On Sun, 30 Mar 2003, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
[at the end of a long debate with Yosh]
> Yes I think psychossocial theories can be useful social theories.
Justin mentions he's tired of this now, just as I'm starting to get interested! Yoshie (as usual) already sees the lay of the intellectual terrain: I'm with her and C. on this one. Using psychological, individual factors to explain social structure is a basic category error. It surprises me that Justin is so bewitched by common-sense thinking here that he doesn't see the problem.
Let's say I want to explain gender inequality via "psychosexual factors"--male anxieties, unconscious resentment because men lack wombs, fear of women's menstrual cycles, whatever. This is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for gender inequality in a society. What must exist in a society are specific social, cultural and material conditions in order for gender inequality to thrive. The economic subordination of women requires a society in which an economic surplus is created and social mechanisms ensure that a few people can control the surplus; political subordination of women requires a political system that gives some people authority to control and take advantage of others; and so on. No matter how virulent my sexist attitudes, if the society I lived in did not have these existing economic and political structures that enable inequality, I could not translate my psychological attitudes into male domination. Thus, if we want to make sense of gender inequality in a society, psychological factors are surprisingly irrelevant.
Perhaps this is hyperbolic, but I think the common-sense tendency to explain social reality in terms of psychological processes (e.g., "racism is due to white men's sexual anxiety", "poverty is due to laziness", "9/11 terrorists hated our freedom") is equivalent to the common-sense perception that the sun rises in the morning, crosses the sky, and sets at night.
Miles