Psychology is so critical, only Marxism can save us now...

October 12, 2003

Is critical psychology becoming just another commodity in the academic market place, asked Ian Parker, professor of psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University, in a presentation in August at the International Conference on Critical Psychology in Bath.

Prof Parker also argued that the British Psychological Society's agreement to be involved in discussions with the government over the draft mental health bill has weakened the position of the Mental Health Alliance which opposes most aspects of the draft bill.

Prof Parker's presentation is in full below

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There are four parts to my argument here. Some of the points of reference are going to seem a bit parochial to critical psychologists from other cultural traditions. But my guess is that they will be quick to notice that, and not only because the political context for doing radical work is so different from that in the imperialist heartlands. Rather, they will notice it because what is called 'critical psychology' in the English-speaking world is already starting to colonise and sanitise what they have been doing.

The 'critical psychology' I am going to focus on in this paper is that kind that is emerging in the northern hemisphere (even if it has had outposts in the South) and it is located mainly in the West (even if it has found some adherents elsewhere). Perhaps one advantage of having this conference entirely conducted in the English language is that we will learn something about the politics of psychology from different parts of the world. But there are processes of economic and political domination in this world played out in academic institutions that weigh heavily against this learning. That context might make it a little too comfortable for those of us in the centre to want to reflect upon where we are now in relation to psychology critically. But we need to do that now.

1. Why is there critical psychology?

So first, let us put on the agenda the question, Why is there critical psychology?

Presumably we wouldn't be tempted to answer this by saying that we owe it to the hard work of a few bright individuals who have carved out a name for themselves. If we were to focus on that aspect there would have to be some careful analysis of the individualisation of academic careers under capitalism; analysis of how voices for apparently new ideas become embodied in certain locations so that theories are attributed to particular individuals such that the speakers themselves may also come to believe they were personally responsible for them.

The question could be tackled by looking at institutional processes, in which the formation of schools of thought is driven by the imperative to produce something novel. Institutional positions are increasingly governed by market segmentation and competition so that universities, for example, will look for a yield on their investment in terms of research ratings or more immediate funding. In the case of 'critical psychology' some of the newer universities have been quicker to throw off traditional ideas about what constitutes psychology in order to take advantage of this market niche.

However, paradoxically it is the wider context for this marketisation and individualisation of critical academic work that actually specifies in most detail what the domain of 'psychology' is today. Contemporary neoliberalism, endorsed and managed by the social democrats as well as the old free-marketeers, has this in common with nascent nineteenth-century capitalism; an eagerness to embrace change.

Everything that is solid melts into air as capital wipes away all obstacles to production for profit, and the latest upgrade of late capitalism requires subjects who will make themselves at home in it, whether they work in factories or work from home.
Even the distinct enclosed sphere of individual identity is now a hindrance to the new fluid forms of identity that are called into being. The subject of neoliberalism must be ready to participate as a stakeholder, with the terms of their engagement being that there is a necessary degree of substitutability and an assignment of rights to those who are accepted for inclusion. They must show flexibility in order to fit the different varieties of work that might be available to them, and also tolerance for the range of different subjects they work alongside. In their participation as producers and consumers they should, ideally, be able to be relational not only in the way they think about others but in the way they think about themselves.

You will already recognise, perhaps, elements of the often implicit, sometimes explicit indigenous theory of self that some critical psychology trades in. We may be told that we should give up our fixation on cognitive or intentional deliberation in favour of an attention to the 'stake' speakers have in interaction, that a quasi-systemic view of selves in community does away with the division between the individual and the social, that conversational turn-taking is the only relevant place where our rights to speak are formulated and deployed, that we should stop harping on about 'problems' and reframe our lives more positively, and that we should be alive to the richly-textured varieties of commonsense.

Contemporary capitalism demands more than a simple abandonment of old models of the individual however. There has been just as dramatic a transformation in the moral texture of neoliberal subjectivity so that there is a positive value placed on the ability to balance standpoints and to hold them in suspension without opting finally for one or the other. A form of reflexivity is required that will enable the subject to assume responsibility for their position without using it as an absolute moral standard to judge others, and there is a correlative expectation that they will not even hold themselves to this standard too firmly; better that there should be a degree of cynical distance and ability to negotiate different viewpoints. The new moralising tone takes its lead from a version of liberal multiculturalism in which there is a respect for others in exchange for agreement that each category of person will refrain from criticising practices of the other's group.

It would indeed be a surprise if these moral demands were not echoed in different sectors of academic life, and some of our 'critical psychology' has been the place where these demands have been taken up and sold to us as new virtues. Here, it is thought that the appropriate ethical attitude to adopt towards research is to aim for a point of undecidability, to elaborate some reflexive implication of the self in that inability to take a position, and to revel in irony as such. The different possible positions that are carefully teased apart so that they can all the more easily be kept at arms length are treated as collections of language games, and the default moral position that is adopted is one that will clean away any derogation of any of them.

In this way a form of verbal hygiene that strips out evaluative terms takes the place of moral evaluation. And even this isn't enough if we really are going to play the game of contemporary capitalism, for there are more explicit political demands that are made on the individual subject so they will be able to rework themselves within certain limits.

These political imperatives are governed by globalisation as the unquestioned expansion of practices from the centre to the periphery and the incorporation of useful local practices on condition that they do not challenge the process of globalisation itself. An openness to change then goes alongside a willingness to accept the resignification of the self in such things as mission statements and a suspicion of anything that would seem to stand in the way of that rewriting of corporate identity.

A thorough relativisation of political identities thus opens the way for an endorsement of change unfettered by the past, by the sense that history is important.

Once again, some of those claiming the label 'critical psychology' take this political logic all the way to a thorough anti-politics in which the problem of what to do with what they find in their redescription of the world is solved by advertising descriptive inconclusion as a goal in itself. The technical apparatus of formal redescription, empty of content, is thus the perfect vehicle of globalisation, for it can be exported and used anywhere without entailing any difficult political questions. Openness to the restorying of reality is all that is required. In some cases this means that limits need to be drawn tightly, sometimes taking the form of deliberate textual empiricism, in which there is an assertion that there really isn't anything of value outside the texts being examined. One motif of this carefully-rehearsed suspicion of politics is 'deconstruction', which becomes a stance that will all the better enable its adherents to juggle opposing concepts to warrant an utter refusal of the historical embeddedness of their reading.

To their credit, I suppose, not all of the advocates of these things call themselves 'critical psychologists'. At the same time, those who do eagerly champion these things are 'critical' psychologists, in the sense that old psychology is now no longer as functional to capitalism as it used to be and it does need some fairly radical restructuring if it is to survive. The model of the psychological individual, the old-paradigm ethos of the researcher and liberal worldview of mainstream psychology no longer deliver the goods, and 'critical psychology' does have the edge on the old approaches. Perhaps it is because there are clearly some new techniques that can be put to use that psychology will tolerate the formation of a new 'critical' sub-discipline inside it. But you can be sure that the discipline will demand something in return

2. What is institutional recuperation?

It is the demand for something in return that I want to turn to next, the second part of the argument. The uncannily-close concordance between the requirements of contemporary capitalism and some of the nostrums of critical psychology should be treated as the topic of debate. The ideas we are concerned with here legitimise, reproduce and strengthen the actual practices of capitalist production and consumption. It would not be possible for neoliberalism to exist without the very ideological practices that sustain it to be endorsed by those who service its institutions. We need to include academic institutions here, for it is at the level of institutional processes that we face a real problem. It is a problem of recuperation.

Ideological recuperation is the process by which radical ideas become neutralised and absorbed, they become part of the machinery that they attempted to challenge. It is a characteristic feature of capitalism that it is hungry for challenge so that it may all the better find new sources of innovation and new markets.

There is, however, a degree of institutional recuperation that is also necessary to neutralise and absorb new personnel who might want to disturb academic settings, to disturb the boundaries between academic and professional psychology, and to disturb the separation between the psychologists and those who are subjected to psychology. It has been the aim of the radical grouping Psychology Politics Resistance for nearly a decade now to build disturbing new alliances between the academics, professionals and users of services. This is a site for identifying and resisting institutional recuperation, with lessons for critical psychology. Let me give you one instance of this.

There is an important debate in the latest issue of Asylum, the magazine for democratic psychiatry incorporating the newsletter of Psychology Politics Resistance. The debate is over whether to engage the government in discussion as to how to implement its new Mental Health Bill. The Mental Health Bill includes provision for Community Treatment Orders to ensure that psychiatric drug treatment will be enforced by designated 'clinical supervisors' for patients who are not in hospital. Even the British Psychological Society (BPS) has been opposing the Mental Health Bill in its present form, but an article recently appeared in the BPS journal in which one of the psychologists defended his decision to 'engage' with the government over implementation of the Bill. This article, called 'How to win friends and influence politicians', was what triggered the heated debate in Asylum. This strategy of 'engagement' with the government weakens the opposition alliance, which so far has mobilised a broad range of organisations in public demonstrations against the Bill. You can see the temptation here, for if the strategy of engagement were to work, then there could be a shift in the balance of power between psychiatry and psychology.
The designated 'clinical supervisors' could be psychologists, who, of course, are bound to be nicer people.

But the idea that nicer people might influence those in power and ameliorate the worst aspects of the Mental Health Bill is also a warrant for institutional recuperation of the opposition; with pernicious consequences well beyond the 'engagement' by this individual. In fact, it is the reduction to the activities of individuals that is part of the problem which compounds it as it psychologises it; whether we are talking about dangerous psychotic individuals who menace the general public if they don't take their medication, whether we are talking about the kinds of people who will give them medication, or whether we are talking about people who choose to engage with the government.

Furthermore, insofar as the designation makes sense in clinical psychology, the debate in Asylum is between 'critical psychologists'. One of them, now engaging with government on behalf of the BPS, has publicly called for such things as electroshock and psychosurgery to be prohibited by law, and the other, opposing this engagement, is a mental health system survivor who managed to keep that history secret to get through clinical psychology training. It is crucial here that we do not make a hard and fast distinction between the bad opportunist betrayer and the good steadfast militant. What is at issue here is how a decision to participate in the apparatus of government weakens and demobilises collective protest. It is that collective protest and debate that is a space that needs to be kept open and it needs to be kept open in our 'critical psychology'.

Now, let me turn more directly to processes of institutional recuperation that we need to notice and challenge if we are to stay 'critical' in psychology. It is understandable in each case that individuals make a decision to 'engage' with the government of academic knowledge, but critical psychology will mean nothing at all if it is not a space for us to find alternative forms of collective practice.

First, some of you may have noticed that articles in journals follow a pattern of citation that mysteriously reproduces the frequency of certain names, and that those names are often the names of the editors and reviewers for the journal. Book proposals for publishers follow the same trend, though if the author is well known they may have a wide enough network of friends for them to be able to suggest sympathetic reviewers. Psychologists doing critical work outside Britain, for example, change their citation choices when they submit articles to journals here, and it is often a deliberate tactical decision.

Second, there is a momentum for the formulation of standards for critical work, of criteria that will persuade more mainstream colleagues that what we do counts as good research. Those of you in traditional psychology departments will know that the only way to defend your work and the work of students is to appeal to versions of the criteria that psychologists already adhere to, but there have been many recent attempts to draw up guidelines that will identify good and bad work. Each set of criteria, of course, is deliberately designed to warrant a particular understanding of what counts as critical, and in psychology that includes a clear idea of what the domain of the psychological should be.

Third, there is a pattern of recruitment that guarantees that certain voices are heard in public forums to be saying certain kinds of things in certain ways. This ranges from the selection of like-minded individuals from other places that will confirm the idea that a particular approach is universally accepted to the organisation of meetings in the format of a talk, usually in English, by a single individual followed by discussion.

I confess that I do not know how these practices could be refused or how alternatives could be developed. I take decisions myself that conform to the processes I have been describing to you: I sometimes submit articles to journals with misleading citations so that the editors and referees will be flattered and perhaps not realise who the author is; I examine academic work and produce an evaluation that will be accepted by my colleagues and sometimes the work fails; I speak too much when I have been allowed to by virtue of my institutional position and imagine that it is fine because at least I am saying something radical, and when I am organising a meeting I am happy to let someone else speak if I think they are also going to say something radical, in the way I understand the meaning of the term of course. My only comfort is the thought that it would indeed be a performative contradiction if a single individual was able to stand here and tell you exactly how it could all be solved. It is a matter for collective deliberation and activity around what the institutions we work in want from us in return for allowing us to do 'critical' psychology.

Well, if things were so grim it wouldn't even be worth saying this to you would it? But things aren't so grim, and that has got something to do with the nature of capitalism too. So I want to explore in more detail why, when power is of this kind, why there is resistance. Part three of the argument.

3. Why is there resistance?

I think most of you do not really believe with all your heart the neoliberal notions I described earlier as being part of critical psychology, and it has been clear from the papers at this conference that most of you have some kind of political agenda.

Even when you have to frame things in an acceptable way for supervisors or conference organisers it is often clear that you already know at some level that the limits of a particular 'research question' provide a bit of security which keeps what you are doing in the academic frame. Some of you will be indignant that I should even suggest that you are not being critical enough. What I am saying is that none of us can be critical enough if we take seriously the economic political context of work in psychology. But critical psychology can be a space for turning back and reflecting on how we are held in frame, and for thinking through why we refused mainstream psychology in the first place.

It would be so much easier if mainstream psychology today did conform to the rather ridiculous culturally-specific representations of human beings we still find in some US American textbooks. However, while our colleagues may on occasion resort to the old certainties that were functional to capitalism fifty years ago, they are often able to supplement that old psychology with some more nuanced hermeneutic or social constructionist arguments. The risk is that we find that reassuring, for they seem to be getting the hang of the new relational rhetoric, and we are caught off guard.

But it is still worth reminding ourselves why we refused to buy components of the old 'model' of the psychological individual. The question now is how to refuse that old model without getting lured by the appeal of the new improved version. What we need to remember is that the embellishments on old-style psychology simply serve to make it work better, and that even the old psychology required a degree of evasion, misrepresentation and systematic distortion of what our lives are like. When I say 'our lives' I mean the elaborate network of responsibilities we have to each other and the ways these commitments are sabotaged and frustrated as we sell our time to some institution which wants to make a profit from our labour and tell us lies about what a great contribution we are making to humanity. I will briefly set this mainstream psychology we reject against some of the assumptions that we often presuppose for the rejection to make sense.
The self-contained psychological subject is such a miserable reduced element of what we are as an ensemble of social relations, and to add in a social psychological dimension adds insult to injury. The family, private property and the state as material structures that condition how we come to function as a particular ensemble of social relations are not domains of 'social psychology'. Furthermore, the utilitarian transparency evoked by psychological descriptions of relationships obscures the way surplus value is extracted from us and the way we academics accumulate cultural capital at the very moment we seem to be merely doing good in the world. And to treat ill-health and distress in a way that ignores the pervasive alienation and exploitation that structures work and leisure is to perform the same kind of victim-blaming that goes on when our false beliefs are targeted without examining pervasive ideological mystification.

Faced with these conditions of life, it is intolerable to expect anyone but a psychologist to really believe that we can examine our lives in a neutral manner, rationally evaluating phenomena and expecting our work to bring about enlightenment to each individual one at a time. The idea that the researcher should simply be accumulating scientific knowledge and enabling people to adapt themselves better to the world is advanced with the hope of ameliorating distress, but it is so limited to the very conditions that make us sick that it functions as a sick joke. Against this, we cannot but adopt a standpoint to what we study and bring into the equation our own reflexive location in the research, and research is then conceived as the production of different kinds of consciousness that go beyond the level of each separate individual. We then start to ask how scientific knowledge of different kinds operates in different institutional spaces and this takes us beyond adapting people, beyond that to the question of social transformation.

The question that psychology has traditionally asked about the world is how things stay the same, almost as if there is a wilful attempt to avoid the process of change. At the same time many possibilities of changing our selves are opened up; this on condition that we stay within its carefully circumscribed limits and as long as we do not address relatively enduring structures that set the parameters for the realm of the psychological. We were told that as long as we stick to what we can actually observe and obey an empiricist worldview, then we should be satisfied, but simply adding in theory is not going to be enough to go beyond this unless we combine it with practice. This does not mean the simple accumulation of knowledge, but an attention to the way knowledge changes depending on social relations.

If we examine the various blueprints that psychology offers us we find that they always seem to confirm assumptions about the way the world is now. The last thing we need is to leave the drawing up of the blueprints to experts. There is an alternative to this. Prefigurative politics is the kind of political action that anticipates in its very process social arrangements that are better than those that we live today.

Actually, despite what I was saying earlier about some notions from critical psychology being entirely compatible with contemporary capitalism, the real trick lies in the way those notions function, rather than in what they assert about human relationships.

None of those notions - of discursive subjects and stake in arguments, of systemic and community identity, of turns in conversation, of reframing and the role of commonsense - are formally incorrect. The reason they are so attractive is because they speak to the desire for something that will go beyond capitalism, and an attention to these things is precisely the stuff of prefigurative politics.

The different aspects of the ethical attitude that one might adopt towards research - undecidability, reflexivity, irony, an attention to language and what the consequences are of articulating representations of ourselves in certain ways - are indispensable if we are to be able to think beyond what is given to us at the present time. And the stance we adopt draws us beyond this ruinous economic order - toward descriptive inconclusion, restorying of ourselves, the immersion in texts of our own creation, deconstruction and some way of letting go of the past which haunts us - are positive utopian possibilities; they are ways of imagining a future without tying into the shapes of the present.

The point, of course, is that we are not actually in this pleasure dome and, if we imagine that we are, we have forgotten some fairly serious historical lessons about the role of practice in negotiating the contradictory reality of global capitalism. Capitalism throws all of the certainties we learnt about old psychology into question, and the contradictory fast-mutating world of contemporary neoliberalism will quickly come to throw any new psychology we develop into question too. It is capitalism itself that ensures that where there is power there is resistance, but that process always opens a question as to whether the resistance will really challenge capitalism or be used by it. Critical psychology needs to provide resources to address that transformation of psychology without getting stuck in any particular model, ethos or worldview.

4. What is the political economy of psychology?

So, let me move to the fourth part of the argument, which includes some proposals for what we need to do not only to tackle psychology but also to tackle the causes of psychology. This debate about concepts we use and how they operate is relevant to what we do because capitalism is ideologically textured; there isn't a strict separation between economic base and ideas floating around above it. What we see so clearly here is the way that certain notions of identity, moral orientation and politics are necessary components of the material functioning of capitalism.

A genuine anti-capitalist 'critical psychology' comprises four interconnected elements. And these elements of critical psychology can be put to work to answer a deeper even more pressing question than why there is critical psychology. The most important analytic task that faces critical psychologists who want to go beyond the historically-limited frame of neoliberalism, a task that involves taking a position in relation to what we are analysing, a position that necessarily impels us to change what we analyse in the very process of understanding and explaining it, is Why is there psychology?

Why is there psychology as such as a domain of abstract intellectual activity that appears to us, to each of us one by one, as if it could be studied within this particular disciplinary frame and which would reveal to us the reasons for human action? These four elements of critical psychology can, perhaps, bring us closer to this object of study.

First, it is a close analysis of the way dominant forms of psychology operate ideologically and in the service of power. Such analysis needs to focus not only on psychological 'models' but also the methodologies it uses. This is where we get to the heart of the issue; the abstraction of the individual subject from social relations and the abstraction of the researcher. Psychology re-presents to us elements of our second nature under capitalism that psychologists imagine to be the real cause of our activity. This analysis would lead us to a political economy of psychology as itself operating within the wider circulation of commodities in capitalism.

Second, it is the study of how alternative psychologies come to be historically constituted so that they confirm ideological representations of relations or subvert them. Here is a reminder that each and every framework we use is conditioned by the imperative of capitalism to open up new markets, and the ideological texture of this constantly mutating capitalism is composed of different contradictory reflections of the way commodities are produced and consumed. As we have seen in the case of neoliberalism, the study of alternative psychologies should include study of the political economic conditions that bears them.

Third, it is the exploration of how psychological notions operate in everyday life to produce contemporary psychological culture. Alongside the historical theoretical analysis of psychology as a discipline we need detailed cultural analysis of the way we reproduce capitalist social relations as if they were mental processes, and the attempt to connect with those processes provides the basis for the different varieties of popular psychological false consciousness. These are new forms of necessary false consciousness that accurately condense and reproduce certain conditions of 'mental' life.

Fourth, it includes a searching out and reclaiming of the way practices of everyday life may form the basis of resistance to psychology. The abstraction and circulation of commodities makes it possible to engage in intellectual work, but it does not give us direct access to anything, which is why empiricism is such an ideological dead-end. It is collective practice that forms the basis of resistance, and some theoretical work is always necessary to make that resistance present to us, and effective as part of collective revolutionary projects.

Conclusion

There is already a space for critical psychology as a sub-discipline in contemporary neoliberal capitalism and there is a degree of institutional recuperation that demands obedience to our institutions.

But, the very conditions of possibility for all of this are also, potentially its undoing. And that poses a choice for us that we need to argue through again and again to make it possible to realise that potential. Critical psychology could itself become another commodity in the academic marketplace or it could make those conditions its own object of study so that it analyses them from a position that will also change them. That is what I mean when I say that psychology is so critical, only Marxism can save us now.

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Philosophy of the market cancels possibility of inclusive schooling

Comment from: Julie Chase, educational psychologist in training, University of East London
Date: May 9, 2005

What a lifesaver! I am a marxist trying not to lose my principles amidst a professional climate that seems not to see the gaping holes in the Blair project for society.There is plenty about inclusion in education but it is set against a fierce market philosophy which I believe effectively cancels the possibility of inclusive schooling.

I believe what we need is to continue the project of comprehensive education and oppose selective education of all kinds. Educationalists cannot afford to consider education as if it existed in a vacuum away from the issues of war, poverty and racism.

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Capitalist psychology is everywhere

Comment from: Chandrashekar Gangaraju, psychiatrist (senior house officer), Calderstone NHS Trust
Date September 7, 2005

A masterpiece article, but which was rather abstract. I feel the issues raised in the article should receive a wider audience which means that it should be less abstract.

I see a capitalist psychology in all aspects of life - the TV programs we watch, the dresses people wear, and how people react to issues and events such as war. I hardly come across any critical views in my work. I feel this institutional apathy is cancerous and people will wake up only when it is too late.

We are in a democracy - can we not organise ourselves to fight back? Am I being unrealistical?

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Who creates wealth?

Comment from: Don Feasey, self employed therapist/author, UK.
Date: March 20, 2008

A bit too long and an abundance of abstract discussion which I found a bit exhausting...nevertheless it needed saying..problem for me was absence of class references when the whole world is now in the grip of an exploitative imperialistic culture. Who creates the wealth?

In the UK the poor class is despised, rejected and criminalised..the social psychology of this situation is to create an atmosphere of fear and oppression. Marx would have undersrtood this and anticipated change...perhaps towards a renewal of fascism e.g China today.

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