The Social Construction of Human Nature:

2008 Tony Ward No part of this article may be copied or reprinted without the explicit written permission of the author.

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF HUMAN NATURE

Models of Social Reality The imaginary world which we construct in order to more efficiently and effectively navigate our daily lives is not constructed in a social vacuum, but that it is substantially influenced by our experiences of the society in which we live, and which reciprocally form part of our model of reality. The experience of the habitus, which consolidates and synthesises our experiences and expectations of ourselves and others, and which is, as it were, cemented into place or objectivated through the mediation of the built world, helps to establish both personal and culture-specific as well as more generalisable notions of social reality. My grandmother, for instance, expected people from her own class and from the middle class to respond to her in different but specific ways. Her model of the social world accepted and included these differences in social behaviour which were culture-specific. On the other hand, she also had a model of what was right and wrong, socially speaking, in a more general sense - in a human sense. Cruelty, for instance, was wrong, irrespective of the cultural context in which it occurred. She was simply unable to "inhabit" the social reality of the person she saw as "cruel". The designation connoted, to her a form of deviance from acceptable human values, irrespective of the fact that she remained unaware of the social construction of the category "cruelty". What this suggests is that, in everyday life, we carry around with us a model of what it means to be, properly speaking, "human", which is shaped and limited by our own experiences. J. S. Mill, for instance, excluded infants and the indigent from this category. The human is a powerful category because it integrates a whole series of socio-economic and political variables and expectations, which operate (in the sensecontext of Bourdieu's habitus) as a polarity or scale along which various acts can be measured ie. as human-inhuman. The precise location of the point at which an act becomes "inhuman" along the scale depends upon the prior experience of the person and the context in which the perception is constructed. For instance, in wartime, propaganda posters almost invariably portray the enemy as bestial (as rapists threatening innocent women and children for instance) in order to legitimate their (bestial?) extermination. The projection onto the enemy of characterological traits which are less than human in order to justify the "inhuman" act of murder needs little further comment.1

Zeman, Z., Selling the War: Art and propaganda in World War II, Orbis Publishing, London, 1978.

What is crucial, is to remember that this process simply exemplifies in extremis, the social construction of notions of humanity, and that these notions are largely mediated through the State, being closely associated with experiences of patriotism. Normalising Normativity Through Education Operating as it does as an arm of capitalism's dominant groups, one of the State's main strategic functions is in the normalising of perceptions, values and expectations. These strategies are carried out largely in its role as an educator of future generations. In particular, the State, through its educational function, develops normativities throughout society at large, and amongst them, the normativity which carries the greatest capacity for normalising social forms and beliefs is that of normativity itself. Education normalises the conception of what it is to be normal. It shapes the meaning of "normal" in particular ways which accord with the needs of capitalist production and consumption, and with the need to reproduce the social relations which they imply. Furthermore, the partial and constructed normativity of what is "normal" is passed off as a universality, equating to what is "natural". This is to say that a biologically-determined conception of nature (and of the nature of being human) is used to legitimate not only the "natural" behaviours which describe being a living organism, but also those which prescribe the "normal" behaviour of the citizen. Any critical analysis of education which would challenge social normativities must therefore first address the issue of human nature as it has been socially constructed. Conceptions of Humanness In addition to our more general model about how things work, we also have a kind of rule-of-thumb sense about how other human beings are likely to behave in a variety of situations. what it is that human beings naturally are. Our model of human behaviour may change over time, as we move from the primary social reality of our immediate family to the wider world of social relations - school, work etc. The picture which we gradually build up serves as a useful guide when we meet new people, helping us to discriminate between potential friendly encounters and potentially threatening ones. In addition to our personal experience, we also construct our model of human behaviour within the context of the institutions which we encounter as we develop - schools, for instance, operate on the basis of agreed conceptions of appropriate behaviour which become part of our social reality. We can also see from this that schools themselves (as well as all of the other institutions which make up our

institutionalised social reality) are founded upon their own conceptions of what it means to be human. In the first instance, families work in precisely the same way. The church, the army, the civil service, the office, the men's club, the women's group, all to some extent operate with their own views of appropriate human behaviour. Very often these views may overlap almost to the point of coincidence. At other times they may be different. A Lakota is likely to have a very different conception of "humanness" than, a member of the Klan. In other words, concepts about what is to be expected of human beings changes over time and in different cultures. Humanness is not a stable category. Differences are largely based upon the individual and shared experiences of the members of any given cultural group. Implicit is a sense not only of how human beings will behave under different circumstances but, as the Eighteenth Century Scottish philosopher David Hume pointed out, a parallel sense of what human beings might be, and perhaps how they should behave. In other words, our sense of humanness has a moral component to it, and reason alone cannot account for morality since, according to Hume at least, reason itself is founded on passion or unreason.2 In this model the world of facts is one thing and the world of morals is another, although the way we see facts, does influence the ways in which moral judgements are formed. Thinking of an act as either good or bad depends upon some wider sense of what we think human beings actually are capable of - of the "generalised other" whom we create to interpret the world of other humans.3 According to Berger and Luckmann, this "generalised other" develops as a cognitive reality when the child moves from the world of family and significant others to the more diverse world beyond, and marks a decisive stage of socialisation, because at the same time that the child apprehends the other as a generalised other, he or she also and simultaneously apprehends him/herself as a generalised other for the other, which begins to shape an awareness about expected behaviours and attitudes in the world, of social reality as reality.4 It is this generalised concept of human behaviour, informally adopted throughout our lives which allows us to shape and perhaps optimise our behaviour in given circumstances. These implicit conceptions of the world (and a model of appropriate human behaviour as part of that world) usually remain invisible to us until they are brought into relief by unusual or bizarre behaviour. It is only then that we become aware that we actually do have an implicit set of expectations about how people should be, and, of course, how they actually are. Our informal conception of
2

3 4

Hume, D., Treatise of Human Nature, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1964. First Pub., 1739, Bk. II , Part III, Section III . Schwartz, B., op. cit., 1986, p. 26. Berger, P. L. and Luckmann, T., op. cit., 1966, pp. 113-134.

what it means to be human changes throughout our lives, and societally speaking, has changed throughout history. The History of Human Nature. Until the 17th and 18th Centuries, social expectations were relatively predictable and unchanging. With the advent of capitalism there occurred a sociopolitical vacuum, so to speak, between the aristocracy and the peasants. To differentiate themselves from the peasants, the newly emerging class of the bourgeoisie adopted as a standard of behavioural expectations, the noblesse oblige of their "superiors". The mores and values of the existing aristocracy in this way became the normative standard against which the bourgeoisie measured their success, their status, their proximity to "old" power and wealth.5 What is important to notice is that it also took place alongside the appearance of other key social concepts of "insanity", "criminality" etc. as Foucault has so well described. Children cannot commit murder because they have not yet qualified for full human status recognition. Similarly, someone who is labelled "insane" is not seen as fully responsible, and is therefore allocated similar prescriptive rights to those "enjoyed" by children with respect to criminality. The insane are seen as having "something missing", and that something, which reduces them down to their essential animalness, is their very humanness.6 Foucault goes on to note that the original prescription of madness began to take place, in France, in the late Seventeenth Century, and that is coincided perfectly with the alienation of the peasants from their land - by crowding the indigent and unemployed, the poor and the starving into the large the Hpital Gnral and similar institutions vacated by the retreat of the Plague. The numbers of beggars and poor were swelled by the unemployed, by peasants driven from the land, by refugees from religious wars, disbanded soldiers etc. - all of these were recipients of a new form of social control - the asylum, intended to "mop up" the indigent.7 There was, initially, no distinction made between the insane and the other poor. What ultimately distinguished the former and led eventually to their separate incarceration and treatment was their inability to work. "It is not immaterial that madmen were included in the proscription of idleness. From its origin, they would have their places beside the poor, deserving or not, and the idle, voluntary or not. Like them, they would be subject to the rules of forced labour... In the workshops in which they were interned, they distinguished themselves by their inability to work and to follow the rythms of
5 6 7

Taylor, R., op. cit., 1978. Foucault, M., op. cit., 1973, pp. 73-4. ibid., pp. 46-9.

collective life. The necessity, discovered in the eighteenth century, to provide a special regime for the insane, and the great crisis of confinement that preceded the Revolution, are linked to the experience of madness available in the universal necessity of labour."8 Confinement was reserved not only for those without property, but also (significantly in an emerging industrialised market economy) for those without the will or ability to labour. Property ownership and work, in other words, became defined by the Establishment as measures of relative humaneness. We can see from this, that our present concept of humanness (that is, the one associated or influenced by the idea of having an ability to work) originated during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries at the same time that Enlightenment philosophies were promoting the ethic of individualism and when the closely related economic theories of Hobbes, Locke, Adam Smith, Bentham, Mill Sen., Mill Jun., Malthus etc. were promoting free-market competition as the epitom of rationality, when they were promoting the essence of man as, in a word - economic man - disciplined man, man willing to subject himself to the yoke of industrialised capitalism. It was this particular conception of humanness therefore which helped to shape emergent conceptions of a particular, invariant human nature, and the human nature which it helped to shape was that of the disciplined animal. Human Nature as a Socially Constructed Negativity To a very large extent, this image of the human animal as a competitive individualist immersed in the pursuit of self-interest in the marketplace remains with us today and has become increasingly congruent with our conception of humanness. This is perhaps why social welfare recipients carry a stigma, why they are abused and denigrated as "dole bludgers", because they do not have the ability to hold down a job and are therefore "lazy" and slightly less than fully deserving of human dignity. But paradoxically, when we look at human nature more carefully, we discover, as Raymond Williams has noted, that it is usually only viewed as a negativity. Under capitalism, human nature is seen as essentially competitive. It is only human nature to cheat, to be dishonest, to steal, to be selfish. This human nature has about it an animality, a voracious self-interest unmediated by gentleness, kindness or other positive and more "human" attributes. By a peculiar twist, if insanity equates with animality, and if humanness is its obverse, then humanity itself, under our current conceptions paradoxically carries with it all of those animal traits which represent the deeper, darker sides of the soul - greed, avarice, selfinterest, and so on, but all kept under lock and key, under the disciplinary control
8

ibid., pp. 57-8.

which is no longer imposed from without, but which is now internalised, This is perhaps why we need the mad and the criminal elements on whom to project that which we cannot admit in ourselves. These negativities are so much a part of our vocabulary and our thinking about what constitutes humanness that we hardly ever think that it might be otherwise - that human nature might be caring, altruistic, compassionate, and so on. And more than this, we seem collectively to be so certain in our generalisations, that there actually is a thing called human nature, ie. some inherent, invariant essence of humanness which includes the characteristics of competitiveness, greed, selfishness, and so on. In other words, these terms apply, in our model, to something that already exists, in the same way that the planet exists or a tree exists. We are unaware, in our designations and discriminations, that the phenomenon which we call "human nature" might actually be a social construction - something that we ourselves have created and are continuing to create-by-naming in order to explain and make sense of the apparent randomness of our social universe. I am suggesting that the conception of human nature is a social construction, and that since the Seventeenth Century it has gradually been transformed along the lines and consistent with the ideologies of competition, hierarchy and free-market economics to exclude other ideologically threatening attributes. Furthermore, I am suggesting that in this process, the ideology of free-market capitalism recruited the processes and language forms of the field of developing scientific analysis to assist in this exclusion. Science, then, was recruited to bolster conceptions of human nature which served the interests of the dominant culture in society. The emergence of scientific rationality along with the proliferation of analyses of "humanness" is not coincidental. As Jungian psychologist James Hillman has reflexively noted, the analytical mind's predilections to psychopathology - particularly in its investigations of the mind itself, coupled with the fact that psychology has become a massive industry determined to "prove" that there is something "wrong" which needs to be "cured" through the development of diverse analytical and diagnostic categories - all suggest a note of caution in ascribing ontological conditions as objective realities: "The helping professions - education, social work, pastoral counselling, psychotherapy - all must envision suffering and illness as something "wrong". They have a vested interest in psychology, as it is now conceived. They must see sickness in the soul so that they can get in there and do their job. But suppose the fantasies, feelings and behaviour arising from the imaginal part of ourselves are archetypal in their sickness and thus natural. Suppose they are authentic, belonging to the nature of man; suppose even that their odd

irrationalities are required for life, else we wither into rigid stalks of reason. Then what is there to analyse?"9 Despite the fact that Hillman here falls into the trap he has helped to reveal and disarm - the notion of an essentialism to human nature, and which warrants analysis his general theme that mental illness is caused or constructed by the scientific-analytic impulse is compelling. This is particularly so when one realises that prior to the seventeenth century, distinctions between the savant and the idiot were not so clearcut as they seem to us today. We justify our "superior" knowledge of these matters based upon legitimations of scientific progress, but it is scientific rationality itself which is here being problematised. Science as an instrument of capitalist development and production has therefore played a very important role in shaping our collective conception(s) of humanness, and it has done so in ways which have supported and reinforced the emergence and development of the present socio-economic system. Psychology, sociology and psychotherapy can therefore be seen as instruments of legitimation for capitalism itself. Capitalist Conceptions of Humanness How this came about has been brilliantly analysed by psychologist Barry Schwartz, who undertakes a critical analysis of the development since the seventeenth century, of the parallel sciences of economics, biology and human behaviour, and shows how they intersect in a mutually reinforcing way to reciprocally legitimate each other and to bolster their mutual foundational legitimation of science itself. In particular, he shows how the evolving conception of human nature which we have increasingly come to accept in the late twentieth century has been invaded by science and given, a kind of meaning which is both inappropriate and dangerous. The process is already apparent in the social and economic theorising in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In his television and literary analysis of Civilisation, historian Kenneth Clark notes for instance that the two sacred texts of the Nineteenth Century were Malthus' Essay on the Principle of Population and Ricardo's On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation.10 He refers to them as sacred texts because:

9 10

Hillman, J., The Myth of Analysis, Northwestern University Press, 1972, p. 4. Ricardo, D., On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1971. (Originally pub. 1821).

"Malthus and Ricardo were taken as gospels by the most serious and even pious of men, who used them to justify actions they would never have thought of defending on human grounds."11 In other words, the debate around the intersection of morality and economics in the mid-nineteenth century was producing a profoundly dichotomous set of social behaviours and theories. Darwin entered this debate in 1871, with the publication of The Descent of Man,12 and attempted to synthesize the two great realms of moral and economic thought. He attempted to fuse his own theories of biological evolution with the predominant economic theories of that time - Mill's Untilitarianism and Ricardo's theories of laissez faire capitalism. Acknowledging the existence of a moral sense in humanity, he proposed what he called social instincts - instincts which govern parenting and sexual reproduction. From a biological point of view, these would be naturally selected so that they would lend themselves to the survival of particular social traits. In other words, those instincts which would survive through a process of natural selection would be the ones which would lend themselves to the Utilitarian principle of the greatest happiness for the greatest number - the ones which rational humans would choose for the common good. Accordingly, people were utilitarian by virtue of their biological nature, and their instincts about right and wrong are completely congruent with their rational moral sense.13 The implications of this synthesis were to be far-reaching. First it established an immediate legitimacy for the existing moral code (as well as for the economic code of which it was a synthetic partner). The existing moral and economic codes were as they should be and therefore historically incontestable because they were the product of an evolutionary process of natural selection. This, of course, legitimated also the present social structure upon which the economic code was based as well as the processes of its continued reproduction. In other words, it suggested that the status quo was just as it should be and that structural change was not only dangerous since it would involve tampering with Mother Nature, but that it was also probably impossible. The Ideology of Social Darwinism By the same token, Darwin's theory of moral evolution had the salutary effect of de-legitimating calls for social change, universal franchise, the abolition of wagelabour etc. It was, to say the least, profoundly conservative, and as such it attracted
11

12 13

Clark, K., Civilisation, British Broadcasting Corporation, London, 1969, pp. 326-7. See also: Malthus, T. R., Essay on the Principle of Population , Dent, London, 1914. Darwin, C., The Descent of Man, J. Murray, London, 1871. Schwartz, B., op. cit., 1986, p. 90.

enormous amounts of support from the dominant culture of propertied, voting, scientific-theorising, rational men, who saw in it a biological justification for their positions of privilege. The argument in favour of conformity to an ethic of individualism, hierarchy and competition was used by Sumner in the 1880s, to justify the existence of millionaires, as the naturally evolved fittest members of the species supported, not surprisingly, by the likes of John D.Rockefeller. By the same token the idea that the current social hierarchy under capitalism is a result of some natural process of biological selection is self-referentially untenable. Nevertheless, these collective "theories" still find expression in academic circles where the continued legitimation of the existing social structure and of the "natural" order of capitalism is promulgated and reframed for its continued reproduction and consumption. The theories themselves and the "scientific" research work involved in their legitimation is ideologically motivated, to counteract the ideas of liberal reform and socialism that were developing throughout the Western world at the turn of the century. Social Darwinism, as it came to be called was designed to sustain the existing social hierarchy in the face of increasing calls for its delegitimation, for greater social equity and for direct worker control of the means of production which was being demanded with increased intensity towards the end of the Nineteenth Century. These ideologies of individualism were increasingly legitimated by reference to scientific "evidence" - most notably, the theory of natural selection used to limit immigration from the reputedly more "primitive" areas of Southern Europe, in an overtly racist way. What lay behind these policies was a conception of work as the measure of one's humanity - but not any work. It was only the boring, repetitive work of industrial production which, as least in the Eastern United States, was what manufacturers sought to boost production and to reduce wages. Notions of "human nature" are deeply implicated in the social struggles of everyday life, and connected to the social relations which operate between different cultural groups. The establishment of and the power to define the meaning of the category "human nature" has been appropriated by dominant groups and used to promote their own ends. What is most powerful about the category "human nature" is that it is self-fulfilling. People accept the category, complete with the values and mores which it encompasses and in the process accept limits to their own behaviour which then circumscribe their imaginative possibilities as existential beings including their critical capacities to contest such normativities. In turn, this circumscription of imaginative horizons establishes the grounds for further research which in turn further legitimates the category itself, and so on.

A Critical Theory of Normativity To the extent that the generic concept of "human nature" is accepted and legitimated, it supports a further category which is crucial to the continued reproduction of the existing social system - that is, the collapsing of what is "natural" into what is "normal". The critical theorists of the Frankfurt School made significant, if somewhat incomplete and imperfect, advances in our understanding of humanness in their analyses of culture and the environment. They also succeeded in raising the crucial issue of social normativity which would later play such an important role in both the social theories of the 1960s as well as in the later Postmodern theories of the 1980s. In particular, they addressed the category "human nature". Upon this problematic rests much of the argumentation surrounding the concepts of authority and legitimacy which animates postmodern discourse and which is so important to the notion of emancipatory education. Horkheimer in the opening chapter to the Institute's first publication made it very clear that: "The term "human nature" here does not refer to an original or an external or a uniform essence. Every philosophical doctrine which sees the movement of society or the life of the individual as emerging out of a fundamental, ahistorical unity is open to justified criticism. Such theories with their undialectical method have special difficulty in coming to grips with the fact that new individual and social qualities arise in the historical process. Their reaction to this fact either takes the form of mechanical evolution: all human characteristics which arise at a later point were originally present in germ; or it takes the form of some variety of philosophical anthropology: these characteristics emerge from a metaphysical 'ground' of being. These mutually opposed theories fail to do justice to the methodological principle that vital processes are marked by structural change no less than by continual development."14 In other words, he recognised that theories of what it means to be a human being cannot be separated from the ideological position of those who promulgate these theories, that theories of human nature are always in the end ideological. This recognition proved to be extremely influential in the social theories which developed in the 1960s. During that time numerous social theorists and psychiatrists all questioned accepted definitions (and legitimations) of what constituted social and cultural normativity itself - what fundamentally constitutes the social categories of sanity and madness.15 They theorised that these categories were themselves
14 15

Horkheimer, M., op. cit., 1972, p. 66. Originating in the Existential philosophies of Sartre, this idea that there may exist an ontological or transactional basis for definitions of normality was taken up by Gregory Bateson who first suggested the double bind theory of schizophrenia in 1956. This was later taken up by a whole generation of social theorists. See: Sartre, J. P., Being and Nothingness, (Trans. Barnes, H.), Methuen, 1957. (Originally published by Gallimard, Paris 1943); Sartre, J. P., Existentialism and Human Emotions, The Philosophical Library, New York, 1957; Bateson G., Jackson, D. D., Haley, J., and Weakland, J.,

shaped by the cultural struggle of competing groups as well as from the social conditions deriving from the social organisation of Capitalist production. This notion was also taken up by educators and resulted in a proliferation of alternative pedagogies and the emergence of an alternative counter-culture value system which aimed to create a more just and equitable society.16 What was at stake was the very definition of what constitutes "normal" behavior. Up until this period, conceptions of normality had been shaped by scientific, that is to say statistical theories. Society was seen by social theorists as a statistical bell-curve in which the values, behaviours, attitudes and beliefs of the statistical majority of the community defined the terms of reference of what constituted normality for the whole society.17 Pragmatic Theories of Social Normativity This statistical view or normality, originating in the work of Emil Durkheim18 and was greatly influential on the American pragmatist sociology of Talcott Parsons who has had a profound influence upon post-war social theorising, particularly in the United States.19 Both Durkheim and Parsons argued that society cannot be understood as the summation of individual psychological perspectives, but that it exercises a separate and autonomous control over individual attitudes and behaviour.20 They held that this being the case, psychological factors do not hold the key to understanding society, but that (in the case of Durkheim) the division of labour and (in the case of Parsons) a consensual validation, determine individual social behaviours. Society itself was then seen as a reality in its own right, or as Durkheim said, as a sui generis. This being the case, individual values become secondary to inanimate social forces which are then amenable to statistical analysis. Social values, in this process

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17

18

19 20

Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia in: Behavioural Science, Vol. 1, 1956, pp. 251-264; Laing, R. D., op. cit., 1959; Laing, R. D., The Self and Others, Tavistock, London, 1961; Laing, R. D. and Esterson, A., Sanity, Madness and The Family, Tavistock, London, 1964; Laing, R. D., The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise, Penguin Books, 1967; Laing, R. D. and Cooper D., Reason ,and Violence - A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy, 1950-60, Pantheon Books New York, 1971; Szasz, T., op. cit.,1972. Neill, A. S., Summerhill, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Mddx., 1968; Goodman, P., Growing Up Absurd, Vintage Books 1960; Goodman, P., Compulsory Miseducation and The Community of Scholars, Vintage Books, 1964; Illich, I., Deschooling Society, Harper & Row, New York, 1971; and Freire, P., op. cit., 1972. "Rightness and Wrongness in the Physical Environment", in Broadbent, G. and Ward, A., (eds.), Design Methods in Architecture, Lund Humphries, London, 1969, pp. 166-178. Durkheim, E., Suicide, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1952, (first published 1897); Durkheim, E.,Moral Education, Free Press, New York, 1961, (first published 1925); Durkheim, E., The Rules of Sociological Method, Macmillan, New York, 1982, (first published 1895); Durkheim, E., The Division of Labour in Society, Macmillan, New York, 1984, (first published 1893). Parsons, T., Structure and Process in Modern Societies, Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois, 1960. Worsley, P., Introducing Sociology, (revised), Penguin, London 1987 (first published 1970), pp. 468477.

thus become marginal categories, and this is particularly true with respect to issues of power. The social philosophy of Durkheim and Parsons is directly opposed to the social conflict theory of Marx and Weber, who see society as evolving from the struggles of competing power groups (albeit in the case of Marx that these conflicts are seen to stem from the division of labour in society arising from the uneven distribution of the means of production).21 Implicit in Parsons view is the belief that power is evenly distributed throughout society, and that while there may be some concentrations, in the finance system, the system of production, and so on, these isolated concentrations only serve as mechanisms for the overall distribution and dispersal of power across the social spectrum. But such conceptions of power do not deal adequately with the asymmetries which seem to characterize the distribution of power in the community. Parsons takes this view of power as an almost incidental factor in social relations. As Michael Parenti points out : Parsons presumption that there is an articulated collective interest in presentday (American) society that is expressed through the integration of common values allows him to emphasize the collusive aspects of power while neglecting the competitive dimensions. By that view, the power of some people seems not to involve the powerlessness of others, and the society has moved beyond class conflict. What is overlooked is that collusive power relations are frequently a response to, or an anticipation of competitive ones and the ability to construct collusive relations greatly determines the ability to prevail in competitive ones. The ideal purpose of collusion is to build such a preponderance of support for a particular interest as to forestall the emergence of competing interests, thereby sustaining the appearance of an unopposed collective interest.22 Parsonian Pragmatics: Conservatism as Neutrality Parsons socially pragmatic theories which have been so very influential were, not coincidentally, developed in the United States in the midst of the Cold War and the virulent anti-communism of Senator Joseph McCarthy, when any theory of social conflict (particularly those associated with Marx) were viewed with extreme suspicion.23 It was a time when such theories dovetailed well with the myth of the
21

22 23

Durkheim's view of the division of labour is that it exists, that it is inevitable and that it must be pragmatically accepted as given. Marx, on the other hand, suggests that the division of labour is itself a result of social struggle and that as such must be seen as amenable to change. Parenti, M., op. cit., 1978, p. 20. It is generally acknowledged that Parson's sociological theories largely shaped the paradigms of American sociology, and these paradigms must be seen in the social and political context in which they were developed. On the other hand, Parson's himself had, by the time of the McCarthy era, attained a distinguished position at Harvard and was for a time the President of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). As such, he participated in a critical analysis of the use of the House

good life under capitalism which were implicit in the enormous programmes of suburbanisation and urban renewal already noted. In this sense they also had a particular appeal for those interested in the acceptance by the community at large of a belief in the collective interest of the citizenry, which translated easily into tacit support for the laissez faire philosophy of the market economy of liberal consumer capitalism. This promoted and reinforced the myth that individuals were becoming increasingly free to choose the lives they wished, and (when we acknowledge any relationship to power at all) that society was moving generally in the direction of a more, rather than a less, equitable distribution of power - the so-called "trickle-down" theory. It was in this context and against such normative and supposedly ideologically free theories of social life that, in the 1960s, there developed a whole field of critical social theory which challenged the presumed ideological neutrality of normative theories such as Parsons and which proposed, in their place a critique of sociology itself in which issues of power and cultural dominance took a central place. These theories took as their starting point a loose affiliation with marxism and the sociology of Max Weber, but were also critical of Orthodox marxism's rigid dogmatism. They were based more fundamentally upon the critical social theorising of the so-called Frankfurt School. Chief amongst these theorists was the psychologist Erich Fromm, whose books were to have an important influence during the 1960s, and who would eventually break with the Adorno and Horkheimer and the other Frankfurt School adherents. The Ontology of Normalcy: Erich Fromm Fromm was deeply concerned with the impact of modernisation upon the collective consciousness of the community.24 The history of this philosophy goes back even further than Fromm, at least as far as the nineteenth century and includes, of course, Marx himself. However, other voices besides Marx noted the negative impact which industrialisation was having upon everyday life. Jacob Burckhardt, Proudhon, Jack London, Baudelaire, Leo Tolstoy and Henry David Thoreau all noted the impact of capitalist culture, while Durkheim himself (conservative as he now appears) noted the encroaching ennui and passivity which seemed to be increasingly pervading public life.25

24

25

Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) in the suppression and censorship of left-wing academics. The record of his involvement does not indicate that he took a strong position, nor that the report produced by the AAUP was significant in stemming the anti-communist witch-hunt. See: Schrecker, E. W., op. cit., 1986. The same distinction between Modernism and modernisation is made by Marshall Berman in his pivotal postmodern analysis of Modernism. See: Berman, M., op. cit., 1988, pp. 88-9. For a succinct analysis of these critical perspectives see: Fromm, E., op. cit., 1955, pp. 185-191.

In our own time, the same diagnosis has been made by theorists as diverse as R. H. Tawney and Lewis Mumford. Tawney notes that in modern society, mankind has allowed itself to become enslaved by things, that economic consideration have, under capitalism, overwhelmed human interests and values. The result, for Tawney, has been a whole society which is poisoned by materialism, and where even spiritual values have themselves become commodified.26 The original publication title of Tawney's work was, "The Sickness of an Acquisitive Society", and suggests that social well-being may have other than a statistical basis, and that the status of normality as an ontological condition is ignored by normative sociological definitions such as that promoted by Durkheim (and later Parsons). A similar position is taken by Lewis Mumford, who, writing in 1951 cited the condition of modern man as one of passivity and quiescence in which all sense of personal creativity, risk-taking and non-conformity were being expunged: "In the end, such a civilisation can produce only a mass man: incapable of choice, incapable of spontaneous, self-directed activities: at best patient, docile, disciplined to monotonous work to an almost pathetic degree, but increasingly irresponsible as his choices become fewer and fewer: finally, a creature governed mainly by his conditioned reflexes - the ideal type desired, if never quite achieved, by the advertising agency and the sales organisations of modern business, or by the propaganda office and the planning bureaus of totalitarian and quasi-totalitarian governments.... Ultimately such a society produces only two groups of men: the conditioners and the conditioned: the active and the passive barbarians."27 What is being taken up here, is the condition which Marx had referred to and which Fromm took up - the theory of alienation - a condition which leads, without any internal contradiction, to the conclusion that it is possible for an entire society to be sick. This presumes a condition of sickness which is implicitly non-statistical, but which is premised upon the alienation of man from himself, ie. as acting outside of his or her own best interests in the interests of social harmony and conformity.28

26 27

28

Tawney, R. H., The Acquisitive Society, Harcourt, Brace & Co., Inc., New York, 1920, pp. 99, 106-7. Mumford, L., The Conduct of Life, Harcourt, Brace & Co. Inc., New York, 1951, p. 14-16. Cited in Fromm, E., op. cit. 1955, p. 196. The writings of Mumford et. al. are at critical variance with the normative definitions of normativity which were in operation prior to the 1960s. What makes Mumford's writing of particular interest is that his theories about planning, design and development have also had an influence not only in the field of social studies, but also in the design disciplines - particularly in the 1960s, where, along with Jane Jacobs he helped to draw attention to the damage being wreaked upon communities by rationalist planning policies. See, for instance: Mumford, L., City Development, Secker & Warburg, London, 1947; Jacobs, J., The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Vintage Books, New York, 1961.

The Myth of Consensual Validation Implicit in Mumford's analysis is the notion that a "healthy" human being is one who active, self-directed, risk-taking and spontaneous, and that the conditions of modern industrialised life are creating conditions whereby the preponderance of citizens are unhealthy. This notion of what it means to be a healthy citizen contrasts sharply with that promoted by Parson's and others, which stress, instead, that the healthy citizen is one who "fits" comfortably within his or her social milieu and who conforms to its social mores. This distinction is one which has been given a particularly sharp focus by Fromm, who noted in 1955: What is so deceptive about the state of mind of the members of a society is the consensual validation of their concepts. It is navely assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideals or feelings proves the validity of these ideals or feelings. Nothing is further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing whatsoever on reason or mental health. Just as there is a folie deux there is a folie millions The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.... Fromm goes on to note that in any given society it follows that a pathological condition may be the norm, and that in such circumstances, the pathology expressed as personal defects may be invisible to its individual members: "... If a person fails to attain freedom, spontaneity, a genuine expression of self, he may be considered to have a severe defect, provided we assume that freedom and spontaneity are the objective human goals to be attained by every human being. If such a goal is not obtained by the majority of members in any given society, we deal with the phenomenon of socially patterned defect. The individual shares it with many others; he is not aware of it as a defect, and his security is not threatened by being different, of being an outcast, as it were. What he may have lost in richness and in a genuine feeling of happiness, is made up by the security of fitting in with the rest of mankind - as he knows them. As a matter of fact, his very defect may have been raised to a virtue by his culture, and thus may give him an enhanced feeling of achievement."29 According to this perspective, it was bizarre for the conception inherent in the normative (and statistical) Parsonian view of social life to have any validity in the face of comments like that of the late Glasgwegian psychiatrist Ronnie Laing, who noted: "The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its

29

Fromm, E., op. cit., Holt Reinhart, New York, 1955, p. 23.

normal man. It educates children to lose themselves, and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years."30 Comments such as this turn the entire category of normality on its head, problematising the issue of precisely what stable category one can hold as invariant from which to make an objective or impartial judgement. Alienation as Norm: Stanley Milgram Mumford's, Fromm's and Laing's characterisation of normative notions of normality as alienation may seem exaggerated, were it not for the fact that, in the early 1960s, they were empirically verified in a remarkable and chilling way by a young psychologist at Yale -Stanley Milgram. Milgram's experiments served to indicate that those dark aspects of the human psyche which are invariably projecvted onto a troublesome Other - the sadistic camp commandant or the gulag executioner who maintained that they were "only doing their job" - that these traits were not only not rare, but that they seem to be overwhelmingly "human" traits, when circumstances warrant. Moreover, his experiments drew a revealing comparison between the social passivity spoken of by Fromm and others and the suburbanisation process which was in full swing at that time. Milgram's experiments provided a very solid empirical basis and legitimation for the theories of alienation propounded by Marx, Fromm, Mumford, Laing, Adorno, Horkheimer - and particularly Lyotard, with his concern for the implications of the gulags and concentration camps. At the same time they gave graphic evidence of how an attitude of objective and instrumental rationalism may blind us to our own humanity and to the humanity of those with whom we relate as professionals. Milgram, then a young psychologist, induced ordinary Americans to torture their fellow men and women with severe and life-threatening electric shocks as negative-reinforcement for apparently failing a word-association test. The experiment sent a shudder through the domain of clinical psychology, and changed for all time our conception of what it means to be a human being in the late 20th century, bringing into sharp focus the social norm of passivity and obedience which Fromm problematises.31 In the test, an associate of the experimenter pretends to be the "subject" of the experiment - the person attempting the word-association test. The real subject of the experiment is the "teacher" of the test, a volunteer. Every time the pretend "subject" offers an incorrect answer, the actual "subject" (in the role of "teacher") is required to administer an electric shock of increasing intensity, in 15 volt increments from 15
30 31

Laing, R. D., op. cit.,1967, p. 24. Milgram, S., Obedience to Authority, Harper & Row, New York, 1974, p. 3-5.

volts to 450 volts. The shocks are not real, but the "teacher-subject" does not know this, since he (all male) can only hear the pre-recorded responses of the learner, (all the way from mild complaints, through screams to ultimate silence). What was most astonishing about the experiment was that almost two thirds of the subjects administered life threatening shocks to the pretend "subject" when ordered to do so by the experimenter. Analysts were astonished that normal caring Americans could be so easily induced to torture their innocent countrymen in response to directions from an academic authority. They were in a position where they were required to choose between obeying a trusted authority and not doing something they clearly felt to be wrong. Almost invariably they chose to obey. The practical implications of Milgram's experiment are enormous. They imply, for instance, that the capacity to conformity to authority is not only very common but that it outweighs (in 65% of the U.S. population) any humanitarian sense of compassion or empathy, any sense of moral outrage. It also raises, but does not answer an interesting question. Can a society which is largely willing to torture its members when ordered to do so be legitimately called "sane"? What, then, of sanity? Is there a culturally invariant state which one can describe as sane? Or is the very concept of sanity itself a socially constructed category which is not exempt from the ideological and political exigencies of an era, conditioned, some say, by factors of race, class, gender, and so on? Even more interesting, from a postmodern theoretical point of view, is the moral position of Milgram himself. While 65% of his subjects can at least point to the authority of the experimenter as justification for their cruelty, to whom can Milgram himself point? He had no one ordering him to torture his actual subjects. His only legitimation was knowledge, peer acceptance and, of course, the power which attended upon the increased cultural capital of a status position at Yale and in the scientific community. For Milgram, the end justified the means in a scientific rationality separated from human compassion. Critical theorists like Laing shaped their positions against such practices.32 As he noted in 1967: "What we call 'normal' is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically estranged from the structure of being... The 'normally' alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane... The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man."33
32

33

In his analysis of the issue of authority as it impacts upon the psychiatrist-patient relationship, Laing quotes an equally compelling example given by Kraepelin of his 1905 encounter with a patient in which it is entirely possible to interpret Kraepelin's own diagnostic behavior as equally bizarre as his patient's. See: Laing, R. D., op. cit., 1965, pp. 29-30. Laing, R. D., op. cit., 1967, pp. 23-4.

What, then, is left of normative conceptions of normality, and if the (postmodern) answer is "very little", then are we cast into an infinitude of relativism in which all moral positions are of equal, which is to say no universal value? These are issues with which we will now have to grapple. First though, we should note that two further things are clear from the example of Milgram's work. Science, Rationality and Alienation The first (remembering that Milgram was a high-status academic) is that academia itself plays a prominent role in not only the shaping of social normativity, and is itself not exempt from the effects of these perhaps pathological social norms which it helps to reproduce. The passivity and social conformity which Milgram sought to expose is as pervasive in academia and in his own behaviour as it is in everyday life, and indeed may play a prominent part in the reproduction of the condition of social quiescence which Mumford, Fromm and others have noted to be a state of alienation. One of the most interesting aspects of Milgram's work was his blindness to the fact that in his experiment he was modelling for his unwitting "subjects" precisely those behaviours and attitudes which he was purporting to expose and measure in them, and that his reflexive blindness was not insignificantly clothed in the authenticating garb of that scientific objectivity of which academia is the authority. The second and more obvious factor in Milgram's work is that its pervasiveness is and was part of the general social development of everyday life from the 1950s onwards, throughout the whole process of suburbanisation. An extensive study of the Chicago suburb of Park Forest in 1953, by William H. Whyte indicated almost identical cravings for acceptance, respect for anonymous authority and a desire for and pressure towards social conformity as pervasive of the new suburban community of that time.34 In the context of what we have already noted about the dual processes of suburbanisation and urban renewal which took place in the 1950s - particularly in the context of the anti-communism prevalent at that time - and also recognising the connection made previously between the organisation of space and the creation of subjectivities, Milgram's and Whyte's findings provide a compelling confirmation. Furthermore, they suggest that the role of the scientist and the academic in this process is not insubstantial. It seems to be the case indeed that in everyday life we exist in a condition which, though termed "normal", is characterised by a pervasive passivity which we accept as the "normal condition" of life. Little wonder then, that, as Fromm puts it:
34

Whyte, W. H., "The Transients", Fortune, Pub. Time Magazine, New York, May, June and July 1953.

"It is (a) fact that man does not experience himself as the active bearer of his own powers and richness, but as an impoverished "thing" dependent on powers outside of himself unto whom he has projected his living substance."35 The implications for all of this are far-reaching, suggesting, perhaps, that no definition of normality can have an absolute relevance since it cannot, without selfcontradiction, take the "normality" of the judge into account at the same time.36 How do we know that the psychiatrist, psychologist or sociologist who is socially sanctioned to make categorical judgements concerning what stands for "normal" is normal him/herself? Certainly, one is able to problematise the sanity of Stanley Milgram, as we have seen. In partial answer to these questions, the social phenomenology of Laing, Phillipson and Lee comes immediately to mind, and it is worth mentioning in this context Laing's own definition of sanity as a function of the perspectives of two people, one of whom is sane by mutual consent.37 This is a significant step away from the objectivist posture of normative diagnostic techniques but it leaves unanswered crucial issues of power. The Counter-Normality of Normative Humanism The suggestion that what we "normally" accept as "normal" may be, in fact a general and widespread pathology leads us into a further dilemma. We are not just faced with a redefinition of "normality" to conform to some other, perhaps more benign ontological condition, rather we are faced with the problem of deciding if there is any condition whatsoever which can be labelled as "normal" or "healthy" against which we might position theories of action in both mental and physical health and/or design. If the passivity, quiescence, obedience and apparently morally vacuous behaviour as witnessed and justifiably condemned in Hitler's Third Reich is more widespread, sufficient to be apparently evident in 65% of all "normal" Americans, and if, by this twist, we problematise the whole conception of pathology, wrenching it from its statistically-self-validating foundations, we have still not succeeded in destroying it as a category in toto. Even Fromm and Laing noted that there exists by implication a less pathological norm, founded upon a converse set of behaviours, attitudes and experiences. Fromm calls this perspective "normative humanism" and suggests that:

35 36

37

Fromm, E., op. cit., 1955, p. 114. See also: Sartre, J. P., op. cit.,1985, pp. 52-8; Laing, op. cit.,1959. This is particularly evident within the legal context, for instance, where indigenous peoples refuse to acknowledge the authority of colonial judicial systems, and where, indeed, the law can be demonstrated to have operated and to have been designed to operate as an instrument of colonisation. A specific case in point in N.Z. being the Maori Land Court, which was established specifically to privatise and therefore alienate Maori land. Laing, R. D., Phillipson, H. and Lee, A. R., Interpersonal Perception, Tavistock, London, 1966.

"From a standpoint of normative humanism we must arrive at a different conception of mental health; the very person who is considered healthy in the categories of an alienated world, from the humanistic standpoint appears as the sickest one - although not in terms of individual sickness, but of the sociallypatterned defect. Mental health, in the humanistic sense, is characterised by the ability to love and to create, by the emergence from the incestuous ties to family and nature, by a sense of identity based upon one's experience of self as the subject and agent of one's powers, by the grasp of reality inside and outside ourselves, that is, by the development of objectivity and reason."38 What is being proposed in Fromm's "normative humanistic" description of "health" is an alternative conception which corresponds to the notion of humanness as the ability of self-creation, to a proactive rather than a reactive relationship to the world. But is this conception any more stable than the one which it seeks to replace? The theory promoted by Fromm is that all of the conforming behaviour associated with statistical conceptions of normality are conditioned, ie. they are the result of primary and secondary socialisation. He cites the emergence of family structures (along with Reich) with the emergence of property as factors in this process. In this sense, both Reich and Fromm laid great emphasis in their work on trying to integrate the theories of Freud and Marx.39 Laing endorses this belief, suggesting that the conditioning which promotes quiescence and passivity is transmitted through cultural institutions such as schools and family structures,40 and that these accepted patterns of social relations are seriously problematic: "A child born today in the U. K. stands a ten times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university, and about one-fifth of mental hospital admissions are diagnosed schizophrenic. This can be taken as an indication that we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them. Perhaps it is our very way of educating them that is driving them mad."41 It is not inconsequential that Laing here pinpoints the practice of education as a primary influence in the creation of subjectivities which are alienated and "unhealthy" with respect to their own creative capacities. All of this suggests that in society as it is currently constituted there exists a basic antagonism between the individual and society, and that this antagonism is an essential result of the need by society to curb or suppress basic individual desires and needs in order to function as society. Furthermore, it raises the additional issue of essentialism - that there is an essential and basic quality of humanness which separates our species from the other animals,
38 39 40 41

Fromm, E., op. cit., 1955, pp. 180-1. Held, D., op. cit., 1980, pp. 112-118. Laing, R. D., op. cit., 1967, pp. 49-50. ibid., p. 87.

and which suggests the commonly accepted notion of a human nature, set over and against the conditioning effects of the environment. In other words, we are thrust into the well-known nature-nurture debate. While the concept of a human nature has now passed into the common parlance and therefore the intellectual categorisations of everyday life in ways which are very much taken-for-granted, its existence, as a conceptual category is far from unproblematic. Critical analysis will show, that what is taken to be "human nature" in one cultural context very often is at variance and sometimes even in opposition to definitions found in other cultural contexts. As Peter Berger and John Luckmann explain it: "Humanness is socio-culturally variable. In other words, there is no human nature in the sense of a biologically fixed substratum determining the variability of socio-cultural formations. There is only human nature in the sense of anthropological constants (for example world-openness and plasticity of instinctual structure) that delimit and permit man's socio-cultural formations. But the specific shape into which this humanness is molded is determined by those socio-cultural formations and is relative to their numerous variations. While it is possible to say that man has a nature, it is more significant to say that man constructs his own nature, or more simply, that man produces himself."42 The Choice of Humanness This critical notion of humanness suggests not an essential form, but a multiplicity of possible forms, each of which is contingent upon a particular social and cultural formation. The one condemned by Fromm, Laing and others as the experience of alienation, which they see as associated with the social relations of capitalism. Implicit in their critique is the belief that other social and cultural forms will produce less alienated experiences of being human. Since the constructions which humans make of themselves are mediated by the structures of social and cultural formations in which they live, and since these formations are infused with circuits of power, theories of what it means to be a human being cannot be separated from the ideological position of those who promulgate these theories, theories of human nature are always in the end ideological. This carries serious implications in the context of prisons and mental hospitals where notions of "cure" and "rehabilitation" are a central theme. As a negativity, prisons and mental hospitals still view "human nature" as something to be suppressed through discipline. Furthermore, representing, in this meaning, the dark or antisocial side of human experience (the animality of the eighteenth century still lurking in the everyday linguistic structures of the twentieth century), "human nature" also speaks to the

42

Berger, P. L. and Luckmann, T., op. cit., 1966, p. 49.

futility of correction or rehabilitation, as to the efficacy of continued discipline and punishment (since who can change that which is essentially "natural"). Also, the concept of a human nature serves in this particular context as the ideological basis for the reproduction of existing social and class (not to say racial) distinctions, insofar as (racist?) state economic, social educational, employment and health policies tend to fill the prisons and asylums with disproportionate numbers from the working class and ethnic minorities. In this way, prisons and asylums serve as a reciprocally legitimating function for racially mediated conceptions of normality. In addition, the practices of psychology and psychiatry since the eighteenth century have masked the magical rites of the "cure" with the apparent transparency of positivism. Yet these theories of psychoanalysis etc. which otherwise purport to reveal the truth of madness contain the seed of the same ideological essentialism, and are themselves to the same extent alienated and therefore pathological, as James Hillman has suggested. The Freudian-Capitalist Model of Humanness It was Freud, in Civilisation and its Discontents, who suggested that civilisation exists only through the suppression of basic instincts - that the inhibition of libidinous urges is a prerequisite of social and cultural life, and the basis of a never ending conflict between the individual and society.43 His conception of human nature is that of that of a sexually uninhibited animalism embedded in the heart of homo sexualis, and sees human beings driven by indiscriminate libidinal impulses which must be curbed and displaced into other socially more acceptable pursuits which lead eventually to the social relations and structures of society as we know it. This view sees mankind as having an essential natuure which is in continuing and unremitting competition and conflict. It is an essentially asocial perspective of human beings, mistakenly, seen as a universal law, separate from the competitive ethos of capitalism of which it is also an extension. Freud's Oedipus complex, for instance, portrays a natural rivalry between fathers and sons for the affections and attention of the mother. This theory is consistent with Freud's wider premise that unrestricted sexual gratification is the primary and essential driving force of all human activity, and therefore that all of this activity is, at root, basically one of competition and mutual hostility. Yet the theory only has validity in the context of the nuclear family in which relations between parents and children assume particular forms - and, in the context of Freudian interpretation, these are those specific relations of Western capitalism in which the family is the basic economic unit.44 But this is a particular
43 44

Freud, S., Civilization and Its Discontents, (Trans) Riviere, J. Hogarth Press, London, 1953. Engels, F., op. cit., 1979.

family which lacks the transition rituals which in many pre-capitalist societies marked critical points in the lives and relations between parented and children. Freud's only means of accommodating the apparently self-destructive libidinous impulse within his overall theories of neurosis was to locate it within the wider context of a conceptually new instinct which he invented, the so-called "death wish" or thanatos.45 This theory has drawn much criticism from Freud's own colleagues and contemporaries,46 not least for its apparent support for the perpetuation of the existing social reality.47 Recent feminist critiques of Freudian analysis have shown it to promote a conception of humanity which is both paternalistic and sexist.48 Fromm notes that Freudian theories for all of their insightfulness in their day are really a product of their times, consistent with the environment of developing Capitalism in which they were developed - that is a social environment which is rapacious, competitive and acquisitive.49 Tooth and claw competition is, for Freud, the sine qua non of human existence, as also it is for John D. Rockefeller, and Freud's theories are seen by many (including Fromm) as endorsing and supporting the Capitalist ethic. Freud's whole theory of humanness is therefore based upon the anthropological premise that

45 46

47

48 49

Freud, S., The Ego and the Id, Hogarth Press, London, 1950. Apart from the theories put forward by Fromm, perhaps the most damning condemnation of Freud's conception of a Death Instinct was that put forward by Freud's colleague and proteg in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association, Wilhelm Reich, who, with Fromm, was also associated with the Frankfurt School. Reich suggested that Freud's Death Instinct was basically an excuse by Freud to account for inadequate psychoanalysis which failed to eradicate some neuroses. He suggested instead that rather than focus upon the repressed memories of childhood, the therapist should take account of the patient's resistance to therapy as evidenced in the dysjunction between his or her pronouncements and body language and posture. In other words, he moved psychoanalysis away from its merely linguistic base and into a relationship with the physical presence of the therapee. In ways which are currently more acceptable, he integrated physical and psychological involvement with the therapee, focussing attention upon the latter's inability to experience total orgasmic function. Reich also criticised Freud's conception of the relationship between the development of civilisation and the repression of the libido, suggesting that instead, the repression of the sexual instinct (which he substituted for Freud's more abstract libido) resulted not in a healthy society, but in a sick society. This, suggested Reich, was the basis for the way in which society produced quiescent and docile citizens willing to conform to its demands. In this sense he came close to Fromm's sense of a pathological society. Both of them later equated this tendency towards docility with the effects of capitalism upon the social relations of everyday life. the difference between them was that Reich felt that no economic and social change could take place without prior sexual liberation, while Fromm placed less emphasis on the social role of sexuality and suggested instead that the separation of man from his natural world created a condition of need which formed the basis of his "nature". This nature for Fromm was different from that postulated by Freud For Fromm, human nature also encompassed a need to love and be loved, to experience relatedness, to be reunited in social harmony, and to be creative and individuated. See: Mairowitz, D. Z., Reich For Beginners, Readers and Writers Co-operative (with Unwin), London, 1986; Reich, W., op. cit., 1972, p. 289, 298. Freud's conception of the Death Instinct was seen as failing to register the specificity of many of the problems thrown up in psychoanalysis. In particular, his Oedipus theory has been criticised by feminists as endorsing and reinforcing the patriarchal bourgeois values of Freud's own time, through its tendency to universalise the social relations of gender. Held, D., op. cit., 1980, p. 113. Gilligan, C., op, cit., 1982; Jagger A. M. and Bordo, S. R., op. cit., 1989. Fromm, E., op. cit., 1955, pp. 211-212. Fromm cites James F. Linclon, the long time head of the Lincoln Electric Company, "that development of the individual can only take place in the fiercely competitive game of life...Selfishness is the driving force that makes the human race what it is, for good or evil. Hence, it is the force that we must depend on, and properly guide, if the human race is to progress." See also: Lincoln, J, F., Incentive Management, Lincoln Electric Co., Cleveland, 1951, pp. 72, 89.

competition and mutual hostility are inherent in human nature.50 Which of course presupposes that there is such a thing in the first place. Freud's theories are consistent in this respect with and drew much of their theoretical substance, from Darwinian theories which were particularly prevalent at that time. A similar theoretical framework was developed by Ricardo in the field of economics, in which the same presumption of an a priori human nature, which, not coincidentally matched and reinforced the normative ethic of developing capitalism: "Both the "economic" man and the "sexual" man are convenient fabrications whose alleged nature - isolated, asocial, greedy and competitive - makes capitalism appear as the system which corresponds perfectly to human nature, and places it beyond the reach of criticism."51 For Fromm, it is Capitalism itself which develops, propagates and shapes the ethic of competition into an ideological category, and not an essential competitive drive in all humans which lies at the root of capitalism. Once again we are confronted with a supposedly scientific truth being developed to support a universalising theory of human nature and consequently relatively determined social relations which in turn are used to support and reproduce these existing structures of capitalist power. The Social Sciences as Agents of Pacification Given these linkages between the needs of capitalism and the normative theorising of social psychologists, it is impossible not to conclude that there exists a fundamental link between the theories of psychoanalysis (with all of their determinations of "normality") and the structures of power in society. The theories and models of humanness promoted by the socio-scientific community, of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis, are therefore deeply implicated in the modes and processes of capitalist production, not only as observable referents ie. in competitive capitalist behaviour "proving" competitive models of being, but as co-legitimating the inherent violence of capitalism itself, leading the professions, as Fromm suggests, to become a serious threat to the development of humankind.52 At the very least, their role has evolved as that of ameliorating the excesses of capitalism by transforming individual subjectivities into accommodations to the status quo society - "assisting" individuals to adjust to an unjust world, rather than in legitimating and supporting the struggle for social justice and change. Fromm has suggested that it is the alienated state of the professionals themselves which lay at the source of this process, and which must be addressed directly by professionals before their espoused social
50 51 52

Fromm, E., op. cit., 1955, pp. 74-5. ibid., p. 75. ibid., pp. 151-2; 170-1.

mission can be matched by their actions. What is true of psychiatrists is no less true of architects or architectural educators, who define human well-being not in terms of creative emancipation, but in terms of normative economic consumer principles. The implicit beliefs in a human nature that lie at the heart of psychoanalytic theories are not just randomly inscribed with the capitalist ethic, but are its embodiment and its fullest expression, and that as actors in the social realm, they carry a real and present responsibility not only for the welfare of their immediate charges, but also for the propagation of the wider structure of capitalist social relations which theorists such as Fromm and Laing suggest are societally and ontologically pathological. It is in this context, that the designer and the psychiatrist both face a critical dilemma in accepting normative definitions of social normality, and why our experiences of mental hospitals and prisons reveal deeper social and ideological issues not only about mental health and penal reform, but about normativity itself. Any discipline which presumes to address issues of human well-being cannot fail to also address these issues of normativity, not only as an exteriority, but as a critical issue of intra-professional theorising and practice. The Impact of Psychological Models on Design Theorising In the context of educational theorising, these matters are of great importance, and this is particularly true in the education of the professional class which carries so much influence for other domains of knowledge. For a start, the normative categorical descriptions of the psychological disciplines have become part of the common language of everyday life in ways which make notions of "ego", "libido" etc. appear, by virtue of their commonality, to be objective entities, irrespective of social, psychological or cultural circumstances. Freudian (which is to say Europeaneconomic) theories of the "self" have in this way become universalised and normalised and reintegrated into not only the human sciences but into all of the other disciplinary models of social reality as well. In architecture, for instance, Freud's theories of the unconscious were an important element of training at the Bauhaus.53 In the 1960s, design theories based on the principles of Skinner's behaviourism were in vogue,54 and these gave way in the 1970s to Abraham Maslow's theories of motivation and self-actualisation.55 In more recent times, the revisionist Freudianism of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has proved influential in their intersection with Saussurian semiotics in the theories of a wide range of postmodern theorists including Derrida, Baudrillard and others, directly
53 54

55

Itten, J., Design and Form, Thames and Hudson, London, 1964. Studer, R., "The dynamics of behaviour-contingent physical systems" in: Broadbent, G. and Ward, A., op. cit., 1969, pp. 55-70. Maslow, A., Towards a Psychology of Being, Van Nostrand, Princeton, N.J., 1968.

and indirectly, in the writings and building designs of Peter Eisenman.56 Psychological theories therefore play a central role in the social construction of theories of design, as well as education. Recognising the relationships of power which stand behind such theories therefore helps us to understand how architecture itself relates to the wider social and economic sphere in more than superficial ways. Seen from the point of view of conservative postmodernism, Lacnian models of humanness suggest a world of floating significations, of total value relativity, anchored only by "partial fixations" which are socially derived, and which create "a discourse incapable of generating any fixity of meaning",57 a world which corresponds to the free-for-all of the market economy. Seen from a critical postmodern point of view on the other hand, such theories suggest a correspondence between social conceptions of normality and power which can do much to inform our view of education. This connection was made vivid by the striking students of Nanterre in 1968, echoing almost precisely, the words of Fromm. Only two years later, in the Spring uprising, striking students at Nanterre in France were equating the Social Sciences with systems of State repression: "...The concern which students feel about their future goes hand in hand with the concern they feel with the theoretical position of their lecturers, whose constant appeals to science (emphasis added) only emphasizes the confusion of their various doctrines. Moreover, student agitation abroad, as in France has been more rife among sociologists than among other social scientists and philosophers. Students from other faculties have been remarkably passive. The case was similar in the USA, in France, in Germany, and also in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Why was student dissatisfaction in all these countries expressed predominantly by social psychologists? The transformation of academic psychology, a branch of philosophy, into an independent study with scientific pretensions, corresponds to the transformation of competitive capitalism into a state-controlled economy. From that point of view, the new social psychology has increasingly been used by the bourgeoisie to help rationalize society without jeopardizing either profits or stability. The evidence is all around us. Industrial sociology is chiefly concerned with fitting the man to the job; the converse need to fit the job to the man is neglected. Sociologists are paid by the employers and must therefore work for the aims of our economic system: maximum production for maximum profit."58 We witness here, with great clarity, the connection made earlier by Foucault, between power, property and deviance. We see writ large that:

56 57 58

Lacn, J., Ecrits: A Selection, Norton, New York, 1977. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C., op. cit.,1985, p. 112. "Why Do We Need Sociologists?" a leaflet distributed on the Nanterre campus, March 1968. Cited in: Cohn-Bendit, D., Obsolete Communism- The Left Wing Alternative, McGraw Hill , New York, 1968, p. 36.

"It is not immaterial that madmen were included in the proscription of idleness. From its origin, they would have their places beside the poor, deserving or not, and the idle, voluntary or not. Like them, they would be subject to the rules of forced labour... In the workshops in which they were interned, they distinguished themselves by their inability to work and to follow the rythms of collective life. The necessity, discovered in the eighteenth century, to provide a special regime for the insane, and the great crisis of confinement that preceded the Revolution, are linked to the experience of madness available in the universal necessity of labour."59 In other words, it is the wage-labour individual, expelled from the land, unable or unwilling to work in an alienating and degrading social context who is labelled "deviant", "dependent", "antisocial" and, in the last analysis, "insane". Sanity, in this context is a category reserved for those who are willing to acquiesce to domination and degradation, to bend to the will of the dominant culture and its enforcement agency, the State. Socialisation, as it happens in education, is then seen as a process of training-in-quiescence, and work itself is framed as an uncreative, alienating and inhuman activity, devoid of intrinsic value, which must be accepted in return for the delayed reward of possibly increased consumption. Seen in this context, normative explanations of sanity as biological dysfunctioning, chemical imbalance etc., can be seen as diversions which preclude a deeper analysis of possible social and cultural causes, and which, with the assistance of the very profitable pharmaceutical companies, therefore prevent critical analysis which might lead to structural change. In this way, the continued reproduction of capitalist relations proceeds unchecked, albeit for the numerous "dysfunctional" victims who are required to accept the blame for their own degraded circumstances. We must not forget, in all of this, the important link which has been forged in western capitalism between normativity and work - that what is "normal" comes down, in the end, to an ability to passively accept the degraded notion of "work" that capitalism demands. As conceptions of "work" have changed and developed, so also and in tandem, have conceptions of what is "normal" human behaviour - that is, the normative scientifically-legitimated conception of humanness. Science has developed its conceptual categories of humanness in ways which directly serve the interests, and simultaneously legitimate the social relations of capitalist production.

59

Foucault, M., Madness and Civilisation, Vintage Books, New York, 1973, pp. 57-8.