Here is my original post:
Doug Henwood wrote:
> You don't have to be a Freudian (though it helps) to see jealousy
> lurking in white racist discourse about black sexuality, for example.
Perhaps -- but if you are a Freudian you immediately assume a psychological (i.e., a non-historical) cause -- and since even non-Freudians in the 20th century are rather spontaneous psychologizers, the air filled with psychological explanations of such behavior, and no serious efforts at historical explanation are made.
What happens if one at least *considers*, as a hypothesis, that people operate, within the social setting they find themselves, out of fairly intelligent and conscious efforts to explain the world around them, using the categories of explanation that that world gives them?
I don't know. I just know that way too many of the brightest people, who might provide us such social analyses, are headed off at the past by the Freudian wranglers and herded into psychological corrals.
We are left with two utterly powerless (or even destructive) hypotheses: (a) a mystical unconscious or (b) the rational choice theorists. The latter are also mystics in so far as they define a priori (rather than historically) what "reason" or "rational choice" is. ------------
Two amendments.
First: I see no evidence that any particular psychological state is involved in what Doug calls Jealousy. "Jealousy" is subject to Marx's critique of "Providence": it is a summary or paraphrase of the facts masquerading as an explanation.
Second, a positive hypothesis to replace the either/or description at the end of the post: All human thought is rational and conscious.
The first part of this proposition, "All human thought is rational," should be taken as a tautology: that is what we *mean* when we say thought. All exceptions to this can be explained in terms of Marx's hypothesis in *The Eighteenth Brumaire* (Man makes his own history but et cetera). The great error of the Enlightenment, which led to what Marx and Engels called its
dividing humanity into two parts, one of which was superior to the other, was its failure to acknowledge this tautology -- that is, its assumption that it (or one sector of humanity) had access to a power denied to the remainder of humanity. The apparent empirical accuracy in many cases of this false assumption stem from a failure to perceive the conditions under which apparently irrational judgments are made. All such judgments
turn out, on full examination, to be rational judgments made under condtions which bar *correct* judgment. "Rational" ceases then to be in any way a synonym for "true."
(This is true even of the hallucinations of schizophrenics -- it is only that in their case the historical conditions include a neurological defect -- one small portion of the brain being smaller than is that part of the brain in non-schizophrenics. It is misleading, however, to call those hallucinations "irrational." That label should be reserved for social institutions and no longer used to refer to the thought or action of individuals.)
Instead of sneeringly dismissing the judgment of white racists that blacks have more fun as irrational (that is as jealousy) we should see it as (1) a quite rational conscious judgment and (2) a profoundly false and vicious
judgment. It is mere psychologistic dogmatism to believe that those judgments have to be understood through an appeal to the mystical science of the unconscious.
The second part of the proposition, All thought is conscious, is also a tautology. There is no evidence, empirical or theoretical, that unconscious thought (*or* feeling, for that matter) exists. We are of course unconscious of what we don't know. That is one of the reasons that individual thought is always mostly (in a quite unpsychological sense) unconscious: no individual possesses enough knowledge of the world to know the full meaning of his/her own thought. As individuals we always think and act with insufficient knowledge of the meaning of our thought and action. (This is of course intensified under capitalism by the division it establishes between an act and its motive. I make this sandwich not to eat but for whatever purpose
I wish to use the wage I receive from Burger King. So appearances are radically separated from reality under capitalism. Psychology capitalizes on this necessary socially determined unconscious to ground the superstition of unconscious thought, of "an Unconscious.")
In my original post I suggested that with the atmosphere permeated with "psychological explanations of . . .behavior, and no serious efforts [are made to provide] historical explanation."
That was before I had read Chip's interesting post on populism. I see it
as precisely the kind of research I was calling for -- a search for historical explanation to replace the superstions of psychology. The paragraphs excerpted below are particularly vivid in this respect. I would suggest one minor correction, from the perspective argued here. "Whether
or not their grievances are legitimate (or even rational)," he writes. I would say that they are undoubtedly rational -- but they are made on the basis
of false or insufficient information, as I believe the whole of Chip's research, as presented on this list over the last few weeks, tends to support.
Carrol
===============
>From Chip Berlet on Populism::
Early questions about centrist/extremist theory were raised by Rogin (1967) and the authors in Schoenberger (1969), and now an increasing number of social scientists use different approaches. Smith notes that in the 1970s there was "a decisive pendulum-swing away from these 'classical' theories toward the view of social movements as rational, strategically calculating, politically instrumental phenomena" (1997: 3). At the same time, there was a rejection of the romanticized view of populism as inherently constructive. Dobratz and Shanks-Meile write that in studying populist social movements it is necessary to consider "socioeconomic conditions, changing political opportunities, resources, consciousness, labeling, framing, interpretations of reality, boundaries, and negotiation of the meaning of symbols" (1997: 32). Discussions of postclassical sociological theories of social movements in general can be found in Tarrow, Lofland, Klandermans, Buechler and Cylke, Morris and Mueller, Johnston and Klandermans, and Boggs. Authors such as Himmelstein, Diamond, Hardisty, and Berlet use variations of postclassical theories to study populism on the
political right.
Using emerging theories of social movements, it is evident that most people who join populist movements are not acting out of some personal pathology, but out of anger and desperation. They are grasping at straws in an attempt to defend hearth and home against the furious winds of economic and social change seen as threatening their way of life. They may feel abandoned, or claim that no one in power seems to be listening. They come to believe that no one cares except others in the same predicament. Their anger and fear are frequently based on objective conditions and conflicts--power struggles involving race, gender, ethnicity, or religion; economic hardship; changes in social status; conflicts over cultural issues; and other societal transformations that cause anger, confusion, and anxiety.
Whether or not their grievances are legitimate (or even rational) they join with others to confront what they believe is the cause of their problems. Often, instead of challenging structures and institutions of power, they attack
demonized scapegoats, often in the form of conspiracist allegations. Sometimes they resort to violence.