Digifesto

I have written in this blog and in published work about Habermas and his Frankfurt School precursor, Horkheimer. Based on this writing, a thorough reader (of whom I expect there to be approximately zero) might conclude that I am committed to a Habermasian view.

I’d like to log a change of belief based on recent readings of Pierre Bourdieu and Carl Jung.

Why Bourdieu and Jung? Because Frankfurt School social theory was based on a Freudian view of psychology. This Freudian origin manifests itself in the social theory in ways that I’ll try to outline below. However, in my own therapeutic experience as well as many more informal encounters with Jungian theory, I find the latter to be much more compelling. As I’ve begun reading Jung’s Man and His Symbols, I see now where Jung explicitly departed from Freud, enriching his theory. These departures are far more consistent with a Bourdieusian view of society. (I’ve noted the potential synergy here).

Let me try to be clearer about what this change in perspective entails:

For Freud, man has an irrational nature and a rational ego. The purpose of therapy is the maintenance of rational control. Horkheimer’s critique of modern society invoked Freud in his discussion of the revolt of nature: society rationalizes itself and the individuals within it; the ‘nature’ of the individuals that is excluded (repressed, really) by this rationalization manifests itself in ugly ways. Habermas, who is less pessimistic about society, still sees morality in terms of social norms grounded in rational consensus. “Rational consensus” as a concept angers or worries postmodern and poststructural critics who see this principle as a basis for social ethics as exclusionary.

For Jung, the therapeutic relationship absolutely must not be about the imposition of the therapist’s views on the patient; psychological progress must come from within the individual patient. He documents an encounter between himself and Freud where he discovers this; he is very convincing. The Jungian unconscious is a collective stock of symbols, as an alternative to a Freudian subconscious of nature repressed by ego. The Jungian ego, therefore, is a much more flexible subject; at times it seems that Jung is nostalgic for a more irrational, perhaps primitive, consciousness. But more importantly, Jung explicitly rejects the idea of a society’s sanity being about its adherence to shared rational norms. Instead, he opts for a more Durkheimian view of social variety:

Can we make any sort of objective judgment about the final result [of therapy]? Only if we make a comparison between our conclusions and the standards that are generally valid in the social milieu to which the individuals below. Even then, we must take into account the mental equilibrium (or “sanity”) of the individual concerned. For the result cannot be a completely collective leveling out of the individual to adjust him to the “norms” of his society. This would amount to a most unnatural condition. A sane and normal society is one in which people habitually disagree, because general agreement is relatively rare outside the sphere of instinctive human qualities.

A diverse society of habitual disagreement accords much better with the Bourdieusian view of a society variously inflected as habitus than it does with a Habermasian view of one governed by rational norms.

…

There’s a subtlety that I’ve missed again and again which I’d like to put my finger on now.

The problem with the early Habermasian view is that ethics are determined through rational consensus. So, individuals participate in a public sphere and agree, as individuals, on norms that govern their individual behavior.

Later Habermas (say, volume two of Theory of Communicative Action) begins to acknowledge the information overhead of of this approach and discusses the rise of bureaucracy and its technicization. In lieu of a bona fide consensus of the lifeworld, one gets a rational coalescence of norms into law.

Effectively, this means that while the general population can be irrational in various ways (relative to the perspective of the law), what’s important is that lawmakers create law through a rational process that is inclusive of diverse perspectives.

We see a similar view in Bourdieu’s view of science: it is a specific habitus whose legitimacy is due to the trans-historical robustness of its mathematized formulations.

The conclusion is this: scientists and lawmakers have to approach rationality in specific trans-personal and trans-historical ways. In fact, the rationality of science or of law are only achieved systemically, through the generalized process of science or lawmaking, not through the finite perspectives of their participants, however individually rational they may be. But the general population need not be rational like this for society to be ‘sane’. Rather, individual habitus or partial perspective can vary across a society that is nevertheless coordinated by rational principle.

There is bound to be friction at the boundary between the institutions of science and law and the more diverse publics that surround and intersect them. Donna Haraway’s ‘privilege of partial perspectives‘ is a good example of the symptoms of this friction. A population that is excluded from science–not represented well within science–may react against it by reasserting it’s ‘partial perspective’ as a viable alternative. This is a kind of refusal, in the sense perhaps originated by Marcuse and more recently resurfaced in Michael Dumas’ work on antiblackness. Refusal is, perhaps sadly, delusional and seems to recur as a failed and failing project; but it is sociologically robust precisely because in late modernism the hegemonic rationality allows for Dukheimian social differentiation. The latter is actually the triumph of liberalism over, for example, racist facism; Fred Turner’s The Democratic Surround is a nice historical work documenting how this order of scientifically managed diversity was a deliberate United States statebuilding project in World War II.

If a top-down rationalizing control creates as a symptom pathological refusal–another manifestation perhaps of the ‘revolt of nature‘–a Jungian view of rationality as psychic integration perhaps provides a more palatable alternative. Jungian development is accomplished through personalized, situated education. However, through this education, the individual flourishes through a transcendence of their more limited, narrow sense of self. Jungian therapy/education transcends even gender, as the male and female are encouraged to recognize the feminine “anima” and masculine “animus” aspects of their psyches, respectively. Fully developed individuals–who one would expect to occupy, over the course of their development, a somewhat shared habitus–seem to therefore get along better with each other, agreeing to disagree as the recognize how their differences are based on arbitrary social differentiation. Nothing about this agreeing-to-disagree on matters of, for example, taste precludes an agreement on serious trans-personal matters such as science or law. There need not be any resentment towards this God’s Eye View, since it is recognized by each educated individual as manifest in their own role in the social order.

Societal conditions may fall short of this ideal. However, the purpose of social theory is to provide a realizable social telos. Grounding it in a psychological theory that admits the possibility of realized psychological health is a good step forward.