Between the Modern and the Postmodern The Possibility of Self and Progressive Understanding in Psychology Jack Martin and Jeff Sugarman Simon Fraser University
Psychology assumes defensible notions of human subjectivity and understanding. Yet, some versions of postmodernism, including some of those currently influential within psychology, eschew the possibility of the kind of understanding-capable personhood on which modern psychology has depended. The authors argue for a skeptical, middle-ground position that might allow psychologists to resist a forced choice between modernism and postmodernism in their subject matter and understanding. The authors set up their argument with 2 stories of human development and change. These stories assume no fixed, essentialist foundations of the sort favored in classically modern psychologies, yet they maintain the possibility of both self and understanding within a real but contingent physical, biological, and sociocultural world. The authors then articulate a middle-ground position as one that avoids the fixed foundationalism, essentialism, and absolute certitude of modernly', without endorsing the radical arbitrariness, antisubjectivism, and anarchistic relativism of some versions of postmodernity.
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t this point in history, many scholars no longer subscribe, or at least not wholeheartedly, to two basic ideas that traditionally have formed much of the basis for modern Western thought since the Enlightenment. One of these ideas is that humans have a pregiven, fixed nature that determines their essential being across historical periods and sociocultural contexts. The other is that humans are capable of attaining a progressively truer understanding of themselves and their world, an understanding on which they can rely as a basis for rational belief and action, even as they develop and change collectively and individually. These core ideas of being and understanding not only underlie but actively constitute much of the practices of psychologists and of many college or university educators. Yet, some postmodernists (e.g., Young, 1992) claim that "the historical unity of the image of the human self is liquefied and lost in an ethereal play of possibilities and momentary selves" (p. 141) and that "our grounding in the rational imagination [has been] dissolved by postmodernism" (p. 137). Psychologists are interested in how humans develop and learn as experiencing individuals. If there are no such selves to develop and learn, psychological commitments require not just adjustment or even reconfiguration but also April 2000
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Copyright2000 by the AmericanPsychologicalAssociation,Inc. 0003-066X/00/$5.00 Vol. 55, No. 4, 39%406 DOI: 10.1037//0003-066X.55.4.397
radical reconsideration and quite possibly abandonment. Educators inevitably subscribe, even if somewhat tacitly, to the twin notions of cultural transmission and personal or collective development, both of which require conceptualizations of what is to be transmitted and of who is to benefit from such transmission and development. Surely, if there are no persons to develop and no defensible arguments about what is worth understanding, any conceivable rationale for psychological and educational practices is dramatically undercut. In short, defensible notions of human subjectivity and understanding are basic conceptual requirements for both psychology and education. How then can it be that postmodern challenges to psychology and education, some of which question both the idea of personal, psychological being and the possibility of a progressively developing and warrantable understanding, continue to capture psychologists' and educators' attention, perhaps even their sympathy? Witness, for example, the extensive debate in the Comment section of this journal (American Psychologist, Vol. 50, pp. 389-394) that followed the publication of Brewster Smith's (1994) article on the "perils of postmodernism" (p. 405) for psychology and Kenneth Gergen's response to Smith's attempt to "rescue the self from the ravages of postmodern analysis" (Gergem 1994a, p. 412). A possible answer is that although psychologists and educators have a better understanding of the problems of modern scientistic approaches to their respective fields in part because of postmodern deconstrucEditor's note.
Melissa G. Warren served as action editor for this 'article.
Jack Martin and Jeff Sugarman, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. The writing of this article was supported by Grant 410-97-1 106 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the annual conventions of the American Educational Research Association, Montreal, Ontario, Canada, April 1999, and the American Psychological Association, Boston, Massachusetts, August 1999. We gratefully acknowledge the comments and suggestions of Mary Gergen, Ken Gergen, Jim Lichtenberg, Kareen Malone, Martin Packer, and Brent Slife on those earlier versions and presentations. In our view, the constructive exchanges we have enjoyed with Ken Gergen are especially noteworthy, given our obvious disagreements with him. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jack Martin, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, 888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, Canada V5A 1S6. Electronic mail may be sent to
[email protected].
Author's note.
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fixed foundations. Finally, we briefly offer general perspectives concerning education and psychological practice that assume the kind of nonessentialist yet real and "understanding-capable" personhood we attempt to articulate and defend.
Postmodern Pros and Cons
Jack Martin
tion in these areas, most do not really believe that the development of individual psychological persons is impossible, nor that such agents are incapable of coming to better understand themselves and their condition through some sort of educational experience. At the same time as psychologists and educators resonate to postmodern themes of difference, plurality, peculiarity, and irregularity as refreshing changes from past adherence to sameness, universality, and strict rationality, they actually maintain many timehonored views of themselves and continue to believe in some version of progressive, warranted enlightenment as afforded by their developing, changing understanding. In effect, having labored within the straightjacket of modernity, they enjoy the ludic romp of postmodernism's radical problematizing without really believing its full social constructionist and deconstructivist implications for themselves and their everyday and professional practices. We argue that this reaction is actually rather sensible but that it might behoove scholar-practitioners to attempt to articulate more explicitly a view of human development and change and of human being and understanding that is consistent with the kind of skeptical, middle-ground position we believe many psychologists adopt, even if only by default. Resisting the forced choice between modernism and postmodernism, we discuss what we regard as a defensible perspective on, or story concerning, human psychological development and change, one that draws heavily on sociocultural (e.g., Vygotsky, 1934/1986), phenomenological (e.g., Merleau-Ponty, 1962), and especially hermeneutic (e.g., Gadamer, 1960/1975) thought as these continue to unfold at the end of the current century. We then present arguments in defense of the ideas of (a) a psychological self without pregiven, unchanging essence and (b) progressive change and understanding in the absence of 398
We explicitly acknowledge from the outset that there is much in the postmodern point of view with which we agree. Postmodernists are "out to demolish ideological positions built on the idea of an epistemic subject being the centre of the world instead of being part of the text of the world" t Lovlie, 1992, p. 132). As correctives to the ethnocentrically assumed foundationalism, naive realism, and rampanl individualism of much North American and European social science, postmodern contextualism, constructionism, and contingency serve to problematize educational and psychological practices in ways that invite consideration of previously marginalized alternatives. In our view, all of this is generally of help to a necessary, ongoing critical consideration of the work of psychologists and educators and its possible motivations and consequences, intentional or unintentional. What may previously have been considered to be universal, ahistorical essentials of a single human psyche are revealed as necessarily and inescapably embedded in historical, sociocultural contexts (Rorty, 1989, 1990). Seeming certainty about such essentials and their status becomes a matter of contingency rather than transcendental necessity. For example, research and theories about self-efficacy, which have had so much impact on contemporary educational and counseling psychology, must be seen as issuing from social and academic traditions of practice as instantiated in (to name only a few) the Stanford and other U.S. academic departments of psychology, a professionalized contemporary psychology predicated on a scientist-practitioner model, American cultural individualism and instrumentalism, and an entire history of Western intellectual practices that construct and support a particular view of the individual, autonomous self equipped volitionally and rationally to function in particular ways within specific, received world views. There is nothing natural or essential about this work or its assumptions, claims, and findings. Given the possibility of different historical, sociocultural, and interpersonal contexts and practices, especially with respect to conceptions of self (cf. Taylor, 1989), things could be very different. Psychologists, like other humans, inhabit times, societies, and cultures that construct them as psychological persons through their participation in them, although the participation is mostly inarticulate and taken for granted. In attempting to reflect on and articulate their lives and work, psychologists are forever embedded in the particulars of their locations in historical, sociocultural time and space, from which they never can escape completely. Their insights, generalizations, and understandings arise within this contingency and are necessarily incomplete and limited. Against this background of inescapable context, construction, and contingency, it is the height of presumption to herald psychological inquiries and conclusions as if they April 2000 • American Psychologist
Jeff Sugarman
mattered more generally across times and contexts and to imperialistically ignore that which differs from necessarily limited practices and perspectives. With this in mind, psychologists must consider the possibility that their attempts at critical reflection on their work and selves may be revealed as ritualistic and self-advancing, serving mostly to promote their own interests and positions of relative power and advantage. The authors of much postmodern writing have attempted to challenge, shock, and jolly readers out of their complacently unreflective mythologies of rational, progressive work and inquiry and their assumptions concerning its foundations, reality, and generalizability. There is good reason for this. For example, in the area of child development, despite a growing recognition that children are different, particular, and irregular, the modern conception of child nature as progressive, regular, and universal continues to dominate psychological and educational theory and practice. Subjugation and repression of that which does not fit into this tidy picture continues theoretically and, even more unfortunately, in actual educational and psychological intervention (cf. Elkind, 1997). But some postmodernists also go further to point out that any notion of the child as subjective agent is constructed by discourses and signifying systems in such a way that the child as agent inevitably is decentered through language and society, to the point where it is necessary to deny the existence of an individual with a reflexive, self-determining capability. In so doing, they seem to deny any basis for educational activity and, as Lovlie (1992) pointed out, to "stab at the very heart of the most cherished ideals of Western culture [including] personal autonomy as an educational goal" (p. 121). As Kenneth Gergen (1991) said, "Under postmodernism, processes of individual reason, intention, moral April 2000 • American Psychologist
decision making, and the like--all central to the ideology of individualism--lose their status as realities" (p. 241). The gravity of such proposals has led several prominent psychologists, who appeared happy to welcome at least some of the postmodern challenges to modern psychology, to express concern about the extent of some postmodern proposals. Sass (1992) suggested that we might do well to "ask about the general validity of the versions of relativism, skepticism, fictionalism, etc., which [some postmodern psychologies] propound" (p. 168). Smith (1994) worried about "abdicat[ing] any useful role as science and profession if we give up either the aims and strategies of science toward approximating an ideal of truth or the aspirations of ethics toward approximating ideals of the good" (p. 411). Kvale (1992) wondered if "the very conception of a psychological science may be so rooted in modernist assumptions that it becomes difficult to understand men and women in postmodern culture" (p. 11). Clearly, there is more to the postmodern critique of psychology and education than a ludic, problematizing romp intended to shake some contextualist, constructionist, and deconstructionist sense into psychologists and educators. If taken literally, much postmodern discourse asks psychologists to give up any claims to foundationalism, realism, and subjectivism with respect to personal psychological life. "Taken at face value, it seems to eliminate a basic presupposition of psychology and education: the idea of an autonomous and intentional agent" (Lovlie, 1992, p. 120). Without psychological agents who develop, learn, and change in ways that can be understood, at least in part, psychology and education are not only problematized, they are liquidated! Of course, not all postmodern writings and positions embrace strong versions of antisubjectivism and relativism (see Sarup, 1996, for a moderate, self-critical example). However, more radical versions of postmodern social constructionism (cf. Gergen, 1997) seem to us, and obviously to those others cited above (Kvale, 1992; Sass, 1992; Smith, 1994), to erase both the psychological agent and the possibility of warranted psychological understanding. In Gergen's (1997) words, such proposals promise an "opening to a de-psychologized account of human action" through which "we may envision the elimination of psychological states and conditions as explanations for action and the reconstitution of psychological predicates within the sphere of social process" (p. 740). Further, on our reading, these accounts offer no grounds for accepting any account over any other, arguing that the loss of any point of view weakens a desired plurality of perspectives and possibilities. It may be possible to interpret the strong version of postmodern social constructionism as advocating only, as do we in what follows, a social relational constitution of the psychological agent, and a respectful, careful consideration of alternative perspectives. However, to us there is a clear indication in such proposals of a more thoroughgoing reduction of the psychological to the sociocultural and of an avoidance of speaking directly to the issue of competing, conflicting perspectives. 399
Unless it is possible to articulate convincingly some alternative middle ground to the unsustainable myths of modernity on the one hand and some of the more excessively radical medicine of postmodernism on the other, psychology and education are in deep difficulty, and not just in the refined air of the academy. The question we address is this: Is it possible to imagine a scenario for human development and change that makes no "fixed" foundationalist or essentialist assumptions, yet which might be drawn on in a defense of limited forms of realism, subjectivity, and warranted understanding necessary to preserve some rationale for psychological and educational inquiry and practice? Our strategy is to articulate two related stories about human psychological development and change, stories that, to the extent that they are accepted as possible, even plausible, might be used to defend the kind of middle-ground position we seek. What we are after is a conception of human being and understanding as dynamic, emergent, and highly contingent processes that nonetheless may be construed as real and as possessing both epistetnic and moral significance. Once these stories are told, we suggest how they might stand fruitfully between the kinds of modern and postmodern excesses on which we have touched thus far. Many readers will recognize the influence of several prominent 20th-century thinkers on the stories we tell. Among the most significant of these are Gadamer (1960/1975), Heidegger (1927/1962), Mead (1934), Merleau-Ponty (1962), and Vygotsky (1934/ 1986). However, our synthesis of their ideas with our own is not intended to be true to the overall positions of any of these aforementioned thinkers.
An Alternative Perspective in Two Stories A Story of Psychological Development Our story of psychological development begins with what we consider to be an ineluctable existential but nonessentialist assumption: At birth, biological humans enter into existing sociocultural contexts that have evolved and continue to evolve within a generally more slowly evolving physical world. These preexisting sociocultural contexts probably evolved initially because the physical and biological vulnerability of human infants demanded some kind of communal, cooperative, relational practices that served the broad function of protection and care. Once in place, any such practices, although always contingent on particular sociocultural locations and histories, inevitably demand some type of related interpersonal practices of understanding and interpretation as a means of social coordination. Biologically equipped for rudimentary physical and perceptual activity, human infants gradually are able to move about in the world and perceive and remember some of what is directly encountered without the mediation of reflective understanding. This prereflective, embodied experience provides for a kind of inchoate agency that enables individual humans to gradually become more and more constituted by the sociocultural forms and practices in 400
which they are embedded and in which they actively participate. Human development beyond infancy consists of physical maturation coupled with the appropriation and internalization of sociocultural practices and the mostly inarticulate assumptive and conceptual frameworks associated with them. Of these practices, relational, conversational practices are most noteworthy for the symbolic activity they both enable and constrain on being embodied and used as psychological tools. It is these internalized sociocultural means that individuals can use to engage in increasingly sophisticated forms of activity, some of which, like recollection and imagination, become more and more free from the immediate physical and sociocultural context. The gradual developmental emergence of these increasingly complex, abstracted capabilities allows individual humans to construct progressively more elaborate theories of their contexts and themselves. Understandings resident in such theories direct ongoing participation and activity in the sociocultural context, gradually shifting the nature of such sociocultural engagement from unmediated direct perception and prereflection to mediated, reflective consciousness. Please note that the actual form and content of either prereflective or reflective consciousness, as envisioned in this story of psychological development, are contingent on the particulars of specific societies and cultures. Although they arise out of the assumed existential condition articulated earlier, they are not the result of any essentialist ahistorical or acultural assumptions or processes. We emphasize this point because it is our experience that as soon as someone proposes anything as ineluctable, there is a strong tendency in contemporary scholarly practice to assume immediately that what is being said amounts to an essentialist claim. Therefore, we want to be as clear as possible that what we regard as ineluctable claims in the stories we are telling are existential and contingent, not essential and pregiven. We are not positing foundational universals in the manner of traditional metaphysics. Rather, we are making an existential argument concerning the conditions of human existence from which different, but not an5', collective and individual ways of life might develop contingently. With the onset of genuine reflexivity, supported by an emergent theory of self (more often than not as both object and subject), human experience now can shift from preconscious and preintentional to conscious and intentional. Whereas initially the human individual existed only as a biological organism immersed in sociocultural practices, the human individual now emerges as a psychological being capable of acting with self-reflective purpose. Our basic assumption here is that although psychological beings have their origins in their sociocultural embeddedness, once emergent in the manner we have claimed, they can no longer be reduced back to their biological and sociocultural origins, even though they continue to be affected by their biological bodies and the sociocultural contexts and practices in which and with which they live and act. The psychological experiences of such beings are not isomorphic with their past and present sociocultural constituents, April 2000 • American Psychologist
as postmodern social constructionists claim, nor can they be reduced or equated to those neurophysiological, biological processes that undoubtedly support them (Martin & Sugarman, 1999). None of this is to say that humans, once capable of reflective agency, often or mostly cease to act without conscious intention and reflection. Our claim is not that conscious intentionality and reflection ever replace unconscious or prereflective activity. Rather, it is that psychological individuals, once they emerge within their sociocultural and biological beginnings, become capable of conscious reflection and intentionality some of the time, particularly when their taken-for-granted, tacit actions in the world are in some way disrupted or thwarted. At any rate, the important thing to remember is that our central notion of emergence of the psychological from the biological and sociocultural always should be understood as an emergence within, never as an emecgence from, The emergence of psychological being involves coming to possess personal theories of self and contexts, hnportantly, these personal theories of psychological beings inevitably are underdetermined by sociocultural experience. Note that our use of the term theory in this context is not intended to connote a highly formal or cognitivized set of propositions. Rather, we use the term to broadly connote those sets of activities and related beliefs that constitute the understandings that humans have of themselves and their contexts. While never ceasing to be constructed in sociocultural terms, psychological beings, as reflection-capable, intentional agents, are able to exercise sophisticated capabilities of memory and imagination, which in interaction with theories of self can create possibilities for present and future understanding and action that are not entirely constrained by past and present sociocultural circumstances. The activity of such individuals includes a psychological self, complete with a "inind of its own," which, while emergent within and continuing to be shaped by the sociocultural, developmental context, attains some limited potential to shape that same context. If this were not so, societies and cultures would remain mostly static over time, unaffected by the activities of individual humans who could do nothing more than pan'ot what already exists in these contexts. In this way, societies require individuals, just as individuals require societies. What it is to be social and what it is to be personal both arise within dynamic processes in ongoing mutable interaction. The psychology of any individual is constantly emergent during the life span of that individual, while the accumulation of the actions of individuals and their sociocultural consequences keep societies and cultures also in constant change. The upshot of our story of psychological development is that there are no fixed, essentialist categories to be found in the various, ongoing, dynamic processes of interaction we have discussed, but that meaningful distinctions still can be made between sociocultural practices and individual psychological experiences. The dynamic, emergent dualism that results from the emergence of individual psychology in sociocultural contexts is still dualism, but it is not pregiven or fixed. Rather, it is both made possible and April 2000 • American Psychologist
constrained by mostly contingent processes of ongoing sociocultural change. It is into this never-ending socioculrural transformation that all biological individuals are lodged at birth but within which, through their active participation, they may emerge as reflexive psychological beings. It is not necessary to deny the reality of either sociocultural or psychological practices and activities, let alone that of relevant physical or biological constraints, to escape from unsustainable notions of fixed essences in the study of humans and their experiences and actions.
A Story of Learning and Psychological Change Our second story concerns learning and psychological change. It attempts to describe in more detail the manner in which psychological beings learn within the dynamic societal-psychological flux just described. As we tell this story, it is important to remember that human learning and change inevitably depend on a pervasive background of historically and socioculturally shaped assumptions and understandings that are mostly inarticulate, tacit, and never capable of being penetrated completely. Not only are there no fixed, static foundations on which to hang understandings and beliefs, but even those more fluid, socioculturally construcled horizons of intelligibility on which humans must and do depend never can be understood completely. Reflexivity always has limitations. The mostly tacit but potentially and partially explicit theories that humans come to hold about themselves, others, and their circumstances originate in their life experiences as participants in conversations and other sociocultural practices. However, once formed, these theories evolve in unpredictable ways that are not entirely determined by literal experiences alone. This is because the various forms and content that humans extract from their experiences are combined, edited, and revised in a ceaseless, dynamic manner, as material appropriated from more recent experiences interacts with that of more longstanding appropriation when people recollect the past, anticipate and imagine the futux:e, and act in the present. The emergent capabilities of recollecting and imagining, although developed in and shaped by sociocultural conversations and relations, evolve in ways that are not isomorphic with acquired conversational and conceptual forms and structures, even as they continue to be affected by contemporary sociocultural practices. Thc fact that people become able to generate images and ideations of actual and imagined experiences constitutes an incontestable phenomenological truism. These images and ideations initially take their meanings from what is appropriated and internalized from sociocultural settings. However, with emergent reflexivity, the private-individual experience of memory and imagination becomes distinct from the meanings and significance with which it has been and continues to be socioculturally endowed. Memory and imagination become the gates that open to the wealth of accumulated past experience in one direction and to the call of future possibility in the other. The spatiotemporal fluidity afforded by memory and imagination contributes sig401
nificantly to the underdetermination of people's psychologies by their sociocultural experiences alone. As reflexive human agents, people continuously attempt to discern the significance of things and to forge meanings and understandings relevant to their particular purposes and projects. The ways in which people learn to discern significance and to construct and interpret their experiences spring from their status as social entities in the company of others. The symbolic and relational tools people come to possess through their ongoing participation in sociocultural milieus allow them to interpret and integrate their experiences meaningfully and to gain some understanding of their circumstances. However, their interpretations also are made from within the bounds of their unique individual histories, recollections of which provide much of the substance for people's personal theories. In attempting to discern significance and to construct meaning, people look for familiarity and relevance between the present and the past. Mostly, this occurs through basic acquisitional learning, as people appropriate and internalize the meaning and relational practices and tools of their societies and cultures. For youngsters, such acquisitional learning is mostly unreflective and tacit. For example, learning to use language and to incorporate the meanings and understandings that such use makes available occurs readily, without much conscious deliberation for the vast majority of human children. Even as adults, in most daily endeavors people do not expend a great deal of conscious effort in grasping the significance or meaning of events. Significance and meaning are provided more or less instantaneously by prereflective understandings. However, people are frequently presented with the unfamiliar or with inconsistencies between what they discern of the present and the prereflective understandings immediately given to the present by their past. In becoming conscious of such discrepancies, people recognize (even if partially and incompletely) that the repertoire of understandings on which they automatically draw is in some sense insufficient. This sense of insufficiency in understanding, incited by irreconcilable features of the present situation and previous experience, is the impetus to engage in the conscious interpretation of revisionist learning. (Our use of the terms acquisitional and revisionist learning is not intended to connote the kinds of computational metaphors and mental models invoked by cognitive psychologists such as Rummelhart & Norman, 1981.) The movement from understanding to interpretation is the hallmark of this more sophisticated form of learning, psychological change, and innovation. In revisionist learning, critical attention is given both to existing understandings and to those "others," or alternative, competing possibilities with which people are confronted and dialogically engaged. In the process of revisionist learning, people learn to clarify things for themselves, finding or contriving their own generative strategies through which they consciously attempt to penetrate their mostly tacit preunderstandings and even to suspend these in honest, open consideration of other perspectives, interpretations, and possibilities. Note that revisionist learning never replaces acquisitional learning. Acquisitional learn402
ing is ongoing throughout an individual's history of learning and always supplies a background on which less frequently engaged revisionist learning depends. Through dialogue with people with other perspectives, positions, and accounts, an individual's understanding is enriched in a process of fusion that results from authentic attempts to comprehend his or her own and others' interpretations and the traditions in which they are embedded. When dialogue across interpretative traditions is engaged, some degree of fusion is inevitable. The understanding that results will differ, at least somewhat, from that contained in any of the competing traditions, both in substantive claims and supporting rationales. Genuine attempts to expand our understanding constitute the basis for revisionist learning. Every genuine attempt to understand more deeply, more broadly, or differently requires a learner to penetrate her or his own preunderstanding and to be open to the understanding of the other. Both of these undertakings are substantive in a way that goes beyond yet assumes the subjectivities of the interactors. The conception of personhood at play in this ongoing dance of dialogical, interpretative learning is that of a subjectivity both made possible and constrained by its historical sociocultural situation, yet that is capable of comprehending something of that situatedness and its limitations, with the possibility of moving modestly beyond them. Such a possibility is clearly evidenced in the creativity of notable artists and scientists, but it also plays out in less dramatic ways in people's everyday lives and circumstances. Individuals are simultaneously constructed (through socioculturally enabled, acquisitional learning) and constructing (through socioculturally constrained, yet agentic, revisionist learning).
Between the Modern and the Postmodern Having recounted these open-ended and admittedly incomplete stories of human development and change without fixed foundations or essences, we now return to what we regard as postmodernism's overreaction to what we believe it is correct to view as modernism's indefensible attachments to false foundations and mistaken "naturalisms" in support of a dubiously scientistic approach to human studies in psychology and education. Specifically, we present alternative perspectives on three irreconcilable tensions that arise from the juxtaposition of modem and postmodern conceptions of the self and of the kind of understanding that humans might achieve. In each of these articulations, we strenuously resist a forced choice between modern scientism and what we regard as postmodernism's overly strong arbitrariness, antisubjectivism, and relativism.
Between Modern Faundationalism and Pastmodern Radical Arbitrariness Postmodernists' sensible rejection of the foundationalist idea that reality is characterized by conceptually independent, ahistorical, unchanging forms or laws that can be apprehended objectively has lead them to conclude that reality is characterized by a chaotic, random flux, the arbitrary ordering of which reflects only dominant socioApril 2000 ° American Psychologist
cultural positions and interests. The alternative possibility that reality a s flux might not be chaotic but might be possessed of emergent, changing, yet identifiable and understandable patterns and movements has been ignored in this forced dialectic. Here, it is useful to distinguish, as Ian Hacking (1995) and Kurt Danziger (1997) recently have done, between natural and human kinds. Whereas natural kinds (e.g., physical objects and biological species) exist independently of those studying them, human kinds are defined and constituted, both intentionally and unintentionally, by the aims, methods, and practices of human agents. But this does not mean that such categories are arbitrary. They are kinds of a sort, even if not natural. Human kinds.., are not natural kinds, but neither are they mere legends. They do refer to features that are real. But it is a reality in which they themselves are heavily implicated, a reality in which they are a part. (Danziger, 1997, pp. 191-192) Because human psychological beings are agents who are aware and reflective, their courses of action and ways of being are affected not only by the classifications of societies and cultures, but also by their own conceptions of and reactions to such classifications. Thus, an individual's experience of being mistreated--for example, as a victim of police brutality--is not simply a social construction but is constituted in part by the individual's own understanding of the significance of being a victim of such violence. This latter understanding obviously reflects a life of immersion in socioculturally available practices, but it also is based on the inevitably somewhat unique set of experiences of any psychological individual. Further, the reflections and actions of classified individuals often result in changes in classification. Witness, for example, changes to classifications in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and associated psychiatric practices as a direct consequence of the activities of various advocacy groups. The sociocultural and the psychological construct each other. Psychological individuals are potentially capable of taking matters into their own hands, at least to some extent. Within all of the dynamic flux that describes the ongoing mutable interaction between societies and psychological individuals, there exists a kind of nonchaotic, social, and psychological reality that is more than linguistic. Language is a richly woven system that will work its performative magic only when the necessary, relevant strands are engaged. When the jury foreman says, "Not guilty," and the accused is released from the custody of jailers, an entire social system of law, authority, and conceptions and practices of freedom (and the possible lack thereof) is invoked. The jury's verdict functions as it does because it fits into this multilayered sociocultural reality. However, if a jury gets its expressive language spectacularly wrong in relation to the relevant sociocultural system, or if a speaker attempts to command a physical force (e.g., commanding the tide to halt), both may end up "all wet." Although language undoubtedly contributes to the making of the sociocultural world, unpacking the historical and contemporaneous effects of language and other human April 2000 ° American Psychologist
relational practices is like changing the world. The physical and sociocultural worlds are simultaneously real constraints on and enablers of the emergence and development of hmnan kinds, both socioculturally and psychologically. Contingency in human affairs serves to select practices and interpretations in ways that are far t¥om chaotic, random, or entirely arbitrary, even in the absence of fixed foundations or essences.
Between Modern Essentialism and Postrnodern Antisubjectivism In tile dynamic, developmental scenario we have painted, the possibility of reflexive subjectivity is developmentally emergent within human embeddedness in real and preexisting physical, biological, and sociocultural contexts. Although precise forms of emergent subjectivity are necessarily historically and contextually contingent and thus variable, some such emergence (given the physical, biological, and sociocultural conditions of human existence) is existentially inevitable. Postmodernists' well-intended attempts to avoid psychological essentialism and the insupportable, exclusionary power praxis they attribute to any such essentialist formulation is thus too radical a solution. It comes at the cost of losing subjectivity altogether, even an always socioculturally enabled and constrained subjectivity. By entirely reducing subjectivity to neurophysiology or sociocultural practice, postmodernists like Richard Rorty (1989, 1990) and Kenneth Gergen (1991, 1994b), respectively, go too far. Reductive strategies achieve success only if they are ontologically informative in the sense that it can be shown that what was described as two different things is actually one thing. Successful reduction is impossible if important aspects of adequate conceptions of things are lost in the reductive exercise. Such impossibility is clearly evident in attempts to reduce psychological phenomena to neurophysiological states. Knowledge of the presumed neurophysical correlates of emotion reveals no more about emotional experience than the physical properties of musical instruments reveal about musical performance. Attempts by social constructionists to reduce psychological subjectivity to the sociocultural also fail. One can agree that one's emotional experience or moral sense would be impossible without one's historical and current immersion in relevant sociocultural conventions and practices that provide necessary means, significations, and standards that partially constitute one's emotional experience or moral sense. However, to go further and claim that reflective, intentional subjective experience of this kind is reducible to those same sociocultural conventions and practices is to confuse subjective experience with its socioculrural origins. The importance of avoiding such conflation is to be found not only in humanistic appeals to the examined life lived fully but also in the necessity that psychologists and educators not ignore potentially influential subjective factors in considering human agents and their experiences and aclions. 403
Beyond Modern Certainty and Postmodern Anarchistic Relativism Postmodernists' understandable exclusion of foundationalist "god tricks" (Danziger, 1997) in effect also excludes and renders incoherent their own strong relativism. Their judgment that one situated, contingent understanding is as good or bad as any other could be made only from a position that is impossibly (by their own arguments) impartial. Because no such situation exists, strong relativism is without the possibility of defense. Although all human practices and perspectives of understanding are necessarily emergent, we believe that some such emergent "meaning making" is nonetheless mandated and encouraged by its necessity with respect to species preservation and extension. In short, understanding itself, whatever its socioculturally determined form, is an inevitable consequence of the human condition and, as such, may be regarded as a primary epistemic and moral good. Danziger makes an important further point: The exclusion of [foundationalist] god tricks does not exclude the possibility of all privileged knowledge, but only that based on the pretensions of the supposedly unsituated subject. It is quite possible that certain situations sensitize one to aspects of reality that remain invisible or blurred when regarded from other points of view. (Danziger, 1997, p. 32) Such perspectivism can be progressive in the sense of attaining a more complete interpretation of a plurality of understandings, all of which may be considered in terms of the various justifications with which these different perspectives are associated. As previously indicated, attempts to attain understanding across different perspectives always require genuine good faith and involve a fusion of competing perspectives and their justifications. Further, any resultant fusions will be subject to relevant physical, biological, and sociocultural constraints, which, although always evolving and changing (especially the sociocultural) and never completely knowable, nonetheless resist any intepretation whatsoever. Viable understandings arise contingently within the physical and cultural world and are not pregiven. However, over time, such understandings also must serve to enhance human existence and experience when applied within the world.
Post-Postmodern Psychology and Education What does all of this imply with respect to socially mandated and orchestrated change through institutional practices such as higher education and psychological practice? The grand view of education that we believe follows from what we have been saying is one in which an individual's sociocultural experiences are expanded and placed within a larger horizon. Through such an education, familiarity and interest are cultivated in ideas, arguments, issues, problems, perspectives, and ways of life that might be quite distant from one's own. In all of this, there is a genuine attempt to understand one's place within a larger historical and contemporary community of humans and their ideas. What is at issue is a concerted attempt to come to under404
stand and care for the very best humankind has produced in the way of moral, cultural, social, and intellectual accomplishment throughout its history, with as much inclusivity as is practicably possible. Such a conception of education is intended to maximize possibilities for human learning and creativity while reducing unnecessarily narrow sociocultural, experiential constraints on human development and change. The idea of self-formation contained in such a view of education is decentered from an isolated, psychological ego, but it does require a coherent sense of dynamically evolving personhood, with attending possibilities. In fact, such an education is fundamentally about the production of particular kinds of persons. To the extent to which individuals educated in this sense can integrate their understanding of others within their own self-understanding, they develop a wider, more differentiated view typified by sensitivity, subtlety, and discernment. In this process of becoming more broadly cultured, individuals acquire the ability to engender more and varied opportunities for continued and sustained development, as well as a set of largely tacit but critical capacities for things such as tact, taste, and judgment. These are not merely cognitive ways of knowing and behaving but are embodied forms of knowing, built up over time into a set of habits that reflects a person's transcendence of individual ego and a self-formation genuinely tied to the shared values, goals, accomplishments, and visions of wider communities. In this way, the student enters into progressively fuller participation in relevant, wider communities of learning and a multifaceted intellectual life. By being assisted in taking up these others into her or his own self-consciousness, the learner also may be encouraged to seek a critical dialogue with people offering various accounts and perspectives in a purposeful attempt to search for understanding and interpretations that go beyond what currently exist as our best ideas and practices, all with a genuine spirit of openness and caring for the activities, practices, criticisms, and transformations that define an engaged life. In this way, the fundamental challenge of individual educational development is revealed as a developmental challenge facing our educational and broader communities. It should be carefully noted that our articulation of the foregoing view of education is not without bias. Also, we do not claim that it is the only defensible possibility, given what we previously have said about human development and change. Rather, although we find our view of education consistent with our previous analyses, it reflects our own values and beliefs, many of which contain undeniably Enlightenment-type perspectives. Unlike what we regard as the ineluctable, existential claims undergirding our stories of human development and change, our discussion with respect to education and our immediately following discussion with respect to psychological practice reflect our own historically and socioculturally shaped preferences and prejudices. Nonetheless, our focus on emergence and reflexivity (always within sociocultural, biological, and physical constraints) supports an interpretation of human being and understanding that we believe has important possible April 2000 • American Psychologist
consequences for education and psychological practice. According to this view, human psychological development must always occur within relevant contexts and constraints, yet it is not entirely determined because of the developmental emergence of a critical reflexive consciousness that is both historically and experientially effected. It is this consciousness that psychological and educational practice can nurture, not as a detached intellectual possession nor as a strictly pragmatic or dialogical tool, but as a means of interpreting societies and selves in ways that extend individual and collective possibilities for living. As an example of psychological practice, we turn to the kind of change sought by psychotherapists and their clients. Whatever, perhaps necessary, therapeutic attention is devoted to the conjoint interpretation of the unique perspectives and circumstances of individual clients surely must be supplemented with serious consideration of possibilities for personal and community life resident in the enduring conversations and struggles of humankind (both past and present) with respect to what it is to be human. The therapeutic investigation must seek conditions of possibility for psychological being and understanding that go beyond and serve to situate and render interpretable individual concerns of the moment, however poignant. In all of this, psychotherapists also would do well to constantly consider the relative differences between therapeutic time and context and the more extensive spatiotemporal expanse of clients' everyday existences so as not to forget the magnitude of the challenge they face and the inevitable presumption it carries. In his marvelously poignant and thoughtful reflections on psychotherapeutic practice in the American cultural context, Philip Cushman (1995) used the hermeneutic metaphor of the cultural clearing to extend this general understanding of psychological intervention: Through our cultural beliefs and personal opinions we unknowingly make it possible in our clearing for certain things to be brought into view, and at the same time we exclude other things from showing up. Our culture does this by developing over time a certain placement of the horizon: it is situated in such a way as to make room for certain things but to deny space for others; to illuminate certain ideas, events, and relationships, but not to shed light on others. When the horizon is located in one place, there is only room in the terrain for certain things to show up; when the horizon moves out, further away from the individual, there is room for new possibilities. (p. 302) In both educational and psychological practice, psychologists must endeavor to foster a genuine desire to understand their place within the broader context of the historical and contemporary world and its constitutive communities, and they must try to come to understand and care for the moral, cultural, social, and intellectual accomplishments human history has made available as a necessary basis for modestly and humbly attempting to go some little bit beyond where they currently find themselves. In this attempt, they have nothing to build on that is not the contingent product of their past histories of sociocultural practice, a product that has been endowed with significance because it has historically served to meet the basic exisApril 2000 • American Psychologist
tential and socioculturally spawned requirements of human communities at both collective and individual levels. With all of its inevitable and at times terrible imperfections, such contingency is not static, even as it both makes possible and limits the world and selves. Because it is not at all monolithic but highly pluralistic and diverse, containing numerous strands that have yet to be realized, developed, and elaborated, this dynamic contingency of human practice, achievement, and failure (together with the subjectivities it has bequeathed) is the source of all possibility.
Conclusion In conclusion, we believe that postmodernists are right to critique the modern project, especially for its unwarranted scientism in areas such as psychology and education. However, a basic mistake of postmodernists is to force a choice between insupportable foundationalist positions of unsituated essence and certainty and their own unduly radical forms of arbitrariness, antisubjectivism, and relativism. Not on12~ are these latter positions incoherent in light of the total rejection of foundationalism itself, but they carry consequences that would deprive psychology and education of both legitimate subject matter and any grounds for understanding it. In the words of Donald Polkinghorne (1999), The postmodernists' commitment to reality as flux has led them to remove personhood or self from the philosophic conversation and to replace it with talk of neurology or sociology. What is currently needed Ein both psychology and education] is a recovery of personhood; that is, a recovery of the psychological realm. Such a recovery cannot be a return to the form self--the unchanging, soul-like spirit, but, instead, it needs to be the explication of a flux self. The question is how one talks about and understands a nonstatic, changing personhood; that is, a reflective and purposive self that is open to its own inner emotions and thoughts, to other selves, and to the flux of nature. (pp. xiii) Although there can be no ultimate defense of human history and its traditions, such contingency is all humans have. Things might have been different, but they were not. People cannot get outside of their historical, cultural contexts but must develop and change from the inescapable inside. The seeds of both interpersonal agreements and interpersonal disagreements are given in historical but far from monolithic traditions. Moreover, human beings' collective actions have consequences capable of modifying their historical traditions, even as they are embedded within them. Nothing is fixed, although much raw material is provided. As psychological persons (selves), individuals develop and learn as members of communities and in terms of existing community achievements and practices with respect to what is valuable, what can be done, and how. However, because humans are capable of becoming active psychological agents, their development and learning can transform them and their societies, at least to some extent. Without a conception of personhood that reflects the possibility of individual and collective transformation, postmodern social constructionism tends to be a too-static view of the human condition, one that is unduly silent with respect to possibilities for human change, innovation, and
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creativity. P s y c h o l o g y and e d u c a t i o n require a m o r e dyn a m i c p e r s p e c t i v e o n selves and societies. S u c h a p e r s p e c tive s h o u l d chart a m i d d l e g r o u n d b e t w e e n s u f f o c a t i n g fixtures o f m o d e r n certainty on the one h a n d and p o s t m o d ern e r a s u r e s o f s e l f and any possibility o f p r o g r e s s i v e u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f the h u m a n c o n d i t i o n on the other.
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