i wrote,
>> mike: psychoanalytic theory IS a theory of how the social shapes the
>> individual.
and carrol said,
>Kelley, this may be. It is *a* theory.
yup
The question is is it a correct
>theory -- and the basis for saying that it is not a correct theory is
>that it is not, from its foundations, based on anything real,
how do you know what is and isn't correct? do you actually think that the correctness of a theory is contained within the operations of theory itself?
let me ask you carrol, what is a capitalist economy? what is the state? patriarchy? can you see it, taste it, touch it, fuck it? i'm with bhaskar here: the social sciences [and i consider psych a social science] "create" their objects of investigation. nay, ALL sciences create their object of investigation. indeed, the edifice of that "social institution" we call academia is premised on the notion that these objects are identifiable, isolatable and, of course, largely assumed 'til now to be "real" "natural"
"out there". that assumption, of course, has been called into question on a number of fronts from marxism to feminism to interpretivism to pomo/poststruc. they are inventions, which doesn't mean that we can't pursue them and that we ought to toss them to the dustbin of history. i.e., you can't see an electromagentic field or gravity but that doesn't stop people from studying them. and they study them through their effects and that's *all* we can do. what such an acknowledgement means is that we need to "do" theory differently before and it is summed up in the pulp culture intro: "pulping" theory is about examining a theory's presuppositions and the conditions of its possibility.
The reason why the social sciences aren't quite up to the prediction and control you demand is that the natural sciences work in closed systems: that is, their applications [which is the equivalent, i guess, of your "correctness" or perhaps efficacy, efficiency, what works as a test of theory] are judged as successful in closed systems. Theories about physical processes are applied in the construction and design of refrigerators and automobiles. Voila! they work, right? yeah, until you leave the fridge door open for two days or never change your oil
the social sciences have no such luxury --because they must deal with history and social transformation-- with open systems, if you will. [prediction and control is what you seem to be into below, for you are essentially holding psychoanalytic theory to a positivist model of knowledge. so let me point out right here, right now that *I"M NOT INTO THAT. but i know how to take it on and argue with it if that's what we need to do right now. it sounds like this is where you're going.]
on that score, i would recommend bhaskar's "on the possbility of social scientific knowledge and the limits of naturalism" in _Issues in Marxist Philosophy_ v II, edited by John Mephan and David Hillel Ruben. A bit obscure, as in difficult to find, i imagine. he's written similar things in his own books, but i don't have copies on hand right now since they're in storage. maybe yoshie can help you out with suggestions.
marx *does* posit an account of the relationship between selves and societies. whether you agree with it and how it has been developed in the hands of others is another question. and i said *posit* for a reason. his is an account, not a theory. what folks do when they develop marx's work is that they've reworked the age-old agency/structure debate and, to the extent that they are concerned with selves/psyches/etc and the relation to society/groups/orgs/institutions/whatnot is related to how much of a determinist they are. if you're a structural determinist then, yeah, you don't bother with it because you argue that contradictions at the macrolevel of the economy are what drive social transformation and these are, in turn, manifested in terms of class conflict. and if you're a structural marxist, all that matters to you is the actions of classes -- and in marx's theory classes are NOT about flesh and blood people, but classes acting as entities in and of themselves. at least that's how structuralist marxists have had it.
but this is reductionism and, as bhaskar points out, it is a thoroughly inadequate theory of society.
[sorry, but the individual beef you brought up is well-taken, but a bit too picayune to bother with. you know what i meant in the context i used it. i'm not of the persuasion that simply not using certain words will make the reasons for their use in the first place go away. furthermore, i was writing to mike and i'm not going to go ballistic on terminological precision when talking to an audience that doesn't know the fine distinctions between individual, self, subject, subject-position, person. it was used colloquially. finally, you might want to consider that disciplines have their own languages and they may well take up words, like individual, to have a certain kind of meaning, knowing quite well about the idea and it's utter silliness-- as you would have it]
but
>rather appeals *either* to concealed religious *or* concealed
>vulgar biologjist premises -- and hence its explanations of *anything*
>are not to be trusted.
what is psychoanalytic theory, then? what exactly are freudians trying to claim? object relations theorists? lacanians? zizek?
i guess the burden is on you to explain what the fundamentals are here since i'm not quite clear what you're railing against. lacan? rail away! but there is much more to psychoanalytic theory than lacan. in fact, the whole desire biz is a major departure from what most folks do with pscyhoanalytic theory.
>Actually, I suspect, psychoanalysis has never been anything else
>but a theory of literature, which is why it is so much more appealing
>to literary critics than it is to people actually concerned with
>individual behavior of actual people.
well just like anything else, it depends on what circles you hang in. much of psychology is premised on basic freudian principles. behaviorism is an obvious exception. most sociologists have a theory of the relationship between self and society precisely because they want to know why it is that people aren't always slavish sheep simply internalizing social expectations and norms. it's all much more complicated than you will have it. at any rate, pound away at sociology all you'd like, but there are reams of books written on this topic and, i'd argue [knowing it's debatable] that sociology is fundamentally premised on theorizing the relationships between "society" and "selves". the fundamental questions here, carrol, is: how does society reproduce itself and, as well, how does it change. we want to know things like that because we want to know how it is that we leave in a racist society and yet some folks grow up to question and fight against racism. you might not agree with this project, but it is the project i'm involved with in various ways. if you don't we really can't talk because you're just shooting spitballs; it's rather unlikely that i'm going to have an epiphany and give up what i consider my calling. ange tried that last august with me, i could only end up laughing and asking if she were a lollipop lady --school crossing guard in au--and the one to guide my safe journey across the big bad city street.
I have been reading a short
>article in Vol. 1 No. 1 of the Journal for the Psychoanalysis of
>Culture and Society, "Psychoanalysis as the Enemy and Ally of
>African Americans." Much of it is a lengthy analysis of a rather
>dull and racist joke that Freud was excessively fond of. As
>long as it sticks to that joke it is highly entertaining, and while
>not very convincing in what it says about Freud's inner motives,
>highly convincing it its exploration of the [possible] verbal
>reverberations of the joke. Put otherwise, the analysis does not
>uncover the joke's *unconscious* meaning (for "unconscious
>meaning" is an oxymoron) but rather spreads out for inspection
>all the quite rational and conscious states which might find
>expresison in the joke. So -- as long as the psychoanalyst
>has a real or imaginary text in which to romp about, he/she is
>fine, but as soon as she/he turns to people, it becomes dull and
>detached from any concrete reality or connection to actual human
>life. This also explains why Harold Bloom's *Anxiety of
>Influence* is so excellent as literary history and so dull and
>unconvincing as an explanation of human motive.
>
>But even that is not the worst of it. You say it is a theory of how
>the social shapes "the individual." That is not possible. Every actual
>individual is enmeshed in a web of contingencies that make it absurd
>to speak of explaining his/her particular life, by psychoanalysis or
>any other means. Society is not one thing, the individual another
>(like a potter and his clay), which is implied when you speak of society
>
>shaping the individual. Neither my skin nor my skeleton nor my nervous
>system shapes me -- I *am* them. It is just as absurd to speak of
>society
>shaping the individual. All forms of psychology (cognitive, behavioral,
>psychoanalytic, what-have-you) end up with a mechanistic conception of
>the human person and a dualistic account of the "relation of society to
>the individual." You can have a theory of how GM shapes the Chevrolet --
what you have written above is reductionism. see bhaskar on the problem with that.
>but not of how society shapes the a human person. All Chevrolets are
>the same; every person is a unique history -- *is*, NOT *has* a unique
>history. It is an utter fantasy, and an arrogant one, to believe that
>there can be a science (or systematic knowledge) of individuals. Science
ahhh but here you have a theory carrol, do you not? a rather inchoate one but it's there. and you're saying that selves are shaped by society, it's just too complex to understand and explain. hmmm. well that an every other thing we study as social scientists -- from markets to the effectiveness of certain pedagogies to religious rituals to social movements to militia membership to predicting election winners
>What kind of oppression has *not* proved extraordinarily hard to get
>rid of? Marxism, as a matter of fact, has so far failed to provide
>an adequate account of the strategy for uniting the working class
>of an advanced capitalist nation around a socialist agenda.
well, now, what you want from marxism is a theory of how to unite the w.c. around a socialist agenda? why on earth do you need this? for one thing, i think it's pretty flippin simple and not nearly the task youmake it out to be: work with the social movements and insights that people do have and push them further, radicalize them and do it humanely instead of beating people over the head; do it patiently and above all recognize it ain't going to change in your lifetime.
one other question, is it a failure of the theory or.......?
the question of why the w.c. doesn't organize around a socialist agenda is actually pretty easy if you ask me. [you've answered it yourself] one could easily use marxist theory to explain this failure. that's not the problem.
the problem is what do "we" do -presumably we is the "enlightened" ones who someone/groups/org/events go to at some point and changed us unless, of course, as some of us on this list were, sprung from the head of zeus.
when people asked marx how to address that question he didn't suggest that we could theorize the "how" at all. we could only do and for him that meant getting involved in politics and theoretical development --that is, we needed to engage those struggles and wishes of the age. after that you can say anything more because people make history, not theories.
>There *is* no identifiable (generalizable) "process of psychic
>development."
how do you know this? because your therapist said. it seems to me, firstly, that there is a process through which infants come to be human. what is that process? is that not what psychoanalytic theory is after? how is it that an infant who sticks everything==food, paper clips, keys, toys-- in their mouth at 6 months [because it ain't real until you drool all over it at that age] come to be, generally, someone who doesn't stick things in their mouth every single time [only when "appropriate" heh, that is] and checks themselves from such behavior? how do they come to have a consience? a sense of right and wrong?
one of the most significant things about being human at all is that we are born too soon. we spend an incredibly lengthy time dependent on other people for our care, nourishment, etc. that matters. and it matters what conditions under which one comes to have a separate sense of self are. and we do. having a seperate sense of self isn't necessarily bad per se. yes, psychologies *are* the product of modernity. but then, everything we work with theoretically largely is, is it not? there is no escape from that. individual is a concept that emerged with the bourg enlightenment. so too is the concept of "society" -- as something with properties that could be systematically studied. it wasn't really around before -- though aristotle certainly forgrounded it [moving from a general theory of states/constitutions/statesmen/citizens to empirical investigations of actually existing states/constitutions/statemen/citizens]
>That is an illusion of bourgeois individualism. That is what various of
>us in
>these threads have been arguing in our many references to contingency,
>to
>the uniqueness of each individual history,
why are individual histories unique? could it have to do with the complexity of contemporary societies? see, you have a theory -- in sociology it's referred to as individuation.
in the impossibility of
>giving
>"systematic accounts" of human motive (except in more or less
>tautological
>terms).
again, see bhaskar.
>I think if you were to go to the archives and review a discussion some
>months ago of the history of the word "identity" you could see part
>at least of what the argument is. The question of "Who am I?" is a
>question created by capitalism (though one can see innumerable
>foreshadowings of it in earlier literature -- e.g., Augustine). For
>Socrates, as for St. Thomas or Dante, the question meant, "What
>is my place in a visible order." With capital's destruction of all
>visible order (read any poem by the great Romantics or their
>successors such as Stevens and Frost), that rational and intelligible
>question became mystified. Psychoanalysis is just one of many
>attempts to give a rational form to an essentially mystic question.
well carrol, i know all that because i trained under someone who wrestled with this issue in some form most of his life. i taught it all for a couple of years. the question, "what is society?", emerged with modernity as well. that doesn't mean that it's a fruitless question to puruse, does it? once we no longer understood ourselves as existing in some point in a natural god given order that was held together by god's will or whathaveyou, people started to ask: so what makes these things happen? why poverty? why revolution? why invention and discovery? why why why?
if you don't like individual for the reasons specified above, then toss society/the social too.
>Why bother? I really don't understand why people think they need a
>psychological (religious or biological) theory of the individual in
>order
>to study social dynamics.
because, as judith butler ask in the pscyhic life of power, do people simply internalize social norms or is there something else to the process. she doesn't much answer the question. anyway, if people actually simply do absorb the dominant ideas around them then how can we explain why some people reject them and become marxists? or what have you. if we simply are our skins, our societies, etc and so on then your theory lacks, at the level of METAtheory, a theory of social transformation. [i repeat, not a theory of how specfici things change; but your theory is deficient with regard to how social transformation is possible at all. revert to the mechanistic marxist explanations of social change and you might as well hang it up, imv.
and yes, there's so much more to it all: people become marxsts or feminist because of the social worlds in which they travel, the historical conditions at the time, etc and so on -- confluence of complex processes. i agree. but agreeing doesn't preclude why it might be important to ask about how conscience and consciousness emerge and why and how they are shaped by the human practices involved in childrearing, schooling, etc.
kelley
-- p u l p c u l t u r e a list for the discussion of media/culture/politics http://www.flash.net/~oudies/pulp_culture.htm ~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~ Don't try this at home. We're professionals.