A Critical Discursive Approach to Identity 171the epistemological problems of dualism, introspection, objectivity, and
rationality. Constructionists view language not simply as a mirror or map
of the world, but rather as the very instrument that is itself the basis for our
methods of simultaneously understanding the world and constructing it.
Social constructionism has thus been instrumental in undermining the
Cartesian dichotomy in psychology of ‘internal’ versus ‘external,’
particularly with respect to identity. For constructionists, neither the
internal mind nor the external world is granted ontological status;
constructionists remain ontologically mute or agnostic about issues
regarding fundamentalism/ontology. Constructionists view all assumptions
about ‘internal minds’ and ‘external worlds’ as constituents of discursive
practices. Gergen (1994) thus problematizes psychology’s long-standing
commitment to a dualistic metaphysics, which assumes an external real
world which both influences and is reflected by an interior mind (or vice-
versa). Instead, he refers to constructionism as a social epistemology,
which collapses the distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ and
instead sees the locus of knowledge not in individual minds nor in extant
sociocultural realities, but rather in patterns of social relatedness.
Constructionists are thus aligned with the critical tradition because
they invite psychologists to begin their search for identity within
relationships/relationality, broadly construed. Relationality could be as
micro as a wink or utterance between two people, or it could be a macro
habitus, such as ‘western democracy’ or ‘capitalism.’ Relationality is
essentially a moniker for interactive contexts, both small and large.
Although social constructionism thus provides an emancipatory
philosophical and theoretical framework for psychologists interested in
interrogating both micro and macro contexts for the study of identity, it
nevertheless has limited analytic mileage as it does not offer a method per
se, nor does it lay out a nuanced, micro-interactional descriptive
vocabulary for analyzing identities as interactional phenomena. These
blind spots are taken up by ethnomethodological and discursive positioning
analytic programs.