Submitted by Jim Aune on June 23, 2007 - 2:39pm
One of my students, Kristin Hill, just finished a really good M.A. thesis on the Left Behind series and its audience (she combined ethnographic interviews with rhetorical analysis, which is a move I wish more rhetoricians would take). We got into an interesting dispute during her defense about social explanations of the world-view of conservative evangelicals disposed to believe in end-times narratives. The theoretical/methodological issues are of general interest, so I want to think out loud here for a bit, to see if anyone can help me out. I'm especially interested in hearing what you Lacanian types think.
Some propositions:
1. Weber: "Not ideas but ideal and material interests govern men's conduct." "Ideas" (including the things rhetoricians study) are explicable in terms of the social and economic, but not as mere epiphenomena; they have their own relative autonomy, although how relative is up for grabs.
2. Insofar as rhetorical studies attempts to make statements about public discourse--broadly defined--it connects to the human sciences of politics, sociology, anthropology, and psychology. Rhetoricians may be distinguished from one another in terms of the relative weight they assign to politics, society, culture, and the psyche. (Where I find myself out of synch with most rhetoricians younger than I is that I give greater weight to politics and society than to culture and the psyche. I fell out of love with political theory when I realized it could not deal with social processes: secularization, capitalism, and other features of modernity.)
3. The explanandum here is the strong and apparently increasing belief in end-times narratives among evangelical Christians. Despite continuing empirical falsifications of the narratives (go back and look at Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth--the dude Reagan quoted in the 1984 presidential debate, as his Alzheimer's was setting in), as well as the lack of biblical support for the claims, they persist, and appear to serve as the basis for unwavering support for the Israeli hard Right, for example, as well as other issues.
4. Following Lucien Goldmann and Raymond Williams, I would call the end-times "myth" a world-view or "structure of feeling" of a distinctive social group. It encodes particular social anxieties of evangelicals at what Goldmann calls the "transindividual" level rather than the psychological. These anxieties include "fear of falling" or middle-class status anxiety, especially the impact of social change upon male status and income (white male incomes have remained flatter than other demograpic groups in last 30 years). If you combine these social anxieties with the relatively closed character of evangelical Christian communities, especially in the South (they are unlikely to encounter differing political and religious points of view), you get a cascade of beliefs that solve problems for believers: anxiety reduction primarily (which is perhaps one of the evolutionary bases for the persistence of religion). Defenders of the once-dominant secularization thesis in sociology point to the greater social safety nets of social democracies (Canada, Scandinavia, Germany, and so on) as an explanation of the persistence of conservative religiosity in the US. Not only are we more fearful (especially of illness or job loss), but our societies are more disorderly (compare the rates of divorce, crime, and addiction in the Christian South with those of blue states or of Old Europe). So you have two deliberative pathways--social anxiety, and the more paleosymbolic threat to masculinity--to end-times politics and belief.
5. Now, why would I need to add a psychoanalytic explanation to the above? Am I still being a reductionist in that I am looking for something "beneath" the discourse itself? To flesh out my argument, I would need more comparative and historical work--so, as I've said before, I want to connect rhetorical studies to the enterprise of historical sociology, the great road not taken by the field so far. If you read Zizek, Foucault, and so on without also seriously engaging Weber, Durkheim, Marx, and Parsons--as well as the great contemporary historical sociologists like Theda Skocpol, Charles Tilly, and Jack Goldstone--you're making interpretations and explanations in an ahistorical void.
According to Mark's 2nd recent post, two important claims implicit in my and Diane's replies are (1) "Some theoretic paradigms do not attempt reference to testable phenomena" but rather are "redescriptive"; and (2) "These same theoretic paradigms . . . . can explain social phenomena" and "observable patterns of human cooperation." I want to point out that, even before Mark elaborates these claims, there is already a nascent equivocation: "phenomena" is being deployed here in two senses. In one sense, Mark is clearly referencing Kant's particular understanding of phenomena as observable stuffs. In another sense—and probably the sense most readers are coming at this—phenomena simply means "stuff," observable or not (a sort of fill-in-the-blank thing-a-ma-bob).
In the instability of the term "phenomena" we can start to see how the politic of a theoretical position begins to move. For example, in the staging of the two claims phenomena also shifts in qualification from testable to social. On the basis of this shift from testability to the social, we should expect the objection to be about precisely such a move: you can't go from the untestable contents of the (individual) unconscious to the empirical observation of the social. In other words, we have a restaging of sorts of Aune's original first query to psychoanalysis: how does one move from the psyche to the socious? And there has already been answers: (1) the individual is an expresion/fold of the social; (2) there is more than one kind of phenomenon—or if you want to flip back to Kant, there is, after all, the noumenal. I really, really agree with DDD on the appeal of psychoanalysis and post-theory is that it will not let go of the way the unobservable affects/effects our lives in important and profound ways (props to Frankl).
Nevertheless, let's give these claims a name for easy reference by way of reduction: (1) psychoanalysis is an organizing discourse; (2) psychoanalysis describes the social. So we have "organizing discourse" and "social description" as short hand (I have trouble remembering this in terms of "1" and "2").
Now, very important to Mark is whether or not a given perspective implicates the criteria of its own evaluation, or as Plato put it, "can give an account of itself." I already feel dirty granting this assumption, but ok, let's go with it for now. Following what I've said previously, Mark associates "coherence" as the internal account of psychoanalysis as an organizing discourse. He then makes two curious moves: the supposed internal criteria for "social description" are number ("how many phenomena can it explain?") and predictability. Here again we have another move—right in the set-up—that I don't find warranted: is the criteria of utility "how much" and "predictability?" It seems to me the criteria of the domain of explanation and predictability is scientific, so we have here, smuggled in at the outset of Mark's discussion, criteria that I'm not going to assent to. Nevertheless, Mark then says: "I would argue that with the assertion of (2) [organizing discourse], the evaluative criteria offered in [social description] (1) must be reconsidered if not wholly jettisoned." That logic is certainly convenient!
For the sake of argument, let's even grant the rigged-in-advance criteria of size and predictability and fuse the puppy: an organizing discourse is valuable only insofar as its social descriptions yield prediction. The question then also becomes, "what constitutes a prediction?" For example, I find genre theory and criticism valuable. It helps me predict the kind of movies we're going to get next summer. Another example: Does, say, knowing the generic constraints of a presidential inaugural predict what Bush is going to say next January? The answer, of course, is "yes and no." We know in advance the different parts of the speech, what Bush will have to do, and so on, but we don't know the contents. Heck, the man could collapse with a heart attack and the speech might not happen at all. So, prediction here is dispositional: there is likelihood, not a guarantee. Now, is there any way to empirically verify the existence of a genre? No. Genre doesn't inhere in any one text. It inheres in, well, in the collective of memories or the "social imaginary," and that's why genres are dynamic and hardly an empirically verifiable entity. I am not suggesting that psychoanalysis is analogous to genre theory, because one is much more complicated than the other. But I would suggest that, insofar as both approaches concern the discerning of dispositions and patterns, both are "predictive" in a limited, non-scientific sense.
Finally, it's important to underscore there are differing understandings of the subject at play in this discussion, and they bear directly on the equivocation of "phenomena": for some, the transcendental subject is still in play; for others, it has (he has) long been dead. When one grants she is an expression of the exterior (and our inability to come to terms with that +is+ our problem), the "blind spot" of observation is not only just an epistemic problem; it's the core of the subject, and most especially the subject who is self-possessed enough to believe there is only in this world what is dreamt of in . . . science and its meta-discourse (analytical philosophy).
I'm quite taken with DDD's suggestion in her first post that what we have here is a differend: for Lyotard, it's "a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments." There are, of course, two ways to read the application of the label: (1) the differend describes the conflict between Mark and those sympathetic to psychoanalysis over the very criteria of "judgment." Mark locates that criteria ultimately in terms of scope applicability and predictability, while someone like me would dispute such criteria. There is no meta-language with which to adjudicate the dispute, however, Mark attempts to supply one (Hegel on the death match comes to mind); or (2) the application of the differend is, in the gesture, an attempt to supply a "post-theory" meta-criterion of evaluation in much the same way as Mark does in (1). In either case, at the risk of sounding obsequious, Dr. Davis strikes me as a savant when she continues:
Shit y'all, when you read stuff like that you have to just nod and say: yeah. Static on the radio—there is peace in that. At least Jim White sings so.
I wasn't really asking for empirical evidence any more than I was asserting an alternative (transcendental or unified) subject. I was just inquiring into the resistance against any empirical support for what struck me as an apparently descriptive claim. Your last few posts clarified things for me while also illustrating how irreconcilable you imagine our perspectives to be.
I wish I knew of a better way to end this drama, but I guess our final scene will feature a few silent harlequins regarding a great divide. As a closing monologue, by clumsy way of epilogue, I'll say that I enjoyed the play, and I appreciate the lively players.
Mark G
as i told jim on the phone yesterday afternoon, i think this has been a very productive discussion; great for those who visit the blogora to read and think through where they "stand" ... and even more for what might be learnt, for what might be moved. i've not responded to the infinite negative thing bc spenser schnauzer started having seizures last week. today -- in an hour or so -- the vet is coming to euthanize her. it seems meet and right, then, to share a recollection about something i wrote when ...; ah, but not right now. right now i'm going to go hold my puppy. good agon and peace to all creatures, great and small.
i'm so sorry, rhosa. xoxo
Oh baby.......hold your puppy. .... I'm so sorry.....
1: Knock Knock.
2: Who's There?
3: Dwane.
4: Dwane who?
5: DWANE DA BAT TUB! I BE DWOWNIN!
One of my favorite knock-knocks, appropriate for many reasons here: when responding to some of Jim's most recent queries its easy to get in over one's head in this environment because the answers are potentially book-length. And, of course, as a linguistic obsession, psychoanalysis of the classical stripe is obsessed with puns. Ok, to Jim's queries, seriatim, with some tentative and admittedly incomplete answers---in the language of "direction"---in the hope readers who want to get into the issues more deeply might have some places to go.
Direction the First: in the domain of psychoanalytic theory, Jim asks how one moves from the level of the individual to the level of the socio-cultural. I don't think that the answer is formally all that different from the problematic pickle between what he once termed "structure and struggle." These are homologous problems. There are a number of answers depending on the psychoanalytic tack one finds most compelling, but all are various ways of refiguring how Freud opened his understudied Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego:
One either buys that move, or has some modified account. The modified accounts that I've seen lately focus on this articulation as the site of "identification": is identification a Neo-Hegelian phenomenon (e.g., one only becomes self-conscious after a recognition of "not-me," and this not-me thus begins the process of the social) or is there some form of identification that is prior to the re-presentation of objects (I recently read a very, every good essay by the blogora's triple-threat, DJ Dr. [Dx3] on this; stay tuned to a journal near you).
Today, the most widely discussed account is probably Zizek's, whose approach is "Lacanian." In a very serious way, The Parallax View goes directly to Jim's question; it is a massive book length account to deal with this problem in a way that helps to "rehabilitate dialectical materialism." I'm only on chapter two, so I cannot really gloss the damn thing, but, I gather that the parallax in all its varieties becomes the answer to this issue of mediation. The key move is a posthumanism (one is clear to distinguish agency from agents) and re-framing the question:
So, it would seem a theory of the subject is "always already" a theory of the social or culture. "As above, so below," say the hermeticists. But not too much unlike our mystical friends, Zizek moves on to insist that the subject of thought does not "reflect" being---that homologies are not parallelisms. Rather, there's an impossible to reckon with "gap" between thought and being that throws more or less vulgar "dialectics" out the window. This is where I cannot go on, because I've not finished the book, but presumably Zizek presents the alternative.
Regardless, attempting to answer this question is implicated in the question of the theoretical humanities: what is the relationship between agency, the agent/subject, and determinism? The question of moving from the individual to the social (irrelevant if it is a question one ought to pose, with apologies to Zizek) is a methodological way of getting at the question of determinism. Indeed, one is tempted to characterize the entire theoretical enterprise in the last twenty years as but various ways to ask and answer questions about this Mac-daddy problem.
Answer the Second: Psychoanalysis and the "science" problem. Well, elsewhere I've had plenty to say about this so I won't go into it but for a few comments. First, Freud's scientistic claims continues to imbue psychoanalysis with a tacit empiricist aura that has long since been abandoned by many who toil within psychoanalytic domain. Many of the empirically testable claims of classical psychoanalysis have been disproved, period. But many of the claims of psychoanalysis are not for empirical testing, and this is because they are more akin to the domain of philosophy and modes of interpretation than to science. That is, I do not believe psychoanalysis is an empirical science, but rather an organizing discourse (as with other domains of theory in the humanities). To yoke psychoanalysis to positivism is to ignore the work done in its name in the humanities for the last—gee—fifty years? The criterion of measurement is coherence, not correspondence. For me, psychoanalysis is a philosophical hermeneutic (of "suspicion," indeed), not a scientific gospel. It's one of many tools that I find useful for doing rhetorical/cultural criticism.
Now, the question of psychoanalytic therapy is a different story. As Mark observed some posts ago, the "talking cure" helps whether it is behaviorist or Klienian in orientation. So, for example, while I find Lacan's arguments about how the symbolic universe works compelling, I would not necessarily be happy with Lacanian therapeutic technique. My own shrink is a Gestalt Theory person. What I'm saying is that I recognize that the clinical dimensions adds some important difficulties to my suggestion that psychoanalytic is not a science.
There's more to say here, but I'm nearing the time to prep for class!
Finally, Direction the Third: Jim suggests there is coming crisis in rhetorical studies. Let me underscore here that, at least in my reading, Jim is not saying there is a real contest, but rather, a perceived tension between an "older Establishment" and a younger group of "cultural studies" scholars. I want to put my chips on the idea of perception, as opposed to "reality." Yes, I have personally felt "wounded" from blind reviewers who held a single, lowly essay as responsible for the "downfall of the field." I've got a rejection somewhere in which the reviewer says precisely that! But I also recognize it’s the feeling of "underdogness" that motives a lot of my work: god forbid manuscripts start to sail through. If so, I'll probably find myself adopting increasingly absurd positions.
More seriously, though, I was talking with my girlfriend about "the coming crisis," and she remarked that in Medieval Studies the very same struggles of perception are in play. She said it was like a group of "gangs" that have meetings at conferences and then come out on the pages with their blunt switchblades. I'm thinking about the video for Michael Jackson's "Bad." So in some sense the story of the coming crisis is part of being in an academic field (in our field, I call it "rhetoric's apocalyptic"---stay tuned for an essay on precisely this topic).
There's much more to say here about "the coming crisis" and, of course, whether the perception can bring the reality of a crisis into being. I think a whole new thread/post on this topic would be helpful. Nevertheless, to me the issue is really one of critical disposition: is it possible to let multiple voices and perspectives exist peacefully under the banner of rhetoric, or is it inevitable that we will marginalize/scapegoat/divide? Well, the answer to both questions is "yes."
[later edit: goddam! I see DDD has posted as I was typing away here for over a half-hour. . . sorry this post doesn't include reference to it; hopefully later]
Let me see if I can parse a couple of claims that appear (to my mind) to surface in both Josh’s and DDD’s most recent posts:
(1) Some theoretic paradigms do not attempt reference to testable phenomena. They are rather efforts at raising questions about the discourses and assumptions pervasive in a given conversation. As such, they should be judged on the grounds of coherence, should be engaged as efforts at redescription (shaking up available categories and questions). This gets us out of a number of problems, particularly the “science” question. Empirical verifiability is no longer a concern. This answer also allows us to see the potential value in such redescriptive efforts. Despite its empirical shortcomings, the Freudian theory of the unconscious at least made us aware of the assumptions in an Enlightenement (Cartesian?) understanding of consciousness. This awareness, among other things, made possible recent theories, such as the notions of cognition as a series of simultaneous parallel processes, a replay of corporal habits inscribed in social space, etc. One might say that same of Zizek’s work—Zizek, somewhere, sez the same of his work. I recall a passage in which he defines philosophy as an effort to ask questions, not to arrive at answers. Zizek also sez that his analyses are not applications of a theory to an empirical phenomenon, but rather en effort at further raising questions about a theory. Finally one might say something similar of Diane’s work on ethics—her efforts at redescription reveal a vocabulary that supposes community as a condition brought on by language (not by some preconscious affectability).
(2) These same theoretic paradigms, described above as redescriptions, can explain social phenomena. Once we’ve redescribed, we can posit that the redescription explains extant and observable patterns of human cooperation. (I’ll note here in passing that Diane’s work excites me in many regards b/c empirical tests do point towards a kind of preconscious affectability. Massumi mentions such empirical tests in the first essay of _Parables of the Virtual_. Other tests indicate a disposition to react to stimuli—as measured by neural activity in the cortices that control motor function—before subjects can even register awareness of the options. A tentative conclusion may therefore be: people respond—are affected--before they’re aware that a response is in order.)
It seems to me that the principal issue is this: can we maintain both (1) and (2)? (1), as Josh indicates, asks us to judge a theory based on its coherence. (2) asks us to judge a theory based on its descriptive utility (how many phenomena does and can it explain?) and its predictive capacity (how much can it predict future phenomena?). I would argue that with the assertion of (2), the evaluative criteria offered in (1) must be reconsidered if not wholly jettisoned. The goal, as Marx put it, must be to rise from the abstract to the concrete. This is a difficult task b/c in the abstract, we become invested in coherence and in political implications. At a certain level, we believe something, and it’s hard to see one’s coherencies troubled. As Diane points out, Marxism, as a social science, has been particularly plagued by failed descriptive utility and by completely failed predictive capacity. So has neoclassical economics, as Marxists love pointing out. (I have become increasingly suspect of any predictive capacity in both discourses, wondering if they are truly a historical-descriptive projects wedded in tenuous ways to a series of political dedications.) My main point here is this: if no empirical testability is available, there’s no sustainable method of moving from (1) to (2). If your analyses are redescriptions and not explanations, then they don’t help people invested in (2). If they try to assert (2), then they can no longer be weighed as redescriptions. If we stick with (1), then we may have an answer to the science question, but we may sever a connection to the social sciences, instead planting our flags in philosophy departments.
Josh’s invocation of the value of the poetic utterance also gets us to an aspect of the social sciences that deserves note: moreso than in the natural sciences, the vocabularies of analysis employed in the social sciences have the capacity to change their referents. An analytic vocabulary (as DDD notes) has a political program implicit within it. It demands something more than explanation. This is why social scientists, I would argue, must judge their theoretic bodies based up on three criteria: empirical utility, predictive capacity, and political effects. Like the theoretic corpus, the object of analysis is not a closed system (this is where Popper’s empiricism fails the social sciences). Both theory and materiality are in dialectic and must be understood as such.
I’m drawn to rhetoric b/c people in this field refuse to sever (1) from (2). We are both philosophers and social scientists, both keen observers and bleary-eyed poets. We are (re)describing. I admire DDD’s and Josh’s immanent efforts to test the limits of a theoretic vocabulary. I question the jump from this immanent testing to an assertion of descriptive utility and predictive capacity. I especially question this jump when its practitioners concede that their work has no weight on the scales of descriptive utility and predictive capacity. The science question, as I understand it, is an insistence that a rethought vocabulary be put to the empirical fires. From what I can see, neither of the posts above answer this question.
Cognitive science, on the other hand, does constantly insist on redescription and empirical testing of vocabularies. (Cognitive science does not, BTW, reduce everything to biology. For instance, Daniel Dennett has argued for a large, if not dominant, social component to human cognition, adopting a metaphor of socio-cultural software running on cognitive hardware, a metaphor borrowed from AI, adopted tentatively, and allowing for both an interior, universalized component that is continuously [always-already] folded into and altered by the contrivances of human sociality.) I am drawn to this approach, as I indicated earlier, because it can be (and insists on being) weighed on philosophical as well as social-scientific scales. Finally, I am drawn this perspective because it is illuminated and informed by both empirical data and close (phenomenological) analysis. Dennett, in fact, defends phenomenological inquiry against hard-line functionalists, such as John Searle. In a similar vein, John Elster and Martha Nussbaum insist on coupling neuroscience, biology, philosophy, and literary study in their analyses and theories of affect.
Mark G
Though I disagree with some of the characterizations mark has made above (frinstnace, my work on ethics may reveal a vocab that “supposes community as a condition brought on by language”…maybe, but it really depends on how you define “community.” I would and have argued all over the place that a preoriginary affectability precedes symbolic intervention. The language relation--in strictly Levinasian terms, “conversation” [entre-tien]--installs the *distance* necessary for an experience of proximity)—anyway, despite these and other nit picky resistances, I also think Mark has now made a space for further conversation, which I appreciate and will venture into.
He admits that he is drawn to certain theories for certain reasons. I like this new tack; it seems very Nietzschean to me. So I’ll follow, quickly, with this: And *I* am drawn to psychoanalytic and, more so, to poststructuralist theories precisely because they refuse to sweep radical alterity and the incomprehensible under the rug; they struggle to hold onto and foreground that which cannot be easily explained or even articulated. In a way that challenges all brands of macho knowledge claims, psychoanalytic and poststructuralist approaches turn their focus to that which eludes safe ways of understanding. Despite the characterizations that typically get attached to this sort of work (these “theorists” are generally described as arrogant, etc.), it seems to me to exude a kind of antimachismo that appeals to me very much. It’s a matter, perhaps—as Nietzsche sez—of taste.
Speaking of which, I’ve now been sitting on my ass here since 5:30 am, so I’m off the gym to engage in what I hold to be a much more important “personal” battle: it’s against butt droop.
"a preoriginary affectability precedes symbolic intervention"
That sounds like a description to me. The claim begs empirical evidence, preferably the kind of experiments that can isolate the variable afforded importance, demonstrating that this variable is responsible for a particular outcome, or at least demonstrating that the supposed order can be consistently observed (if possible) in controlled circumstances.
As I sed above, I keep asking for evidence b/c people make descriptive claims. In the vocabulary of my earlier post, they move from (1) to (2), from philosophy to the social sciences. If the claim is not descriptive, if it won't be weighed for its descriptive utility or its predictive capacity, then I won't ask for evidence, nor will I accept the claim as anything more than a poetic utterance. I honestly don't see how that insistence is stubborn or dismissive.
Mark G
I am very tempted to respond with a non-response: "I'll explain--again--preoriginary affectability, Mark, if you explain how human productive capacity becomes Capital...right here in blogspace." But i will refrain.
Not to be too snarky, but since I’ve got to finish reading and responding to a dissertation right now and b/c I’ve tried a hundred times to lay this out in print, lemme return your own question to you Mark, without qualifying it or deconstructing it: where is your empirical evidence that this is not a “correct” description? Do you have empirical evidence that indicates that humans are by nature enclosed, alienated beings who only then, by choice or circumstance, encounter others? Or is that simply the more standard description based on all kinds of time honored presumptions? Real question. Respond if you want. And I’ll return the favor later, when i finish this diss—-though I will have to reframe that question in a way that doesn’t automatically silence what would like to be said.
I do want to note--again and ever again--that one of the things that both psychoanalysis and poststructuralism have done for us is to challenge the very originariness of site on which your question is based--that is, as Josh suggests more eloquently than i can manage here, they operate as a challenge to the presumptiveness of a phenomenology that relies on the simply observable. I am much more interested in and attuned to enigmas than phenomena.
Re: #3 and to some extent #4...
It isn't as if detailed narratives of end-time expectation is unique to 20th century North American evangelicals. It's relatively little known, but as evidenced from news reports on Newton's papers reveal fairly specific eschatological expectations and predictions:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/06/18/newton.papers.ap/index.html
Oftentimes, for various reasons, these elements are left out of the historical depiction (i.e. it doesn't fit with the Enlightenment narrative of Newton as a father of modern science to emphasize his "strange" end-times beliefs). So, for instance, in the English translations of Dutch theologian Wilhelmus a Brakel, they leave out his treatise dealing with Revelation and predictions about the end-times (because they are "empirically false" and therefore no longer relevant?).
If there's anything remarkable about the Left Behind novels, first and foremost it has to be how poorly they are written. What needs to be shown, I think, is what differentiates North American dispensationalist eschatology, beginning with Schofield et al., from historically traditional Christian speculation on the same subject. If this is not done, what is uniquely characteristic could easily be missed.
Yes, you've nailed something that causes me to lose sleep about social explanations. It is possible to criticize this dispensationalist eschatology rather easily from within the Christian tradition(s): on scriptural grounds ("watch, for you know neither the day nor the hour" or a reading of Revelation in historical context), as well in terms of the tools of reason (no end-times prophecies have been fulfilled, and contemporary dispensationalists keep shifting ground as their predictions are falsified) or tradition (the general reticence of orthodox Christianity--broadly defined, if you limit it to the early ecumenical councils--on this issue, and the peculiarly American provenance of this latest Scofield Reference Bible-driven set of narratives). John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory systematically attempts to refute *any* effort to use social theory to interpret or explain aspects of religious belief or practice. But I would think that a sociological explanation would help separate the "irrational" aspects of belief, or, perhaps better, the merely "cultural" accretions the Church has picked up over the years. If it is the case that end-times narratives recur in times of social dislocation, isn't it useful for orthodox Christians to point out what is merely "human" (or "American"--evangelical Christians largely cannot get out of their Americano-centric worldviews) from the Gospel?
What I think my student was trying to argue is that one needs to "understand" the Left Behind audience on its own terms, as a distinctive world-view (she used the term "epistemology"), sort of the way an anthropologist like Geertz would prefer "thick description" of cultural beliefs/practices to using them as cases for a larger theory.
To me, "reductionist" is another word for "historicist," but I won't explain that because this is a blog. :-p
To your first question, though, I don't think your explanation needs psychoanalysis any more than plane calculus does. Psychoanalysis is another vocabulary for explaining the appeal of apocalyptic thinking, but if you're not interested in knowing why something is appealing at the level of affect—why a given myth provides some individuals pleasure and others, pain—then there is certainly no use for it.
Rhetorical studies has been very good with the projects of taxonomy and topography; we make good maps. Like historical materialism, rhetoricians are good at showing in retrospect how material structures (which for me includes language) track trends. What we have not been good at doing is explaining the role of affect and emotion. The most sophisticated account of the emotions in the rhetorical canon thus far is, well, the work of George Campbell---a project Art Walser has really done well to expose for us. But after that . . . Burke? Yet Burke's remarks on emotion and desire are so . . . so topographical. What else is "motive" in Burke but a kind of surface script (or fantasy)? It's like there's no motor in Burke.
So, for me, psychoanalysis is useful because it provides various theories of affect that supplement our genealogical and topographical projects. In the example of the appeal of the Left Behind series, in addition to the socioeconomic (and cultural) causes you identify, we might also say the True Believer is goaded by "desire" (for example, the demand for love represented by righteousness; God as the Big Other, and so on). Freud has a lot of compelling things to say about group psychology and behavior and the feelings that motivate the support of certain leaders. Lacan has a lot of interesting things to say about why folks do and believe things that seem prima facie painful or simply absurd. So, for me psychoanalysis is a nice counterpart to more immanentist approaches—the logical extreme of which is historicism. Psychoanalysis couples a vocabulary of interiority to an analysis at the level of exteriority (historical materialism; ideographic criticsm; generic analysis; close textual reading, and so on). Why do white men in the south find evangelicalism a prop for masculinity? Because, a forum of righteousness is an outlet for enjoyment, especially over feminized bodies (congregations, actual people, little boys, etc.), and a vivid way in which a productive violence can be circulated in a fantasy of victimage and redemption (with some props to Burke).
In sum, this ain't to say psychoanalysis is the Last Theory. With nods to Rorty on the politics of redescription, it's to say that it is another vocabulary to describe the world around us, and one that is particularly keyed to affect. In rhetorical terms, I suppose psychoanalysis is concerned here with pathos and the emotional appeal (though I would quickly argue that pathos and ethos are absolutely inseparable, insofar as emotions are always a relation to the Other or another). So you don't need psychoanalysis, unless, of course, you are asking the sorts of questions what could enlist its help. For me, psychoanalysis is a good place to go for answering what Eagleton says is the question of ideological critique: "Why do people invest in their own unhappiness?" The only satisfactory answer, seems to me, requires a "beneath" or locus of the obscene---an "off scene," a place out of sight, a gap---in short, an explanation requires the category of the unconscious. Affect and the unconscious are thus the content and form, a motor/fuel and a place, that helps us to specify rhetoric as the medium, if not the object, of exchange at the level of the subject.
I think perhaps the problem with psychoanalysis, like the label "poststructuralism" and "postmodernism," is that it appears to many to be a monolithic, Freudian enterprise when it is not. The domain of theory is huge, and it is only united in reference to the mechanisms of defense and the category of the unconscious (and arguably the notion of repression as dynamic)—after that, though, generalization is tough.
I could go on, but I don't want to give away an essay I've planned to write with a colleague on this very topic. So. I be shuttin' up, now.
I'm not sure that we need to think in terms of "supplementing" sociological, political, or ideological models. If Foucault has any merit, we should at least see that his work positions the outside inside: what we imagine as "interior," "psychological" dynamics are in fact the micropolitical work of what we often reference as "exterior" social and political forces. F. Jameson’s _Political Unconscious_ does something similar—places the ground for our interior anxieties in the exterior contradictions of capitalist society. Where Marx and Weber may go wrong is in their attribution of empirically observable behaviors strictly to empirically quantifiable causes (economic interests, bureacracies, etc.). (NB: I don't include Durkheim here b/c he at least tips his hat to the "organic" work of cultural grouping and the relationship between these "deep" organic communities and the "rational"-legal apparatus of modern societies.) If the interior is an epiphenomenon of the exterior, then rhetorical criticism (a procedurally hermeneutic enterprise based largely on individual reports of psycho-social phenomena—motives, concerns, cares, etc) is a bit like watching the monitor to understand what’s happening in the CPU. The question at issue, it seems to me, is one asked by cognitive scientists re: the phenomenological (rather than analytical/empirical) bent: Does the phenom have any reliability as a measurable and consistent factor in social-political explanation of behavior, or must we bracket the stuff inside our heads b/c it's so unreliably tied to our behaviors in real historical circumstances or b/c it's so impossible to determine what's really inside our heads in the first place? Anyone who’s ever read discussions of colors and quales knows how intricately one can discuss the relationship or the disconnection between the event and the phenom, the color and the quale. I'm inclined to lean towards the dominant functionalist answer here: the mind is a black box that we can only explain in terms of its function vis-a-vis other organisms or other systems within a given organism. Phenomenological explanation, therefore, is out the window, as is all psychoanalysis (Freudian or otherwise).
Nevertheless, I have to concede that the above answer allows little room for rhetorical investigation or agency beyond some ethically questionable efforts to employ keywords and tested metaphors in the interest of shifting perspectives and voter-behavior in predictable ways (paging Dr. Luntz. Dr. Frank Luntz, white courtesy phone). Lest we all find ourselves testing skin conductivity upon perception of cognitively/affectively heavy metaphors to learn what excites the electorate, I think we need, as Josh sez, a supplement to our genealogical and topographical projects.
I would like, in a perfect world, to see rhetoricians in conversation with those who do research in neuroscience, cognitive science, AI, and empirical psychology (more along a research line defined by the works of William James than by those of Sigmeund Freud) to develop a theoretical body that can account for interiority (affect, sour grapes, habit) without tumbling into the deep hermeneutic morass of phenomenology or Freudian-Lacanian-Jungian psychoanalysis. These latter psychological accounts are so wildly untestable and in some cases so evidently wrong-headed if not harmful that I sometimes am concerned about or embarrassed by their persistence in the humanities (especially in English departments). When a whole discipline devoted to disinterested scientific investigation, such as psychology, repudiates a theoretic body, we should be careful about adopting it. There is another rich body of work on affect and interiority (including the writings of people such as John Elster, Daniel Dennett, Ronald De Sousa, Amalie Rorty, Antonio Damasio, Jesse Prinz, and Martha Nussbaum), a body that has empirical grounding, that is testable by way of mechanisms other than another close reading (though close-reading may nicely supplement this testing), and a body that comports nicely with Aristotle's theory of pathos (as well and George Campbell's and David Hume's take on rhetorical vivacity--Art Walzer has actually presented on the connections between Damasio's neuroscience and Campbell's take on the vivacious idea. One might also consult Jeffrey Walker’s work on Aristotle, pathos, and cognitive science.) I'm baffled that Freud and Lacan continue to dominate the conversation despite all of this new work in a variety of disciplines. Elster, in the early 1980s, recommended that those interested in persuasion consult cognitive science. Yet we're still on the analyst's couch, positing unproveable theories about desire, the objet petite a, and lack.
Mark G
Historicism.
Physicalism.
Reductionism.
I am not surprised to see how historical materialism gets folded into an appreciation of Foucauldian historicism--and that somehow this has common cause with empiricism. I don't quibble with the understanding of the interior as an exterior--just with the idea that this is the whole story (the limit of the totality, if you want).
Perhaps Mark helps us to see better a dividing line over which there is some disagreement among folks: shall we resign ourselves to understanding the socious only in terms of "the fold"--that is, everything in terms of immanence/material causation? Or is there always something that eludes us, a constitutive gap, or--as I am wont to push for--an ob-scene? Is the final horizon always capitalism? Or is that decision a political choice (as opposed to, say, an ontological condition) for the purpose of critique? Does something escape us and, if so, can "it" have effects? Is culture autonomous?
Hmm. Well, maybe the dividing line is not as clear as I was originally led to believe. Perhaps, then, an apology is in order?
I'm sorry the work and interests of so many of your colleagues embarrass you Mark. Mea Culpa.
And I'm surprised to see "they" are "dominating the discussion," so I apologize for the loudmouths too. Obviously they are idiots and simply haven't done their proper readings. On behalf of everyone who has read the "hermeneutic morass" of difficult French Thinkers, Butler, Zizek, and of course Lacan and, before him Freud--and well, hmm, I guess Durkheim too . . and wait a minute, well, yes, Barthes, Marcuse, Adorno, who else? Castoriadis? Another German? Yes, Benjamin. Where was I? Oh yes, on behalf of everyone who reads this "wrongheaded" material, I apologize for your embarrassment, Mark.
I also apologize for the black clothes.
And especially the black turtlenecks. Sheesh.
I apologize for the severe looks, the dyed hair, sometimes long and in a ponytail, and I apologize for the earrings that curl up around the ear or find themselves into a nostril. I'm sorry for all the people who pay someone, often in excess of a $100 an hour, to work-through their problems to feel better. I'm sorry for all therapy, for the divorced couples. I'm sorry for false memory syndrome and all those illusory Satanists. I'm sorry for victims of trauma (I know, they just cannot get over themselves), and for people who are compulsive. I'm sorry I bite my nails and hangnails. Yes, I'm sorry for the confessionals and that weird dream last night where I had a baby wolf (the vestigal tail didn't develop until the age of fourteen, my parter told me). Well, for all of that: I'm sorry, I'm sorry, we didn't get the invite and we showed up anyway.
You know, it's too bad there isn't room for everybody, that we must insist on reducing the seating to only those who share your reading habits or who don't embarrass you. I suppose with less guests at the table there isn't much variety, but the food is safe and predictable.
Have you ever seen those sushi placemats at certain eateries? You know, the ones that show you pictures of all the sushi? Some of the mats have this funny thing where, next to a handful of the sushi pictures (the ones with tentacles or that look like poop on rice), there's a starburst that says, "CHALLENGING!" At least at your dinner party you don't have to eat the "challenging" sushi. Heck, I faintly hear a new cry coming from the dining room: "Solidarity! California Rolls for Everyone!"
PS: Zizek devotes a hunk of The Parallax View to cogntive neurobiology and brain science, you know, just in case you accidently fall in Barnes & Noble into an open book and find yourself reading it.
In my defense, I should say:
I've read a good bit of Freud, Zizek, Butler, etc. And I never sed they shouldn't be read, only that the concerns about this line of work should also be heard among folks in rhetoric. I'm not embarrassed that Freud and his offspring persist--Freud writes, well, persuasively. I am worried that a particular (widely refuted) version of psycholanalysis get presented without defense, as if there were no dissenting voices, no worries over these theories, no other (arguably more believable, more predictive, less harmful) explanation of human phenomena.
I trust that in the presence of dissenting voices, the problems with this line of criticism will become evident. This isn't about excluding the (marginalized) other. It's about evaluating theoretical paradigms for their explanatory and predictive capacity and for their political/ethical implications. If the best argument that we can make for a theoretic approach is that it adds a new vocabulary to the conversation, then we have very little reason to pursue its application or its elaboration. After all, many discourses mentioned above (Satanism, wolf-dreams, and the endless terminology taxonomizing sushi) may add to the critical conversation as well, but these additions may not be desirable. I can't imagine that we must inhabit a normalizing ethos of "California rolls for everyone" in order to insist on the rigorous investigation or evaluation of our theoretic paradigms. I would hope that a ruthlessly critical disposition would lead one towards the pickled octopus, or the starfish sashimi. If, after having sampled the fare, expressing reservations about a theoretic discourse makes one into a normalizing fascist, then truly the ethos of "pity the poor other" has crippled our critical (not to mention our evaluative) faculties.
Mark G
First, Mark says this:
"I would like, in a perfect world, to see rhetoricians in conversation with those who do research in neuroscience [etc] . . . without tumbling into the deep hermeneutic morass of phenomenology or Freudian-Lacanian-Jungian psychoanalysis. These latter psychological accounts are so wildly untestable and in some cases so evidently wrong-headed if not harmful that I sometimes am concerned about or embarrassed by their persistence in the humanities (especially in English departments). [argument that neuroscience is better than psychobabble] I'm baffled that Freud and Lacan continue to dominate the conversation . . . . we're still on the analyst's couch, positing unproveable theories about desire, the objet petite a, and lack."
Then, Mark says this:
"I've read a good bit of Freud, Zizek, Butler, etc. And I never sed they shouldn't be read, only that the concerns about this line of work should also be heard among folks in rhetoric. I'm not embarrassed that Freud and his offspring persist--Freud writes, well, persuasively. I am worried that a particular (widely refuted) version of psycholanalysis get presented without defense, as if there were no dissenting voices, no worries over these theories, no other (arguably more believable, more predictive, less harmful) explanation of human phenomena."
It doesn't take a rhetorician to point out the change is in tone here, and the first dismissive, if not arrogant "tone" is tempered in the needed qualification. I'm glad you see the import of qualification. It sounds more, how shall we put it? . . . invitational.
Notwithstanding the scientistic folks who are saying, "hey, that Freud guy got a lot of stuff wrong, but he was on to something with this unconscious bidness" (check out the write up/send up in Newsweek on the Mac-Daddy's 100th), today few of the rhetoric folks you summarily dismiss in the same pot (as if you can hyphen Jungians with Freudians and Lacanians!) are taken to make scientifico-empirical claims. Now, Zizek in his latest "goes there," but in general the demigods of High Theory who all owe a debt to Freud and/or Lacan are not making claims one would even want to empirically test. Empiricism is not the only way to evaluate something, of course. Psychoanalysis is used in the humanities, as most folks know, as an interpetive vocabulary to put language to certain dynamics folks see in the world, especially in "texts" and the people who engage those texts.
Now, to your straw-person: "If the best argument that we can make for a theoretic approach is that it adds a new vocabulary to the conversation, then we have very little reason to pursue its application or its elaboration."
Reducing the notion of "redescription" to the additive argument ("but wait! there's more!") is not quite it, of course (again, see Rorty on redescription, which he would deny as an argumentative field anyway). The argument about theoretical perspectives is not simply diveristy and variety is good---which is, we must admit, one of the bubbly pluaralist arguments behind the liberal arts---but also that vocabularies bring realities into being (thank Deity for the poets/philosophers). If we all agree that "it's all inside" (and, horror of horrors, its CPU is made by Intel!) then vocabularies cannot transcend and better correspond, they only cohere to a greater or lesser degree; there's no meta-language here to evaluate the superiority of your cherished vocaulary. After all, Mark sez phenomenology is out the window, right?
In my world, critical assessment or dissent is not calling your conversant an idiot and an embarassment to the field, and then retreating to the language of truth-will-out critique. A number of materialist scholars in rhetoric routinely criticize psychoanalysis and other theories of the post without resorting to a dismissive tone (e.g., see Aune's thoughtful original post to this thread). Or put alternately, saying there is room for eveyone at the table doesn't mean you cannot ask them what their name is or what they do for a living or even asking for their credentials; and if they want the raw squid that is still moving, what's wrong with letting them eat it? Even when you think some types of perspectives or thinking are a load of tripe on rice, insofar as a lot of people are eating it and there seems like a supportive group for it with really smart and creative chefs, perhaps there is some value in it? Maybe you might take a class in eating the challenging sushi, you know, so you understand what it is they are tasting, even if you don't care for it. I know many times I've tried to eat chitlins; admittedly, I just don't "get it." And because that's the case, I try not to malign the cuisine of those who do. Chitlin eaters are not a disgrace to my family. Now, I have some first cousins who married each other, but, you know, Freud would say that's a much different story . . .
Let's propose that theoretic vocabularies may be evaluated based upon their (1) empirical validity, (2) their predictive capacity, and (3) their social/political effects. The first two, of course, point us to fairly common questions in the social sciences: how accurately/effectively does this theory explain a social dynamic? How accurately/effectively does this theory predict future outcomes of a social dynamic? I gather that Lacanian analysis, as Josh defends it, does not answer either of these questions, nor does it purport the ability to answer these questions. This leaves us with the third: social/political effects. Rorty's notion of redescription seems an appropriate place to begin our questions about whether or not Lacanian analysis redescribes things in a political/social project that we find acceptable. His notion of edification, likewise, leads us to think about how much a given theoretic construct improves the lives and the relationships among those propagating, applying, bickering over its terminology.
The question becomes, how does Freudian (or Lacanian) psychoanalysis edify us? This is where the food analogy will fail. Eating hurts the individual. Professing and promoting beliefs may damage more than the professor. IN the past, we know that many have benefitted from their time on the couch (not surprising, given that empirical research finds all psychoanalytic approaches roughly equal in their beneficial effects--seems there's something good about talking out our problems, regardless of the terms we use or the narratives that we tell). We also know that in the past, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis have yeilded questionable and damaging treatments for standard psychological illnesses, such as depression, schizophrenia, and, as Jim Aune reminds us often, autism. Finally, Marxian scholars have argued (convincingly to my mind) that Freud's psychoanalytic theory participates in a bourgeois interiority that often blinds people to the social causes (or amplifications or complications) of their psychological trauma. So, looking inside cripples the efforts to change the outside. In the humanities, it seems that Lacanian and Freudian analysis produce more Lacanian and Freudian analysis--more redescription. Presently, I don't see the value in this last effect. I trust that my feelings about the earlier mentioned effects are evident. I would like for this post to end here, but the interchange has become complicated by a variety of dynamics.
So I must proceed with a rear-guard defense: I never called anyone an idiot, never sed that those who declare themselves Lacanians or Freudians or Jungians are embarrasments to the discipline (though I did say that I was embarrased by a version of Lacanian psychoanalysis dominating the conversation despite a plurality of other and arguably more persuasive perspectives. Given that I occupy a dissenting position and that I've never written on the subject of affect, I am partly to blame for the situation that embarrases me.). I never sed that empiricism is the final scale for evaluating theoretic paradigms, and certainly never threw phenomenology out the window. (On this latter point, I would hope that a movement into cognitive science be made with a constant effort to preserve the importance of phenomena as data. If we throw phenomenology out the window, then rhetoric will have little to offer to the social sciences. We'll be left describing what objective social forces feel like to the pitiably deceived denizens persuaded but not moved by their professed beliefs.) In short, I did not put the mantle of abuse on anyone. Those who care to don a hairshirt must do so without my assistance. I won't even provide the garment.
And this is the last of it: I'm honestly exhausted by the constant accusations of incivility, dismissive tone, or the abusive treatment of otherwise kind and considerate colleagues. I'll concede to a provocative element in the posts above (all the posts above). Provocation is, well, provocative--it gets us talking. It got us talking. Finally I'll note that those who cry loudest about character assassination are often themselves practicing a species of the ad personam. I learned that last one from Bill O'Reilly, a man who instantly dismisses all criticism as vitriol spewed by malicious detractors. I'd recommend that we stop talking about our feelings, our incivilities, and our bruised egos, and start talking about the matter. In the end, none of this is about me any more than it's about Josh. It's about how best to approach rhetorical analysis. I like that conversation. I'd like to have it.
Mark G
Mark recently said: "So I must proceed with a rear-guard defense: I never called anyone an idiot . . . ."
Earlier Mark said of the "the deep hermeneutic morass of phenomenology or Freudian-Lacanian-Jungian psychoanalysis" that the "latter psychological accounts are so wildly untestable and in some cases so evidently wrong-headed if not harmful that I sometimes am concerned about or embarrassed by their persistence in the humanities (especially in English departments)."
Mark is housed in an English department.
An OED definition of "wrong-headed": "having a perverse judgment or intellect; persistent or obstinate in erroneous opinion; perversely or obstinately wrong." An OED definition of "idiot": "A person so deficient in mental or intellectual faculty as to be incapable of ordinary acts of reasoning or rational conduct. Applied to one permanently so afflicted, as distinguished from one who is temporarily insane, or ‘out of his wits’, and who either has lucid intervals, or may be expected to recover his reason."
Mark recently said: "[I] never sed that those who declare themselves Lacanians or Freudians or Jungians are embarrassments to the discipline (though I did say that I was embarrassed by a version of Lacanian psychoanalysis dominating the conversation despite a plurality of other and arguably more persuasive perspectives . . . .)"
Earlier Mark said: "the latter [morass of phenomenology or Freudian-Lacanian-Jungian psychoanalysis] psychological accounts are so wildly untestable and in some cases so evidently wrong-headed if not harmful that I sometimes am concerned about or embarrassed by their persistence in the humanities (especially in English departments)."
Mark recently said: " I never sed that empiricism is the final scale for evaluating theoretic paradigms, and certainly never threw phenomenology out the window."
Earlier Mark said: (1) "there is another rich body of work on affect and interiority . . . a body that has empirical grounding, that is testable by way of mechanisms other than another close reading (though close-reading may nicely supplement this testing)." And (2) "I'm inclined to lean towards the dominant functionalist answer here: the mind is a black box that we can only explain in terms of its function vis-à-vis other organisms or other systems within a given organism. Phenomenological explanation, therefore, is out the window, as is all psychoanalysis (Freudian or otherwise)."
Finally, Mark sez: "I'd recommend that we . . . start talking about the matter. . . . . It's about how best to approach rhetorical analysis. I like that conversation. I'd like to have it."
My response is: ah, blog-logic. Context is really everything, isn't it? And (con)text is also the locus of "lack." Do you really want a conversation? If so, why not really go for it? I readily admit there is a fine line between trolling and provocation in the blogosphere; humor is usually my way of telling the difference. So what is "the matter" of the conversation? How do we proceed? Tell me a joke?
A horse walks into a bar and sits down. The bartender asks, "Why the long face?"
Ta-dum-dum.
I think this has been a productive discussion; the fact that it's been veering toward the personal simply shows the importance of the issues. A few observations:
1. I still don't know how one gets from the psychic/psychoanalytic dimension to the social and cultural. I can't help thinking that there is a bourgeois liberal bias in all the psychoanalytic perspectives in that they start from the individual rather than the social group. Hence my emphasis on Goldmann's notion of the "transindividual." But, Josh, I do think your analysis of masculine desire in your response is very helpful indeed.
2. If psychoanalytic theory/criticism is to make headway in rhetorical studies (or elsewhere), there needs to be an answer to the "science" problem. I believe that there is an answer, but (much like traditional public address scholars circle the wagons when criticized by theorists--you should have seen that happen at Vanderbilt last fall) no one seems to want to develop it. Without connecting especially Lacanian theory to other perspectives in the human sciences, its proponents will simply come off as a sort of hermetic guild.
3. I am convinced--this all started when I magically became a "conservative" after the publication of Rhetoric & Marxism in 1994, having been unacceptably left-wing in the field before then--that there is a disturbing crisis abrewing in rhetorical studies, and it is rather similar to the social science wars of the 1970's. Scholars (especially younger ones) of a post-structuralist (broadly speaking) bent feel wounded by journal reviewers or, in some cases, tenure committees. I, like others, am really very tired of hearing that I or occasionally my students are somehow reactionary if we want to study, say, presidents or supreme court justices (one of my best doctoral students was harangued on the phone for an hour by a faculty member at a Major Midwestern Doctoral Program for how "traditional" his and my co-authored article on Hugo Black was, and that he couldn't possibly fit into their "Advanced" program. I doubt that the guy read the article--just looked at the topic. Another faculty member at the same institution has made similar attacks on me, both publicly and privately--admitting finally to a former student that she had not actually read my work). Would it really kill people who identify with post-structuralism or cultural studies occasionally to read some economics or policy studies? Why can't we do both? So it seems like one of those classical "punctuation" problems (if you ever studied interpersonal communication): husband withdraws, wife nags, husband says he withdraws because she nags, she says she nags because he withdraws. My back is up because I think many cultural studies scholars refuse to accept criticism; cultural studies scholars feel misunderstood by an older Establishment. We're seeing something of a replay of this problem in the current discussion.
Wowee. I've been scrambling with various deadlines and so have had to take a little break from the Blogora---imagine my surprise this morning when i logged in and got a glimpse of what you boyz do when Momma's away. :)
Mark and I have run up against this impasse before--his hard-headed insistance that everything can be tested, that everything is testable, or that it damn well ought to be, and that if it's not testable, it doesn't exist or isn't worthy; and my equally hard-headed insistance that the theory of testability is itself often the problem, precisely b/c it forgets that it is itself a theory or that what is considered "proof" is housed in nothing but theoretical propositions and presuppositions that have forgotten that they are. For a powerful examination of the problem and the drive of the test, I would recommend Avital Ronell's _The Test Drive_ ---except that if you already make testability your bottom line test for worthiness, you probably won't find it worthwhile.
I have to say that it did offend me for a nanosec when Mark said (and he did say it, right? It's right there on the screen below this...) that he finds what *I* do an embarrassment. But then i realized that it does go both ways. I'm not going to pretend to be on some moral high-ground here. I very often feel embarrassed by Marxist approaches that seem unaware of how highly contested, how biased (why priviledge economics or even materiality?), and how utterly dismissive they are of other approaches. So in a weird way, we agree: we are both kinda embarrassed by that to which the other devotes his or her scholarly energies. I think that's okay. I don't want to rid English departments of Marxist discourse, though. I find Marxist theory and practice beneficial, productive, and challenging. I don't think it's hogwash; i think it's a powerful critical perspective ... one that often forgets it is also a perspective, a theory, especially when it's dissing "theory." One could easily say the same about Lacanian approaches or cult studs approaches, or poststructural approaches (and btw, the latter two are not synonymous). And what can any of them bring to the table but a new vocabulary, along with its attendant (new) methods of testing and provability??
One more thing. Mark writes:
Now *that* i do find to be hogwash. Freud---even before Bataille---noted that the so-called "inner experience" turns out to be a constitutive outside, an exteriority that produces the fiction, when necessary, of the inside. See, for example, Group Psych, where Freud flatly states that the "individual" is a function of his or her social relations. (psychoanalysis, he says there, was always already social psychology.) Or see The Ego and the Id, where the "character of the ego" turns out to be the product of an irreparable and originary relationality. Lacan, for his part, offered up the neologism "extimacy," which is meant to indicate that the subject's "center" exists outslde itself, that his or her *own* existential structure is ex-centric, like a mobius strip. It was not Freud but American ego-psychology, which typically reigns surpreme in psychology depts here in the states and which eagerly dismisses Freudian psychoanalysis as "wildly untestable," that banks on "bourgeois interiority."
Jim, the *psychoanalytic* dimension BEGINS in the social and cultural. But i'll pose the same question from a different perspective: how on earth does one get from cognitive science to the social and cultural? If one believes that everything comes down to the hard and testable facts of biology---and even Burke made that the "ultimate ground"---how on earth can one get to the social?
In any case, i think what we may have here is not simply a disagreement but a real differend: differences, unresolvable through litigation, between parties who do not share the same rules of cognition. And i don't think "tolerance" is an acceptable response to it since tolerance, as we know, still holds onto the notion that one is correct, has god on her side, and can therefore be infinitely patient and merciful with the idiots. I'd like to think that our response (that is, the rhetorician's response) to the differend would be to listen, to listen more carefully, to listen precisely to the static and interference on the line that announces the limits of the differend. Already Mark has issued an invitation to discussion, to further discussion...and Josh has seconded, with the request for humor. And Jim has responded with both...