One of the aims of formulating a rhetorical-responsive version of social constructionism corresponds with that mentioned above by Foucault: it can confront us with the 'real' socio-historical and socio-cultural conditions of our lives, those making the current nature of our consciousnesses possible - where, of course, in the view taken in this book, it is a part of what it is for these to be the 'real' conditions of our lives that all attempts to characterize them are, by their very nature, contested.