"Peter K." wrote:
> Carrol:
> >Now you really don't have to consult Lacan to know that sitting
> >together eating donuts and chatting is better than standing
> >around in the dark watching four or five strangers do a bad
> >job of singing freedom songs.
>
> Still, saying one is better than the other means you have a theory,
> even if it's nothing more than intuitive, so for example someone
> wants to know why it's better, you'd just answer "it is, trust me."
One can play lots of games with the *word* "theory," but if we are going to use it for substantial communcative purposes there must be some limits on its scope. I have in earlier posts indicated that one necessarily uses what might be called "folk psychology," a complex (and often contradictory) set of tacit or explict rules of thumb. People won't like it if you say hello by stomping on their instep. Most people would rather sit on a davenport than crouch in a cesspool while they are reading the paper. If the room is brightly lit you are apt to see a spot on the wall sooner than you would if the room were dimly lit. (According to the grapevine at the U.of M. in the late '50s someone was enjoying a grant of $100 thousand a year from the Navy Dept. for research proving such points as the last one.) I have also said that formal psychology can and does collect useful empirical data that can be used by the social theorist or the neuroscientist.
I have consistently denied that psychology can *explain* anything. I take it as tacit knowledge that most people would rather sit around chatting than stand in the chilly dark watching rituals that held no meaning for them. I absolutely deny that what is called psychology can explain that fact -- it can only give labels which, as Marx said of "Providence," are only a sort of paraphrase of the facts, not an explanation.
Freud's *Psychopathology of Everyday Life* and *Interpretation of Dreams* are fine late-Romantic novels, and just as *Bleak House*, *Dombey and Son*, and *Our Mutual Friend* dramatize what it feels like to live in the modern city (now modern world) and *The Cantos* dramatize beautifully what the (Platonic) American Dream looks like when taken with deadly seriousness, so these works of Freud let us see, raised to the highest level of theory, what it feels like, while living in a world of abstract individuals existing prior to and autonomously of social relations, to imagine those individuals as though they were concrete and existing.
More importantly, they let us see how the most rational and conscious -- even highly self-conscious -- thinking can generate the most bizarre and irrational results. Could any sane man, the reader cannot but ask, propose such fantasies? (One can ask this either of the *Interpretation of Dreams* or of *The Cantos.*) But just as we must admit the rationality (when seen from "inside") of the voices that speak to the sufferer from schizophrenia, so to make sense of Freud's fantasies regarding dreams and verbal slips or of Pound's visions of conspiracy we must see them from the perspective of that history which is the man, a history which unfolds in the case of Freud within the overlap of 19th century positivist science and the bourgeois illusion of the abstract (free) individual. Within that framework his arguments are entirely rational and entirely conscious. (Of course this only identifies the grosser elements in that history we call Freud, ignoring all the contingencies and relationships which defined its specificity.) He was not mad but only trapped in a history that activated an overwhelming desire to explain what cannot be explained because wholly contingent.
The contingent can be described, and general tendencies noted, but if those notations of general tendencies are mistaken for explanations with historical or neurological force, sheer chaos results and endless fidgetting. Please note that all attempts to use Lacan or Freud for purposes of social explanation are merely disguised pleas that someone else successfully use a method that has never been used in such a way without producing twiddling fantasy.
Carrol