The blind spot of constructionism … is that on the one hand it reduces everything to the level of construction and, on the other hand, it occupies a metalinguistic or essentialist position outside construction.
Thus, in order to de-essentialise constructionist argumentation we need to relate the production of reality constructions to something external to the level of construction itself.
This exteriority, however, cannot be a transparent exteriority, a new essence which is objectively accessible. If that was the case we would have a return to traditional essentialism and objectivism. In other words, this outside cannot be a base on which the superstructure of reality constructions is erected.
It has to be an exteriority impossible to represent, to construct at the level of symbolic meaning, but also impossible to avoid. …
But why is that exteriority necessary? It is not only because otherwise social constructionism becomes essentialist. It is also because any tautological entrapment into the world of social construction is incapable of providing an account of the cause that governs the productions of social constructions of reality.
The crucial question that social constructionism is incapable of answering is the following: if the level of construction is engulfing the totality of the real, what stimulates the production of new social constructions?
This cause has to be something external to the level of construction itself otherwise the argument enters into a tautological spiral. We have established then so far that in order to de-essentialise the constructionist argument and reveal the logic that governs its production and articulation, without however reoccupying a traditional essentialist position, we have to locate an exteriority which serves as the cause of our social constructions, an exteriority which is in itself unrepresentable but constitutive of the play of representation.
What can this element be? Answer: Dislocation
Stavrakakis 1999, 66-67