Abstract
In this chapter you will be offered a ‘post-psychology’ that traces concepts of motivation and motives through various theories relevant to my project. The most important problem, around which this ‘immanent critique’ is centered, is that of scientific objectivity: How to make of subjectivity a scientific object? Or, how to move beyond this contradictory ambition? As already mentioned, the concept of ‘boundary objectivity’ around objects such as ‘energy’ are suggested as central. We shall discuss prevalent strands of positivist psychology (behavior design, cognitive theories, self-determination theory), and then off-mainstream traditions. Of the latter, I focus mostly on the Vygotskian (socio-cultural-historical) tradition, including its version of critical psychology, but I also venture to find parallels to (critical) psychoanalysis. When off-mainstream traditions seek a scientific objectivity for their concepts of motives, the idea of (biological and social) ‘function’ becomes important, as it configures the necessity of needs, defines pathologies and cures, and translates those into activities. This has spurred attempts to overcome such functionalism, and the dualisms it entails; attempts, which then run into troubles with how to think of objectivity. That contradiction is the germ cell from which the position of this book has emerged.
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Notes
- 1.
The EARLI special interest group 8 on motivation and emotion conference “Design for Motivation and Emotion”, Aarhus 2018.
- 2.
Klaus Holzkamp”s (2011) term for the kind of psychology that proceeds by correlating two variables to find what causes behavior.
- 3.
In Chap. 3, we shall dive more deeply into this issue, as we consider the relations between signs as things and as objects.
- 4.
Another example is given in Solgaard and Nissen (2021): The use of personality tests in practices of hiring. Here, participants are vaguely aware of the limited validity of test scores, but move back and forth between referring to them as given facts, negotiating their meaning, and reflecting their implications.
- 5.
This sets in motion a continuous process of verification that gradually undermines veridity because the formal transparency of procedures masks rather than reconciles or overcomes contradictions of meaning. Hans Rosling’s popular and well-intended “factfulness” (Rosling et al., 2018) is to pee in your pants to stay warm in the deepening winter. The rise and fall of the Danish anti-environmentalist Bjørn Lomborg, who was endorsed and financed by liberalist and neoconservative Danish governments to promote “climate skepticism” with pure evidence, is an illustrative case. Jamison (2004) laments Lomborg’s contempt for real science and calls for new procedures to secure factfulness; yet his reconstruction of the political and institutional backgrounds of Lomborg’s rise to fame rather suggests a wider contextualization of such “facts” in ideological struggles. Lomborg’s trick was precisely to substitute a formalized procedure of evidence for the consistencies of climate science that were and are intimately related to the politics and the publics of climate activism, both before and after Lomborg. While Lomborg’s easy rise to power is an occasion for grave concerns, his fall is encouraging; yet, what has been generally learnt from it?
- 6.
This is true of plants as well, but the scarce resource in plant “economy”, is nitrogen, rather than energy.
- 7.
The pseudo-mathematical representation of theories is a more general trope in psychology (Lewin, Valsiner, and many others), as well as in other social sciences. Rather than a false dressing designed to be allowed access to “science,” this form should be analyzed as a way to invoke the hope of a science that can cumulate a body of knowledge through formalizing stipulated theorems.
- 8.
Even with the theorizing of life implied in sexuality, in self-preservation and the death drive, psychoanalysis never (to my knowledge) thought of basing the idea of a libidinal economy on the finitude of life—everyday life as well as life course – as it would be developed in existentialism. Perhaps this was a result of its clinical focus, life viewed as “zoë” rather than as “bios.”
- 9.
Later, “motivation,” as an already well-established object, does appear there, as well as in more recent standardizations such as health promotion and sports.
- 10.
Valverde (1998) recounts how some early 20th century alcoholism programs—before “motivation” —would emphasize displays of will, taking inspiration from the gymnastics of the time (which, in turn, reappeared later as “fitness” and “body-building”).
- 11.
Kahneman, who earned a Nobel prize in economics, makes a note of how apt that phrase is: Paying attention. “You dispose of a limited budget of attention” (ibid., 23).
- 12.
Anyone writing in English will be familiar with the warning built into the algorithms of the Word program: “Passive voice. Consider revising.” Apparently, passive voice spends the reader’s limited System 2 budget. And I don’t even have to know how or why—just trust and go on writing the canonical language.
- 13.
Probably first of all the interactive or customizable nature of “hyper-text” and the coexistence of multiple platforms on the same hardware device; as we shall see in Chap. 4, this logic of a commodity or brand defining a fixed frame with customized items (all standardized) is recognizable also in domains such as counselling.
- 14.
The “Copenhagen Consensus Center” initiated by Lomborg is a case in point—see (June, 2023) https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/.
- 15.
The idea that causal explanations in psychology masked the affirmation of a generally accepted rationality was already proposed by Holzkamp (1993), who, in turn, based partly on Smedslund (2012 [1988]). For my purposes, I propose to free this hypothesis from its place in an argument for a new realist psychology of reasons (cf. Sect. 2.12). Instead, my attempt is to use it in a post-psychology that seeks to understand the performance of causal psychologies addressing reasons.
- 16.
Note that the concept of “common sense” is not, as I intend to use it, pejorative. Rather, I think of it as an object of study and of a reflective self-overcoming – mindful that the task of a theorist is to suggest new ways of thinking, thus to move beyond common sense, in ways that are always precarious (cf. Nissen, 2012b, Chap. 7).
- 17.
In Bowker and Star (1999), these are dubbed NSS statements: No shit, Sherlock? – too obvious to be taken seriously as instructions to nursing practice. Yet, mainstream psychology is virtually made of these.
- 18.
Thus, as “Nature” as defined in Chap. 1. This may, but need not, be “anchored” in an “ultimate” reference to an organic substance – most typically, the brain.
- 19.
This can even be argued within their own logic: The priming strengthened the association “cocaine-research” —which was probably already established with the remuneration given to participants—except, in this genre, participants always try to do what they are told, or they are deleted from reported findings.
- 20.
For a realist critique of this methodology, see Chirkov and Anderson (2018).
- 21.
Imagine how funny your date would find it when you checked the “funny meter”; or, imagine how you would interpret him/her replying that my joke is 7 on a scale from 1 to 10, after consulting his/her “funny meter”. Perhaps just as another joke? Or, maybe stuff for another episode of the dystopian sci-fi TV show “Black Mirror”?
- 22.
Thus, even though professionals in social work and in schools often experience the wave of “evidence-based practice” as imported from the medical field, it actually originated in educational psychology.
- 23.
See Motzkau (2007) for a more contextualized approach to suggestion.
- 24.
SCHAT is an inclusive way of naming the tradition, without separating the “cultural-historical” from the “sociocultural”. The former has been more European, and continued more from the further development of Vygotsky’s theories by A.N. Leontiev and his colleagues in and around Moscow, while the latter has been more Anglo-Saxon and took off more directly from translations of Vygotsky. Part of this history is about translations. Another part is about how “CHAT” has been widely institutionalized with reference to the works of Engeström and colleagues as representing a “3rd generation” of a “dynasty” after Vygotsky and Leontiev. The more inclusive name fits the profile of the association and its conferences (see https://www.iscar.org/), and it is more relevant here—even though, as we shall see, it was Leontiev who developed a proper theory of motives.
- 25.
See (June 2023) https://apps.who.int/gb/bd/PDF/bd47/EN/constitution-en.pdf
- 26.
As the framing of a psychology (sui generis, independent of other social theories), this functionalism is rarely articulated explicitly as such, even if it could be, obviously, with reference to such social theories as those of Malinowsky or Parsons. The exception to this rule is perhaps certain Freudo-Marxist socialization theories that explicitly took the “reproduction of capital” as their overall point of reference (e.g., Lorenzer, 1973).
- 27.
In the specific article quoted here, Hedegaard is ambivalent about the term ‘need’ itself. She recapitulates and confirms Leontiev’s above-quoted reversal of the cycles of actions and needs (p. 16), but she does not explicitly take up ‘functional-objective’ or ‘higher cultural’ needs. In her ontological Table 1.1. on ‘Planes of analysis,’ ‘needs’ figure at the top as ‘social needs’ and again at the bottom as the ‘primary needs’ at the level of ‘human biology’ (p. 19). She rearticulates Bozhovich’ use of the term ‘need’ as a ‘motive factor’ (p. 22, note 2), that is, as conceptualizing the structuring of motives, claiming only implicitly that the functional objectivity of the social needs of ‘activity settings’ determines such ‘motive factors’ as ‘needs.’
- 28.
In fact, materialism is quite often idealistic, when ‘matter’ is conceived as formless, that is, the form given by the conceptualization itself is ignored and projected onto ‘matter’ itself.
- 29.
In earlier writings, I have used the term “German-Scandinavian Critical Psychology,” but I realize that important contributions have been Finnish
- 30.
It should be noted that Holzkamp and Osterkamp were a couple, who worked together and influenced each other’s works to a large degree—and that Osterkamp devoted most of her efforts after Holzkamp’s death in 1995 to representing “his” legacy.
- 31.
It is instructive to compare with the phenomenological sociology of Schütz, Garfinkel and others, despite their more direct acknowledgement of the Husserlian legacy. Here, phenomenology is smoothly rearticulated on the basis of sociology’s foundational assumption of the rational agent. Since Durkheim and Tönnies, the bracketing of the possible irrationality of less-than-social individuals such as children, natives, mental patients, etc. was part of constituting a “sui generis” social science. Even Goffman (1961) had to delimit his study of Asylums from any claims about the objects of psychiatrists’ expertise (cf. Nissen, 2012b, Ch. 3).
- 32.
Incidentally, and interestingly, Osterkamp’s careful and respectful rearticulation of Freud’s work is directly opposite to Holzkamp’s hasty appropriation of phenomenology.
- 33.
The general narrative seems to be that Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology (Kojève, 1980), attended by Lacan, Sartre, and others, were a founding moment. I am much indebted to Judith Butler’s thorough reconstruction of the French reception of Hegel and of the concept of desire, although a full appreciation of this work and its object is beyond my scope.
- 34.
Although Holzkamp participated in an attempt at rearticulating the clinic already in Kappeler et al. (1977), that GNCP “practice research” remained undeveloped, and even when it took off as a program in the 1990s (cf. Markard & Holzkamp, 1989; Fahl & Markard, 1999; and Nissen, 2000), it only half-heartedly problematized the structure and discourse of the clinic.
- 35.
Butler (1997) discusses the way this problem is related to embodiment and to the possibility of resistance. In this respect, her project can be seen as similar to that of GNCP.
- 36.
It is also important in aesthetics – as we shall see (Chap. 5): Does Rancièrian dissensus refute the singularity of the artwork, or is aesthetic creation precisely an individuation that temporarily unites contradictory regimes of sense in a paradoxical consistence?
- 37.
In and of itself, this idea could simply, as in Illouz’ equally convincing reading, express an emerging capitalist consumer culture, rather than a universal aspect of human life (Illouz, 2019).
- 38.
“Freudian Repression” is a part of this book by Stiegler, and also the title of a book by Michael Billig printed in the same year (1999). Interestingly, while Stiegler highlights technology but ignores activity, the opposite is the case with Billig, who convincingly rearticulates Freud’s analyses as “repressed” expressions of forms of social interaction and discourse as conversation. Thus, they each highlight an aspect of the social practice that is missing in Freud.
- 39.
An example of this are the attempts to characterize the problems that arise from the recent sudden rise in the use of “screens”, where such technologies are seen as damaging since disturbing healthy, “natural” relations between “mother and child” as well as the natural sequence of ontogenesis, which, it seems, must recapitulate that of history (e.g. talk → text → screens) (cf. Stiegler, 2010a; Bossière, 2021).
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Nissen, M. (2023). A Post-psychology of Motivation. In: Rearticulating Motives. Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43494-5_2
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