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Great posting John thank you. And did anyone hear David King on Today programme this morning arguing very eloquently about the urgency of the climate change issue ( again) and urging social scientists, among others, to engage in debate and action. Good wishes, Annie -----Original Message----- From: The UK Community Psychology Discussion List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of John Cromby Sent: 27 April 2009 10:08 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: [COMMUNITYPSYCHUK] the importance of the individual I wanted to pick up on this in Richard's post: "I understand that critical psychology is trying to rise above and confront the dominance of individualism but I don't get the apparent denial of the importance of the individual." There are for sure tricky issues here but - at least in my view - this doesn't amount to a denial of the individual, or a negation of individual experience. Instead its a recognition that individual experience is never - could never possibly be, never is, never has been - pristine, bounded, and self-contained. Its about recognising that its never the case that social and material forces are simply context: they are also, always, fundamental constituents of experience. Individuals are not and never have been separate from their social and material environment. They are instead always and already social products, the outcome of prior processes of socialisation and enculturation. What we experience as our 'individuality' is co-constituted from the accretion of social relations, cultural and symbolic artefacts, and the traces of life events. These things impress themselves upon our (variable) biology in ways that are contingent upon the shifting and detailed particulars of our life trajectories (so its hard to generalise about their effects: social causation is always and necessarily probabilistic in character). So the congealed traces of social relations, symbolic artefacts and life events interpenetrate our biology to give us the skills, knowledge and experience upon which our choices are made. They give us what we call our beliefs and attitudes, they give us norms of emotionality, safety and reactivity, and attributes such as confidence; and they give us regimes of feeling that locate our bodies, with exquisite sensitivity, in our dynamically changing social and material worlds: and all these things load information with valences that situationally create preferences. Social relations and life events also give us meta-cognitive faculties of remembering, planning and deliberating that allow us to wield cultural resources and symbolic forms effectively and legitimately; they give us habits of the body and of thought, and they give us memories that 'thicken' our experience with echoes of prior moments of living. In sum their interpenetration with our biology is so thorough that no experience we have - not even one - is simply and wholly an 'individual' one. You can 'prove' this to yourself: try to think of any single experience you've ever had, ever, that was wholly free of social influence? Consequently its never the case that individuals simply 'choose', 'decide' and 'act'. To be sure, we do experience ourselves doing such things. But the actual bases of our choices and decisions are never simply our own. We are not, despite our fond illusions to the contrary, sovereign agents controlling our own realm of action. Rather, every 'choice' we ever make is always, absolutely always, pre-reflectively figured and shaped by material and social forces that we may not always be able to identify or recognise. And every 'choice' we ever make is always enabled, too, by neural systems that are dynamically open to external influence, many of which operate outside of conscious awareness. Now none of this means that individual experience isn't important, doesn't exist, or should be discounted. For psychologists to take such a stance would be strange indeed. But it does mean that simply counter-posing 'the individual' to social influence is likely to produce false dichotomies and over-simplistic explanations. It means that explanations rooted in 'individual' choice are necessarily only ever telling part of the story. It means that the analysis and unpicking of experience, on any given occasion, is so incredibly complex that we are always prone to errors of omission or reification. Moreover, we have an ideological climate where individualism is frequently associated with (neo)liberalism, capitalist notions of the bourgeois individual freely choosing her or his place in labour and other markets, and explanations for any number of psychosocial phenomena that reduce the massive complexity of social and material influence down to 'individual' choice in ways that frequently result in victim blaming and work ideologically to mask the contribution of social and material forces. Given all of these considerations, it makes very good sense for critical psychologists to be consistently wary and suspicious of simplistic, individualistic explanations. This is why it can seem that 'the importance of the individual' is denied. J. ******************************************************** John Cromby Department of Human Sciences Loughborough University Loughborough, Leics LE11 3TU England Tel: 01509 223000 Email: [log in to unmask] Personal webpage: http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~hujc4/ Co-Editor, "Subjectivity": www.palgrave-journals.com/sub ******************************************************** ___________________________________ COMMUNITYPSYCHUK - The discussion list for community psychology in the UK. To unsubscribe or to change your details visit the website: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=COMMUNITYPSYCHUK For any problems or queries, contact the list moderator: Grant Jeffrey ([log in to unmask]) ___________________________________ COMMUNITYPSYCHUK - The discussion list for community psychology in the UK. To unsubscribe or to change your details visit the website: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=COMMUNITYPSYCHUK For any problems or queries, contact the list moderator: Grant Jeffrey ([log in to unmask])