Lets take Wittgenstein at his word when he tells us:
 

Here on PMTH, this is easy for us to do.  So many of us therapists are drawn to Lyotard's visionary postmodernism, and   we work together in a mutual quest for paralogy.

But there is another side to postmodernism and we would be wise to take it into account.   When critics complain about pomo they often have in mind what I have christened "nostalgic postmodernism."  We need to remind ourselves of this dark side of pomo-- because it is part of us and because our own vision is diminished if we forget it.

Nostalgic postmodernism  is the part of us that wishes things were simpler, the part that dreams of days beneath the trees and climbing over hills, the part that wishes to forget all about television and computers, that wishes all the people we cared about could collect in a satisfying togetherness out in some unpolluted pasture on a Saturday afternoon.

Remembering that part of ourselves, let's listen, for a moment, to the haunting voice of the king of nostalgic postmodernism, Jean Baudrillard.

He will tell us how badly we create our lives and, moreover, how hopeless it is to try to make things better.  This is social constructionism of a completely different stripe that Gergen and Shotter, or than Anderson and Goolishian.  Let's not forget it.  Some of the public knows it, and when they hear us saying postmodernism is beautiful, they may, thinking of Baudrillard, wonder if we have really lost our minds.

Let me give you Baudrillard's voice by providing you with my summary of a classic Baudrillard paper, Plastic Surgery for the Other.  If you so desire, you can click on the title of my summary and in cyberspace speed you will be landed on the site of the original, or some copy thereof.
Many of Baudrillard's papers are available online, by the way, and he is a very prolific author.

If you do decide to go the original article, and you tire of reading it, I hope you at least page down to the last paragraph.  There you will find this author's  trademark kind of conclusion where he says:
 

A few days ago PMTH subscriberTom Strong contributed a review of a book called The End of Knowing by Fred Newman and Lois Holzman.  Perhaps, you recall my telling you then that I had recently seen a wonderful play that Newman had written on Wittgenstein, a play that he had been invited to put on at the recent American Psychological Association convention in San Francisco.  Recall now?  If not, click here and read the original article.

Anyway,  it has been a few days since Strong's review appeared PMTH NEWS, but today it is our good fortunate to have a response to that review posted by Holzman that was apparently co-written by Newman.  Although Holzman posted her response to the list late Tuesday evening, for your convenience I am publishing it here as a web page.  That way so we can continue to refer to it over the next few days.

I understand that Holzman or Newman, or perhaps Joyce Datner who works with them and is also a PMTH subscriber, or perhaps all three, will respond to some questions from us.

There are so many things we might ask them to elaborate.  Let me name a few that occur to me and you choose among them or, please, make up your own:
 

1. Holzman & Newman say they are pleased that Strong recognized that they went beyond Shotter and Gergen.  But in what way do they go beyond Shotter and Gergen?  Is this a way of saying their system is better than that of either Gergen or Shotter?  If so, in what way do they claim that it is better?
2. Strong says simply that Newman and Holzman regard social constructionism as "anachronistic for holding to enduring meaning...."  But in what way is social construction dated?  And why does it matter?  Why is being "anachronistic important?  We don't want to choose theories on the basis of whether they are fashionable.
3. Newman & Holzman say that Strong was wrong to think that their system is focused on the present.  In fact, they said, it is historically rooted.  But I want to know: How does one use dramatic performances to work with historically rooted issues?

[A] nice, well-organized narrative, with everything in its place, prevents the appearance of alternative circumstantial possibilities, amongst which, if we are to be the authors of our own lives, we must be free to judge.

The fundamental prejudice of the Enlightenment is the prejudice against prejudice itself, which denies tradition its power.

[T]he subject's centre of gravity is this present synthesis of the past which we call history.

Let me, however, tell you a little about the authors.  First, I want you to know that not only is Holzman a PMTH subscriber but so are several other people who work with her, such as Joyce Datner, Director of the West Coast Center Social Therapy, and Murray Dabby,  whom I believe directs the Atlanta Center for Short Term Therapy.  I want you to know, too, that Fred Newman is, himself, a Wittgensteinian philosopher (Ph.D. from Stanford, I believe).  Holzman's specialty is Vygotsky.  Isn't that a combination?

But what I want to tell you mostly is that, at the last American Psychological Association Convention, I went to a play that was sponsored by the APA, and the play was written by (and perhaps directed by) Fred Newman.  Lois Holzman was one of several accomplished actors in the play.

It was a WONDERFUL play!  It was about Wittgenstein and language!  And it was sooo funny!    PMTH subscriber Helen Shoemaker went with me.  Ask her what she thought.  I heard her laughing.

It was my first time to meet Lois Holzman, but I should tell you she and Newman take therapy to a very different place than my paralogy.  And it's a good place. But I want to say this, too.  It was, perhaps, a year before this play that I was invited to make a presentation at their West Coast Therapy Center and I talked, among other things, about paralogy.  I felt my ideas very well received.

What would you expect?  There is room, of course, for a variety of therapy modalities in postmodernity.  It is modernity that fights to usurp the field.

Let Newman and Holzman tell you about their postmodern therapy.  But, first, look at Tom Strong's review of their book.
 

I notice that a number of people at PMTH have been talking broadly about authors who are not often consider "postmodern."  I think this is good.  David Pocock made the point in a recent article we have on PMTH that we too often forget the past and and think we are inventing the wheel all over again.  I agree.

Jerry Shaffer has given us a clear summary of a recent paper written by Salvador Minuchin in our postmodern era.  Read the summary and you'll see what Minuchin thinks of Narrative Family Therapy.

I understand that the article is followed by a reply from Gene Combs and Jill Friedman, as well as Karl Tomm and Carlos Sluzki.  Shaffer does not summarize their responses but he does give us a tease.  He says they are  thoughtful and worth looking into.

Okay, I'm curious.  Anybody out there want to summarize the response of these four thinkers to Minuchin's criticism of Narrative Family Therapy?
 

As I predicted, we were all more active posting on Saturday than we were on Friday.  No one violunteered a hypothesis, however, as to why not only PMTH but other listservs seem to have this pattern.

Another thing to note is that Nick Drury has almost caught up with Diana Cook and David Pocock in the reading of Wittgenstein.  He has been working on this for quite a while and during this time Diana Cook and Pocock have been moving at a somewhat slower rate to allow Drury to catch up.  Now the three of them will move at a face pace through the next 25 or so aphorism in hopes of catching up with Judy Weintraub, Ulf Korman and Harry Korman shortly after the beginning of next year.
Click here to read about Thursday.  Another noticeable content in our Saturday discussions is that numerous people agreed that Minuchin had had a powerful influence on their sense of family therapy - whether or not he was postmodern.  This raises the issue of his postmodernism and many of us are hoping to get a closer look at the article Jerry Shaffer recently described for us as well as a look at the responses.
 

Thursday,  under this column, I gave you a quotation of Kenneth Gergen's in which he told us that there were substantial gains in choosing social constructionism over constructivism.  And, yesterday I reviewed an article by Kenneth Gergen (1989) in which he argued long and hard for the advantages of social constructionism over constructivism.  The advantages of constructionism, Gergen maintained, are that, unlike constructivism, it keeps us from getting mired in the paradoxes of solipsism.   Rather than trying to look into people's private minds, as constructivism does, constructionism, he explained, , looks at the way language and other cultural public practices create our lives and values the way they are.

Today, I would like to give you a related quotation from John Shotter.  In this article Shotter, like Gergen, talks about the way we 'construct' our illusions and biases with language, but here Shotter is talking about a particular illusion, the illusion that our inner individuality is truly separate from others,  or, in Shotter's words, the "illusion that we are individuals." Shotter says:
 

I think the meaning of this passage may be explained by yesterday's discussion of Salivador Minuchin on PMTH.  In discussing Minuchin Judy Weintraub said she would never be able to see a person's pathology as "individual" again.  After Minuchin, psychological "pathology" is seen as a symptom of a certain organization of the group interaction.

Shotter, I believe,  is making a similar point. Not only do groups construct individual pathology (by skapegoating and so forth) but they also construct all sorts of psychological states that we consider individual, such as love, defensiveness, dominance, meekness, timidity.  For example, a person is more likely to be defensive if conversational partners are insulting, more likely to feel in love if conversational partners are loving, and a person can only be funny if listeners are able to get the joke.

In sum,  like Gergen, Shotter  wants us to focus on what goes on between people linguistically and not to be distracted by trying to appear into the privacy of their consciousness.

quote is from:
Shotter, John.Conversational Realities.Sage, 993.

But that's another story.  For now, if you're interested, just look at my summary of Gergen's paper and make of it what you will.
 

Wittgenstein Readings

The Wittgenstein readings can all be identified by a subject head that says something like "LW reading #22".  That makes them easy for you to delete them unread if you consider them
uninteresting.  The number in the subject head tells you what aphorism is being read.

These readings have been going on for some time, years in fact, and they involve my posting an original "reading" (the aphorism and a commentary) and a
small group of "readers" posting a response to my reading.  Then the readers and I write back and forth a few times.

The arrangement is that these readings will be made available for others to study over our shoulder, but the readings themselves are limited, by and large, to the people who have been participating in this project for some time.  Anything else would make the project unwieldly.

However, if you have a particular question or comment you want to make occasionally, go ahead.  The readers might respond. Also, at times Jerry Shaffer has been kind enough to respond to an invitation by posting commentary - so the rules for who is encouraged to participate are provisional.

An introductory article on Wittggenstein's concept of a language-game is available through the PMTH Weekly
 
 
 

In responding to Tom Conran's post yesterday, I made a distinction between nostalgic and visionary postmodernism.  Lyotard, I claim, is visionary, but many other postmodern theorists are nostalgic.

Today both Peter Rober and Judy Weintraub called for more discussion of nostalgic postmodernism.

What is it that we have lost as we have made this turn into postmodernity?  What is it that you miss from old modernity?
 
 

Why can a dog feel fear but not remorse?  Would it be right to say "Because he can't talk"?

And then Jerry Shaffer led Tom Strong and me into a meaningful review of postmodern history, what modernity was, premodernity, and even preliterate society.  (Where was Andy Lock who talked yesterday about postmodernism and his recent book on prehistorical man?)

And while all of this was going on, Shaffer and Judy Weintraub continued to hash out the intricacies of Kuhnian paradigm revolutions.

Is it any wonder that I'm a Lyotardian visionary paralogist?  With you folks to inspire me?
 
 

Nothing could be more central to PMTH discussion than whether values exist in a postmodern world.  Are postmoderns nihilists?  Or do they, as Lyotard suggests, have values?

Tuesday there was a controversy on PMTH as to whether it is even possible for postmoderns to have values better than Hitler's.  One person took the position that formalized values acquired from God were  inherently better than less defined postmodern values.

Others argued that postmodern values were psychologically real.  They are acquired through our socialization process as children and thrive in postmodern paralogy.
 
 

Today, Tom Strong gives us a review of a new book by Jonathan Potter called Representing reality: Discourse, rhetoric and social construction.   The review gives the reader a good sense of this  important book.  As you will see from Strong's  review, Potter's deconstructs the notion that scientific fact is the undestructible bedrock of our culture's knowledge. What is presented as "scientific fact" to the public is, Potter argues, ambiguous data packaged in a rhetoric that distracts from the selection bias of the sample, the way others would have interpreted things differently, and even from the extent that vested interests have biased the subject matter  being studied.

I have ordered my copy of this book, but I have not yet read it.  Still, I have read books with a similar thesis and they are designed to give us a much less romantic picture of the nitty gritty of research process.

The reader interested in further study of the way science packages data and turns it into apparently indestructible fact, consider reading:

Latour, Bruno and Woolgar. (1986).  Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts. Princeton University Press.
 

Nick Drury has contributed a note for the PMTH collection on Maturana and Varela as they compare to Kenneth Gergen.  For a while, not long ago, the Maturana and Varela theory of autopoesis was particularly inspiring to family therapists.

Drury tells us his theory us his theory as to why autopoesis is now being upstaged by the postmodern writing of Kenneth Gergen.

Click here to see Drury's note
or click here to see a site on
Maturana and Varela's theory of autopoesis

Fleck, Ludwig. (1979).  The genesis and development of a scientific fact.  The Univ of Chicago Press.
 

One of the continuing  discussion points on the PMTH  list recently has been around the distinction between constructionism and constructivism.   Some people think this distinction is important, and others think too much is made of it.

Perhaps, Judy Weintraub is right: These are two sides of the same coin.  Still, Kenneth Gergen does not think so.  He says,
 

And what is it that some good people like David Pocock and Manfred Straehle feel we lose if we give cognitive and constructivism the short stick?

These matters are still up in the air.
Cllick here to link to previous discussions
on constructionism vs constructionism.
 

This distinction may be attributable to a footnote of Kenneth Gergen's in his key paper on Social Constructionism in 1985. In that footnote, Gergen said:
 

Berger, P., & Luckmann, T. (1966).  The social construction of reality.  NY: Doubleday.
Gergen, K. J. (1985).  The social constructionist  movement in modern psychology.  American  Psychologist, 49(3), 266-275.
Watzlawick, P. (Ed.).  (1984). The invented reality. New York: Norton.

Click here to see an article on a conversation we had here at PMTH on social constructionism versus constructivism.
 

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