The Review: The late Ian Hacking making people up

On the great philosopher of science. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. You can now read The Chronicle on [Apple News]( [Flipboard]( and [Google News](. If I were [king]( I would make The Social Construction of What? (1999), by the Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking — who died last week at the age of 87 — required reading for all humanists, preferably in their first or second year of graduate school. Hacking began his long and distinguished career writing about the sciences of probability, but in the last third of his life he turned to the social and human sciences — “all of those fields,” as he [wrote]( in 2006, in one of his many contributions to the London Review of Books, “from sociology to medicine ... which are thought of as having to do with finding out the facts,” but “which are also engines for making up people.” “[Making up people]( the title of not one but two of his essays, became Hacking’s great theme, one he pursued especially in writings about the history of psychiatry and the social uses of statistics. He combined these interests — which he shared with Michel Foucault, a major influence on him — with the analytic philosophy of language to produce a remarkably clarifying account of the historically and culturally contingent nature of human subjectivity. It is Friedrich Nietzsche who, Hacking says, offers the earliest formulation of the linguistic mechanisms that make up people. “There is something that causes me the greatest difficulty,” Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science, “and continues to do so without relief: unspeakably more depends on what things are called than on what they are. ... Creating new names and assessments and apparent truths is enough to create new things.” In the following century, the “labeling theory” of sociologists like Howard Becker and Mary MacIntosh would, in Hacking’s words, insist “that social reality is conditioned, stabilized, or even created by the labels we apply to people, actions and communities.” Those would become trendy topics in many precincts of the humanities and the qualitative social sciences, especially as routed through Foucault. Under the banner of the New Historicism, two generations of literary critics pursued a sort of amateur sociology of the historical variations of the human subject. Gender studies and some queer theory attended to related concerns, such as the social construction of gender roles and the production of homo- or heterosexual identities out of medical and legal discourses. SPONSOR CONTENT | Florida Atlantic University [Recognizing the importance of female role models for women in STEM.]( NEWSLETTER [Sign Up for the Teaching Newsletter]( Find insights to improve teaching and learning across your campus. Delivered on Thursdays. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, [sign up]( to receive it in your email inbox. Or take, with Hacking, “women refugees.” What can it mean to describe, as one Canadian scholar promises to, “the social construction of women refugees”? After all, Hacking writes, “it is obvious that women are refugees in consequence of a sequence of social events.” “Social construction,” Hacking shows, is here shorthand for at least two, related, sets of claims. First, “woman refugee” is a legal designation and so both obviously “constructed” and extremely meaningful for the women so designated. But second — and I take this to be the heart of what Hacking is interested in — that legal category imposes on or solicits from the woman refugee certain ways of behaving. “She needs to become a woman refugee in order to stay in Canada; she learns what characteristics to establish, knows how to live her life. By living that life, she evolves, becomes a certain kind of person (a woman refugee).” And not just ways of behaving but ways of thinking about herself: to learn how to be a woman refugee according to Canada’s social and legal codes “changes how some women refugees feel about themselves, their experiences, and their actions. Hence in that indirect way people themselves are affected by the classification — and, if you like, the individual herself is socially constructed as a certain kind of person.” The problem of social construction is related to the “making up people” that Hacking develops out of labeling theory. “Sometimes,” Hacking writes, “our sciences create kinds of people that in a certain sense did not exist before.” (I love Hacking’s charming precision — that “in a certain sense” reflects a stylistic modesty largely absent from Foucault-derived social theory.) His go-to example is multiple personality disorder (now known as dissociative identity disorder). Beginning in the nineteenth century, some disturbed people were found by psychiatrists to have “split selves,” which could be elicited under hypnosis. Then, for a century, the diagnosis basically disappeared. In the 1970s, Hacking writes, psychiatrists began to diagnose it again, in increasing numbers. “First, a person had two or three personalities. Within a decade the mean number was 17. This fed back into the diagnoses, and became part of the standard set of symptoms. It became part of the therapy to elicit more and more alters.” In other words, a new kind of mental illness emerged out of the dynamic interactions of patients and their doctors, with influence running both ways. The end result, Hacking writes, is a new “way to be a person.” Hacking’s point is not that multiple personality disorder is merely fictional, generated entirely out of the discourse of psychiatry. Like possession in Renaissance Europe, he says, multiple personality disorder becomes, in a certain time and place, an available template “for a disturbed person to display and adopt.” The disturbance, whatever it is, has some existence outside of or prior to its instantiation in possession or multiple personality disorder. Or at least it probably does! Hacking’s carefully phrased hedge on this point brings the reader to the mysterious heart of the problem of the social and historical contingency of mental illness: “A few people ... almost choose to become splits” just as “tormented souls in the past have often been said to have in some way chosen to be possessed, to have been seeking attention, exorcism, and tranquility.” High-functioning autism, which became an available diagnosis in the English-speaking world sometime in the second half of the last century, offers a cleaner, although for that reason less interesting, picture of what Hacking calls the “looping effects” whereby an expert category can construct — make up — the people it describes. The complex of traits now described as constituting the condition “high-functioning autism” surely existed, Hacking says, before the diagnosis. But only when it became a diagnosis did it also become “a way to be a person, to experience oneself, to live in society.” Thus are we all, in one way or another, made, and made up. For more on Ian Hacking, read the Daily Nous’s [obituary](. And here’s “[Making Up People]( (1986) and then the second “[Making Up People]( (2006). ADVERTISEMENT UPCOMING PROGRAM [The Chronicle's Strategic-Leadership Program for Department Chairs] [Join us in June]( for a virtual professional development program which will provide the space, time, and tools to help department chairs take on the challenges and opportunities of the role. Through workshops, high-level seminars, and individual development plans, chairs will think strategically about their departmental and institutional impact. [Register today!]( The Latest THE REVIEW | OPINION [A Law-School Rankings Formula After Ron DeSantis’s Own Heart]( By Brian Soucek [STORY IMAGE]( U.S. News is devaluing faculty expertise at the worst possible time. 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