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Everyday Essentialism
Social Inertia and the ‘Münchhausen Effect’

Dick Pels

Virtual Realities

R
ISING TO a classical challenge in theorizing the materiality of the
social 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 is
to make-believe that social orderings are (maintained by) self-fulfilling
prophecies which are stabilized by the reality effect of what I call ‘everyday
essentialism’. The ‘stickiness’ of the social, in other words, can in part be
explained 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 virtual
character. Which is not to say that they don’t exist. Rather, they are imagin-
ary objects which continually hover between fact and fiction; partial realities
which are not present in any rounded or fully accomplished manner, but are
implicated at each and every instant in processes of realization and dere-
alization. Social institutions and collectives are not transcendentally given
entities but collective fictions which produce a reality effect as long as they
are confirmed in their existence by means of recursive acts of belief and
practical investment.1 They are made to happen in and through the practical
work that is done here and now, in real time and on the spot; they are in a
permanent state of inauguration, and are incessantly at stake in attempts to
render them a little bigger or a little smaller. There is no hope for a final
definition or spatial overview of their ‘actual’ structure, because from the

 Theory, Culture & Society 2002 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),
Vol. 19(5/6): 69–89
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70 Theory, Culture & Society 19(5/6)

moment of last observation they have already changed into something

different from what they were (cf. Shotter, 1993: 103–4). Everything
happens in principle within the local face-to-face situation in which indi-
viduals do their practical construction work and mutually account for the
realities they are bringing into being. In between the human bodies and the
perspectives they embody there is ‘nothing’ apart from the material things
(the buildings, the letterheads, the traintracks, the glass fibre cables, the
organization charts, the budget figures) in which this virtual reality has
nested itself, and which lend it a (false) appearance of fixity, singularity, and
natural presence.2
This brand of constructivism is equally critical of everyday forms of
realism and essentialism as of the way in which mainstream social science
has tended to copy and epistemologically ratify them. Everyone, including
the social scientist, is in the business of constructing social realities and
acting performatively upon them; everybody inflates or deflates, enlarges or
diminishes the reality status of what is described or explained. Sociologists,
as much as ordinary actors, are interested in ‘acting at a distance’, in
mobilizing 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 social
scientists which is affirmed against the ignorance of their informants; it is
performatively accomplished by everyone’s attempts to describe it. Like
ordinary actors, sociologists define what keeps us all together; social
‘factors’ or ‘determinants’ are the special offering of social scientists who
make 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 the
people’, recounting how ordinary people live, who they are, how they
behave, what their true motives and interests are, how they must be ranked
in statuses and classes, how the social space must be carved up in fields
and figurations, sectors and subsystems. Because these structures and
systems are identified and named in an authoritative way (e.g. by scientific
means), they grow in their reality. They become thicker or thinner by virtue
of 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 same
way 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 presents
through the chimneys to please all ‘good’ children. This is a time when all
parents and half of all the children collectively act ‘as if’ in order to let the
red-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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Pels – Everyday Essentialism 71

of those around you conspire to reconfirm the fiction. The belief in other
bishops and placeholders of God likewise erodes only slowly as a result of
the 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 and
have wrought objects, rules, and institutions which constrain and stand in
the way of unbelievers like myself. This of course puts Him in the same
category as UFOs, unicorns, fairies, goblins, and demons; who all enjoy a
material existence to the extent that other people successfully force their
beliefs upon me. And their ontological status varies, is built up and broken
down as such entities manage to bind or unbind other forces and entities,
enlarge or diminish their remit of action, become further institutionalized
or fall into destitution.
As Bakunin and other anarchists knew, the belief in God does not
differ essentially from the belief in the State (or in Science, Truth, and the
Intellectuals). Marx, Bakunin’s great political and intellectual antipode,
merely repeats an old anarchist piece of wisdom when announcing in a
forgotten footnote in Capital: ‘One man is king only because other men stand
in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the contrary, imagine that they
are 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 sits
with the materialist tenor of his analysis of commodity fetishism (and of his
second-order fetishization of scientific truth). It more nearly agrees with
Bourdieu’s account of political fetishism: a process of reversal in the course
of which the political spokesperson substitutes himself for the group,
considering himself the real creator of the reality of the group, since all
those involved misrecognize that his power depends at each and every
moment 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 person
himself (Bourdieu, 1991: 203ff., 248–50). But power is not an essence or a
thing, or a personal quality or property of powerful persons, but a social
relationship which needs to be accomplished from one moment to another
by means of acts of belief and tokens of recognition. Power relations require
the hard work of all concerned, both the powerful and the powerless, in
order to substantiate and deliver them and render them true and valid.
According to Barnes, it is therefore almost true when Durkheim states that
social facts are things which are exterior to the individual. His example is
that of a gang in which each individual member observes that John is the
leader by taking notice of the actions of all the others, and derive from it
what the others know or believe about John’s position. The power relation-
ship constitutes a virtually closed circle of self-fulfilling action. It is defined
by all involved as a whole, and at every moment fixed and certified as a
working social order. The ‘error’ of conceiving of the social fact of John’s
leadership as external is then so extremely small that it does not have
practical validity, even though a small portion of John’s authority is in fact

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72 Theory, Culture & Society 19(5/6)

‘interior’ to each individual, since it depends upon his own belief in the
legitimacy of John’s leadership. For most practical purposes, Barnes
assumes, the individual may safely neglect his own small contribution to
social reality (Barnes, 1988: 51).4
Things and Reifications
The idea of power balances which exist in ‘a hollow ring of belief and action’
(Barnes, 1988: 50) re-focuses the more general paradox which centrally
occupies 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 intractability
and inertia? How can these momentaneous local productions explain the
sheer span and durability of social orders, their heavy-handed grip on the
individuals who ‘make them happen’, and the mechanical routine which
ensures their transgenerational re-creation? A radically constructivist
account of social reality equally radically confronts us with what has been
called the ‘genetic paradox of institutionalization’, according to which social
institutions are inextricably both ‘works of freedom’ and ‘works of imprison-
ment’ (Beerling, 1964; cf. Giddens, 1984). How does it come to be, to recoup
a classical version of this paradox, that the relations between individuals
acquire an autonomous existence over against them? That the powers of
their own life become all-powerful against them (Marx and Engels, 1969:
540)? How can this strong form of epistem/ontological subjectivism carry
the dead weight of collective reality? A constructivist here appears to get
himself 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 or
fetishize them, i.e. because in the routine conduct of everyday life we tend
to consider social facts as things and behave towards them as such. If this
is 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 and
reinforces the ‘natural attitude’ which ordinary actors adopt most (but not
all) of the time towards the institutional world which envelops them. The
fetishization of social reality is duplicated on the second-order level of
scientific analysis. More sceptical approaches such as phenomenology or
ethnomethodology, which incline towards the opposite view (consider social
facts 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 of
accounting and reflexive monitoring of action) crucially preconditions the
reproduction of durable social worlds (cf. Pollner, 1987; Hilbert, 1992).
However, while they admit reflexivity and performativity on the first-order

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Pels – Everyday Essentialism 73

actorial level, such approaches appear also in some way to confirm the
‘natural attitude’ of everyday sense-making, insofar as they embrace an
agnostic descriptivism which is unwilling to ‘ironize’ or critically ‘remedy’
the work of everyday reification, preferring to view it as a remarkable
accomplishment 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 granted
some of the objectivist features of endogenous (knowledge) practices, while
the latter still underestimate the reflexive ingenuity of actors who are able
to playfully negotiate and stage their reifications (e.g. by ‘acting as if’).
This train of thought introduces the anti-realist ‘rule’ that social facts
must not be considered as things but as reifications (Pels, 1990b; Taussig,
1993: 226); they are fetishes and black boxes, and everyday realism and
essentialism are crucially important in consecrating them as such and
sealing 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 of
authority, 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 of
fetishism and reification, which in postmodern quarters may sound old fash-
ioned and passé, but which I like to replicate here: people erect false idols
in order to kneel before the products of their own handiwork; the products
outgrow and rise up against their producers; social relations and definitions
become independent and posit themselves as thing-like foreign powers over
against the acting and defining individuals themselves. The shape which
this classical formula adopts here is the following: because and insofar as
people consider social facts as things, because and insofar as they experi-
ence and describe them as natural, failing to recognize that they casually
reconfirm their matter-of-factness and transcendent singularity, they
rebound upon the individuals with the force of things, which carry real and
hard consequences for their everyday behaviour.6
This hypothesis largely determines the further search plan of this
article. There are two issues which need to be more fully addressed. First,
we need to look more closely into the performative grammar of everyday
realism and essentialism, which will necessitate a brief excursion into
speech act theory. If descriptions fulfil numerous functions over and above
the 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 my
critical formula reiterates in sharpened epistemological form. On the one
hand, I wish to argue that the circular logic of the self-fulfilling prophecy
has a much larger action radius and is much more constitutive of collective
patterns of action than its classical formulations are ready to accept. I

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74 Theory, Culture & Society 19(5/6)

suspect not merely that most social facts take the shape of self-fulfilling
prophecies, but also that it is precisely through the impact of everyday
essentialism that definitions of the situation rebound so massively and
painfully upon the definers themselves. This incidentally presumes that my
own critical approach does not itself slip back into the realist mode, and
does 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 reification
which does not revert to new reifications, or merely undertakes to smash
one fetish with the aid of another (cf. Latour, 1996a, 1999). In contrast to
the lingering naturalism of both structuralist and interpretive analytics, the
new critique must not hesitate to reflexively duplicate the logic of perfor-
mativity for the critical observer him/herself.

Magical Realism
Following Wittgenstein’s famous aphorism that ‘words are also deeds’, and
Austin’s view that one can do (all sorts of) things with words (Wittgenstein,
1998: 140; Austin, 1962), the idea of the performative infrastructure of
language 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 contextualist
history of ideas, Bourdieu’s sociology of language, Butler’s analysis of
gender, and the science and technology studies of Latour, Pickering, and
Law. 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 construct
or create (part of) it, since the described state of affairs only exists as soon
as the utterance is made (e.g. ‘I declare this court to be in session’). But as
Austin’s own analyses tended to bring out, performatives did not so much
constitute a separate class of utterances over against constatives, but rather
defined a constitutive element in all linguistic communication, including
formally neutral descriptive statements. Austin himself increasingly focused
upon utterances which curiously wavered between descriptive and perfor-
mative modes (1962: 85), which suggested that the descriptive fallacy was
perhaps more deeply anchored in everyday language use than originally
presupposed. 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 is
often discharged through a semantic detour, being actively disguised by the
factually constative linguistic form. The reification then performs a magical
reality effect: what is identified as a fact is surreptitiously confirmed in its
factuality and strengthened as an entity which is naturally and objectively
present.7

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Pels – Everyday Essentialism 75

There is no need to search far and wide in order to encounter everyday

examples of this linguistic-epistemological sleight of hand. All domains of
social action feature an endless game of reality construction and destruc-
tion, in the course of which social objects, positions, statuses or identities
are rendered bigger or smaller by describing, naming, or classifying them
in a naturalistic way. Modern politics, which depends so intensely upon
credibility, presentation, image, and spin (and hence upon an intricate
collusion with the modern mass media), offers a first stream of examples.
On a daily basis, politicians claim and journalists report that the credibility
or image of a minister, of the cabinet, or of the political enterprise in its
entirety has been ‘damaged’, ‘tarnished’ or ‘hurt’, that the position of
particular individuals has become ‘compromised’, ‘doubtful’ or even ‘unten-
able’, that the government’s policies have ‘received a painful setback’, or
that the opposition party has now ‘completely lost the plot’. In reverse, a
politician may have ‘scored well’ in debate, the cabinet may have ‘emerged
from the crisis in strength’, while the opposition, after having previously
‘slumped’ and ‘roamed in the desert’, may presently be demonstrating a ‘new
élan’. All these descriptions add or subtract a bit of performative energy to
or from the situation at hand, enabling the spokesperson to add his or her
own small contribution to the perceived strength or weakness of the
positions which are initially represented as existing independently of such
interested judgments (‘Chirac heads for fatal fall’; ‘In Washington, Albright’s
star 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 to
Portillo’s hopes’; ‘The Hinduja affair may leave a permanent cloud over
Peter Mandelson’s name’; ‘Mayor Giuliani is God’). Recall the not untypi-
cal scene of a trade union leader announcing on the national news that ‘he
thinks that the threat of industrial action has now become very real’, while
this public statement by an authorized spokesperson of course itself consti-
tutes a threat to initiate strike action. Neither need one be bemused by the
strange habit of officially ‘conceding’ an election defeat, as if the defeat did
not really exist prior to the very instant at which one is prepared to publicly
acknowledge it. A similar Münchhausen logic determines the diplomatic
attitude towards allegedly ‘criminal’ regimes whose existence is stubbornly
denied, so that they exist a little less solidly than when one would officially
recognize them. Such performative circularity may for example explain why
the breakthrough in the Middle East peace process of a few years back only
became feasible as soon as the Palestinian side promised to scrap a raft of
articles in the Palestinian Charter which pretended or implied that the state
of 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 world
of sports, where the never-ending contest about honour, credibility and one’s
good name similarly plays a reality-constituting role. ‘Bergkamp loses credit
with players’, according to an old newspaper report about the Dutch national
team:

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76 Theory, Culture & Society 19(5/6)

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 was
already split up. In the San Siro, Bergkamp has lost his self-confidence and
even in England, where the Amsterdammer is revered as a demi-god, he has
not been able to recover his earlier form . . . The man who last year still
commanded a market value of 20m guilders and earned 50.000 a month,
looked in the match against Scotland like an average striker [obviously, these
gloomy lines were written far in advance of Bergkamp’s subsequent successes
with 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 and
thereby threatening ‘to stain the reputation of the national game’. Tony Blair
had previously added his own not inconsiderable drop by declaring that, if
Hoddle had actually said what he was reported to have said, ‘it would be
very 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 sports
association in the Netherlands. His position was widely seen as having
become ‘untenable’ after a few uncouth remarks about the Dutch Crown
Prince’s inclusion in an ‘undemocratic’ organ such as the IOC. The
chairman’s arch-rival, a former judo world champ and a long-standing IOC
executive member, claiming that his good name had become tarnished,
reverted to a classical performative conjuration which often poisons
everyday brouilles: ‘As far as I am concerned, he does no longer exist’ (see
Sharon’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 feel
more comfortable in a Peugeot’. ‘There’s more and more fun at V&D’, it was
claimed in the midst of unfavourable financial reporting about the Dutch
department store. As a publicity agent commented: ‘They apparently sensed
that it was high time to introduce more fun at V&D and decided their
campaign to say that it was becoming more fun every day’.
Examples such as these indicate that sometimes people are perfectly
aware of what they are doing when they wield performative language and
conjure up a social (some)thing out of nothing. In contrast, it is rather poorly
appreciated how profoundly performative mechanisms are rooted in a
supposedly more distanced and methodologically purified practice such as
science, and how intellectual power positions are continually built up and
broken down by describing them as strong or weak (‘that argument is not a
strong one’; ‘that thesis is untenable’), more or less prestigious (‘he has been
to Harvard’), or as more or less adequate to reality (‘parapsychology is a
pseudo-science’). Titles such as Knorr Cetina and Cicourel’s Advances in
Social 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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Pels – Everyday Essentialism 77

to be advertised as ‘really existing socialism’. Incidents and scandals rack

this 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 been
irreparably damaged by the controversy over GM foodcrops’; ‘David Irving’s
reputation as a historian lies in tatters after the High Court conviction’. More
ordinary descriptive judgements likewise perform their creative work: ‘Marx
is dead (but still not buried)’; ‘The postmodernist hype is now finally on the
way 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 to
the four greatest prose works of the twentieth century’; ‘this book is a
landmark, a pioneering work of vital interest to . . .’; ‘Pierre Bourdieu is
widely recognized as one of the most important sociologists of the postwar
period’.
The Power of Words
It is Pierre Bourdieu, indeed, who has explicitly elaborated speech act
theory 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 are
invariably relations of power, that there are no neutral propositions, and that
how things are classified and named is incessantly at stake in social
struggles. While Austin is commended for his sensitivity to the contextual
framing of language use, he is also criticized for his tendency to locate the
power of words exclusively in linguistic forms and insufficiently in the insti-
tutional conditions of language use. The magically generative force of
language, which creates what it states, precisely unfolds through the social
weight of authoritative spokespersons, which varies with the extent of insti-
tutionalized recognition of their authority. Performative effectiveness
immediately derives from the capacity of spokespersons or ‘authorities’ to
enforce collective recognition and hence to realize their representations with
the aid of an accredited and therefore credible language. Performatives are
acts 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 ordinary
citizen, proclaim a general mobilization in the middle of Trafalgar Square?
The actual source of the performative magic therefore lies in the ‘mystery
of ministry’, i.e. the delegation by means of which an individual (a king, a
priest, a spokesperson) is officially sanctioned to speak and act in the name
of a group, which is simultaneously constituted in him and through his
actions. The power of the word is nothing but the delegated power of the
spokesperson (Bourdieu, 1991: 72–5, 105–9).8
Let me note three critical points about this sociological account of
performativity. First, Bourdieu’s criticism of Austin’s sociological naiveté
appears somewhat overdrawn. The latter does clearly introduce his
‘conditions of felicity’ for performative speech as social and cultural

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78 Theory, Culture & Society 19(5/6)

conditions, and demonstrates a fair grasp of the impact of authority relations

on linguistic action (cf. Austin, 1971). Secondly, Bourdieu appears in turn
to underestimate the extent to which the illocutionary power of language
may be induced by particular linguistic-epistemological structures which
actively disguise the performative charge – as is typically the case in realist
or essentialist modes of speech. Of course, the reality effect is enhanced to
the degree that representations are better authorized or command a wider
social recognition. But the power of language does not merely originate from
the social ‘outside’ but also from the ‘inside’, because it is inscribed in the
performative grammar of the utterance itself. It is not exclusively social
authorities which lend words their weight; words are also linguistically or
grammatically empowered. Bourdieu, to be sure, does recognize the
masking of performatives as constatives as a token of symbolic violence,
irrespective of whether this masquerade is perpetrated by ordinary
spokespersons 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’ which
locks together the dominant and the dominated parties in a power relation-
ship. The language of authority never rules without the complicity of those
who are subjected to it. This double bind becomes a little less intractable
as 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 to
their own domination; but also that they tend to wrap this everyday recog-
nition in the same reificatory language which the authorities themselves
employ in order to legitimize their positions of power. From both sides, the
relationship 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 marks
the crucial lack of reflexivity in an approach which takes great pride in its
unique reflexive sensibility (cf. Pels, 2000a). With an uncanny sharpness
of sociological wit, Bourdieu has traced the performative magic of everyday
realism and essentialism, demonstrating how authorized representations
actively shape the world which they describe or classify. His fine-grained
analyses of e.g. institution rituals show how people attribute a particular
social essence to each other, which frames and fixes who they are and hence
how they must behave. ‘You are a little girl, aren’t you’? The parent does
not tell the child what it should do but who she is; as a result of which the
child 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 of
institution as a solemn act of categorization which tends to produce what it
designates’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 51, 120–1). In his analysis of the regionalist
and ethnic discourse of identity, Bourdieu similarly highlights the perfor-
mative force of practical classifications which contribute to the production
of what they describe (1991: 220). Every objectivity claim with regard to
the actual or potential existence of a region, an ethnic group, or a social
class, represents a claim to institute which enhances their chances for

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Pels – Everyday Essentialism 79

survival. Political and juridical classifications likewise make or break

collective identities to the extent that they succeed in imposing legitimate
divisions and boundaries. In this regard, the statement ‘there are two
classes, i.e. bourgeoisie and proletariat’, does not differ principally from the
statement: ‘the meeting is opened’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 134). Even academic
conflicts, which are to a larger degree swaddled in euphemization, regularly
feature essentialist accusations which are dressed up as classificatory
concepts: 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), which
answers to a logic which principally differs from the work of science. Even
though sociology finds itself heavily implicated in symbolic struggles of
classification, and often arrogates the authority to draw boundaries between
classes, regions, or nations in order to proclaim whether they do or do not
exist (1990: 179–80; 1991: 106, 242–3), it must not become enmeshed in
this 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 to
classes and of thereby telling them what they are and what they have to be
. . . they must objectify the ambition of objectifying, of classifying from
outside, 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 this

classificatory struggle can be observed, including the position which is
occupied by the sociologist, who is deemed capable of telling the truth about
a struggle where the major stake is the truth about the social world. But this
objectivist pretension of totality implies that, ultimately, the performative
logic must be banned from sociological discourse itself which, although
never neutral in its impact, is constative and explanatory in its primary
epistemological drive (1990: 181–4; 1993: 10–11). The critical analysis of
everyday essentialism is only achieved on the object level (and generously
applied to all sociological rivals), and not reflexively extended towards a
self-consciously performative conception of sociological practice. Socio-
logical realism, however, by authoritatively proclaiming what does and does
not exist, contributes to the realization or derealization of what it describes
or explains in a manner which does not differ essentially from the perfor-
mative politics of everyday life – even though it is a continuation of these
politics by the different means of science.

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80 Theory, Culture & Society 19(5/6)

The Natural Proximity of Facts and Values

An intriguing and central feature of the logic of performative reality
construction is that descriptive and prescriptive strands of judgment
crossover and mingle in almost ‘natural’ fashion. Performative statements
are not purely descriptive, because the described state of affairs only comes
into being when the statement is made; but neither are they purely prescrip-
tive, because they do something rather than say that something should be
done; instead of calling for action they themselves constitute the action. This
primordial entanglement of fact and value supplies one of the sources of
energy which engender the knowledge-political construction effect. Factual
statements often display a crypto-normative infrastructure, because they
identify ‘normative facts’ which are indirectly productive of reality precisely
on account of their subdued and unacknowledged normative tension. A self-
consciously performative theory, in other words, should discard the classical
epistemological split between analytical and normative theory and its atten-
dant postulate of value-freedom, in order to acknowledge and cheerfully
accept this internal mix or ‘natural proximity’ of facts and values for its own
epistemological practice (Pels, 1990a, 2003: ch. 4).
Both in Austin and Searle, speech act theory is already strongly
tempted to disavow any stringent dualism between facts and values,
allowing for a far greater continuity between ‘ought’ and ‘is’ than is
considered appropriate in more traditional social methodologies and
philosophies of science. Austin’s detailed examination of speech acts
reflected his intention ‘to play old Harry with two fetishes which I admit to
an inclination to play old Harry with, viz. (1) the true/false fetish, (2) the
value/fact fetish’ (1962: 151). In a familiar analysis of the making of
promises and other institutional facts, Searle argued that the naturalistic
fallacy itself perhaps originated in a fallacy, since it is quite possible to
derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ on logically defensible grounds (Searle, 1969:
175). Neo-Aristotelian approaches to virtue likewise dismiss the idea that
the 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 most
innocuous functional concepts (‘watch’, ‘farmer’) already delineate a goal
and hence cannot be defined independently from their good, valid or
virtuous incarnations.9 ‘That is not (good) English’; ‘This is no longer
football, this is all-out war’; ‘Only in the second half Ajax stopped playing
anti-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 an
exciting action film looks like’; ‘The San Siro did not glimpse the real
Ronaldo until just past the half hour when he sold Stam an exquisite dummy
only 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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Pels – Everyday Essentialism 81

separation between normative and explanatory theory, the normative defi-

nition of (true) science nevertheless coincides with a description of its
supposedly most elevated form: the actual practice of great thinkers and
inventors. 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 a
different line of work’. ‘There are no good artists any longer, Walter, there
are artists with money and there are artists without money and the artists
without money are no artists at all’ (Joost Zwagerman, Gimmick!). Mountain
climber Simpson to his colleague Naar: ‘The ordinary public that doesn’t
know 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 this
intrinsic meshing of value and fact. ‘The Spice Girls are now definitively on
their way out’: the evaluative assessment is packaged as a constative
description. Despite first appearances, this is not quite what is traditionally
targeted as the ‘naturalistic fallacy’, which illegitimately passes off values
as facts or derives the latter from the former. Indeed, insofar as it ‘merely’
forbids any categorical reduction of values to facts or vice versa, the
classical formula of the naturalistic fallacy continues to lean upon a prior
epistemological separation between them; it does not issue in the (presum-
ably absurd and dangerous) epistemological advice to consciously and
cheerfully throw them together. In the critical approach favoured here, reifi-
cation and naturalization instead emerge because an originary fact/value
mix is split and halved to leave only a factual constative in which never-
theless the normative or knowledge-political element continues to burrow
and proliferate. In this process, the ‘normative fact’ is stripped of all subjec-
tive and context-referring modalities and neutralized into a description
which lacks an identifiable purpose, standpoint, or spokesperson (cf. Potter
and Wetherell, 1988). This view enables us to retain the general purpose of
the naturalistic critique, without forcing us back into the dualism that still
dominates 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 fact
to norm whenever one authoritatively proclaims who a person ‘is’ and hence
what (s)he ‘should be’. The indicative functions as an imperative: ‘become
who you are’; ‘A real man wouldn’t back down from something like that’; ‘A
Pels would never do such a thing’. But the preceding account invites us to
be more precise: essentialism always commingles facts and values, in order
to project both into a transcendental realm from which their spokespersons
are forever exiled. Essences are also normative facts which are stripped of
their spaced and timed character in order to operate as supposedly external
and objective constraints. In this fashion, both performativism and essen-
tialism consider facts and values to be intrinsically interwoven; their crucial
difference is located not in the mixture itself but in the way in which

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82 Theory, Culture & Society 19(5/6)

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’ for
its intolerable mixture of facts and values, while itself claiming to generate
neutral descriptions and explanations (e.g. Elias, 1978, 1987). Or as
Bourdieu argues: ordinary language never describes the social world merely
as it is but simultaneously as it should be, and hence virtually always
generates performative effects; which is why sociology, which in his view
intends to operate only constatively in order to take the world ‘as it is’, has
every 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 logic
because it reiterates this everyday objectivism on a more sophisticated
methodological 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 contrast
rather emerges between approaches (both on the level of ‘science’ and that
of ‘common sense’) which actively embrace the inseparability of description
and evaluation and hence reflexively acknowledge the performative reality
effect, and those accounts (everyday essentialism, realist sociology, objec-
tivist epistemology) which separate themselves from the performativity of
their own constructions, and actively work to eliminate it.
The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
In conclusion, I like to focus more intently upon the curious phenomenon
of the ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’, as it has been classically defined by Thomas
and Merton. Austinian performatives indeed appear to operate exactly like
self-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 what
they state. The ‘Thomas theorem’ (‘If men define situations as real, they are
real in their consequences’) at least offers one familiar rule of thumb in a
science which is otherwise poorly endowed with such widely shared apho-
risms. Merton considers it a crucial theoretical insight which is relevant to
many if not all social processes (1973: 421). Giddens likewise views it as
a special case of a more general social phenomenon (1984: xxxii); but he
fails to elaborate it as centrally as e.g. the interpretivist or labelling theory
of 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 more
crucial theoretical status (cf. Berger and Luckmann, 1966; McHugh, 1986;
Filmer et al., 1972; Potter, 1996; Hutchby and Wooffitt, 1998). Barnes
provisionally stakes out the most radical claim when he describes society
as a division of knowledge which is based upon practical knowing and

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Pels – Everyday Essentialism 83

recurrently confirmed belief, and accordingly views social reality as ‘a

sublime, monumental self-fulfilling prophecy’ (1988: 52).
The Thomas theorem therefore varies on a broad range from rather
quiet to more radical epistemological interpretations. In the constructivist
conception which is favoured by Barnes – and which I like to support here
– the performative logic of situational definition plays a much larger role in
the everyday (and scientific) construction of reality than was originally
envisaged by either Thomas or Merton. That its far-reaching impact went
unrecognized 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 the
objective features of the situation and the variable interpretation which one
may attach to them, so that the self-fulfulling prophecy emerges as a ‘real’
consequence of an ‘unreal’ definition of the situation; an initially erroneous
account elicits new behaviour which transforms the originally misguided
picture into a true one (1973: 422–3). Following Merton, it is a mechanism
which translates unfounded, fear-inspired images into cold, hard facts; a
tragically vicious circle which can only be breached by discarding the
original definition itself. Merton’s analysis hence presumes that one may
consciously and planfully halt the workings of this vicious performativity on
the basis of insights which are deliverable by scientific sociology (1973:
424, 435).12
As a result, the critical analysis of reification once again relapses into
sociological 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, and
the epistemological circle is far more closed (but simultaneously far less
vicious) than would be acceptable to Merton, who continues to take for
granted that there exist true and false definitions of the situation which are
independent of what people actually think or believe about it (Krishna,
1971). If consciousness, belief, imagination, and values instead constitute
the reality of social situations in a more immediate and integral fashion, one
may legitimately question whether the self-fulfilling prophecy can in fact be
abolished 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 limited
application of the Thomas theorem results from the persistence of an objec-
tivistic theory of representation which mistakenly turns the self-fulfilling
prophecy into a pathological phenomenon. But the phenomenon of ‘boot-
strapped induction’, as he prefers to call it, is ineradicable. Social life
represents a gigantic bootstrap operation in which circular, self-validating
definitions of the situation routinely render these situations true or untrue
(Barnes, 1983: 536). As with Merton, naturalization and reification result
from the erasure of the feedback loop, of the circularity of perspectivist
reality construction. But the essential difference is that Barnes reflexively

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84 Theory, Culture & Society 19(5/6)

duplicates this insight for sociology itself; which is likewise seen as continu-
ally engaged in ‘bringing off’ bootstrapped inductions which cannot find
their grounding in an autonomously accessible social world.
Next to Sinterklaas, this view therefore elevates the famed Baron Von
Münchhausen 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 of
social constitution. This mechanism is no longer seen to rely on traditional
forms of social realism, but conceives of social (dis)order as a virtual reality
which is continually brought off in situ, in real-time local contexts, by means
of 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 them
differently, interprets their unity or diversity and their coherence (or lack
of it) from his/her specific position and perspective. They are fictions that
carry very real consequences. No one ‘reflects’ a pre-given structure: every
one pushes and pulls at it, works upon it, modifies it, in order to render it
a little more solid or a little more fluid. This view also reflexively applies
to social scientists, who likewise operate upon the social order from a
perspective which is dictated by the peculiar temporality of their slow-paced
or ‘unhastened’ professional practice. Social facts must not be considered
as things but as reifications, which come into being because (and insofar as)
actors fail to calculate their own performative contribution to them, and as
a result continue to define and treat them as things. This performative circle
is only vicious as long as it is not recognized for what it is and cheerfully
practised 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 the
extent that – actors reflexively include themselves in their performances of
the social world, they will be able to play with (rather than succumb to) their
reifications, and will believably “act as if” (rather than fully believe) that
these things “really exist” ’.

Notes
1. See also Harré (1975) and Knorr Cetina (1994) on fictionality as a routine
component of social life. Bourdieu similarly advances that ‘It can be said without
contradiction both that social realities are social fictions with no other basis than
social construction, and that they really exist, inasmuch as they are collectively
recognized’ (1996: 20). See further below for a critical view of Bourdieu’s residual
social 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 similarly
take their cue from a strong nominalistic conception of social facticity. However, it
seeks to qualify such accounts by reaffirming a more traditional view of the

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Pels – Everyday Essentialism 85

‘stickiness’ of the social as resulting from symbolic reification. I like to extend the
notion of ‘relative existence’ (Latour, 2000) once again from scientific facts and
technological objects to re-cover ‘Durkheimian’ institutional facts, which some of
these accounts consider too weak to hold the social world together. Another ‘non-
objectual’ candidate factor of social cohesion in individualizing consumer societies
is offered by the increasing salience of celebrities as ‘audience-subjects’ (cf.
Marshall, 1997). Such public individuals act and function like social institutions
and in this respect effectively bridge the micro–macro divide.
3. See e.g. Godwin’s conviction that ‘government rests entirely upon opinion’ and
only exists by the grace of ‘confidence’ (1976 [1793]: 148, 181–2, 247–8). This
classical anarchist insight prefigures interactionist and reputational conceptions of
power exercise such as offered by Collins: ‘Power, as well as fall from power, is a
self-fulfilling prophecy, which operates along mutually reinforcing chains of conver-
sation’ (1981b: 104; 1981a: 994). This micro-logic is generalized towards the social
structure of property and authority (Collins, 1981a: 1004, 1009). Cf. also Abrams’s
view of the state as an ‘essentially imaginative construction’ (1988: 76–7, 82) and
Taussig’s similar notion of ‘state fetishism’ (1993: 219).
4. On this last point, I like to register some disagreement. Precisely because social
reality is stabilized through the contributions of all individuals concerned, it is
essential to maintain a permanent awareness of its incessantly constructed and
accomplished character. It is intriguing to notice how closely an ethnomethodolo-
gist such as Hilbert, who tends to bracket all belief in social structures, underwrites
a 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 ethnomethodologists
appear unwilling to critically correct the everyday reification of social facts, but are
satisfied 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 Laclau
and Zizek, already generalizes to ideological and political signifiers such as God,
Class, Country, and Party (Butler, 1993: 99). Acts, gestures and enactments which
produce an effect of transcendence or causal substance ‘are performative in the
sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabri-
cations manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive
means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological
status 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 results
from ‘a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of
boundary, fixity and surface we call matter’ (Butler, 1993: 9, italics omitted). On
Butler and performativity see also Bell (1999). On the critical linkages between
linguistic performativity and performance studies in the line of Turner, Goffman,
and Schechner, see e.g. Carlson (1996) and Schieffelin (1998).

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86 Theory, Culture & Society 19(5/6)

7. The indicative mode is the least clearly marked speech mode, behind which
may 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 as
many statements about an undesirable state of affairs which express a request or
activate 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 that
it is often resorted to in situations of tension and conflict. This is the gist of the
familiar example elaborated by Potter, in which Diane says to Alan, after having
heard a suspicious noise which may be caused by a burglar: ‘you’ve got your shoes
on’. Once again, the descriptive mode is far from neutral or coolly objective, but is
manifestly anxiety-ridden and action-oriented, offering a means to divert attention
from oneself and to put pressure upon others (Potter, 1996: 108–9). Cf. also Potter
and Wetherell (1988).
8. I provide a more extensive discussion of representation and spokespersonship
in science and politics in Pels (2000b).
9. Cf. also Searle (1995: 22) on concepts such as ‘husband’ and ‘citizen’, and
Bourdieu (1996: 20) on the concept of the ‘family’. Functional descriptions always
include both an upper and a lower threshold which are connected by means of a
normative 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 and
Luckmann’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 the
figurations in which they are caught up is virtually always imperfect, incomplete
and 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 Sciences

at Brunel University and a Senior Research Affiliate of the Amsterdam
School for Social Science Research. He is the author of Property and Power.
A Study in Intellectual Rivalry (Routledge, 1998); The Intellectual as
Stranger. Studies in Spokespersonship (Routledge, 2000); Unhastening
Science. Autonomy and Reflexivity in the Social Theory of Knowledge
(University of Liverpool Press, forthcoming 2003) and co-editor (with John
Corner) of Media and the Restyling of Politics (Sage, forthcoming 2003). He
is an associate editor of Theory, Culture & Society.

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