Confronting Theory

Philip Bell

Description

Confronting Theory presents a methodological (philosophical) and educational evaluation and critique of what has come to be known as Theory (‘with a capital-T’) in cross-disciplinary humanities education. Rather than merely dismissing Theory writing as risibly pretentious and abstract, Confronting Theory examines its principal concepts from the perspective of academic psychology and shows that, although ‘Theory that only dogs can hear’ may sound like revolutionary psychological analysis it is frequently incoherent and/or has few, if any, empirical implications that students can evaluate.

Chapter One:

Cultural Studies and Capital-T Theory

The Problem of ‘Theory’

Cultural Studies and/as Psychology

Texts and Science 

Theory's Challenge 

 

Chapter Two:

What is Theory About?

Immaterial Foundations

After the ‘Sokal Hoax’

Theory is Not Metaphor

 

Chapter Three:

Different Things

Language Problems

Reductionism and ‘Essentialism’

Relations and Things

Becoming Theoretical

Real Differences: ‘Race’ and Identity

Making Sense of Difference

 

Chapter Four:

Theory, People and ‘Subjects’

Psychology and the Emergence of Cultural Studies

The ‘Return to the Signifier’

Semiotic Subjects, or Persons?

Decentring Psychology

Equivocating: Anti-‘Essentialism’

Subjects Need Biology

 

Chapter Five:

‘Post-Human’ Theory and Cultural Studies

The Printing Press, Digital Media and Humanism

Enlightenment Humanism

Escaping the Human?

Problems of Coherence

 

Chapter Six:

Affecting Ontologies

Affect as an Entity

The Trinity: Feeling, Emotion, Affect

Becoming Ontological – The Student’s Problem

Affect extraordinaire: Horse Sense?

 

Chapter Seven:

Real experience, Un-real Science

Moving Science: The Body in Theory

Vital Phenomenology

Neo- or Non-Psychology?

Realism as an Ethical Attitude

 

Chapter Eight:

Theory and Education

Realism as a Default Position

When Students ‘do Theory’

Teaching Theory

Bluffing 

‘Post-Humanities’ and Education

No Laughing Matter

Sujets

• Digital Media
• Technology Policy
• Public Policy
• Political Science
• Popular culture
• Cultural Studies
• Internet
• Science

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 14 mai 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841503813
• Langue: English

Extrait

Confronting Theory
In olden days a glimpse of theory Was looked on as something dreary Now, Heaven knows, Anything goes!
Apologies to Cole Porter
Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning fact and existence? No. Well, don t commit it to the flames, all the same; but be careful .
David Hume
Confronting Theory
The Psychology of Cultural Studies
Philip Bell
First published in the UK in 2010 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2010 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2010 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Holly Rose Copy-editor: Heather Owen Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire
ISBN 978-1-84150-317-2 / EISBN 978-1-84150-381-3
Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.
Contents
Preface
Chapter 1: Cultural Studies and Capital-T Theory
Chapter 2: What is Theory About?
Chapter 3: Different Things
Chapter 4: Theory, People and Subjects
Chapter 5: Post-Human Theory and Cultural Studies
Chapter 6: Affecting Ontologies
Chapter 7: Real experience, Un-real Science
Chapter 8: Theory and Education
References
Index
Preface
There is not a fixed and yet there is a common, human nature: without the latter there would be no possibility of talking about human beings, or, indeed, of communication, on which all thought depends - and not only thought, but feeling, imagination, action. (Berlin [1986] 2004: 26)
I n the twenty-plus years since Isaiah Berlin wrote this letter on human nature , a lot has changed, including what it means to write a letter. More significantly, of course, the idea that humans have a nature, and that academic disciplines need to understand this if they are to converse about communication, imagination and feelings, sounds quaintly essentialist and indefensibly humanist in today s post-disciplinary academy.
The eight essays in this book address overlapping aspects of the theoretical assumption that human experience, culture, communication, and life itself can be meaningfully understood without reference to human nature (however flexible and non-essentialist that concept may be). I present arguments against the idea that systematic empirical knowledge about people, their biology and their psychology, is irrelevant to the domains of the humanities [ sic ] and social sciences. I regard it as educationally imperative that students be taught that it is possible to know objective things about why and how people behave and feel as they do in particular cultural and social circumstances. I mount this thesis by examining key concepts and assumptions in post-humanist capital-T Theory: is it epistemologically and ontologically more tenable, more productive, more useful as the basis for conversing about cultural life than the episteme that it overturns?
Darwin, Marx, Freud, even in their own different ways, Piaget, Skinner, Levi-Strauss and Judith Butler - all describe dimensions of social and psychological life and assumed that human beings were an animal species with certain qualities, capacities, dispositions and physical limitations. Amongst other things they disagreed about what kinds of explanatory (and that meant causal ) accounts of different human lives needed to be postulated to understand various human interactions, their biology, social histories, and multiple, ever-changing cultures. But all these writers assumed that the different phenomena and processes they were trying to understand were real: they made competing, but contestable claims about what is the case. They adopted publicly defined terminologies, however novel they may have been at the time (e.g. Freud s cathexes , Marx s surplus value ) and were not immune to theoretical analysis - they were certainly not na vely anti-theory, not na ve positivists (Skinner, perhaps, excluded). For my purposes, however, the most important methodological assumption that united all those who theorized about people and studied them empirically within the social and biological sciences, was that they each understood that they could have been in error, and if so, they could be shown to be in error .
From the1970s at least, European philosophical writings increasingly competed with empirico-realist epistemologies in Anglo-American humanities and social science curricula. Few methodological certainties remained by the end of the century as students learned to question realism, reductionism, essentialism, and Western epistemological foundationalism . New -isms and -ologies peppered academic discourse, questioning the assumed objectivity of knowledge ( scientific knowledge included). In fact, as will be discussed in this book, humanities students today are very likely to leave university equipped with an armoury of arguments against science s claim to objectivity, whether or not they have attained even rudimentary knowledge of any particular science during their own studies. (Ironically, graduates from science faculties are unlikely to know anything at all about these critical paradigms ).
I believe that post-disciplinary education in what is now called Cultural Studies has not earned the right to such dismissive anti-realist complacency. Theory-inspired Cultural Studies has shown too little regard for cogency, coherence, truth and evidence. In mounting its attacks on the very possibility of knowing things about people, Cultural Studies writers have often ignored the liberating demands of reason and objectivity. As a result they have denied students the opportunity to converse with each other about common cultural, political and social issues. If all knowledge is completely language-dependent (or theory-dependent ) in the strong sense of these terms - if novel realities can be invoked through words alone - knowledge is quickly reduced to mere belief and high-sounding opinion. Epistemological modesty in the face of recalcitrant reality and contingency is not encouraged in such an educational environment.
I find it ironic to have written this book. I am at best a lapsed psychologist , having taught in the media and cultural fields for almost four decades, the period of the ascent of post-disciplinary studies. And I have a long history of critically analysing essentialism and reductionism (for instance, in regard to representations of gender and race ). I have been consistently critical of the methodological and educational triviality of much of academic psychology itself. 1 I have maintained a consistently anti-reductionist and anti-positivist position. In fact, forty years ago I wrote an undergraduate essay that argued against the logical possibility of reducing psychological predicates to physiological descriptors. Mental phenomena could not be understood nor explained only as physico-chemical phenomena, but had to be defined relationally. Any coherent account of consciousness had to allow that consciousness was always of some state of affairs that existed independently of the brain.
Fast forward to the new millennium - today I have been forced to restate these kinds of arguments in the context of the saturation of what is now called Cultural Studies discourse by ad hoc psychological concepts and metaphysical postulates so abstract that only dogs can hear them, as students often joke. As a university teacher, I have tried to comfort my bemused and confused charges with counter arguments to the new-fangled idealisms and metaphysical houses of cards that Theory -writers have constructed.
As I no longer have teaching responsibilities, nor carry the soul-destroying burden of administering a large academic unit, I have taken the opportunity to confront several aspects of Theory , asking that its proponents justify their methodological assumptions and metaphysical excesses. I try to break out of the circular corral of textuality and the question-begging defence of inter-textuality. Instead, I ask what the claims of particular cultural Theory analyses of psychological issues imply - what could each mean, if anything, empirically. I briefly outline the relevance of the analyses I canvass to psychological issues (for example, to questions of human emotions, when I deal with affect ), and sketch some of the relevant historical contexts from which Theory and Anglo-American academic psychology both developed.
I have tried to be fair to examples of writing that I admit I sometimes find pretentious and affected, by taking their authors at their word , so to speak. I have laboured over many texts that yielded very little enlightenment, but have done so in good faith, hoping to understand them before offering my critique. In this I have acknowledged the respective writers own advice that their analyses are not meant to be interpreted figuratively (e.g. metaphorically), but are intended to be read literally. I have tried not to be dismissive, even though I judge many analyses found in Cultural Studies to be philosophically na ve. This has meant that I have included many lengthy quotations from works popular with Cultural Studies academics and hence likely to be familiar to students. Although I have limited my technically philosophical arguments, the educational issues that agitate my concern do demand some epistemological sophistication of my readers at times. So where appropriate I have explained what is at stake in technical terms, I hope clearly enough for undergraduate readers and their teachers alike to understand. And I have resisted the temptation to satirize the examples I discuss (well, mostly), although I have done so elsewhere in less formal contexts, I have to confess. 2
It will be cle