Learning from Feminism: Social Psychology as a Possible Utopia ADRIANA GIL JUÁREZ Department of Health Psychology and Social Psychology Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) Department of Social Psychology Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) CONTACT ADDRESS: Facultat de Psicologia Departament de Psicologia de la Salut i Psicologia Social Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Edifici B 08193-Bellaterra (Barcelona). Catalonia. Spain. Tel. 34-93-581 17 04 Fax. 34-93-581 21 25 e-mail:
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Abstract This paper presents work in progress from a prospective Ph.D. This thesis mainly deals with the role of affectivity in social psychology. Affectivity has not been a major issue for years, probably due to the gendering of topics, which has marked affectivity with the “stigma” of femininity. Instead of affects, cognition and subsequently language have been placed at the centre of interest of social psychology. Rationality seems spread everywhere, even in these purportedly postmodern times. One aspect of my work on affectivity concerns the role of utopias in social psychology. The present, it is argued, is the place where we construct utopias to make the future present. This is in strong opposition to notions of the future as a predictable space and the past as only the cause of the present: thus emptied out of any alternative meanings. Conventional social psychology, it is suggested, works within these latter notions. By contrast, my proposal of a Social Psychology as a Possible Utopia, directly derived from the experience of feminism, works within a present full of possibilities: a Utopian condition.
Learning from Feminism: Social Psychology as a Possible Utopia From a conventional social psychology point of view, it is possible to think that future is a foreseeable reality caused by the ‘natural evolution’ of the factually palpable present. However, mainstream social psychology also has a project of ‘humaneering’ (cf., Stainton Rogers, Stenner, Gleeson and Stainton Rogers, 1995). In this, the future is a reality for which we accumulate knowledge intending with it to get solutions for all future eventualities. This emergent reality will make future society a precisely known society and a practically controllable one, in other words: a fact. In this way, projects and utopias are reduced to a matter of planning the future. This planning is understood as a faster, more effective and less erroneous way to the future than the mere evolution of conditions. With this, the present of conventional social psychology and its notion of future, as well as its notions of project or utopia are reduced to just one possibility: that of causes and effects and their planning, or to put in another way, their control. In this formulation, the present appears as lacking in content and above all as lacking in possibilities, in surprises. This follows, since what we recognise in it is caused by the past and planning for the future occupies all the remaining space. We are offered a future, that when present, will not be anything more than effect of the past and the planning for a further future. This boils down to pre-living, say a Monday from a Sunday afternoon that was itself set by Saturday. In such a one-dimensional formulation, we only have a single possible interpretation of past, of present and of future, only one notion of the movement of society: • a development forward, planned, produced by past causes and productive of future facts. In short, a society that changes to remain the same: ultimately, a consummated reality. All this is vastly distant from what feminism has taught us of political experience, theoretical knowledge production and daily practice. The present of feminism, and the one here proposed for a Social Psychology as a Possible Utopia (SPPU) is, as I understand it, a moment of construction, a reconstruction of the past and a possibility of the of future. Hence, I do not see the present as a mere reiteration of past facts. This follows, since social reality does not have a direction predetermined by past or by the planning of the future. The present is precisely where we can find new directions to those matters that seemed facts. Possibilities of multiple futures are to be found in the present, in the recognition that what is distinctive about processes is their quality of being socially constructed. From this notion of the present and from the fact that it does not share the taken-for-granted facts of conventional social psychology, SPPU finds more than an interpretation of social reality. Indeed, it can see several realities, because it can see several utopias, several projects. For these are precisely the ways by which subjects appropriate the present, expectations that allow 2
people to see it in different ways. Thereby, social processes get meaning and manifest a direction constructed by social subjects. Such a future as projects and utopias does not end in planning. Rather it begins in an enriched present, enriched not with facts but with processes in movement, temporarily constructed. Thus, what is at issue between a conventional social psychology and a SPPU it is not merely an argument about titles, but a much deeper matter of the enrichment or the impoverishment of symbolic reality. In other words, it is concerned with the resources that society has for understanding itself and for elaborating projects, and it is an issue about the understanding of the social that social psychology has as a discipline. The key that enables a SPPU to understand social processes lies in utopias: in those mundane utopias that we call projects, or in grander utopias such as that of feminism. The latter has proved it can be utopia and reality simultaneously. The psychosocial process that underlie both kinds of utopia is the same: to appropriate the constructing of the future starting from now. Thereby, I wish to argue, we enrich the historical, cultural, symbolic possibilities of society. Why a utopia and not just prediction? Prediction though apparently speaking of what will be the case in the future is made from the past. That is to say, what we predict in the present for the future is determined by the past of the phenomena concerned – without opening possibilities. Furthermore, the predicted future is determined by the form of the present as the predictor observes it. A utopia, according to that which feminism, or better, the feminisms, have taught to us, reconstructs a social process taking into account: • what is not given in that process; • what it possibly contains that we do not yet consider part of it; • and, into what we can possibly convert it. A utopia also uses its creativity, which we define as “the collective remembering that falls further on” (Fernández Christlieb, 1994), and in this way, we enrich the knowledge of the above process in the present. In this sense, a utopia, as opposed to prediction, is not awaiting the fulfilment of what we projected on it. Finally, a utopia typically widens the range of possibilities of processes and can reveal the meanings from which we are constructing them. It can, thereby, influence the future of the symbolic configuration of society, as in fact feminism has done – not by the planning of the future but through the appropriation of present. In other words, while the predictive mode operates by seeking to complete processes that are themselves taken-for-granted, the utopian mode is concerned with recovering the acting and transforming capacity of social subjects. In this way, the fundamental task of a SPPU is to make projects and utopias from processes, instead of making historiographies of social phenomena, as conventional social psychology does. In recognising these processes’ character of being provisional (Ibañez, 1994) and their possibility of transformation, we should be in a location in which we would construct a “social fact” instead of verifying and describing it. To make utopias is the moment in which future is being constructed in the present, because we choose in what 3
direction the processes in which we are involved can follow (Zemelman, 1992). In this way, if there are several realities, different meanings and projects in society, then any given utopia is only one of those possible meanings and not The Reality. A utopia must consider the specificity of a process and that utopias particular meaning for widening that process’s potentials and should always allow that such a utopia is but a possibility. A utopia, in other words, is not the complete social reality, it is only one of its possibilities. Hence, as social psychologists of a SPPU, our task in the discipline is a matter of values. We choose under what shared meanings to elaborate a utopia and what processes we want to boost in doing this. In this way we go from being an observer of the social to being a participant of society. We can think here on the work accomplished by Valerie Walkerdine in The Mastery of Reason, 1988, or of the work taken on by Latin-American community psychologists (Montero, 1994). All these possibilities are equally valid, at first sight, but I would argue that some possibilities are more possible than others. Besides the values that sustain a utopia and that allow us to choose between utopias, what makes a utopia more possible than another? According to the SPPU the only constraint upon an utopia is its verisimilitude. Of course, we should not understand verisimilitude as the Truth of conventional social psychology. Verisimilitude is also a social construction, a convention, an agreement, that which can be interpreted socially as credible. It does not attempt to lay down what has happened, but to consider what could happen – what is possible. This also discriminates the genre of utopias from of fantasies: in the latter one can have and make relevant the existence of unicorns! It is possible but not necessarily credible. The distinction depends on whether there are social subjects for whom the possibilities seem relevant and believable. Therefore, a credible utopia is a believable project in terms of what it anticipates. The power of a utopia is not based in “objective truth” but in its persuasive force. A utopia “speculates” with the possibility of a process in a credible but also an interesting way, in a possible but also an original way. As it “speculates” a process a utopia can, thereby, widen the possibilities of that process. In this sense, what is credible has to do with what is magic, but not as that is understood in fantasy fiction. Magic, as with all the domains of affectivity, is assigned only to us – the women (Gil, 1995). What is credible does not exist as an “objective fact”, what it is credible changes, as reality changes. Because of this, a SPPU does not try to know and to describe social reality “objectively”. Instead, it seeks to construct a process, through a credible utopia. Instead of looking for our object of study in classical theories and taken-forgranted facts, we must construct it. This requires a seeking in symbolic reality, in the arena of what is possible, in what is susceptible to making sense to people. In others words, a focus upon what belongs to affectivity and in that which concerns language and its capacity for resignifying symbols. Social psychology as a SPPU must intuit the possible relationships between processes, it must invent its “objects” with the only constraint being that of yielding to verisimilitude. The exemplary utopia considered here is that of a SPPU, which, as I see it, offers a considerable level of credibility. Specifically, it widens the range of possibilities in the comprehension of what is social. If 4
generic social psychology could recognise society as an endless number of possible utopias in becoming, it would have the same option of constructing itself as a Social Psychology as a Possible Utopia.
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References Fernández Christlieb, P. (1994). La Psicología Colectiva un Fin de Siglo más Tarde. Barcelona: Anthropos. Gil, A. (1995). Aproximación a una Teoría de la Afectividad. Treball de recerca. Barcelona: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Ibañez, T. (1994). Psicología Social Construccionista. Guadalajara, México: Universidad de Guadalajara. Montero, M. (1994) Psicología Social Comunitaria. Guadalajara, México: Universidad de Guadalajara. Stainton Rogers, R., Stenner, P., Gleeson, K. and Stainton Rogers, W. (1995) Social Psychology: a Critical Agenda. Cambridge: Polity. Walkerdine, V. (1988). The Mastery of Reason. Cognitive development and the production of rationality. London: Routledge. Zemelman, H. (1992). Los horizontes de la razón. II. Historia y necesidad de utopía. Barcelona. Anthropos.
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