[...] An interactive category is a category in which the people named by the category can be affected by the category. When a person is diagnosed by a family practitioner as an alcoholic, that category is not simply a description but rather 1) the person so defined can adopt behaviors and thoughts in accord with the category, and 2) the category can change their social relations. The person defined by the doctor as an alcoholic might, for example, begin to draw on cultural narratives about what alcoholics are like - for example, the film Leaving Los Angeles - and begin to enact those behaviors where they didn't before. Likewise, the person's social relations can change as in the case where the doctor's diagnosis has legal ramifications, leading them to be forced into some form of treatment or even sent to an institution. Here's it worth remembering that these sorts of categories aren't simply a personal affair, but rather are a collective affair.

The point is that unlike rocks, persons and social systems interact with the categories that befall them. They take up attitudes and behaviors with respect to these categories. It is in this sense that people and social institutions are formed or constructed by signifiers and concepts. A media report that says the economy is bad is not simply a description of the economy, but becomes a call to action upon economic institutions, governments, and individual people regardless of whether it is true. By contrast, rocks adopt no attitude or behavior with respect to the way we categorize them. They go on behaving rockishly just as they always did before. The important point is that these categorizations are not simply a matter of us adopting an attitude pro or con with respect to how individually have been categorized. Rather, these categories function independent of us, socially, even where we think they're bullshit. The former Republican US Presidential candidate Herman Cain might think that racial categorizations are bullshit and that we're all free neoliberal subjects, but the social system still codes him in ways to which we must respond. Even where we doesn't adopt an attitude towards these things, the effect of these signifying structures still has a causal impact on him that delimit possibilities for him, that situate him socially in such a way, and that contribute to his life experiences and how he develops.

My point is that if we're true realists - and hopefully materialists! - we should be attentive to the properties of different types of systems. We should recognize those systems that have capacities of reflexivity or of taking up attitudes towards ways in which they are described and those systems that do not have these characteristics. And given this we should heartily embrace theories of social constructivism, recognizing that categorizations and signifying structures have a real impact on the operations of reflexive systems leading them to develop in particular way [sic]. [...] for certain types of systems descriptions have real constructive effects and for other types of systems descriptions do not. We should be able to have our Baudrillardian analysis of the system of objects as commodities imbued with symbolic value and our realism too.