Postmodern Psychologies, Societal Practice, and Political Life

Lois Holzman, John Morss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415925556
• eBook ISBN: 9781317795162
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

After over a decade of theoretical writing, it is now possible and timely to evaluate the impact of postmodernism on psychology. This book brings together a group of highly respected contributors to the postmodern debate in psychology. Their chapters reflect on achievements and limitations of attempts to develop postmodern approaches to psychology. The essays are interactive, reflective and the authors are often in active debate. This volume introduces the general reader to such topics as Marxist and feminist psychology, social constructionism and deconstructionism. Postmodern Psychologies is the first book to assess postmodernism's impact on psychology, both within the discipline of psychology and the broader culture.

II FROM IDENTITY TO RELATIONSHIP: POLITICS AND PARTICIPATION

The contributors to Part I have been primarily concerned with psychology's encounter with postmodernism. The contributors to Part II concentrate on the nature and implications of postmodern psychologies for societal practices and political life.

Weaving its way throughout their discussions of psychology, society, culture, and politics is the concept of performance as a method for a new way of understanding/being/becoming, that is, for transforming human social relations. At issue is: Can we create new performances of our sexuality, our meaning-making, our emotionality, our identities, our politics, our lives? Performance, the authors imply, becomes unstoppable.

Performance is not just the first night of the show, the polished (perhaps) and single-voiced human pyramid that is the orthodox Western (and Eastern) theater. The stage lights show you what you are meant to see and how your are meant to see it, just like a conventional conference presentation. Performance in that sense—the performance of Cloud Nine at the Royal Court Theatre or of The Lion King on Broadway, official performance as sanctified by the institution of the theater—is no more than the tip of the iceberg. That kind of performance is essentially repetitive, even if it closes after the first night, and even if it's been arrived at through the actors improvising in a workshop.

Performance, we think, is better revealed by the rehearsal. Here the nuts and bolts are in clear sight, yet the performance aspects are just as much present as on opening night. Actors are working in rehearsal to create collectively something new, not to display a finished product. Rehearsals lurch awkwardly between technical precision and tedium. They may stop and start unexpectedly. At one and the same time some people are performing on stage, some are chatting about the performance, the play, the director, or the acting, while others argue about where they will have dinner after the show.

This is the performance that our contributors find relevant—even essential—to the transition from (modernist) identity to (postmodern) relationality, from a psychology of adaptation to a psychology of transformation. Their essays can also be viewed as a rehearsed performance of the possibilities afforded by the postmodern-ization of psychology. The implication, the authors suggest (passionately), is that such a transformation of psychology is helping to make possible a social/political/cultural transformation that goes far beyond the borders of a particular discipline. Performance, as a method and as a form of life, can restructure and rebuild how it is that we are together.

Women as Spectacle^1 Mary Gergen

[As the house lights dim, and the spotlight falls upon me, I begin.² ‘I carry a pink boa and a gold lame’ purse. A sign with the printing “FEAR IS THE MOST DANGEROUS WEAPON” is placed on the stage, facing away from audience. I place a chair center stage. A music stand holds the script.]

POMO: [Chewing gum, blowing bubbles, takes it out and sticks it under the chair. Poses with my gloves].

Limelight, ah, that turns me on. [Wavesfor light.] Basking in that warmth of the spotlight. What a place for a lime-starved kid. [Stretching out.]

Kid, I said. Do I hear some snickering? Who is she kidding? She may not be an old goat, but kidhood is long since past for her. This week Beatrice Wood, the Mama of Dada, died in her studio in California, just days after she gave a party in honor of the director of Titanic. The obituary said she was 105, but she quarreled with that calculation. She always said that if scientists had showed that time was relative, then she was thirty-two. Longevity for her depended on two things: chocolate and young men. I want to dedicate this performance to the Mama of Dada, wherever she may be.

Age is a social construction.… So like Beatrice, I'msomewhere between six and sixty today, depending on how we get along together. We'llsee what the relationship will bring.

Still, at whatever age, this is a pretty formidable place to be standing, with you out there—a real live audience—expecting something from the latest dance troupe perhaps. It's a big space to fill. I'llgive it a whirl. [Swirling around big space with arms out.]

Before I get too far along, let me just thank you for coming, and joining in the performances… I couldn'tbe standing up here without you. And, of course, if you are wondering how come you are watching me, then you just better reflect back and consider what you did to deserve me. Cause I certainly didn'tmake this up all by myself.

But you might ask: What is this Woman-as-spectacle thing all about? What is she going to do? and Why? Here I am, a nice girl (formerly) of Lake Wobegon, looking like a raspberry shortcake, and Mardi Gras is already over. Heck it's Lent already. What's the psychology of being outlandish… outside the customs, peculiar,… provocative… a woman on the edge of feminine respectability… or way over the line?

One thing for sure—I'mhere to amuse you… bemuse you, and confuse you. All those ooze words… is that sexy or what?

Over there is an imaginary circle of my textual friends, my social ghosts, they warn me of the dangers of what I am trying to do. Mary Russo³ has said: “Making a spectacle out of oneself seem[s] a specifically feminine danger. The danger… of an exposure… women who make spectacles of themselves have done something wrong, had stepped,… into the limelight out of turn—too young or too old, too early or too late—and yet… any woman can make a spectacle out of herself if she is not careful.”

[pause…] WHAT IS THE WORST SPECTACLE YOU MADE OF YOURSELF?

(Pointing at individual audience members.]

Arguing with somebody more important than you in public?

Belching or, God forbid, farting in company, or even alone?

Getting caught eating like you were hungry? Not a bad idea., [digs in purse, brings out donut]

Being rude to somebody, even if he was trying to molest you?

DO YOUR CHEEKS BURN TO THINK OF IT? EVERYBODY WHISPERING BEHIND YOUR BACK… HOW EMBARRASSING… IF ONLY YOU COULD DISAPPEAR INTO THIN AIR. (IF ONLY I HAD NOT BROUGHT IT UP!)

[Pauses, points.]

Peggy Penn, over there in my magic circle, has spelled out one of those moments in a poem called “Omen for Women.” Here she describes her first moments of menstruation:

At twelve my russet blood rolled out,
everyone on the bus to Latrobe, PA. saw it.
they whispered, “See, her eggs are multiplying!
her insides sloughing off! See! its dripping on her
knees!⁴

Is there no recourse but to relive our endless anguishes or try to for-get?

Peggy saves her humiliation this way:

Leaving a trail
for you to find me in eleven years.

[Motion of looking at trail of blood behind me.]

(There's a positive spin if I'veever seen one. A Hansel and Gretel fairytale: follow my droplets and you'llfind your way home.)

COULD YOUR SPECTACLE EVER BE REVALUED? MIGHT THERE BE SOMETHING TO SALVAGE IN YOUR STORY? EVEN POLITICAL POTENTIAL? (Or is this feminist jive?)

Mary Russo also said: “ In contemplating these dangers, I grew to admire… the lewd, exuberant… Mae West.

… her… feminine performance, imposture, and masquerade… suggest cultural politics for women.”

[Taking out flask, has a drop of schnapps.]

bell hooks⁵—an outlandish African American star—concurs: “When we give expression… to those aspects of our identity forged in margin-ality, we may be seen as ‘spectacle.’ Yet,… it is a means by which culture is transformed and not simply reproduced with different players in the same game.”

Transformation, re-creation, even recreation, the politics of fun. Let us women move from living with fear, the most elegant weapon, as Jenny Holzer's neon sign proclaims [takes out sign and holds it up] to a raucous appreciation of our violations of the codes by which we live. [Tears it up.]

If we want to strip away the bars holding us in place, the corset stays of respectability [opening coat], and tease the audience with our unbounded flesh, how shall we begin? [takes off coat, revealing her outfit.] We walk a thin line in this little striptease… we must be careful that the seams of sentences all run smoothly into one. We don'twant to snag our stockings, stub our toes, on the runways of our stage of life.

[Checks nylon seams leg on chair.]

Beryl Curt warns that… words … beguile the listener … into believing they are merely mirroring the world “as it really is,” and obscure their ability to glamour that reality into being”⁶.

I am guilty. I do wish to glamour a reality into being, preening these words into worlds. You have been forewarned. [Waves her scarf,]

The spectacle under construction needs more introduction. Over there are people who would want to strip me of my style. At my age, (chronological, that is) I am meant to disappear. I should have been gone long ago. In the dance of the life cycle, I am being propelled against the wall. Centripetal forces spin me to the chairs, from which I rose so long ago. Arms that circled me and kept me on the floor. Oh, how I could dance. [A bit of waltz.] Now they'velet me go. My dance card is empty.

Now I'm—melding with the walls, pressing into paper … melting with the glue … stuck, not pinned and wriggling like Eliot's Prufrock, but misting into mottled lavender, without a muscle's twitch. [Places scarf of sheer purple silk over head.]

This is the fate woman of a mature age endures. She is somewhere over forty, and about as useful as a fruit fly. [At least they have the courtesy to die swiftly when their breeding days are done.] If she cannot procreate, she is lifeless, you see, but not dead. She never should attract attention. She learns to be the antispectacle. [Removes scarf.]

Such hatred we sometimes feel for her. [Wrings scarf.] That shameful blot on the image of our youth? Couldn'twe just wring her neck? Be done with her. No one needs her. Hoarder of Medicare, Social Security, our tax dollars.

But lest we discard her so quickly, she is also me, and perhaps you. She is our destiny, us of the female persuasion. Ugghhh, should we call for our pills, our drugs of convenient forgetting?

[Takes another sip from the flask.]

Is there anyone to call?

Today, she is a creature under construction.

And I, in my spectacular role, a Postmodern Mama, with nothing to lose but my invisibility, I challenge those who wish to erase these fine lines. [Takes off next jacket.]

On the face of it, it's a challenging task. How do we claim a space on the floor when we are told that the music has stopped? How can we face up to this rejection? It is a challenging task.

We spin over possibilities.

Who else can we become?

Is this only a Midsummer Night's Dream?—we struggle with meaning and mistaken identity.

In this masquerade, where parody is paramount, we must fake it as we go. Well at least we have some talent and experience there.

In the politics of spectacle, we will reclaim a space.

[Pause]

[Points, and seems to listen]

The man on the aisle wonders what all the fuss is about. Why fight the inevitable? Go gracefully into the night. Why blame men if we are swayed by the beauty of fair young maidens. We are mere animals, after all. Yearning to spread our seeds abroad. Nature's call is wild. It's not political, its biological.

In the dominant world of science, support for the gentleman endures. Doctor Freud had this to say: “A man of about thirty seems youthful…. A woman of about the same age frequently staggers us by her psychological rigidity…. There are no paths open to her for further development”⁷.

Sociobiologists are crawling out from under every rock, claiming that our fates are in our genes, and they ain'ttalking Levis.

As evolutionary psychologist David Buss has said: “All around the world men are more interested in the youth and beauty of their sexual partners and less discriminating in their choice of partners than women are.”

We hear feminist researchers lament the discourse of science on our wallflower women: “Images of disease and deficiency … become the basis of discourse about women's lives in general”⁸.

”Every woman over fifty years of age becomes a patient.”

The disease, of course, is menopause. I always say the best treatment, next to chocolate and young men, is a fan. [Removes one from bag and fans self.]

Well, let's not wait for Science to come to its senses. We haven'tgot all day. We must deface its smug veneer.

Yet, how is it possible?

Here, the other voices [points] suggest scripts for us to follow.

They can help us to blast out of our prisons of ladylikeness. There are … ruses, diversions, and ways to resist.

It is time for glamouring, for mystery, for puckish surprises, for carnival.

Can making a spectacle create cultural change?

As Michelle Fine and Susan Gordon suggest, we: “need to disrupt prevailing notions of what is inevitable what is natural,… to invent and publish images of what is not now, and what could be”⁹.

(We need to draw dirty pictures … do unruly things … un-ruly … against the rulers, against the rules.)

Topsy-turvy, let's turn the world order upside down …

[Some kind of straddling… the chair. Sits backwards on it.]

Woman on top … controlling the pace … taking in as much as she wants.

A missionary in her position, evading the law.

A butterfly wing stroking in sweet rebellion. Stirring up the airwaves in spunky surrender.

The image of the disorderly woman stirring the cauldron.

Lady Godiva rides, and politics proliferate.

Let's make some “gender trouble,” as Judith Butler says.

Let us fool with Mother Nature: rub on the line that divides the sexes. (Mmmmmm that always feels good to rub on that line.)

Cross over the line, erase the line, blur the line? Is there a politics of lines?

[Gets up.]

If gender is performance, we become the dramatic effect of our performances. We act out the bodily gestures of gender and age. We are fantasies whose bodies are inscribed through our performances.

We, w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• I Postmodernism and Psychology: Oasis or Blur?
• II From Identity to Relationship: Politics and Participation
• III Extending the Dialogue
• Index