Each one of us occupies, in the grander scheme of things, an infinitesimal space for an infinitesimal length of time, and yet, for us as individuals, this is all the space and all the time we have and so figures subjectively as hugely significant.
Our greatest intimacy is with the bodily sensations that mediate our relations with the world around us: because we feel, physically, what is going on, we have a sense of ‘interiority’ which seems to be just about the most indubitable indication of what is happening to us. We feel we know what is going on in our own ‘minds’ with an especially privileged certainty, while we can only make educated guesses about what goes on in the minds of others. The physical experience of doing things – experience which is absolutely unavoidable – convinces us that, most of the time, doing things means assessing options and taking decisions. We seem to be given an indisputable knowledge of wishes and intentions which are entirely private to ourselves, and our greatest guarantee of the truth of someone else’s wishes and intentions seems to be to induce them to give a truthful account of them from their own inner experience.
Our understanding and assessment of the world around us is mediated socially by the people and things we come into direct, bodily contact with. The language we speak we learn from those who speak to us, and we speak (extraordinarily precisely) with their cadences and their accent. Our experience of social power is transmitted by those with whom we have daily contact – first families, then educators, then employers. On the whole, the nearer people and things are to us the more significance we are likely to accord to their effect upon us (inevitably, for example, children experience their parents as enormously powerful). At the same time we are of course surrounded by a complex apparatus conveying information and controlling meaning; the extent to which we are able to gain a critical purchase on this apparatus will determine our understanding of our world. In all these spheres we are encircled by an horizon beyond which the world is a mystery.
From the perspective of time also we occupy a life-span which gives us a sense of the ‘length’ of history. The elderly live in an era which, for their grandchildren already beyond the reach of fashion, becomes a realm merely of nostalgia. The Norman Conquest seems to most of us in Britain (who know about it at all) to belong deep in the mists of the past – and yet there are still families living on estates seized then, and it takes only 13 seventy-year-olds, living back-to-back, to get there.
We live, then, at the centre of a world of ‘proximal space-time’.
This world is deeply, perhaps even by now indelibly, established in modern culture. Only rarely from within our social and cultural institutions - as rarely, for example, in literature as in the law - is there a glimmer of acknowledgement that we are not, at least ideally, the originators of our own conduct and masters of our own fate. The whole tendency of Western ways of thought has been increasingly to see the individual as autonomous.
Global society constitutes a system of inexpressible complexity. It is like a huge central nervous system in which ‘social neurons’ (i.e. people) interact with each other via an infinity of interconnecting and overlapping subsystems. The fundamental dynamic of the system is power, that is the ability of a social group or individual to influence others in accordance with its/his/her interests. Interest is thus the principal, and most effective, means through which power is transmitted.
Power is generated within and through social institutions. The institutions of power operate independently of particular individuals and at varying distances from them, affecting them via almost unimaginably complex lines of influence that travel through individuals as well as through other institutions. A highly simplified diagram (from The Origins of Unhappiness3) suggests the basic structure through which power operates:
The further away from the individual person a particular social institution is, the more powerful it is likely to be and the more individuals it will affect. For example, the machinery of global capitalism has enormous effects on vast numbers of people in the world who are themselves in no position to be able to see into its operation. Fig. 2 attempts to give an impression of the pervasiveness of distal influence. Individual citizens have virtually no way of resisting the powers which bear down upon them - their only hope is to act in solidarity with others.
Apparently paradoxically, the nearer to the (average) individual an institution is, the less its total power is likely to be, though, owing to the distortion of his or her perspective, it will be experienced by that individual as more powerful. For example, as might be the case with employers, we tend in every day life to attribute considerable power to those whose ‘decisions’ most nearly affect us. However, it is rarely, if ever, that an employer ‘makes a decision’ in the sense of spontaneously exercising free will over us; it is far more likely to be the case that the employer’s ‘decisions’ are conditioned by economic events which operate at such a distance from us (as well as the employer) that we cannot even discern their basic properties.
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A number of interesting consequences follow from the notion of 'power horizon'. One is the new meaning it gives to the concept of the 'Unconscious'. Unconsciousness ceases to be, as it is in Freudian theory, a property of individuals, and becomes an external, social phenomenon: we are unconscious of what we cannot know or have been prevented from knowing. At the most proximal level, parents may conceal aspects of the(ir) world from children, or exercise their power to forbid access to activities or information they deem unsuitable for their children, or indeed threatening to themselves. At more distal levels, we are nearly all unconscious of the origin and manner of transmission of powers which affect our lives in all kinds of crucial and intimate ways, not because of our own stupidity or wilfulness, but because they lie beyond the zone our gaze can penetrate. A further consequence of our limited power horizons is, as already implied, the opportunities which are opened up for the more or less deliberate exploitation of our perspective. The globalization of the 'free market' is one obvious area where the ruthless malpractices of Business can be shifted beyond the horizon of those most able to object. Opposition to abuses of power in 'developed' democracies can be dealt with by media manipulation and appeasement while the most brutal exploitation of labour, etc., is shifted to places likely neither to fall readily under the eye nor to engage the feelings of the general public. What goes on in Burma, Brazil, Indonesia or Singapore is, for example, relatively easily maintained as a matter of indifference to the vast majority of voters in Britain. (It is true, of course, that readers of the broadsheets - often now sneeringly referred to as 'high-minded' - and viewers of televison's intellectual safety-valves, Channel 4 and BBC2, may be to some extent apprised of what goes on further afield. But, as one BBC political commentator elegantly put it 'the trouble is, it's a tabloid world' in which it matters little what goes into high minds.) It is also worth noting how the limited reach of our personal memories through time hugely facilitates the recycling of fashion and the maintenance of obsolescence, the disruption of on-going organized resistance (e.g. the demise of unionism, whose ideological origins are by now totally obscure to most people), and the ability to veil in a fog of oblivion the savage iniquities upon which much of our social structure is founded (the manner in which those who robbed and murdered their way to property and wealth have managed since to clothe themselves in the regalia of honour, virtue and distinction, is a matter for unceasing wonder). |
Each of us is thus surrounded by a spatio-temporal 'power horizon' beyond which it is impossible to 'see'. The radius of this horizon will of course differ between individuals according to the availability to them of power. In a general sense, the better educated and well connected will have 'longer' power horizons compared to less advantaged people. Despite obvious benefits of class, however, the majority of us probably find ourselves in boats more similar than different - hence the ability of higher-order power to manipulate entire populations in terms of their understanding of how the world works.
The extent to which an individual can be said to ‘have’ power will depend upon the availability to him or her of power within the system, i.e. how much power is transmitted through him or her from outside sources. (I have tried to outline out what this model signifies for the experience of psychological distress in Fundamentals of an Environmental Approach to Distress.) Fig. 1 gives the impression that power flows only in one direction - from the more to the less powerful. This is of course somewhat misleading: it is possible both for proximal to influence distal institutions and for individuals to act back onto their environment. It is however the case that the flow of influence in this 'reverse' direction is strictly limited in scope and distance.
An individual can in this way be defined as an embodied locus in social space through which power flows. People are thus held in place within the social environment by the influences which structure it, and their freedom to change position or influence people and events is strictly limited by the availability of power within the sub-systems in which they are located. In fact, no significant amount power is available to the individual beyond that which is afforded by the social environment.
Some of the complexity of social space is conveyed in fig. 3. A (rather stereotypically conceived!) family floats in social space, the direction of influence between its members and some proximal systems shown by the arrows and its relative strength by their thickness. Rather as if each of the smaller spheres were like a neuron or system of neurons in a nervous system, the ‘electrical impulse’ of conduction is power and the ‘neurotransmitter’ is interest. But the diagram leaves out infinitely more than it can illumine. Quite apart from the different ways in which power can engage or coerce interest, it is impossible to convey the way it flows through the system. Power does not originate within the individuals, nor within the institutions shown (e.g. work, school), but is generated much more distally within and between socio-economic and cultural systems whose all-pervasive influence defies intricate analysis4.
1. This is of course not a view which I have simply invented for myself out of nowhere. An excellent academic account of the social origin of self may be found in Ian Burkitt's Social Selves. Sage, 1991.
2. George, Susan. 1999. The Lugano Report. Pluto Press.
3. Smail, David. 1999. The Origins of Unhappiness. Constable.
4. For a website packed with information about the scientific understanding of complex systems, try
http://www.calresco.org/
A great part of what we take to be characteristically human achievements – in particular thinking and willing – is intimately bound up with our ability to use language.
Our propensity for reflecting about ourselves, for weighing and assessing the evidence of our senses, for comparing, anticipating and judging, all depend on our learning to use words. The use of language permits us to extend our society, materially and conceptually, illimitably further than any other group of animals could conceivably achieve, and indeed it is essentially our linguistic ability which defines our intelligence. In our everyday sense of ourselves, however, we often overlook the extent to which what we take to be individual, interior aspects of our personal ‘psychology’ are in fact extremely fallible social constructions, culturally acquired via the medium of language.
For what we take to be causal process of thought, decision and will are frequently little more than a kind of running commentary that accompanies our actions. As we grow up we learn to attach words to our activities that, if we’re not almost superhumanly attentive, come in our understanding to replace the activities themselves. An awareness that we are pushed and pulled by, quite literally, the force of circumstances gives way (if indeed it was ever perceptibly developed) to a conviction that our commentary on these events actually gives rise to them. As the Russian developmental psychologist Lev Vigotsky argued so powerfully3, the child’s thought is not somehow simply internally generated, but is acquired from the social context. Thinking is self-talk which has become silent.
Many of the characteristics that we tend to regard as entirely 'psychological' are acquired in exactly the same way as thought and language - that is to say, from outside. The most significant case in point is probably 'self-confidence', the crumbling of which is so often at the root of the kind of personal distress which can be 'diagnosed' by the experts as 'neurotic'.
Confidence in themselves is acquired by children as they grow up through the confidence powerful others place in them. Just as children learn to think by hearing what others say to and about them, so they learn to assess themselves according to how they are actually treated. What feels like an entirely internal faculty, a kind of moral property which ought to be under the individual's personal control, is thus a 'wired-in' characteristic which can no more be changed at will than can the language we speak.
| accords with:- | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| my actions | what I feel | my account to others | the best available account | Result | |
| My commentary | YES | Insight | |||
| YES | YES | Sincerity | |||
| YES | YES | Authenticity | |||
| YES | NO | Deception | |||
| NO | NO | Self-deception | |||
If, therefore, my commentary - what I tell myself - accords with what can be objectively established (what I have called the 'best available account'), I can be said to have insight. If my commentary accords with what I feel and with what I tell others, I can be said to be sincere. And so on.
Mystifications of InteriorityMuch of what psychoanalysis takes to indicate a realm of 'unconscious motivation', and, more importantly perhaps, many of the ways in which we deceive ourselves and cause others pain by referring to pure motives for bad actions, can be demystified by the use of the kind of conceptual schema outlined here. |
I do not want to claim that this schema is absolutely accurate or logically watertight - it is intended more as a model - but it does do away with the necessity for postulating complex and ultimately mysterious internal moral and psychological entities. In banishing a literally understood interior space, it reinstates the importance of the external world we all occupy. It downgrades psychology and upgrades sociality. Perhaps the most important effect of this is to shift our judgement of the validity or otherwise of what people say and do from unanalysable, supposedly interior moral impulses to an essentially exterior, social world of language and action. A world which is through and through permeable to the operations of power and understandable only in relation to them.
I do not mean to suggest by any of what I have said so far that the embodied individual is bereft of agency in any sense; what I do want to say is that what we take to be the individual, personal processes through which we understand and shape our worlds tend to be inflated by a sense of personal autonomy which is very largely illusory.
Much of what we take to be ‘cognitive processes’ consists in one form or another of commentary, or self-talk. Cognitive psychologists – especially the less sophisticated ones - often write as if decision-making processes, attitudes, beliefs and so on are independent, essentially rational ‘schemata’ existing somehow as causal agents in people’s brains, and that they can in principle be isolated and accessed (by, say, a ‘cognitive therapist’) and, where necessary, altered to give more satisfactory behavioural outcomes. Much of the procedure of identifying and altering such ‘cognitions’ takes place through the medium of language. In this way, it is felt that, at least in principle, an individual can tell you what, for instance, his or her ‘attitudes’ are (or at least that they can be inferred from his or her account), and that they can be altered through rational discussion. The most vociferous – and simple-minded - proponent of this kind of approach in the therapeutic world in recent times has been Albert Ellis, whose brain-child, ‘Rational-Emotive Therapy’, is widely practised.4
However, rather than being behaviour-causing schemata, localizable inside people’s heads and describable by them, ‘cognitions’ of this kind can only be understood as social constructions, distributed throughout a network which extends far beyond the individual who appears to host them. What we so often take to be an ‘attitude’, for example, is little more than the commentary individuals give to account to themselves (and/or others) for the way they conduct themselves in a particular circumstance. People do, of course, behave characteristically, but they do so for reasons which are far more complex than simple cognitivism allows.
People may or may not be aware of the ways in which their interests are ‘hooked’ by powerful influences in social space-time, but in almost all circumstances they will be ready to offer an account of what they are doing and why, and indeed to maintain a commentary to themselves on the significance of their actions. The accuracy of any such commentary – whether delivered by the individual him- or herself or by an independent observer – will depend upon the extent to which the social causation of the behaviour in question is transparent. And, given the complexity of social influence, very often it will not be. As we shall see later, the illusion that the individual in some sense owns, hosts or is responsible for conduct whose origins are in fact largely social is one which is frequently ideologically exploited by power as a means of obscuring its own machinations.
The illusion that the individual is the sole originator of his or her conduct is of course nowhere more compelling than to the individual him- or herself, and it is as much as anything the conviction with which people are ready to account (through commentary) for their conduct which gives rise to the whole notion of ‘cognitions’. For the most part, though, all I am aware of when I perform some action or other is the bodily processes which take place in me as I do so. I will probably have long forgotten that the names I give to these processes (‘I wanted to’, ‘I thought that’, ‘I intended to’, ‘I meant to’ , ‘I decided to’, etc., etc.), rather than describing some self-evident, causal, internal rationality, were acquired originally from the often tentative and puzzled efforts of others trying to read the significance of my infantile adjustments to a world getting to grips with me.
Commentary consists largely of a series of guesses about the meaning of my actions based for the most part on very scant evidence, but, because of the extremely limited perspective from the self-as-centre, it seems to the individual involved a fairly comprehensive account of his or her (embodied) experience.
There are other ways too in which we are induced to host as our personal failings the iniquities of the outside world.
In his masterly analysis of the effects of French colonial rule in North Africa, Frantz Fanon demonstrated how the impress of distal power can end up as hatred and strife among the oppressed groups themselves, thus apparently legitimizing conceptions of the ruled by the rulers as, for example, genetically tainted, psychologically inferior or 'mentally ill'1. A similar process is in my view involved in some aspects of what has come to be known as 'political correctness', the typically Orwellian irony of which is that they are neither political nor correct.
There is of course no disputing that in modern Western society whites often oppress blacks and men often oppress women. This is bound to be the case in a social context in which people are forced to compete for scarce resources and to differentiate themselves from each other in any way which will accord them greater power, however illusory that power may be (nothing, after all, could be more pathetic than the belief that 'whiteness' confers personal superiority or that men are in some way to be valued more highly than women).
However, it is a conceptual mistake of the first magnitude to attribute the causes of such oppression to internal characteristics or traits of those involved. So long as sexism and racism are seen as personal attitudes which the individual sinner must, so to speak, identify in and root out of his or her soul, we are distracted from locating the causes of interpersonal strife in the material operation of power at more distal levels2. Furthermore, solidarity against oppressive distal power is effectively prevented from developing within the oppressed groups, who, successfully divided, are left by their rulers to squabble amongst themselves, exactly as Fanon detailed in the case of Algerians impoverished and embittered by their French colonial masters.
It is not that racist or sexist attitudes do not exist - they may indeed be features of the commentary of those who exercise or seek to exercise oppressive, possibly brutal proximal power. But that commentary is not the cause of the process that results in such proximal oppression and it is as futile to tackle the problem at that level as it is to try to cure 'neurosis' by tinkering with so-called 'cognitions' or 'unconscious motivation'.
This, I think, explains the otherwise puzzling success of 'political correctness' at a time when corporate power extended its influence over global society on an unprecedented scale. For this success was in fact no triumph of liberal thought or ethics, but rather the 'interiorizing', the turning outside-in of forms of domination which are real enough. The best-intentioned among us become absorbed in a kind of interior witch-hunt in which we try to track down non-existent demons within our 'inner worlds', while in the world outside the exploitation of the poor by the rich (correlating, of course, very much with black and white respectively) and the morale-sapping strife between men and women rage unabated.
Once again, we are stuck with the immaterial processes of 'psychology', unable to think beyond those aspects of commentary we take to indicate, for example, 'attitudes' or 'intentions'. The history of the twentieth century should have taught us that anyone will be racist in the appropriate set of circumstances. What is important for our understanding is an analysis of those circumstances, not an orgy of righteous accusation and agonised soul-searching.
1. See in particular Chapter 5 in Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Penguin Books, 1967.
2. A persuasive statement of a very similar view is to be found in Paul Farmer, On suffering and structural violence, In A. Kleinman, V. Das & M. Lock (eds), 1997, Social Suffering, Univ. California Press.