Alena wrote
>So if psychologizing, both professional and everyday, is just one way of
>talking about the human condition, perhaps we should be careful of
>privileging it and at least be aware of how any discourse can be used for
>ideological purposes that we might not want to support.
>
>SURELY I am preaching to the choir, right?
(choral flourishes "aaaahhhh-mmmmeeeehhhnnnn...")
i've been having this internal (well, perhaps not so internal eh? huh huh)
struggle with psychology for many years,
i used to believe in it, studied it, tried to understand all of it, but
one day my entire belief structure completely collapsed and i remember
feeling thoroughly stunned, stranded, thinking i'd been duped, "it's all a
fiction," i said aloud. it's methodologically more sophisticated than
phrenology, but it amounts to the same - inferences about the interior by
examining the contours of the exterior.
one of the reasons i have stayed with xmca is because of the
social-cultural-historical aspects of learning, and not specifically about
how "others" learn but about how i, as an adult gay woman, learned in the
contexts of the conservative university. of course you're right, we must
be careful about privileging _any_ discourse, because any discourse is an
institutional dialect designed to both project institutional validity,
and protect the speaker at the same time. the difficulty is always with
idelogy, it's an insidious concept, really, because it functions as
"common sense" in a way that disables radical thinking. i think the point
of perfect perplexion for me was when, while trying to read Marx on
'methods', i came across the assertion that "all methods are ideological"
and whoa. i couldn't seem to undo that as a arresting tautology. long
story short: i believe there is more to be understood by understanding how
history influences societies, than how to study what might be inside
someone's head. psych-mind; ology-logic - a logic of the mind? that's a
tautology, too. befuddling.
anyhow, i am going to make a very concentrated effort here to only offer
supportive remarks, and i am (oh geez she promises this all the time!!!)
really really going to put aside my frustrations and not rant on other
people's disciplines of choice.
thanks Alena.
diane
Alena, brave grrl, reminds me to think more, rant less...
>
>I'd like to quibble, Diane, although this quibble actually supports your
>argument, it seems to me, by drawing your exception back under the cover
>of your argument.
>
>"Understanding others depends upon a capacity for psychological
>evaluation" is true only in a particular mode of discourse, both
>professional and everyday, about the human condition. There are societies
>in the world, it is claimed, such as Samoa (see the work of Alessandro
>Duranti and Elinor Ochs), where speculation on what is going on in
>someone's mind is not valued and has no means of linguistic expression.
>What happens instead is that one presents a judgment that, say, so-and-so
>is behaving badly, which is then responded to by whoever is listening by
>encouraging the telling of the story, and the action is then described
>without any form of speculation about internal states -- the action and
>its judgment are both social and not psychological facts. (It seems to me
>that even in societies like our own where judgments of psychological
>states are vastly dominant, we often go the same route, at least partway,
>when we claim/acknowledge that an action is bad in itself for its social
>consequences, no matter who the perpetrator is or what their intentions --
>as in bureaucratic institutions, for example.)
>
>So if psychologizing, both professional and everyday, is just one way of
>talking about the human condition, perhaps we should be careful of
>privileging it and at least be aware of how any discourse can be used for
>ideological purposes that we might not want to support.
>
>SURELY I am preaching to the choir, right?
>
>--Alena
>
************************************************************************************
"Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a
cigarette in a gutter - all are stories. But which is the true story? That
I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard,
waiting for someone to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making
this note and then another, I do not cling to life."
Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931.
(...life clings to me...)
*************************************************************************************
diane celia hodges
university of british columbia, centre for the study of curriculum and
instruction
vancouver, bc
mailing address: 46 broadview avenue, montreal, qc, H9R 3Z2
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