Hello again penners, I remember Habermas (in *Knowledge & Human Interests* - chs 10-12) and Postone (in *Time, Labor, and Social Domination* - ch 9) taking a tip from the realm of psychoanalysis for their critical theory (I should stress P. disagrees with H. about damned nearly everything else) that brings to mind Ange's reference to Freud's qualifications on memory. The past is not something to be dug up so much as it is something that should be suspected of invisibly dominating our present. In the dialectic of present and past, objectified historical time is an alienated lump which weighs on us today and will thus delineate the future for which we're bound. In that sense, presenting us with alternative histories is a big chunk of presenting us with a very different present and, concomitantly, a whole menu of futures. I don't mean this quite in the sense of a repressed memory (it would be too much to ask for the sort of clarity, accuracy and certainty we should be pursuing in a criminal law court), but rather in the sense of inviting coherent accounts which correspond to the artefacts (we need not follow Foucault, who seemed to think history is nought but an accumulation of documents written by victors with the future in mind - history has left plenty that wasn't particularly meant to tell stories years or centuries later - from scold's bridles and those turn-of-the-century 14-inch girdles with which we tormented our women, to all those old treaties Jim Craven so regularly quotes at us, to those short hoes doubtlessly still hang over Virginian fireplaces, even to things history is succeeding in making us forget about our own very selves, like the eight-hour-day and the manicured lawns of Kent State U.). The idea being that we draw people's attention to real things rather than text books or the Discovery Channel. Thus armed, the theory goes, people might indeed see history as something that is always being appropriated by some interest or other. This may lead them into inquiring into what their interests might be, with an eye to doing some appropriating of their own. Which is pretty well what psychoanalysis is all about, I suppose. Only it's about the social and not the individual. And it's about intersubjective reconstruction rather than instrumental excavation. And it's about destabilising the present to open up the future. All very airy-fairy - but, hey, we are talking about psychoanalysis. And some of us are teachers, too. The babblings of a very tired man, I'm afraid - it's getting light outside, and I have had a singularly unproductive night of it. On the other hand, a large brush-tail possum did come visiting just after midnight, and I did get to watch a stunning little frog crawling across my study-shed window in patient-but-vain pursuit of moths, and a few inches behind that, the morning drizzle has outlined a six-foot web, in the middle of which a two-inch-wide (five inches if you add the legs) Golden Orb spider is busy wrapping a death shroud around a less vigilant moth (boy GO spiders are only 1/4 inch long - no phallus in charge there ... ). And now the Galahs are waking up, festooning the grass in pink, grey and white. All stuff a bloke could miss if he were to take PhD dissertations too seriously ... Cheers, Rob. ---------- > From: Doug Henwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: [PEN-L:3382] Re: Psychoanalysis > Date: Mon, 15 Feb 1999 10:41:42 -0500 > >Louis Proyect wrote: > >>If that was only the case. Psychoanalysis has very limited value in >>explaining how people behave. For example, when psychoanalysts write about >>fascism, they usually go off on the most ridiculous tangents about sexual >>attitudes of the German masses, or Hitler's psychopathology in particular. >>There is nothing at all abnormal about German society in the 1920s. If >>anything, it was more open-minded and healthy than any other country in >>Europe. What happened is that it was subjected to enormous strains due to >>the collapse of world capitalism and a section of the population went nuts. > >Why people embrace politicians and parties against their own material >self-interest is one of the great mysteries of politics. And there's no >doubt that lots of people embraced fascism who later suffered from it. Why >does anti-Semitism have the power it does, even in societies with few or no >Jews? Why do so many working class Americans hate welfare moms with what >looks like an irrational passion? It has more than a little to do with sex >and race. There's many a slip between the material/social world that >Marxists analyze and the world as people see and act on it. > >This isn't a matter of either/or - you have to analyze the "enormous >strains" on German society that made "a section of the population [go] >nuts" but you also have to understand how and why they went nuts, and why >they acted the way they did. > >Thanks for using the term "went nuts"; it makes my point for me. > >>Perhaps Doug is referrring to the value of psychology rather than >>psychoanalysis. I think psychology is very useful. Some of my favorite >>psychologists are Shakespeare, Dostoievsky, Chekhov, Melville and Proust. > >"The poets were there before me." - Sigmund Freud > >Doug >
