Alfred Adler: The Individual and Media

Let's dwell in the work of Alfred Adler; his cultural, group, and individual processes of a mediated world and a mediated self. Adler began with 12 propositions which serve as the ground or referent for his working system. Like the Ptolemaic, geocentric, worldview; it can function pragmatically. What interests us here is not objective Truth, but rather a functional, pragmatic, system that is both useful and thoughtful. We approach Adler the attitude of radical empiricism.

The 12 propositions (paraphrased):

1. The fundamental human condition is a striving from a state of "felt minus situation towards a plus situation, from a feeling of inferiority towards superiority, perfection, totality."
2. We strive towards a biological and environmental self-ideal, a fiction that we (ultimately) create and choose to endorse as our guiding fiction.
3. We go about our business largely unaware of our guiding fiction, it is unconscious.
4. The goal (guiding fiction) is a final cause. It is a teleological pull towards the self-deal fiction. One must identify the final fiction to organize the behavior into meaningfulness.
5. Ones style of life is shaped by this final fiction from an early age. Behavior that seems contradictory or absurd becomes meaningful when viewed from the final fiction of the self-ideal.
6. The style of life is a system that is comprised of conscious and unconscious processes.
7. Biological and environmental factors are relative to the goal. Genes and experience are not direct causes but probabilities that function through the style of life towards a self-ideal.
8. An individual's opinion of themselves and their worldview (enframing) influence all psychological processes.
9. The individual self is embedded with the social context. The self and context are not independent.
10. All biological and personal desires become social desires.
11. The goal of the healthful individual is social interest; an un-narcissistic, non-ego-centered life.
12. Maladjustment includes lack of social interest, a persistent and defining sense of inferiority, and a goal of personal superiority over others. 

Adler proposes a psychology of context. How can we understand the individual-mediated (figure-ground) phenomena of media psychology through this pragmatic system of thought? What are the implications for thinking through cultural phenomena that we have encountered in media and psychology? If we ask the questions; how does this behavior serve to move from a state of minus (inferiority) to a state of plus? How does the style of life form the worldview that produces the phenomena? How can think from new directions when we consider the fictional finaltude of a media producer and media re-broadcaster (persona)?

Ways of Thinking: From Art to Social Science

Chromatic Gradation Effect

I entered into psychology as many of us do; through the life-theorists. I call them life-theorist because they are not merely clinicians who treat the psychologically disturbed, but also, they think about our common experiences of living, and how to go about those experiences most effectively. They can also be called life philosophers because their interest is often less on acquiring facts and more on effective living. Most of us enter into psychology via our interest in Freud, Maslow, Jung, and others that have come to be called psychotherapists. For me psychology was never wholly about therapy and patients; it was more about living, life, and thinking; the psychology of the practitioner.

Once one is in it, one realizes that the field of study is not really a field at all, but rather, fields. We find psychologies rather than psychology. These psychologies each have a unique set of definitions, practices, and ideologies that defines their practices. We sometimes meet another "psychologist" who holds a view similar to ours, of what psychology is.

The first thing we learn about the psychologies is that there are two, distinct, practices. One psychology is that of the research psychologist. Primarily interested in the social, abnormal, personal, cognitive, emotional, perceptual, sensorial, or biological aspects of being human, these folks employ a variety of research methods to either explore, describe, or write the laws of human and nonhuman phenomenon. These psychologists spend their time researching; choosing and using various research methods (choosing the methods that best suit their beliefs about doing research) in order to test, develop, and work through their ideas.

The other side of the field, what we call clinical-counseling psychology, is comprised of individuals who think about, research, and impart strategies for living. This area of study and practice extends from helping the severely mentally ill, considering how to better communicate and interact with others, to exploring the very concept of the existence of the self. Practitioners of this kind of psychology work with others, using their one-on-one and group experiences as research information, to establish their ideas.

I entered psychology as a second profession. I had spent the first  decade of my adult life studying classical music in both European and American conservatories. An art school, music conservatory education is comprised of studio time (we use practice rooms, which are small closets with a piano and a music stand), one-on-one lessons with a master teacher, various classes in the practice, history, understanding, performing, and creation of music, as well as ensemble rehearsal (chamber music and symphony orchestra). There were distinct differences between my music education and my psychology education. Music school, like most art programs, is a unique experience which reminds me of an ancient master-apprentice model of learning. Contrastingly, the academic university system is mostly a classroom experience. In the conservatory we had to perform pieces for our "grade" (something most of my teachers rolled their eyes at), in this university we took tests, delivered and wrote papers for our grade.

Upon entering the university, I was immediately captivated by what was called the science of psychology; the use of the scientific method. I was taught that his is what made psychology a "science". Not unlike music theory, in which each note is analyzed in the context of its harmony and progression, scientific psychology seemed to get to the foundation of what it was considering. I have always relied on analogical thinking to grasp new ideas. It seemed like an easy enough comparison; music had theorist who analyzed its form, harmony, progression, rhythm, and dynamics; we even referred to these as the elements of music. Like the ingredients of a recipe, things could be broken down and analyzed by the elements and procedures that brought them about. It is important to note that in conservatory we never assumed that these elements caused the music. We looked at analysis as a description, not as an ultimate explanation of music. We all understood the function of a V-chord in an I-IV-V progression, but we never felt that the progression (or the chord) caused the music. We simply understood the harmonic analysis as a symbolic representation of the music itself. I would say that, if asked what caused the music, most musicians would say that it was caused by the composer or the performer. As for the emotional aspect of music, that was enisled to our private conversations. Most of my professional musician colleagues were likely to discuss technical aspects of music rather than the emotional experience of the music. Even when emotion was discussed it was referred to as "interpretation" of the composer's intention.

It seems that music theory is the science of music. The observation, description, and even control (there are long-respected rules of composition that all conservatory students learn) of the musical elements is the mission of music theory. However, we never mistook the theory of music as the cause of the music. In this sense, musicians view analysis as description; not as cause and effect lawfulness.

In science, or more accurately in the philosophy of science, we discuss two different kinds of scientific lawfulness: causal laws and correlational laws. Causal laws describe how events are causally related. Correlational laws describe how a events reliably occur together, but do not necessarily have a causal relationship. In our thought experiment of music theory as a scientific method, we can understand harmonic analysis as a description of correlational laws; the harmonic or melodic progression is not seen as the cause of the phenomenon, but rather, a useful description of it. A graphic analysis of a piece of music might be similar to an fMRI image of the brain, in that it displays a symbolic representation of the elements of the phenomenon. Whereas my first thinking about psychological phenomenon was informed by musical art and the humanities, my second inquiry led me to the natural and social sciences. Each

Science, it has been said, is a method; a step-by-step procedure that, if followed, results in reliable models of the phenomenon being studied (Popper). It has also been argued that science is a social action, one that moves by economic, political, and social pressures (Kuhn). The natural sciences (biology, chemistry, physics, and some areas of psychology) study physical stuff. The scientific study of society, economy, emotions, cognitions, and behaviors are called social sciences. Sometimes social scientists are dedicated to defending the status of their discipline as a science, against the natural scientists' criticism that it is a soft science. It has been my experience that a scientist's concern with being a scientist is one that is observed more amongst the social scientists than amongst the natural scientists.

One psychological tradition, in particular, has resonated with me both as a social scientist and as an artist. The Gestalt tradition, originating with Max Wertheimer, continues to bridge the two worlds of art and science for me. The Gestalt theorists were interested in how contextual structures determine meaning. In psychology we find the Gestaltists exploring the then new medium of motion pictures, Virtual Reality, art, and social meaning. Kurt Lewin, who is considered to be the founder of social psychology, was a Gestalt thinker. The essence of the Gestalt position is best expressed, I believe, in the chromatic gradation effect in the above graphic. We find here the phenomenon take on meaning in relation to their environment. The Gestalt (the grounding) is the empirical or rational background that the phenomenon emerges within. Like notes in a chord or melody, we manifest not from our environment but with it.

Games People Play on Facebook

In last month's guest blog at Lehigh Valley Style Magazine, I introduced Eric Berne's system of Transactional Analysis and how it can be used to understand the games people play with each other through social media. I am not talking about Candy Crush or FarmVille, but rather games of discourse that have even higher stakes and bigger payoffs than do the highly addictive video games. Here is a continuation of that blog on the Games People Play on Facebook.
As Berne described in his 1964 text Games People Play,  Transactional Analysis (TA) is based on classic, psychoanalytic theory. The personality is described as three ego states: the Child, Parent, and Adult. These correspond to the Freudian Id, Super-ego, and Ego. At any given time, we can respond to another person from one of these three ego states. We can also react to others who approach us from a particular ego state.

Ego States

The child ego state comes in two forms: the happy-go-lucky, curious, and naive, natural child, and the submissive, sheepish, eager to please, adaptive child. The natural child is free-spirited and curious. The adaptive child only expresses their true feelings at the risk of losing their parents' (or lovers) approval. The child ego state (that we uniquely express) is a result of our own, personal childhood.

The parent ego state is learned from our parents. We can have a loving and supporting, nurturing parent ego state, or a harsh and judgmental critical parent ego state. The parent ego state which we express mimics our youngest experiences with our parents.

The adult ego state is rational, logical, and emotionally reserved. From this ego state we do not react, but rather, we deliberately consider our response in a rational way. Anger, fear, and ecstatic jubilation are replaced by sober contemplation.

Transactions

Berne's idea is that the trouble begins when we react to others from a parent or child ego state. Games begin when one habitually approaches us from a child ego state, forcing us to either play along (flirt and tease) from our child ego state, or to take responsibility and control over the situation (from our adult ego state). The ego state from which we approach others can influence from which ego state the respond to us.

Take for example a transaction between a professor and a student.

(Student enters the classroom late)
Professor: "You are late! How dare you disrupt my lecture? Get out!"
Student: "Who do you think you are talking to me like that!"

In this example the professor and the student are both speaking from the critical parent ego state. The winner will be the person who has the most power. Let's see how a student responds from the adaptive child ego state.

(Student enters the classroom late)
Professor: "You are late! How dare you disrupt my lecture? Get out!"
Student: (head down and leaving) "I'm sorry, I always mess up."

Here we see that there is a moral sado-masochistic relationship taking place. The professor speaks from the position of critical parent and the student responds, as he probably does with his own father, from the adaptive child ego state. But what happens if the student responds to the critical parent from the adult ego state?

(Student enters the classroom late)
Professor: "You are late! How dare you disrupt my lecture? Get out!"
Student: "You are absolutely correct professor, this was inconsiderate and atypical of me, my car broke down. I did make a considerable effort to make it to class, may I please remain to hear the lecture?"

In this example the critical parent is met with an adult ego state response from the student. The only choice the professor has (without looking like a heel) is to respond from an adult ego state as well, "thank yes, please have a seat".


Karpman Triangle & Strokes as Payoffs
These transactions can be analyzed into typical patterns which Berne called games. The payoff of a game, the big prize, is a stroking. Emotional stroking is akin to physical stroking as an infant, when we interact with someone we acknowledge their worth as a person, even if we interact with them harshly, we are acknowledging that they mean something to us. To ignore someone is the ultimate insult, to not acknowledge them as having any meaning in our lives. People can get strokes in habitual ways. Stephen Karpman illustrated that we can fall into patterns for getting strokes from others by adopting one of three roles. We can get our strokes by being victims, persecutors, or rescuers.

A victim gets stroked by a rescuer (positive attention) as well as from the persecutor (negative attention). Whether good or bad, the attention affirms that they mean something to someone.

The persecutor and the rescuer both get power strokes to their ego. One comes from a critical parent, the other from a nurturing parent ego state.

Complimentary, Crossed & Ulterior Transactions
There are complimentary transactions and crossed transactions. A complimentary transaction is anything that goes on indefinitely. For example, adult-adult (problem solving) transaction, a parent-parent ("kids these days..." type conversations), or child-child (flirting). Parent-child and child-parent transactions can also continue indefinitely. If you have ever wondered why so and so always makes you feel dumb, or why you always feel superior to such-and-such, there is probably a P-C or C-P transaction taking place.

The trouble begins when we have crossed transactions. A crossed transaction occurs when person A speaks from A-A and person B responds from C-P or P-C. In other words, when we react to a perfectly honest compliment or criticism as if it was coming from a parent or a child ego state.

There are also ulterior transactions, which take place when person B is ostensibly responding to person A, but is really intending the response for person C. This happens all of the time on Facebook. When a person replies to a friend's post, not as a reply to that friend, but rather, as a cloaked message to a third person, it is an ulterior transaction.

Psychological Games
Before we take a brief look at the most common psychological games found on Facebook walls, let's illustrate two briefer forms of exchanges that we find; rituals and pastimes. A ritual is a brief, symbolic transaction that serve to "grease the wheels of social interchange" (James & Jongeward). An example often used is the everyday greetings that we symbolically use to acknowledge another; "Hello, how are you?"

A pastime is a longer, superficial, conversation that serves to meet the demands of social interaction while remaining safe in superficiality. We find this conversation amongst strangers at a party (nervous "weather" talk), or about other surface level topics like sports or politics. The defining characteristic of pastime conversation is that it is always general, flimsy, and safe. It serves to avoid any confrontation that is risked when a genuine conversation takes place.

Eric Berne described a psychological game as, "a recurring set of transactions, often repetitive, superficially rational, with a concealed motivation; or, more colloquially, as a series of transactions with a gimmick." A game prevents honest, open, and authentic relationships between people. A person often uses a psychological game to avoid emotional intimacy, avoid the vulnerability that is a part of any healthful relationship, and to maintain control over others.

Some of the games we play happen between employees and employers, students and teachers, parents and children, and between friends and lovers. All function to either avoid authentic intimacy, maintain control, or stroke one's ego.

A common game that avoids authentic contact with others is called the harried executive. This person avoids any commitment of responsibility to others by always being in a hurry to get to some pressing, important meeting. The strategy here is; "keeping it brief keeps me out of commitment and the vulnerability of authentic interaction". It also serves to stroke the individual's ego by having to attend to important matters.

In Ain't it Awful takes place when the boss or husband leaves the room. It is banter between fellow employees, husbands, wives, and students who use the game to maintain a sense of control over someone.

More involved games include what Berne called stamp collecting. Authors of Born to Win, James and Jongeward, put it this way:

"When people 'collect their stamps,' they manipulate others to hurt them, to belittle them, to  anger them, to frighten them, to arouse their guilt, etc. They accomplish this by provoking or inviting others to play certain roles or by imagining that another person has done something to them... When people manipulate others to re-experience and collect these old feelings, they are indulging themselves (often with the permission and encouragement of the Parent ego state). This form of self-indulgence is a racket. Berne defines rackets as "Self-indulgence in feelings of guilt, inadequacy, hurt, fear, and resentment..."

A commonly found game is called Kick Me, a game that is often people who self-indulge in guilt. In Kick Me, a person wears a sign that says "don't kick me" which makes it irresistible for others to not want to kick them. Once kicked, his game shifts to Why Does This Always Happen To Me, another game of guilt. This is a game of the constant loser, the person who seems to take pride in their misfortunes. Berne describes this mentality as "My misfortunes are better than yours." It is a game that strokes ego, and places one on the moral high-ground, thus controlling another. Kick Me is often found in people who put themselves down. It is a way of maintaining control over others by saying, "I will hit myself before you can hit me."

A variation of Kick Me is called Stupid. Here is a transaction from the text Born to Win:

Son: I am stupid.
Father: You are not stupid.
Son: Yes, I am
Father: You are not. Remember how smart you were at camp? The counselor thought you were one of the brightest.
Son: How do you know what he thought?
Father: He told me so.
Son: Yeah, how come he called me stupid all the time?
Father: He was just kidding.
Son: I am stupid, and I know it. Look at my grades in school.
Father: You just have to work harder.
Son: I already work harder and it doesn't help. I have no brains.
Father: You are smart, I know.
Son: I am stupid, I know.
Father: You are not stupid! (loudly)
Son: Yes I am!
Father: You are not stupid, stupid!

In Stupid, an individual takes comfort in their feelings of depression or sorrow. It is called collecting "blue" stamps.

In I'm OK, You're not-OK a person collects stamps (reassures their sense of self) through anger and hostility towards others. Take for example the husband who is always being schooled by his wife, or the friend who is always saying "If you would have listened to me". In this game, a person builds themselves up at the expense of those around her.

See What You Made Me Do is a classic game of blame. Unwilling to take responsibility for their own failure, which would threaten a fragile ego, this person always has someone to blame for their short-fallings. "Some people can collect feelings of purity, blamelessness, and self-righteousness," James and Jongeward explain.  This is a common game between companions.

Often we send messages to others, not only through what we say, but how we say it, when we say it, our body language, how we dress, and what we choose to post on our walls. In TA these are called "sweatshirt messages" and are akin to the memes and messages we post on our facebook walls. "The person whose shoulders droop, who whine and look anxious, may wear a sweatshirt message that says, 'Please Don't Kick Me. I'm a Victim'. Their invisible messages give their associates a come-on, either to put them down or to try to help them" (James and Jongeward). Some people play "dumb" and wear the "Gee Whiz, what can you expect from a fool like me?" message. Of course this is a way to get others to take over responsibility.

One of the favorite, but serious, games is called RAPO. This happens when a persecutor poses as a victim, and drops the axe on an unsuspecting rescuer. RAPO refers to emotional raping. Other messages that one can observe include:

I'm Going to Get You If You Don't Watch Out
Lean on Me, I'm the Rock of Gibraltar
Don't Worry, I'll Take Care of You
I'm Better Than You
Catch Me if You Can
Keep Your Distance
I'm So Fragile
I'm So Good and Pure
Screw You

If we carefully look at the patterns of our Facebook posts, we will see that certain themes exist in our messages. We are not only sending others a message, we are reinforcing a belief about ourselves, to ourselves. When others validate those messages with a like it serves as evidence that our self-view is accurate; if others believe it about me, it must be true!

But these messages often contain subtextual messages that are the opposite of their surface-level appearance.  Psychologist Fritz Perls described the game of Bear-trappper this way:

"The bear-trappers suck you in and give you the come-on, and when you're sucked in, down comes the hatchet and you stand there with a bloody nose, head, or whatever. And if you are fool enough to ram your head against the wall until you begin to bleed and be exasperated, then the bear-trapper enjoys himself and enjoys the control he has over you, to render you inadequate, impotent, and he enjoys his victorious self which does a lot for his feeble self-esteem." (Perls)

 In the game of Uproar two people who enjoy a good fight sit down to play. One takes on the role of persecutor, the other of defendant, but both are persecutors. Person A makes a critical remark to person B, which is almost always a strategy to avoid closeness with others. We see this game played between domineering fathers and teenage daughters (Berne). Father finds fault with daughter, daughter clashes, both storm off to their rooms. The payoff is they both slam the door on genuine intimacy and vulnerability. Sometimes person B will provoke the criticism of person A, just to get the ball rolling.



Life Scripts
In Transactional Analysis, we are also aware of Life Scripts. James and Jongeward explain:

"A psychological script bears a striking resemblance to a theatrical script. Each has a prescribed cast of characters, dialogue, acts and scenes, themes and plots, which move toward a climax and end with a final curtain. A psychological script is a person;s ongoing program for a life drama which dictates where the person in going with his or her life and the path that they will lead there. It is a drama an individual compulsively acts out, though one's awareness of it may be vague."

We follow many different scripts, these are the narratives that inform our approach to living. "Does someone like me do this sort of thing" could be as commonly thought as "what would someone whom I'd like to believe myself to be (and like others to believe too) do in this situation" is a more accurate gist of the question. When others interpret our life script in a way that is incongruent with our own self-view, we can react in two, broad ways. If we truly believe in our sense of self, it is at most a minor misunderstanding. If we are hostile and putt-off by their perception of us, perhaps we are not so convinced ourselves that they are not, after all, seeing more clearly than we are.

I Am, Therefore I Think

Sometime just after the first year of life, an infant will look into a mirror and recognize for the first time, this thing we refer to as “self”. It’s not too surprising that around the same time children will also start using words like me, mine, dada, mama, and the favorite expression of all two-year-olds, no!

These two events, the reference to the idea of self and the grammar of language, are not unrelated. Although it might seem that we merely use words to refer to a reality, many psycholinguists and philosophers think, as did Martin Heidegger, that “man acts as though he were the shaper of language, while, in fact language remains the master of man.”

The word “no” is an act of distinction. To utter “no!” one must have some suspicion of their potential control over others and the manipulation of their environment. Gestating inside the pregnant word “mine” is the understanding of possession and control.

The French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, pointed out that during this mirror phase, we have a fall from grace; an exiting of the blissful, infant Garden of Eden, where no distinction is made between me and m/other. In fact, it is at this very moment when we realize our own nakedness, that Lacan claims all of our worldly woes begin.

In philosophy, this idea that we can think about our self is sometimes called the subject/object split (S/O for short). At the moment of mirror-recognition, I am at once the object of my subjectivity. We find examples of humans who do not experience the S/O in feral children (children neglectfully raised without learning language). These children do not cognitively develop beyond a very basic understanding of the self.

We take the idea that we are subjects amongst objects quite literally. Most of us live captivated-in-an-acceptedness that there is a subjective world (how warm or cold it feels) and an objective world (what the number is on the thermometer). Oddly, we live in an age when we privilege the objective world over the phenomenal experience. If I am hot or cold is often less relevant than what the thermometer reads. Or is it?

When we hear certain teachings from the Buddhist tradition of “losing the ego,” I think that we come close to what Heidegger and Lacan were describing. Loss of ego is not ego in the sense of self-importance, but rather its Latin etymology of self. Losing one’s self is forgetting for a moment, the S/O that exhausts us in our daily lives. If we consider those who have lost themselves in helping others, we might get a glimpse of what it means to transcend the ego.

Similarly, we can understand what the Buddhist tradition calls the illusion of reality in the S/O split. We take the objective as the real (the temperature in the room) while living the reality of the virtual (how we experience, phenomenologically, the room to feel). We are living in a struggle between what I experience and what I know. Perhaps this is what we sometimes refer to as thinking and intuiting?

We have forgotten the reality of our pre-mirror phase existence. We cannot ask the infant because they do not yet have the words to speak reality. But we can, as both Western and Eastern thinkers suggest, remain aware of the uncertainty of our certainties.

Pretty in Pinko: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Marxism but Were Afraid to Ask Molly Ringwald

Imagine this. It's just a decade after the U.S. is withdrawing the last troops from the war in Viet Nam. The nation is mourning the loss of school teacher/astronaut Christa McAuliffe and 6 fellow astronauts who died on the Space Shuttle Challenger. And an actor and former FBI informant on communist sympathizers is serving his first term as president of the United States.

The neoliberal attitude had replaced the sense of compassion and community that came out of the New Deal, civil rights, and anti-war eras. Posters, t-shirts, and bumper stickers all celebrating the virtues of arrogant wealth became popular. Ironically, it wasn't the wealthy who watched the snobbish Robin Leach rant about the wealthy lifestyles of America's elite, but rather the lower and middle-class hoi polloi who were driving Dodge K-Cars. In the middle of all of this Ayn Rand ideology, a guitar chord rang-out that changed our view of the world -and still resonates in my adolescent ears. In 1986 John Hughes released a film called Pretty in Pink that became wildly popular. The story is timeless; a girl from the wrong side of the tracks is pursued by a rich prince, both suffer rejection from their friends and families, but in the end love prevails over social class. Looking back, it is more striking to me now than ever before just how brave Hughes was in this film, peddling a message that directly confronted the popular ideology of 1980s America. So poignant was this movie in describing social class struggle that I use it to teach Marxist theory in the college classroom. Andie (Molly Ringwald) is a working-class, high school Senior attending a privileged school. As her principal suggests in one scene, she is "lucky" to be at the school. Andie is an individual in a school of homogenized affluence. Her clothes (all self-designed and handmade) typically center around the color pink. Her ne'er-do-well father (played by Harry Dean Stanton) is a loving and lovable father who can't seem to either get over his ex-wife, or get a job. Andie and her father can be used to understand Marxist theory. Both of the working class, proletariat, each represents an aspect of that class. Jack is an example of the guy who has given up, what Marx called the Lumpenproletariat. The Lumpenproletariat sees no point in struggling against their lot in life and instead feeds off the bottom of the social structure. They wait for crumbs to drop from above. Andie is a different sort of proletariat. She possesses a certain cultural commodity, something that separates her from the rest of her social class. Still, she remains firmly one of the proletariat. She has upward mobility, perhaps through marriage, education, artistry, an entrepreneurial spirit, or her beauty. Andie, her dad, and their friends are what we today call the 99%. On the other side of the tracks, we find a group of teenagers who come from affluence. All members of the same country clubs, these kids sport Armani suits and drive Porches and BMWs to school. They represent the bourgeoise. This is the ruling class, for whom money is the answer to all problems. They live increasingly isolated and hedonistic lives of drugs, sex, and privilege. The archetypal bourgeoise teen is Steff McKee (James Spader). Snobbish, arrogant, and hyper-contemptuous, Steff embodies the rich "bad boy". His best friend, a bourgie named Blane (Andrew McCarthy), has fallen in love with the natural beauty of Andie. For his love, he suffers social ridicule, cold-shouldering, and disapproval from his friends and family. Blane and Andie both illustrate what Marx called class consciousness. They are aware of the roles they play in the structure and of the consequences that those roles have. The tensions between the bourgeoise and proletariat class structures illustrate Marx's material dialectic. Steff epitomizes the ideology of being materially-determined; in other words, we are what we have. Duckie (played by Jon Cryer) is the manifestation of the proletariat historical dialectic; an angry but impotent man, emasculated by free market capitalism. Iona (Annie Potts) plays a special part in the Marxist narrative. The owner of a small business (the record store TRAX where Andie works), she is an outsider, she is the future Andie. She floats between the proletariat and the bourgeoise, and like most self-made people are not fully accepted by either class. Marx referred to this group as the petite bourgeoise. TRAX serves as the meeting place of the classes, a place where popular culture and burgeoning love serve as the synthesizer of the material dialectic. In the end, love prevails over class structure as Andie and Blane embrace at their Senior Prom. A good American ending to a Marxist fairy-tale. Perhaps in real life the revolution is a bit different. If Stalin had directed Pretty in Pink, the prom might have looked more like Carrie, and the title would have to be changed to Revolution in Red. By the way, Duckie gives his approval to Blane and Andy, which results in his raising to masculinity. But that's a Freudian story for another day.

Rethinking Reductionism With Google Maps

"The romantic spontaneity and courage are gone,

the vision is materialistic and depressing.

Ideals appear as inert by-products of physiology;

what is higher is explained by what is lower

and treated forever as a case of 'nothing but'

-nothing but something else of quite an inferior sort.

You get, in short, a materialistic universe,

in which only the tough-minded find

themselves congenially at home."

 -William James

(The Present Dilemma in Philosophy)

Matthew Giobbi, 2012.

A sea change has occurred in how we understand the structure of knowing in cognitive neuroscience. Today, researchers, writers, and professors of psychology are holding discussions in a way that is much more in-line with the attitude of William James's radical empiricism.

James instructed the emerging science of psychology to embrace a cross-paradigmatic (in today's terms, an interdisciplinary) attitude of investigation. It has been a long time coming for psychology. James, greatly in spirit with his friend C.S. Peirce, was attempting to point the science of psychology in the direction that the other sciences of the 20th & 21st Centuries would take; a trajectory towards semiotics. Much of what Peirce outlined in his works on semiotics, a system of thought that has been the central influence on contemporary science, was unpacked for psychology in James's radical empiricism and pragmatism. Today, it seems that we are closer than ever to the third culture that C.P. Snow had called for in 1959; a truly radical empiricism.

Despite this shift in how we approach knowing, there are two philosophical attitudes that seem to prevail amongst students entering into the university study of the social sciences. It is for these students that I present this essay. It is not a suggestion to reject, but rather, an invitation to expand how we think about knowing through the social sciences. These two attitudes are strikingly present in conversation with most of my first-year students. Both share a common origin in early, classical, concepts of the philosophy of science, as well as an almost taken for granted (captivation-in-an-acceptedness) place in the Enlightenment rules for thinking. In addition these philosophies are closely related to two fallacies of thought, a consideration that is the topic of this undertaking. The two concepts that I speak of are Reductionism and Mechanism.

William James

In his extraordinarily insightful text on the philosophy of science, Worldviews, Richard DeWitt explores the evolution of the scientific knowledge systems since the early Greek thinkers. Just as Professor Hilary Putnam describes, in an interview with Bryan Magee, DeWitt outlines some central attitudes that have been dismissed within some sciences, and privileged within others. Whether this be the result of an internalist attitude within a specific field of study (only learning the history and philosophy of the science from within that science), or due to the absence of the study of the philosophy of science in most university science departments, the question of what science is has a different answer depending on the discipline in which it is asked. This is especially true for the social sciences. The main distinction between physics and the social sciences has been the adoption of Peirce's philosophy in the former, and a forgetting of it (through James's pragmatism) in psychology. This is the context of the problem, but let's turn to the two specific concepts of interest in this discussion; reductionism and mechanism.

The idea of reductionism is woven into the fabric of our sense of reality. Although it seems obvious that bigger is made-up of smaller (subatomic, atomic, cells, organs, etc...), an accompanying sensibility is not necessarily true; that smaller is the cause of bigger. Reductionism, then, is the idea that larger features are caused by smaller features. Examples include the idea that an area of the brain causes a certain behavior or temperament, or that a particular emotion is merely a result of certain neurotransmitters. This attitude of reductionism commits what is referred to as a causal fallacy, specifically, the idea that smaller causes bigger. It is an attractive, almost commonsense, point of view. However, critical analysis shows us that smaller might be correlated with bigger, but, smaller is not necessarily the cause of bigger. As we all learn in the first year of research methods, "correlation is not causation".

C.S. Peirce

Let's consider an example. In a popular Introduction to Psychology text by David Myers, the author correctly points out that brain scans of virtuoso violinists reveal a specific development in the motor strip of the right, frontal cortex. This area of the brain is associated with the left hand and fingers, which are predominant in violin playing. The right hand is mostly used for grasping the bow, rather than fingering notes, which accounts for the difference in neural concentration and activity between the left and right motor cortex. Keep in mind that this is true due to the lateralization of brain function; the left side of the body is associated with the right side of the body. Note the choice of the word associated rather than caused. Even in the use of the most basic words one can infer causation rather than correlation. The point Myers makes is that the violinist's brain has concentrated neural tissue and activity through years of practice of the instrument, and in turn, correlates with greater finger dexterity while playing the instrument. We do not have a clear causal relationship here, but rather, a correlationship. In this example, we cannot say that the brain in causing the violin playing, no more than we can say that brain chemicals are causing an emotion. The idea that the smaller causes the larger is a fallacy that has a history rooted in the 16th and 17th Century Scientific Revolution, a tradition from within The Enlightenment.

At the time, physics was largely developed through Newtonian, or what is now called Classical Mechanics. The idea was that all the structures of the natural universe (from planets to the brain) were merely a mechanized, clockwork structure that are governed by universal laws, just waiting to be "discovered". The way to discovery of this mechanized, lawful natural order was through reduction; dissection, magnification, and peeling away to the ultimate substance. This ultimate stuff, it was thought, would be arrived at through careful observation and measurement. Newtonian notions of science were abandoned in the early 20th Century, in particular with the Einsteinian Revolution which established that stuff at the subatomic level does not follow the same laws as the substances at the atomic level. In other words, Newtonian science does not work at the subatomic level. Today, physicists speak less in terms of classical mechanics, and more in the ideas of theoretical physics; Chaos Theory, String Theory, and subatomic physics.

New models of science, which physics embraced in the early Twentieth Century, were largely based on the influential thinking of C.S. Peirce. Without Peirce's work on semiotics there would be no theoretical physics. Whereas most of the sciences moved away from the "old view" of science, much of the social sciences did not. Despite the fact that the founder of American psychology, William James, called for a scientific psychology greatly influenced by Peirce, the more simplistic system of behaviorism completely overshadowed James in the early Twentieth Century. Radical Empiricism and pragmatism were not alone in this, the Gestalt tradition was also drowned by the behaviorist paradigm, not to return until cognitive psychology emerged in the 1960s. The way in which scientific psychology has been done, since the Nineteenth Century, has largely been based on antiquated notions of a Newtonian Science. Today, as predicted by thinkers including Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, scientific psychology has rethought what "science" is and how it is done.

A rethinking the fallacious assumption, that reductionism infers cause and effect, can be illustrated by using a familiar model from Google Maps. With google maps we have a function that is similar to that of the microscope when looking at a tissue sample; magnification. Through "zooming out" (the - function) we can take a distant of view of the object from afar. As we increase our magnification ("zoom in" with the + function), we are able to approach the street level of a specific neighborhood. We are tempted, when magnifying a piece of tissue, to understand the cells as building the tissue. We are also tempted to understand neurotransmitters (or brain areas) as the "cause" of a simultaneous emotion, behavior, or thought process. However, we would never claim that somehow a street in Newark causes the universe. We do not view the magnification of maps in the same way that we view the magnification of neural tissue or the brain. The question is, why do we assume causation through reductionism, and can we expand our approach and understanding of science, in a radically empirical way, through the Google Map metaphor?