I don't see an answer in your quotes from Sartre, or your comments on them. Are you saying that anything like psychology is just too individualistic for a Marxist to take seriously? All we are is dust in the historical wind?
---------- Let's see if we can get a bit more clarity before debating further. "All we are is dust in the historical wind?"
Well, we're not angels and we're not robots, and we are never going to be either. So if you spontaneously speak against a Christian background (which even most euro-atheists do if they are unlucky enough to have once been christian), it follows that we are, figuratively, dust in the wind. That is, our lives have no cosmic meaning -- no meaning beyond what we make of them. So? What is the opposite of "dust in the wind" for you? I don't start out with that image or the preconceptions which make it intelligible, so I don't know.
What I've been trying to say, and it seems this is what Yoshie is trying
to say in her comments on Sartre, is that a particular human history -- yours, mine, hers, x's -- is too rich, too complex in its multiple relationships and responses to those relations and transformations of them through those responses to be caught in any explnatory web (other than the reductive one of neuroscience, which applies to all members of homo sapiens, most primates, and to some extent to all beings with a neural system). That neuroscience has interesting things to say -- but it is not going to answer the questions you want to ask, because no one, *ever*, is going to answer those questions about individual thought and action.
To put it another way -- Psychology is not individualistic enough, because it is impossible to be as individualistic as a theory would need to be to answer questions about "individuals" such as psychology pretends to offer. Actually existing individuals are far to concrete to be explained, *as individuals*.
[Also active here may be a premise that TOEs make sense. But the futility of any TOE, even one turns out to be true in physics, astrophysics, and cosmology, is not going to be possible in social studies in general. As you say, there is going to be quite a bit of sloppiness. I suspect we know all we or anyone is ever going to know about the basic dynamics of the capitalist mode of production -- *not*, repeat NOT, that we know everything about or even close to everything about it, just everything that we are going to be able to know. We're going to have to live with our ignorance. And at a certain level of generality we know quite a bit about capitalist culture: we know that every generation or two it will be necessary to clothe earlier
modes of capitalist thought in flashy new clothes, because being new and revolutionary is what capitalism is all about at every level.
So, aside from empirical generalization of no explanatory power we are simply never going to know anything systematic at all (not even in a sloppy or vague way) about what makes *an individual* tick. And that, apparently, is what you and Zizek and Daniel can't stand -- just as someone told Engels, well then, atheism is your religion, you are going to claim that this or that idea of mine is "my psychological theory." So be it.
Actually, literary criticism does pose an analogy -- and it is equally doubtful that literary criticism has an object. Whether or not it does depends I would say on whether textual criticism (editing texts) is a legitimate systematic discipline. The topic which poses this question most sharply is that of the legitimacy of a diplomatic text of *King Lear*. The editors of the Oxford Edition of Shakespeare argue that one cannot -- that there are two quite
different *Lears*, and any conflation of them is to create a play that never existed. That battle may never be settled, and would thus mark either the limits of literary criticism as a discipline or its simple impossibility.
The following quote from a recent post of Sam Pawlett's provides a simpler test:
This mileau do have some good points like critics should avoid needless
jargon, jargon which [makes] pubs like Art in America incomprehensible."
I quote it as I quoted it in my response. the "[makes]" is my editorial
emendation. Was I correct in assuming (a) that an intention existed in Sam's head which (b) was intelligible, so (c) the text as it appeared
in his post was an incorrect or corrupt text, and (d) my emendation is (probably: we are allowing for sloppiness, as you suggest) a correct or "true" text -- what Sam "really" meant? If this cluster of assumptions and conclusions based on them is correct, then we have an answer, in the case of literary criticism, to the question, "What is the object of the theory of X?" where X is literary criticism. I claim that so far, no one, including Freud et cetera have given a satisfactory answer in the case of psychology. What is it the study *of*?
[Note the 'crux' in my paragraph above: "response. the". Is "the" a corrupt text? Did Cox intend "The," and would an editor be justified in such an emendation? Even answering "Yes" to that question does establish an object for literary criticism (as a systematic study) -- the interpretation of texts (since one can say that "the" is or is not a corruption only on the basis of some understanding -- i.e., interpretation -- of the text.)]
Carrol