Postkonstruktivismus - Jenseits von Postmoderne und cultural turn

This paper seeks to explore some idiosyncrasies in postmodern and poststructuralist thought. Given the popularity of the cultural turn in social sciences as a mainstream of Western academia, we try to reconstruct the most problematic logic at work there: the assumption that the world is a “construction” of signs, symbols or discourses and that there is no 'real reality' based on social materiality 'behind'. Unfortunately, this type of constructivism, which we would like to classify as 'vulgar', avoids to apply these thought to it's own dogma. It therefore trapped in a logical dilemma and contradicts most of its own arguments, which we would like to illustrate by three popular assertions. It is this critique, which brings us to confront vulgar constructivism with aspects of various types of critical theory (Lacanianism, constructive realism and Bourdieu's class analysis) to argue for a postconstructivist approach, which gives up the 'arbitrarity'-mantra in vulgar constructivism for a 'necessity'-approach to social reality. This should help to provide the basis for a more profound understanding and critique of life world phenomena than postmodern constructivism can apply.