Psychology without Foundations

History, Philosophy and Psychosocial Theory

Steve D Brown, Paul Stenner, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780761972273, 9780761972266
• eBook ISBN: 9781473903630
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

For many years, for many people social psychology has been deemed a discipline in crisis.

This new book proposes a way out of the crisis by letting go of the idea that psychology needs new foundations or a new identity, whether biological, discursive or cognitive. The psychological is not narrowly confined to any one aspect of human experience; it is quite literally everywhere.

The book proposes a strong process-oriented approach to the psychological, which studies events or occasions. Aspects of experience such as communication or embodiment are treated as thoroughly mediated - the product of multiple intersecting relationships between the biological, the psychic and the social. The outcome is an image of a mobile, reflexively founded discipline which follows the psychological wherever it takes us, from the depths of embodiment to the complexities of modern global politics.

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ONE

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The First Word or: in the Beginning is the Middle

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For an instant, the tranced boat’s crew stood still; then turned. ‘The ship? Great God, where is the ship?’ Soon they through dim, bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking look-outs on the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lancepole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight. (Moby-Dick, ch. 135)

We start at the end, at the famous scene in Herman Melville’s novel where the whaling ship Pequod, having finally engaged the great white whale, is crushed by Moby-Dick and slips slowly into the waters. The tiresome journey, driven forward by the obsession of Captain Ahab, is finished. But not for all. There is a survivor, Ishmael, who floats in the shark-infested waters, orphaned, awaiting his eventual rescue. What does Ishmael think as he bobs on the ocean and considers his miraculous fate? Does he actually consider himself saved? Would he not have preferred to have followed Ahab and the Pequod to the very end of their mission? Does he consider how to begin again, is he already dreaming of resuming the search for Moby-Dick? Or does his future lead elsewhere, away from the whale and the sea?

Melville’s classic is a novel which dwells at great length on ambitions, obsessions, on the drive to accomplish projects that seem perpetually just out of reach. As such, it is a psychological novel, a work that grapples with what it means to be a person. Ahab’s search for the white whale is an exemplary demonstration of human endeavour, of the desire to have done with something, to have finished off and realised a goal. Melville suggests that such ambitions contain within them something fateful and portentous. The search for Moby-Dick will end in tragedy. It is destined to go unresolved. At the very end of the novel the whale itself – which has in any case only existed as, at best, a wave on the surface of the water, and, at worst, the object of Ahab’s fevered vengeance – disappears entirely. Ahab, along with Starbuck, Queequeq, Tashtego and the entire crew are drawn towards the end of their long, wearisome search. Except for the sole survivor, belched back to the surface of the water from the sinking wreck. Call me Ishmael…

This is a book about what it means to think psychologically. About what it might mean, what it could mean to be a social psychologist. It is a book, we hope, befitting the times. To write on these themes 50 years, maybe even 30 years, ago would mean starting in a very different way. We would perhaps begin with the departure of the Pequod as it sets sail, determined in its search. We would seek to write from the perspective not of Ishmael but of Ahab, with his dogged conviction that the whale is within his reach. In other words that it is possible to be entirely clear about precisely what it means to study the psychological, and that, moreover, the project of a social psychology is both clearly mapped and entirely realisable. From our historical perspective, we are less sure.

What separates Ishmael and Ahab is the shipwreck. What separates twenty-first-century from twentieth-century social psychology is not quite as dramatic, but every bit as eventful. It is the so-called ‘crisis’ experienced by the discipline in the 1970s. This comprised an intense set of debates about the nature of doing social psychology (see Gergen, 1973, 1982/1994; Harre & Secord, 1972; Israel & Tajfel, 1972), followed by a prolonged period of acrimony and reflection amongst the various participants. If before the crisis it was possible unproblematically to proclaim social psychology as a discipline with a bold vision and intellectual project, after the crisis such claims could only be made cautiously, argumentatively, and with a great many caveats. Ahab knows what to do. He will hunt the whale no matter what stands in his way, he will track down and have done with Moby-Dick. Ishmael does not. He is confronted with choices: Should the project be begun anew? Should it be revised and entirely rethought? Should it simply be abandoned?

But why did the crisis come about in the first place? Why is it so difficult to adequately theorise the psychological? If a novelist like Melville can so brilliantly explicate the nature of obsession and vengeance, why can these same psychological processes not be unravelled in the laboratory, or at the very least be properly named and characterised by social psychologists? We will return throughout the book to the philosophical and methodological problems which psychologists face when attempting to do so. At the most general level the answer is that such attempts to fix and provide once-and-for-all explanations actually impedes rather than enhances our understanding. Because such explanations drag the phenomenon kicking and screaming from its rightful place in the complex weave of human affairs and make it stand on its own, as something to be characterised, dissected and classified outside of the places and times where it has any meaning. If psychology kills its subject matter in the course of taking hold of it, then novelists like Melville bring it back to life precisely because they approach the psychological indirectly, off-to-the-side (so to speak), by exploring how it unfolds when set loose in a particular context (How far will Ahab go? Where will this journey lead?).

Our contention is that all post-crisis writing in social psychology necessarily begins from the perspective of Ishmael rather than Ahab. It begins within the shadow of a calamity, of a disruption to the project. As such, it confronts uncertainty and indecision. The question is how to go on. For some writers, the answer is to return to previous convictions, to re-launch the project of social psychology and redouble our efforts to secure clarity and knowledge. For others, the project needs rethinking, a questioning of ambitions and goals and of the techniques needed to accomplish these ends. For others still the project is no longer worth pursuing, and the search for the white whale of the psychological needs to be replaced with other tangible pursuits (perhaps a search for the biological or for the discursive as foundations).

Whatever option is chosen, it seems that what is required is a new form of clarity. This involves a new start to the project, a clear sense of beginning again, or a new project altogether. Our argument in this book is that we do not need to consider the grounding of psychology as a practice in this way. That is to say that if it is correct to speak of psychology as having ‘foundations’ then we need to rid ourselves of the idea that these resemble the physical foundations of a house, or the financial act of commitment which establishes a charitable foundation. The foundations of psychology are, we want to argue, more akin to the ways in which biological cells and organisms continuously rebuild themselves whilst retaining their intrinsic identity over time. Or if psychology is akin to a building or an institution, it is closer to the model of the Shinto temple described by David Lowenthal (1985) which is systematically dismantled and rebuilt every twenty years without apparently disrupting its status. This is what we might call foundation through displacement, or, as we will describe later, as creative and reflexive foundationalism.

To begin to speak of foundations in this way is to run several risks. We are not suggesting that psychology ought to be founded anew in biology, and on the basis of the insights of the modern bio-sciences on the nature and processes of life. But we do want to rethink the relationship psychology has to biology and to the established ways we have of apportioning subject matter between ‘nature’ and ‘society’. We are not claiming that what is required is a new, once-and-for-all grounding of psychology in a clearly defined set of assumptions about how the worlds (physical, organic, personal and social) that we inhabit are organised. This would be to echo the call for ‘new foundations’ that is so routinely and tiresomely heard across the discipline. But we are proposing that such assumptions need to be continuously invoked and explored as an ongoing and integral part of what it means to be a psychologist. Finally, we are most certainly not calling for the demolition of all foundations whatsoever. Such a call is, of course, a foundational gesture in itself, albeit of a most peculiar and regressive nature.

What we seek to do in this book is proceed from the troublesome relationship we have to that which grounds us, which includes the desire to have done with grounding altogether. We will argue throughout that we can neither settle nor dispense with this relationship, and that attempts to do so merely push the problem into more complex and immediate forms (such as the complex recursive relationships that model builders discover when they need to relate their terms or variables). What needs to be done instead, we want to demonstrate, is to hold the relationship close and to continuously examine how foundations are constructed and reconstructed as a live feature of the phenomena we study.

We want then, to start from the perspective of Ishmael, confronted in a very literal way with the question of how to go on, and the means through which to persevere. We are not claiming that we are alone in this position, nor that we have the hubris to see ourselves as sole witnesses to a great disaster that has befallen the discipline. Rather, Ishmael denotes a particular way of seeing psychology that is available to any psychologist. We could call this, following the terminology of Michel Foucault, an ‘Ishmael-function’ (see Foucault, 1978). This would stand in contrast to the ‘Ahab-function’ of choosing to see psychology as a clearly defined project that is getting ever closer to making firm statements about the nature of psychological processes, despite their frustrating tendency to continually recede at precisely those moments when they seem just in reach.

As a discipline, psychology has tended towards the Ahab-function. It seeks answers to fundamental questions about thinking, about being a person. However, it attempts to do so by rigidly posing very narrowly defined questions which concern very specific facets of personhood that can be made to show up in laboratory settings or in the transcribed record of a tape-recorded interaction. In some sense, psychology ends up killing – or at the very least simplifying – the phenomena of which it desires to speak, in the same way that Ahab’s search for Moby-Dick strives to finish it off for good. But the psychological is no less elusive than the great white whale. Attempts to pin down the exact nature of psychological processes are notorious for their tendency to excise precisely that which is felt to be most essential. In this way psychology typically falls far short of providing a convincing account of the rich diversity of human experience – the psychological slips away from what psychologists try to do.

How might we even begin to address this tendency? We can first of all observe that the psychological is to be found way beyond the laboratories and transcripts of the discipline of psychology. The psychological is quite literally everywhere – it is being worked out and worked through as a live concern in all aspects of human activity. Moreover, there are a great many disciplines and practices which seek to articulate the psychological. We find fine and subtle accounts of the psychological in art, literature, music, theatre, and in journalism, broadcasting, political commentary and public debate. What it means to be a person, to think psychologically, is being addressed and engaged in these realms. So it makes sense to say that not only ought we, as psychologists, to engage with these realms (such as the nineteenth-century North American literature of Melville), but we also have a kind of obligation to try to follow attempts to articulate the psychological wherever they lead us, which will be way beyond the safe confines of the psychology department. We need to do so not least because there is a reciprocal relationship, or interdependency, between academic psychology and these other realms of psychological enquiry. For example, the nineteenth-century psychology of someone like William James is most certainly influenced by the literary traditions of the time, not least that represented by his brother Henry James. Correspondingly, the work of a modern novelist such as Sarah Waters is shaped by shifting kinds of sexual identity and forms of experience that can be indexed to very particular historical and cultural moments, which include the versions of ‘the psychological’ offered by the professional psychology of the time. We might then say that ‘psychology’ – broadly defined as the study of what it is to be a person – is everywhere.

We propose something like a kind of ‘second-order psychology’ which attempts to pursue the psychological across the complex cultural and material forms that it takes. If ‘first-order psychology’ is the attempt to replicate and reproduce the psychological under narrow, laboratory-like conditions with the ambition of putting the mechanisms of human action ‘under the microscope’, so to speak, then ‘second-order psychology’ is all about following human experience through the myriad of forms that it takes, including the forms mediated by scientific psychology itself. At every point, and with respect to the concrete form of experience we are studying, we should take guidance from those commentators and experts on experience who seem most relevant – here it may be literature, there it may be molecular biology, sometimes sociology, at other times art. If first-order psychology is governed by the Ahab-function (‘find and have done with the whale’) then second-order psychology is governed by the Ishmael-function (‘follow the whale, wherever it takes us, endlessly’).

Second-order psychology, however, must have another dimension to it that would chime with von Foerster’s (1993) notion of ‘second order cybernetics’ as a cybernetics of cybernetics. This dimension goes beyond the affirmation that psychology must ‘observe’ beings that are themselves ‘observers’ (a situation which necessitates what Luhmann [1998b] refers to as ‘second-order observation’ or the observation of observation). Thus, second-order psychology must also be a ‘meta’ or ‘reflexive’ psychology to the extent that it recognises the need to study the scientific discipline as well as the subject matter (and the relations between the two). The psychological as subject matter is ultimately not separable from the forms of knowledge that take it as their object, and these forms of knowledge are in turn inseparable from the forms of social order in which they are implicated. The purpose of this book is to assemble some of the theoretical resources necessary for such a second-order psychology. We want to lay out a very different ‘image of the psychological’ alongside sets of terms, concepts and relations that enable its thought.

It should be clear from the above that we are not in the business of merely peddling one more postmodern story urging that we dispense with foundations in favour of continuing the job of deconstructing each and every claim to truth in the name of resistance to power. We are not ‘anti-foundationalist’ in this sense. Rather, we wish to explore the paradoxical sense in which we must continually create our foundations, precisely because we lack them. This is no small distinction. Anti-foundationalism proceeds negatively, smashing claims to truth, relativising notions of value, and ironising ideals of progress. Our reflexive or creative foundationalism, by contrast, risks the proposition that we must create our realities and live out values, that we are doing this already (whether we know it and like it or not), and that the art of living is always in the process of either progressing or regressing. Our environments, our bodies, our minds, our relationships, our societies are never static or singular, and can never be dissociated from ‘value’. This means that we must take care. It does not mean, however, that human beings are somehow autonomous and God-like creators, inventing our worlds out of nothing but acts of will. On the contrary, we are ourselves creatures of a creative process that exceeds our own limited existence. Anti-foundationalism, for the most part, thrives on a premature distinction between natural and social sciences, or between the natural and the social and cultural more generally. Reflexive or creative foundationalism refuses this distinction and insists that we are hybrid creatures with multiple forms of heritage: creatures of biochemistry, creatures of consciousness, creatures of communication.

Following this introductory chapter, we have organised the book into eight core chapters and a conclusion. Each of the core chapters serves a double function. On the one hand, each deals with a key thinker in the development of reflexively foundational modes of thought and practice. On the other hand, each chapter homes in on a subject matter of psychological relevance. We use the key thinker as our ‘guide’ or mediator to shed light on the topic or subject matter. We also read each thinker selectively. Although we hope each chapter is wide-ranging enough to serve as an introduction, we will admit that we adopt a reading strategy that emphasises connections and juxtapositions between thinkers rather than offering a ‘purist’ view of each in particular.

The eight core chapters divide into two sections. Chapters 4 to 9 deal with specific topics: communication (Luhmann), embodied experience (Artaud), affect (Spinoza), memory (Bergson), subjectivity (Foucault) and the stylisation of life (Deleuze). To set the scene for this run of six chapters, however, we considered it necessary to include two chapters dealing with much more general concepts that are indispensable to our project. We enlist Alfred North Whitehead as our guide to a concept of process, and Michel Serres as our guide to a concept of mediation. The accounts of communication, embodiment, affect, memory, selfhood and life-style that follow presuppose and put to work these more general notions of process and mediation. We are uncomfortably aware of the fact that our thinkers are all white, European males and that, with the exception of Michel Serres, all are dead. This selection rather obviously reflects our peculiar intellectual paths and our particular interests and desires. Equally obviously it should not be taken as suggesting that these are the only thinkers worth engaging with, or that scholarship prior to the era of TV was inherently superior (although sometimes we think this latter point may be true!).

Our aim throughout the book has been – to borrow a phrase from Isabelle Stengers (2002) – to ‘think with’ our key authors. More specifically, we have tried to put the concepts to work in order to open up what are hopefully fresh insights into psychological phenemona and issues. We have not attempted to speculate on what psychology might look like when considered solely from the perspective of each thinker – a ‘Bergsonian Psychology’, a ‘Spinozist Psychology’, and so on. We have instead followed Deleuze’s strategy in asking what particular ‘image’ of the psychological can be discerned through an engagement with the work of each thinker in turn. For this reason, we have also...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Publisher’s Acknowledgements
• 1 The First Word or: in the Beginning is the Middle
• 2 Whitehead and Process
• 3 Serres and Mediation
• 4 Luhmann and Communication
• 5 Artaud and Embodiment
• 6 Spinoza and Affect
• 7 Bergson and Memory
• 8 Foucault and Subjectivity
• 9 Deleuze and Life
• 10 Conclusion: On Losing Your Foundations and Finding Yourself Again
• References
• Index