Identity, the Group, and the Social Construction of Reality

However important establishing a relationship with reality may be for the individual's survival, we should never underestimate the danger individuals perceive reality to pose for them. The danger to which I refer here is not the danger of this or that version of reality, but of reality itself, which is to say of a sphere of existence outside the individual's subjective control. Because of the threat reality poses, the individual's life project as often as not becomes that of dismissing reality rather than living creatively in relation to it.

Our ambivalence toward reality is nowhere better exemplified than in the idea that (social) reality is “socially constructed.” This idea attempts to deny social reality any claim to objectivity grounded in a relationship with natural imperatives, for example as their symbolic expression. At the same time, however, that social construction emphasizes the sui generis quality of social reality, it also calls into question those qualities that could make our social being real: that it is non-arbitrary, and that it endures. If it does not endure, in what sense is it real? Would it not be better, then, in thinking about the experience of the social world, to focus attention on its contingency and indeterminacy (Bhabha 171-2)?

A specific application of the idea that social reality is “constructed” is of special importance: its application to understanding the individual. To understand reality as a social construct means to understand the individual as a social construct, as a meeting point of socially produced identities. But, social construction has more significance than this. At the same time that it locates the individual in the intersection of social identities, it also suggests a project, which is to undermine the definition of the individual on the basis of identity. This project is supported by the judgment that identity is on the surface, and does not reach down to the depths of our being (Bhabha 48). Identity is on the surface