Thursday, August 05, 2010

Credulity

Our capacity as human beings for imagination and story-telling makes us exquisitely vulnerable to exploitation by those who understand the properties of ideological power. Our natural propensity to credit commentary above any more detached understanding makes us more than prepared to open our minds to versions of ‘reality’ which are laced with some kind of appeal to our tastes, preferences or perceived interests. We are, one could say, naturally credulous. The societal apparatus which exists for the manipulation of our credulity forms an absolutely essential part of the technology of power. In everyday parlance this is, of course, for the most part what we mean by ‘the media’. But the news and entertainment media are not the only determinants of the way we see and interpret the world. Education and the related institutions of intellectual endeavour and instruction are also crucial to our understanding. None of this, of course, is lost on those in whose interest it is to channel the fruits of our labours into their pockets....

Once again, the attribution of greater reality to words than to worlds is already prefigured in the almost irresistible priority we accord as we grow up to commentary. Pretty well everybody is in this way primed to attach enormous importance to language, and I would not want to suggest that this phenomenon is in any way the invention of a cynical controlling power. It does not have to be conspiracy that rules our society (though sometimes it may be), but merely the sliding together of the interests which oil the wheels.

Modern philosophy, for example, has over the twentieth century come more and more to credit the importance of language and to discredit any notion not only that the world can be directly known (which certainly seems impossible), but that there is any point at all in speculating about what lies beyond language. There is nothing, says Derrida, outside the text; popular readings of Foucault privilege ‘discourse’ above all else; Rorty scoffs as the idea that our understanding could ‘hold a mirror up to nature’.

While these philosophers have serious, possibly even valid, points to make, their standpoint also lends itself wonderfully well to a society which seeks ideologically to detach its citizens from their embodied relation to a material world. Serious intellectuals seem to be the last to anticipate the use to which their work will be put. When, for example, Jean Baudrillard writes of the ‘hyperreality’ created by unfettered consumerism, it is all too easy for the edge of critical irony to be lost from his text and for it to become a kind of sourcebook for marketing executives, admen and other cultural illusionists. The whole notion of ‘postmodernism’ becomes popularized as the cutting edge of social and intellectual progress, distracting us from the (much more comprehensible) insight that what we are involved in is in fact a recycling of high capitalist economic strategies which reached a previous peak seventy or eighty years ago.

Psychology also has played an enormous part in helping to de-materialize the Western world over the past century. Freud managed to represent the significance of our experience as not only all in the mind, but most of it in the ‘unconscious mind’ such that it became well and truly impossible for us to criticize our world (just to criticize our selves, and that only with the help of a professional psychoanalyst). Indeed, for much of psychology, what goes on in the world, what are the material relations between individual and society, is a matter of complete irrelevance. All that counts is what goes on inside the individual’s head. Whatever the benefits of this view in terms of the hope it may bring to people of controlling their fate, it is an absolute godsend to those who have a less rarefied grasp of how to make the world work to their advantage. Thieves sack the mansion undisturbed while its occupants remain sunk in their dreams.

13 comments:

  1. When I read this:

    "for much of psychology, what goes on in the world, what are the material relations between individual and society, is a matter of complete irrelevance. All that counts is what goes on inside"

    - my first impulse was to comment: "He should read David Smail". Then I clicked on the link.

    So many thanks for posting this. Smail is very good, very sharp and very disillusioned (in the best sense), which no doubt explains why he is so assiduously ignored.

    - w.

    ReplyDelete
  2. thanks qlipw; yes my friend who is a shrink and was going to this lefty shrnks conference this week in Nova Scotia asked me who I thought did some good theory in psychology; she used to be a freudian so i said at first Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, though it didn't convince me finally i thought it was the strongest possible case for psychoanalysis. Then when she said she's not a freudian anymore (even denied being one ever! not so not so) and I suggested him, and she wrote to him asking if there was anyone in the states who was on his same track. And he said come to our conference in manchester or wherever maybe you'll meet some merikan students but no, there was no one he could think of in practising psychology and psychtherapy who was thinking like him in the US.

    I think Gabor Maté though may have some similar views, in Canada.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "I suggested him,"

    Smail that is

    ReplyDelete
  4. -While these philosophers have serious, possibly even valid, points to make, their standpoint also lends itself wonderfully well to a society which seeks ideologically to detach its citizens from their embodied relation to a material world.

    Well, I’ve gone down this road before, so (without wanting to say anything about ‘these philosophers’), what is the objective (or even rhetorical) status of this embodied relation to the material world? The subsequent reference to Freud is interesting here – somehow the Freudian project locates human distress (and human experience generally) within the human mind (somewhere, perhaps, within the skull), somehow disjoint from the world, but you could just as easily argue that what Freud illustrated was how the substance of the mind was a product of the concrete relationships between a developing human and its human environment. It’s all very embodied - these nipples and mouths and vaginas and arseholes and penises - but it’s all also totally historical – ‘mother’ and ‘father’ aren’t biological categories here.

    - the scientific method is at its best the least coercive as well as the most accurate way we have of establishing what is - while acknowledging the limitations of these concepts - 'real' and 'true' ... A method fundamentally libertarian at its core.... unbiased observers struggling in good faith to arrive at the most objective assessment possible...

    The Scientific Method, no less! It does exist, within the skull.

    -Our capacity as human beings for imagination and story-telling makes us exquisitely vulnerable to exploitation by those who understand the properties of ideological power.

    Well, yeah, but the opposite is just as likely.

    ReplyDelete
  5. thanks bill

    i don't think i follow about Freud -

    "the substance of the mind was a product of the concrete relationships between a developing human and its human environment."

    the substance of the mind is innate: the structure of the mind - three interconnecting chambers and some other regions that come and go (preconscious) - is produced by the conflcit within the individual arising from various desired relating to a social model based on purported normal relations between heterosexual couples also determined by the same conflicts nterior to the individual (later).


    "It’s all very embodied - these nipples and mouths and vaginas and arseholes and penises"

    What is "it"? then you say

    "but it’s all also totally historical – ‘mother’ and ‘father’ aren’t biological categories here. "

    presumably the same "it" - but I can't identify it.

    ReplyDelete
  6. At birth, the baby has a mind that is characterised as entirely "Id". The content of this mind is the consciousness of desires. The idea of private property is innate - the Id desires sole possession in objects suitable for consumption and exploitation. From this primal desire - for private property in objects of sensual enjoyment - arise the conflicts with the exterior world, which occasionally thwart these desires, and even more importantly rival or share them, which will create the later more elaborately structured mind.

    Freud's account is not consistent, but this is the overwhelmingly dominant version.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I don’t think I meant any more by the word ‘it’ than the object of Freud’s study. We can call it a developing human individual.

    What you have in Freud, I think, is an idea that the way in which biological imperatives are met critically determines the nature of the psyche. Freud didn't, as far as I know, see this as an historical issue, so I'm not trying to reclaim him as a closet marxist. But it doesn't take a great leap to regard the biological imperatives of an infant as just that -- biological imperatives (food, shelter..), as opposed to human needs, and also to see that the way in which those imperatives were met, as he was studying the effects of it, took a particular historical form (maternal nourishing, heterosexual relationships, etc.).

    I think that the broad characterisation of Freud - id, ego, superego, penis envy, the unconscious, all that stuff - misses a great deal of the insight. I also think that the general version of Freud that abounds has a lot to do with the way in which his ideas about unconscious and biologically driven impulses were co-opted to inform means of control and manipulation -- from mobs to advertising campaigns.

    So, I'm not convinced that he can be held responsible for managing to ‘represent the significance of our experience as not only all in the mind, but most of it in the ‘unconscious mind’ such that it became well and truly impossible for us to criticize our world.’ Blaming Freud for the prevalence of psychobabble seems to me akin to blaming Marx and Engels for the idea that history constitutes some sort of natural process of conflict and resolution.

    From the Smail argument: -“‘credibility’ – what people can be persuaded to believe – is the ultimate goal of ‘spin’, but in the popular mind their remains an indissoluble, though inarticulate, link between what is believable and what is real or true.”
    This contains the heart of what I think is problematic with that account of ‘credulity’ and what stems from it. The constraint on oppression and exploitation becomes some transcendental buffer – reality, truth – just as the object of the Scientific Method exists out there somewhere and determines our idea of progress or failure. For sure, psychobabble is pernicious (the prevalence of self-help solutions to malnutrition and unemployment are one of the more disgusting current media manifestations), but I don’t think replacing it with 19th century positivism is the way forward.

    ReplyDelete
  8. "I think that the broad characterisation of Freud - id, ego, superego, penis envy, the unconscious, all that stuff - misses a great deal of the insight."

    Which is....?

    ReplyDelete
  9. "as he was studying the effects of it, took a particular historical form (maternal nourishing, heterosexual relationships, etc.). "

    Sophocles:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophocles

    "the general version of Freud that abounds has a lot to do with the way in which his ideas about unconscious and biologically driven impulses were co-opted to inform means of control and manipulation -- from mobs to advertising campaigns. "

    Yes I agree here, Bernays' Freud is the US' Freud, and this is all simply about sex drive dominating consciousness and various required repressions dominating the unconscious thus functioning as secret motives. But then the "sexual revolution" changes the typical repressions and their forms, so that the appeal of this

    http://www.artofsmoking.com/joe_camel.jpg

    is in fact is the same as this

    http://ih0.redbubble.net/work.3727108.1.ts,482x482,white,longsleeve,fafafa.v3.jpg


    that it isn't unnoticed.

    ReplyDelete
  10. "So, I'm not convinced that he can be held responsible for managing to ‘represent the significance of our experience as not only all in the mind, but most of it in the ‘unconscious mind’ such that it became well and truly impossible for us to criticize our world.’ Blaming Freud for the prevalence of psychobabble"

    Is that what he's doing? I think rather he is just observing that for Freud, the individual's fantasies are determining of individual psychic comfort. The girls weren't sexually abused, they desired forbiiden lovers and then tormented themselves. And of course -

    "Happiness is the deferred fulfillment of a prehistoric wish. That is why wealth brings so little happiness: money is not an infantile wish."

    That's not equivocal is it?

    ReplyDelete
  11. As for Freud "held responsible" - I don't think Smail is suggesting that Freud personally was some demiurge who fashioned a world which would guarantee his product the reception it got, or that had he never lived, everything would have been different in his discipline and in the world. Clearly Freud is just the most famous of many practitioners, and arrives just before modernism and represents a kind of peak of a many-centuries-long tradition of thinking about the individual psyche.

    It seems pretty clear to me that Smail subscribes to a fairly straightforward Marxist concept of how bourgeois intellectuals produce culture product useful to their class and from it's/their perspective, and that he's not presenting Freud as some figure out of German Idealist dreams of worldmolding German Spirit. Clearly he's not personally "blaming Freud" for the dominant ideas about and practise of psychotherapy - that would seem to contradict everything he says about his conception of the world and individuals, and your interpretation seems to hang on a resort to typical expressions in the composition of the essay.

    ReplyDelete
  12. "but I don’t think replacing it with 19th century positivism is the way forward."

    I think you misidentify historical materialism as "19th century positivism".

    For although the media and marketing technocrats vie with each other to foist upon us that ‘reality’ most profitable to themselves and to the influences which control them, it becomes pretty obvious that we are not talking here about what most people think of as reality, but about make-believe of differing degrees of credibility. At the heart of this whole enterprise, then, there is a contradiction: ‘credibility’ – what people can be persuaded to believe – is the ultimate goal of ‘spin’, but in the popular mind their remains an indissoluble, though inarticulate, link between what is believable and what is real or true. Credible worlds, in other words, are not the same as real ones. Business fakes a world which it sells us as the truth, but is fatally undermined by the truth that lies beyond it.

    For language need not be simply the means whereby we create an infinity of relative worlds (that is to say, a snare and delusion). On the contrary, it may be used in the struggle to decode our experience of reality, to give us a sense of what is actually happening in the world.

    ReplyDelete
  13. and while i can see an objection to 20th century positivism as just vicious ideology, how is 19th century positivism not part of a "way forward"? Do you just think there is no point in seeking practical measures to deal with certain kinds of resource depletion - water, breathable air - resulting from environmental changes? Are you suggesting a purely rites and spritesy response - just transform ourselves to not need water but also to be able to breathe under it?

    ReplyDelete