The psychodynamics of recognition

As I have been repeating throughout this series of posts, Brandom-Hegel’s account of normativity requires that every normative action be assessable by something outside itself.  Absent such an external standard of assessment, in Wittgenstein’s words: 

I have no criterion of correctness. One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can’t talk about ‘right’. (PI 258)

This is the core insight that has led us into and through the (Brandomian reconstruction of the) Hegelian ‘dialectic’.  In a sense, Hegel’s master idea is to simply keep applying this insight to every philosophical category, thereby opening each category onto its “constitutive” external standard of assessment – an endlessly repeatable kind of transcendental argument.

But we can distinguish two key central cases of this move.  First, there is the case of perception.  Brandom-Hegel proposes a dynamic understanding of perceptual experience which sees any given perceptual content as in part constituted by its relation to other perceptual contents.  (I’m being amazingly telegraphic here because this isn’t the point of this post, but you get the idea.)  Part of this dynamic account is the idea that when two perceptual contents are in tension, we have an obligation to resolve this tension.  (This obligation, Brandom-Hegel argues, just is the Kantian ‘synthetic unity of apperception’ that constitutes the self as self.)  Thus, for example, when we remove the apparently-bent stick from water and conclude from our new perceptions that the stick is really straight, this reconfigures the relation between, and therefore the normative statuses of, different elements of our internal ‘perceptual economy’.  Our original perception of the stick-as-bent is still part of our internal perceptual economy, but we withdraw our endorsement of it, and this withdrawal of endorsement changes the original perceptual content’s location and role within our overall web of commitments.

The second key case is interpersonally social.  Brandom-Hegel argues that normativity is intrinsically social, and therefore understanding even the kind of normative content involved in perceptual experience ultimately requires backing up to the complex system of our society as a whole.  Just as we evaluate different perceptions against each other, so we evaluate different social actors’ normative judgements against each other.  We therefore need a model of the social relations we’re talking about – and in the last post I outlined Brandom’s basic model, his “algebra of normativity”.  The key claim here is that whenever we engage in normative action, we are implicitly attributing to some other social actors the right or authority to assess that normative action.  We can therefore in principle ‘map’ the relations of authority-attribution within any given community.

So here’s the model.  For any given normative action I am engaging in, I can decide who I take to have the authority to assess that action.  (Like so much else in this series of posts I’m going to complicate this later, but roll with it for now!)  But having decided which social actors have the authority to assess my action, I cannot then control what those social actors actually conclude – what assessment they come out with.  I am therefore frequently presented with a tension among the social judgements that I have chosen to treat as authoritative.  I engaged in an action thinking that it was good, but the social actor whose authority I have chosen to recognise on this matter believes that my action was, in fact, bad.  This creates a social-normative tension (precisely analogous to the tension between my perceptions of the stick-as-straight and stick-as-bent), and that normative tension requires resolution.

Now here’s the point: there are two ways to resolve this tension.  One option is that I accept the other social actor’s judgement, and conclude that my action was, in fact, bad.  The other option is that I conclude that I was wrong to grant them that authority in the first place – I can withdraw my judgement that their judgement is authoritative.  (In the analogy with perception, this is the option of withdrawing endorsement from one or the other piece of perceptual content.)

This is where I want to bring in psychoanalysis again.  My claim is that this fundamental dilemma – constitutive of normativity in general – is very insightfully thematised by psychoanalysis.  We are creatures who – intrinsic to our sociality – value approval or approbation.  We care about others, we sympathetically identify with others, and part of what we sympathetically identify with is those others’ perceptions of us.  We seek out others in part to see ourselves through their eyes, and our desire is that we see ourselves through their eyes positively.  Our own internality is in this way constituted by our sense of others’ sense of us.  This is a very deep sense in which the self is social.

And because of the way our sociality functions, the kind of tension I’m talking about here is painful.  We like it when others like us; we dislike it when they dislike us – and the more we have chosen to value their opinion – or affect – the more positive their positive affect towards us feels, and the more negative their negative affect feels.  We do not want to be isolated – but we also do not want to be thought of poorly by those whose own internality we have chosen to value.

So, if someone whose judgements we value judges us negatively, we have two options, both painful.  We can accept the judgement, and attempt to transform ourselves in a such a way as to no longer merit negative judgement.  Or we can remove their power to wound us in this way, by withdrawing our high opinion of their judgements.  But this latter option is also painful, because (the psychoanalytic claim is) withdrawing ‘investment’ from a person we have ‘cathected’ in this way is intrinsically painful – and this is in part because we have chosen to make this person’s affect, judgements, and actions part of our own internality – in severing that affective connection we are also wounding ourselves.

So, the claim is that by navigating our social worlds in this way, we are also navigating a difficult affective space: we are attempting to manage our own psychic economies, which are intrinsically in part ‘distributed’ across the psychic economies of those whose internalities and actions we have chosen to value. Whenever such tension arises in the ‘distributed self’ constituted by such social relations, it causes us pain.  The psychoanalytic claim, moreover, is that many psychological ‘symptoms’ are the result of mechanisms the psyche adopts to try to manage such pain – to try to address such tensions or contradictions within the socially-constituted normative self.

I’ll write more about these themes in my next post.

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