday essentialism: social inertia and the ‘münchhausen effect’

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