ABSTRACT
From sociology to international relations and from philosophy of science to politics, ‘constructionism’ seems to be the new game in town. Registering this trend, the aim of this chapter is first to formulate a discursive approach to some of the epistemological and theoretical problems surrounding constructionism. The importance of such an approach is presented by the need to supersede the fruitless opposition between essentialist/objectivist conceptions of nature and reality (often emanating from a hard-science perspective and founded on a realist and representationalist epistemology) and a relativist, even solipsist, post-modernism, which questions the existence of a real beyond the field of representation. In this attempt I will draw - inter alia - on the discourse theory formulated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Lacanian psychoanalysis and Katharine Hayles’ ‘constrained constructivism’. Today, the emergence of what Ulrich Beck calls ‘Risk Society’ points to the theoretical, practical and ethical importance of adopting such a discursive constructionist framework. It also reveals the challenge faced by contemporary societies: if nature and all risks are discursively constructed; if, furthermore, it is impossible to provide objective representations of risks that would permit their piecemeal technocratic and de-politicized administration, the need for an arena in which environmental risks – but also, and by extension, security, biotechnology, and other risks - should be discussed, constructed and democratically decided becomes urgent. In that sense, the challenge of uncertainty, of the discursively constructed nature of any certainty, is a thoroughly political challenge.
