on positivist pricks

Music: Bryan Ferry Boys and Girls (1985)

Oxford English Dictionary, "prick": I. To pierce or indent with a sharp point.

One of my favorite literary critics, Frederick C. Crews, used to be quite friendly to psychoanalytic approaches to literature, but then quickly repudiated it in a series of sharp critiques (mostly directed at Freudians). In his hilarious send-up of rhetoric/English casebooks, The Pooh Perplex, In Which it is Discovered that the True Meaning of Pooh Stories is Not as Simple as is Usually Believed But For Proper Elucidation Requires the Combined Efforts of Several Academicians of Varying Critical Persuasions: A Casebook (1963), there is an enjoyable chapter by "Myron Masterson" titled "Poisoned Paradise: The Underside of Pooh," in which the psychoanalytic critic asserts that Christopher Robin was "attracted by [a] fetishistic . . . striptease" by Piglet, eventually leading to a mock orgy of homoerotic desire with Roo and Tigger. Crews lampoons what I would agree is the very difficult to read, tortuous, and implausibly stupid psychoanalytic essay (one by Rey Chow on Walter Benjamin comes to mind). Here Crews' critique is rhetorical and is the counterpart to what Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen has dubbed "zero theory": "psychoanalysis is a content-free nebulosity, a perpetually moving target. It is like Lévi-Strauss’s 'zero symbol,' a thingamajig that can designate fill-in-the-blank as one sees fit." Now, before one starts to think that, with this assertion, Borch-Jacobsen is repudiating psychoanalysis, she should stop short: he is responding to the claims of some practitioners that "psychoanalysis is an empirical science." Lacan said that it was a science, but he meant that in a very peculiar (well, non-scientific) way. Nevertheless, that Crews' parody of psychoanalytic criticism is funny at all is a testament to its "zero" status as an empirical theory. Although unquestionably for the uninitiated psychoanalysis has a built-in authority appeal because Freud made such claims, most folks in the humanities that read and study the stuff are not interested in making scientific claims.

While I admire both Crews and Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen's work, I do not like how Crews tends to contextualize Borch-Jacobsen's in his gradually righteous crusade to remove psychoanalysis en toto from the known universe (of course, there is no unknown universe for Crews). As far as I can tell (well, at least based on The Freudian Subject and The Emotional Tie) Borch-Jacobsen has written numerous monographs on psychoanalysis as a theory and philosophy. Borch-Jacobsen does the work of psychoanalysis, does a kind of psychoanalytic criticism, in a philosophical and cultural project. So when Crews tries to enlist him as somehow supporting a positivistic cause I am nervous. I cannot speak for Borch-Jacobson because I'm new to his work---but I don’t think he'd join Crews in his fetishized strip-tease for reasons I briefly detail below.

Unquestionably many of the empirical claims of classical psychoanalysis (which usually denotes drive theory and Freud-derived approaches) have been scientifically disproved. Many of the significant claims of psychoanalysis, however, are not empirical claims and subject to testing. Psychoanalysis is a way of describing the social world, a narratology, if you want, that gives otherwise incomprehensible events meaning. In analytical philosophical terms, it is a vocabulary interested in coherence, not correspondence. Its claims are limited to the domain of meaning and its underside, but does not cross the horizon of "the human." One time classical adherent Viktor Frankl published a book, Man's Search for Meaning that sort of specified why psychoanalysis is not a science: there is something redemptive, truthful, and specifically human in suffering and in the confrontation with death that no science can specify. Of course, this project is philosophical too, which is why we might characterize psychoanalysis as a philosophical hermeneutic, what Ricouer termed a suspicious mode of interpretation.

Psychoanalysis is thus more like a perspective and approach, and less like a singular, unified theory, that orbits the concepts of the dynamic unconscious and defense mechanisms. One is hard-pressed to argue that psychoanalysis is monolithic, or to suggest that one can generalize about "all psychoanalytic theory" by isolating, for example, the work of Freud as the common denominator.

This said, then, I'm always somewhat baffled when I come across the positivistic argument---there is no empirical evidence to support psychoanalytic claims and so on---in rhetorical scholarship. Once I gave a paper at NCA that argued Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project was influenced by Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, and if we understood the arguments about condensation and displacement in chapter 6, then Benjamin's wild organization scheme for his masterwork started to make sense. A respected colleague told me my work was invalid because of the "voodoo of the unconscious," which just sorta surprised me because I was basically providing a "reading" of a text that really had nothing to do with the validity of condensation and displacement [it was more or less a history of influence paper]; even if the theory was not empirically verifiable that had nothing to do with my claims. When I asked why the "unconscious" was a bad concept, I got more of the Crews-like appeals to empirical science.

What's so strange to me about these appeals to science is that they are made to invalidate a method of reading that appeals to a vocabulary, a name for dynamics (and usually in a text in relation to a generalized psyche). So, for example, you don't have people criticizing ideological criticism because it decerns a structure, and "structures don't march in the street!" You don't have folks criticizing genre theory because science cannot empirically verify the existence of form. Genres are learned organizing schemes—narrative structures, basically. I suppose Freud's pretension to the discernment of "laws" is partly to blame, but still, it just seems wrong-headed to me to insist an organizing principle and hermeneutic approach to a text is immediately idiotic and embarrassing to a field because there's no way to empirically test one's claims.

Over two thousand years ago Aristotle divided the project of knowing into the camps of the sciences and the arts (techne, not art as we think of it today necessarily). And he said rhetoric was an "art" particularly because it was crafted by humans toward (somewhat) blind ends; his favorite brand, deliberative rhetoric, was always about arguing for an action in face of an uncertain future. If one sees psychoanalysis as a method for interpreting rhetoric, it too is faced with a similar uncertainty: the unconscious. It's the category of the dynamic unconscious that gets in the way of "testing" and such---its what gives the enterprise this "zero theory" factor. To force psychoanalysis into the domain of universal laws across contexts is like arguing rhetorical success can be taught from a textbook, or as Isocrates says, "like an alphabet." Or put alternatively, to make psychoanalysis an empirical science is to make rhetoric soothsaying. It's just not a fair move, and grossly misunderstands what a psychoanalytic approach is really about.