Response to Parker

There is much to comment on regarding Ian Parker's "Against Postmodernism,"  an article which appears in the most recent issue of Theory & Psychology. 
Inseparable from the substantive issues he presents relative to Marxism, 
postmodernism and power are quite serious problems concerning the logic of 
his argument and misrepresentations and distortions of the positions of many 
postmodern psychologists and philosophers he discusses. We will be 
commenting on these issues at a later time. For now, we confine our response 
to the issue of power, not as an abstraction in the manner in which Parker 
raises it, but in life-as-lived - both in the university and outside of it. 

There's more than a bit of irony in the fact that, in an essay so concerned 
with a radical Marxist agenda, Parker exhibits a complete lack of 
self-reflection about how he might be impacted on by his own bourgeois 
location, the university. Both his posture as the official Marxist and his 
commitment to Marxism as an epistemology (and, thereby, his stature as the 
official knower) have their roots in his academic position. Universities 
bestow power (perhaps, more accurately, authority) on those they hire to 
function as official knowers. In all too many instances, those academics who 
consider themselves Marxists, radicals or revolutionaries appear to be 
shockingly oblivious to the implications that their institutional location 
has on their thinking ('critical' or otherwise). Among the things that an 
academic location appears to do is make it exceedingly difficult to 
recognize differences between work within the academy and work carried out 
in other contexts. Parker's article embodies this unself-reflective 
institutional bias. 

His portrayal of and attitude toward our twenty-plus year non-university-based 
practice  exemplifies this. It is another page in the story of the 
unwillingness of the psychological establishment (especially the 
left/progressive establishment) to look seriously at things that are outside 
the official institutions of knowing (see Holzman, in press). His critique 
of our work is made under the pretext that we are just like him, that ours 
is just another bona fide institution. But Parker knows better than this. He 
and we have a decade-long political/intellectual relationship and he is well 
aware of our unique independent institutional location. That we are a 
different sort of historical phenomenon than he is has been the topic of 
many fruitful discussions among us, both in print (see Parker, 1995 and 
Holzman, 1995) and out. 

Just how different are we from Parker? The institutions and community which 
we, along with hundreds of others, have brought into existence and nurtured 
these past decades (the East Side Institute for Short Term Psychotherapy, 
the East Side Center for Social Therapy and its affiliated therapy centers 
in other US cities, the Castillo Theatre, the All Stars Talent Show Network, 
the Development School for Youth, the Community Literacy Research Project, 
Inc. and the Committee for a Unified Independent Party) are not funded, 
controlled or validated by any government institution or university. They 
weren't  built with government grants or taxpayers' money, but through years 
of standing on street corners and knocking on doors, asking ordinary people 
to support independent, progressive psychology, culture and politics. No one 
learned about our work in a college text or university lecture, but from our 
community organizing. Our institutions don't function according to the 
hierarchical structure of traditional institutions. Our training center, the 
East Side Institute, gives no grades, degrees or tenure. Our therapy centers 
do not diagnose and there are no rules (implicit or explicit) against 
clients socializing with other clients or therapists. The All Stars Talent 
Show Network, our youth development organization, produces talent shows at 
which everyone who auditions gets into the show.  Everyone connected with 
the Castillo Theatre, including the actors, producers, set designers, etc. 
serve on the house staff when the house is open. The radically democratic 
collectivity we have built emerged as an inseparable part of what we were 
building, and it continues to evolve. Rooted in the dialectic relationship 
being/ becoming, our 'business' is creating becoming. Parker is in the 
business of critiquing what is. 

At a minimum, Parker should have made note of these differences instead of 
lumping our work with that of academics for his critique. But he didn't, and 
instead treats us as if we were part of the university system instead of a 
group of people who self-consciously tried to create a research environment 
as free as possible of the biases of the official institution of knowing. It 
doesn't follow from our intentions or practice that we've succeeded, but it 
does follow that any honest and serious analysis of our work needs to take 
this into account from the very beginning. 

Parker's failure to do so leads him to make some fairly serious blunders, 
given his moral/political commitment as a Marxist. Take, for example, his 
critique of our collectivism. Parker says, 
 

We do not understand collectivism superficially as people coming together, 
which is what Parker implies as he goes on to describe an even worse danger 
of collectivism:  "The pitfalls of collectivism in postmodernism pale into 
insignificance, however, when we discover what it has spawned, in a powerful 
strain of individualism" (p. 620). His characterization follows. 
 

In 1995 Parker published an article in which he critically examined 
published articles that attacked our organizations as a 'cult' and one of us 
(Newman) as a 'guru.' Dismissing these charges, Parker gave his own critical 
assessment of social therapy, including his worry over the potential danger 
of authoritarianism within our organizations (in other words, we had 
'cult-like' tendencies). By critiquing our work within the pages of Theory & 
Psychology, Parker is now giving us the validation of an official academic 
institution.  At the same time, we find this critique to be little more than 
the same cult charge dressed up in fancy language. 

Even if we were to grant the logic of his argument (which we don't), it 
seems to us that 'a battle of the wills' is better than the hegemony of the 
university - it's emancipatory relative to the authoritarian institution of 
knowing. To claim otherwise is really to self-servingly proclaim oneself 
more valid (by virtue of being the officially-sanctioned keeper of knowledge 
and moral authority) than the people. To do so in the name of Marx is 
remarkable. We wonder if this whole argument reduces to mere pragmatism: "If 
everything's up for grabs, will I lose my job?" 

Other academics have had the same worry about postmodernism. For example, Louis Menand, a professor of humanities at City University of New York, has 
warned of the dangers postmodernism poses to the future of American liberal 
education (Menand, 1995). Our discussion of Menand's pragmatism in The End of Knowing (the book which Parker puts forth as the basis for his critique 
of us), is helpful here, for he too uses a critique of postmodernism to 
defend his position as an official knower. To his credit, Menand honestly 
and forthrightly presents his pragmatic self-interest.  Pointing out that 
the postmodernists' criticism of traditional forms of knowledge undermines 
the university as the officially-sanctioned location of knowledge and takes 
away its reason for being; without that, he says, "I think people will worry 
what they're paying for" (p. 143). He continues, 
 

Parker is not a neo-liberal pragmatist like Menand. He is a Marxist critic 
of the university who gets all the benefits of being validated by the 
university. We have no problem with this, except when it leads him to forget 
or distort who we are. 

Holzman, L. (1995). "Wrong," said Fred. A response to Parker. Changes, An International Journal of Psychology and Psychotherapy, 13, 1, 23-26. 

Holzman, L. (Ed.), (in press). Introduction. Performing Psychology: A
Postmodern Culture of the Mind.  New York: Routledge. 

Jameson, F. (1984).  Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism. New Left Review.  146, 53-92. 

Menand, L. (1995). Marketing postmodernism.  In R. Orrill, Ed., The
Condition of American Liberal Education: Pragmatism and a Changing
Tradition. New York: College Entrance Examination Board. 

Newman, F and Holzman, L. (1997). The End of Knowing: A New, Developmental Way of Learning. London: Routledge. 

Nietzsche, F. (1977).  A Nietzsche Reader.  Harmondsworth: Penguin.
   (citation from  in Parker (1988).)

Parker, I. (1995). "right", said Fred, "I'm too sexy for bourgeois group 
therapy": the case of the Institute for Social Therapy.  Changes, An
International Journal of Psychology and Psychotherapy, 13(1), 1-22. 

Parker, I. (1998).  Against postmodernism: Psychology in cultural context. 
Theory & Psychology, (8,5), 601-627. 

Also see: 
PMTH NEWS articles on Parker's article.
Review of End of Knowing by Tom Strong
Response to Tom Strong's review by Holzman and Newman
And see PMTH articles on Holzman and Newman: 
  Lyotardian Paganism and Holzman and Newman
  On the End of Knowing
  More on newman & Holzman's Social Therapy