I’ve often been preoccupied by the question of why people are drawn to certain theoretical approaches. While it would be mistaken to reduce this into the psychodynamic, I nonetheless agree with Craib that there is a psychodynamic aspect to ways of theorising. In representing the social world in a conceptual vocabulary they open up or close down certain modes of relating to it:
I have argued elsewhere (Craib 1987) that ways of theorising, as well as the content of theory, can be seen, in addition to their real value as a contribution to knowledge, as psychodynamic processes. By this I mean ways of dealing with the world that find their parallel in the ways individuals deal with the world on a more personal level: we can find similar processes and defences at work in theory as we can find in the everyday activities of people in the world.
Anthony Giddens, by Ian Craib, pg 122
He suggests there is an impulse towards denying complexity within structuration theory, expressed through the impulse towards synthesis (taking the ‘truth’ of different perspectives) and the assumption boundaries are blurring across previously distinctive areas of disciplinary expertise. I found the most thought provoking part of his account, echoing arguments in The Important of Disappointment, how this dynamics play out with the representation of agency in Giddens:
There is also an element of omnipotence in the insistence, at least in theoretical terms if not in his historical sociology, of the importance of praxis, of human action, human meaning over and against structural constraint. It is not that the theory dreams an imaginary power for human beings, one that we do not have; we have the powers that Giddens suggests, but there are other, and often stronger, powers in the social world. A stylistic sign that these issues are being glossed over lies, I think, in his increasing tendency towards assertion rather than argument in his work. I can understand this tendency; in many ways it shows more self-respect than persistent defensive debate, in which he could easily find himself embroiled if he felt that he had to reply in detail to every critical contribution
Anthony Giddens, by Ian Craib, pg 123
It is clearly Giddens’s radical voluntarism that inspires those most impressed by and ready to take up his theory. His voluntarism seems to me a reaction to the modern world not dissimilar to that of post-structuralism, and inherent in the linguistic turn of modern philosophy as a whole. As human freedom has become more limited and as it has become more difficult to think in terms of radical social transformation in the modern West, so attention has concentrated on more narrow aspects of life, such as language, where a complete (and I think imaginary) freedom is posited: the world is as it is because it is a product of our language, our discourse. For Giddens, it is a product of our practices; he has not moved along the line as far as post-structuralism but is on the same end of the continuum. In psychoanalytic terms this might be termed a sort of cultural reaction formation: the less power we seem to have over the society we live in, the more we assert our freedom in theory.
Anthony Giddens, by Ian Craib, pg 123
Though this analysis could easily be turned back on Craib to ask about, for example, the psychodynamics involved in someone being inclined to ‘keep things in their proper place’.
Mark Carrigan 