Back when I was in high school, I hungrily and
indiscriminately devoured such periodicals as my parents happened to subscribe
to. Some, like The New
Yorker (still going strong) and Scientific American (now
intellectually defunct, but fine while it lasted), opened up whole new world’s,
to my lasting enrichment. Others,
like the middle-brow Saturday Review, Time, Life, and
(even) Soviet Life, were at least worth glancing at for a time. One, Psychology Today (still
being published, apparently) did not begin publication till I had left home,
but my mother subscribed, and I would leaf through it sometimes when I visited
home. It turned out to be
pretty lame.
Unlike the topics of physics porn or philosophy porn, which have heft, being aimed at the well-educated (the latter,
indeed, egregiously in The New Yorker), pop psychology (short for popcorn
psychology) is not worth
noticing, let alone polemicizing against:
its audience understandably needs something to occupy their eyes while
they concentrate on chewing their gum, bless ‘em. But there is an interesting paragraph in the “Retrospect”
chapter of the final volume of Ernest Jones’ classic biography of Freud, worth
quoting here. Jones himself
was a practicing Freudian analyst, and towards the end of a long career,
writes:
What impresses [the psychoanalyst]
is the shallowness of so much of what passes as acceptance of Freud’s ideas,
and the superficiality with which they are treated. They are so often bandied about lightly as a form of lip
service, that one cannot help suspecting that much of the so-called acceptance is really a subtle form of rejection, a
protection against assimilation of their profound import.
-- Freud, vol. III (1957), p. 433.
An intriguing -- and typically Freudian -- take on the
matter; and yet, I suspect,
inaccurate. For with no such
suspected motives of Widerstand (resistance,
Abwehrmechanismus) the educated public (and the middle-brow media that serves
them) also widely trivializes the findings of physics, misunderstands those of
linguistics, and caricatures those of philosophy. So, Case Not Proven.
(Nor yet disproven.)
~
Jones’ conjecture as to the source of public
acceptance-through-trivialization of Freudian theory, while not persuasive, is
yet suggestive. So let us
think aloud.
That a movement or doctrine may be emasculated by an
embrace, was well known to those of us in the antiwar movement, self-imagined
as the revolutionary youth movement, in the late 1960’s: we called it
coöptation.
Individual activists could be bought off by being given a nice job at a
university or think-tank, or be lured into self-parody by an ingratiating
media. As for the unreflective
mass of followers, they were offered cooptation by trivialization: “You’ve come a long way, baby” and
“You’re in the Pepsi generation” (ads respectively for a cigarette and a
soft-drink)
That parallel, however, will not take us far towards
elucidating the case in question.
For that was a conscious and cynical maneuver, whereas Jones points to
classically Freudian unconscious
Resistance, where the obfuscators are largely unaware of their own
motives. Moreover, the Youth
Movement has too little theoretical gravitas to parallel Freudian theory: a Marxist critique of the capitalist war-economy may have
been logically at its center, but sociologically was far on the periphery. To examine the undercurrents of resistance in the way
Jones intends, we need something with more intellectual heft.
Not, however, Freudian theory itself. Its results are too uncertain, its
current position in the noosphere too beleaguered, and cooptative lip-service
by now too rare, to provide a useful test-case. But let us check for parallels or anti-parallels (among the
many skew lines) in the more settled fields of physics and linguistics.
~
“How on earth do you know that?” I
asked.
“Now, Watson, confess yourself
utterly taken aback.”
“I am.”
“I ought to make you sign a paper
to that effect.”
“Why?”
“Because in five minutes
you will say that it is all so absurdly simple.”
-- A. Conan Doyle, “The Adventure
of the Dancing Men”, in The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1904)
Holmes’ prediction
proves, of course, correct (it is for such scenes that Nigel Bruce was
so perfectly cast). And the
exchange illustrates both prongs of the scientific-academic strategy of
dismissal, of any theory put forward by a rival:
(1) wave it aside as preposterous
(2) wave it aside as old hat
Specifically, as regards the reception of Chomsky’s
psycholinguistic theories, these took the forms as follows:
(1) Caricature the theory, so that it seems to lead to absurd
conclusions; then point out that
these conclusions are absurd.
(2) The exact opposite: So far from rejecting the theory as absurd, embrace it as
true -- but as obviously true. Plato/Vico/Groucho already said
that. Or: I said that; and your own “theory”,
with its welter of neologistic terminology and slippery symbolisms, is naught but a “notational variant” of mine.
[to be continued, inshallah]
No comments:
Post a Comment