Appendix:

Marginal monsters and degradation rituals

Bruner is well aware of the institutional dangers of his 'left-handed' tendencies. Indeed, in discussing the attack of the computationalists on those still wanting to talk in terms of intentionality and agency, he notes that "there were brave holdouts against the new anti-intentionalism, like philosophers John Searle and Charles Taylor, or the psychologist Kenneth Gergen, or the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, but their views were marginalized by the majoritarians of mainstream computationalism" (Bruner, 1990, pp.9-10). And in practice, to be marginalized, is to have what one says or writes rendered 'invisible' within the discipline; one's voice is excluded from the conversation, from the back and forth process of criticism and the growth of knowledge. To the extent that marginal figures do not reproduce a discipline's discursive regime (but tend, in fact, to upset it!), their work is accounted unintelligible, insignificant, or inconsequential, and people's mainstream professional reputation does not suffer if one remains ignorant of it. Bruner himself has often teetered on the brink of precisely this fate. For - besides his recent apostasy in Acts of Meaning - he has always been one of the "monsters" (to use Foucault's term) prowling on the growing edges of the discipline, attempting time and again to open up new topics of investigation (while at the same time being continually concerned also, with developing new explanatory concepts to bring them as soon as possible to order).

          Thus, during his time in Oxford in 1976, after having delivered his Herbert Spencer Lecture, Intentionality and the Image of Man, he too found himself placed in the ranks of the "brave holdouts," and marginalized (see Bruner, 1983, p.265). For after he had delivered it, the members of his Oxford Department of Psychology organized a seminar to which they invited him, and in which they one by one rebutted (and ridiculed ) what he had said in the lecture. He was invited to reply to their rebuttals, which he did, and soon after left Oxford. He comments on the process of his ritual exclusion as follows: "my friends referred to it as the 'Bruner-bashing seminar'. It was in the high English academic abrasive tradition. I was never much good at it. But at least it aired the issues" (p.265). He does not, however, analyze it any further; he does not see it as having any connection with what he now sees as the unfortunate direction taken in the first cognitive revolution. Indeed, in going on to ponder the reasons for its current revisioning, its shift of focus from meaning to form, Bruner (1990) suggests that "it would make an absorbing essay in the intellectual history of the last quarter-century to trace what happened to the originating impulse of the cognitive revolution, how it became fractionated and technicalized" (p.4). But here also, he goes no further. He simply adds: "The full story had best be left to intellectual historians."

          But this, it seems to me, is precisely what we must not do: for it is events of just this kind that a cultural psychology of the kind Bruner envisages should help us to understand. Indeed, in discussing the ways of meaning-making intrinsic to a culture, he himself maintains, that they are "not only shared by a community, but conserved, elaborated, and passed on to succeeding generations who, by virtue of this transmission, continue to maintain the culture's identity and way of life. Culture in this sense is superorganic. But it shapes the mind's of individuals as well" (Bruner, 1996, p.3) - and, we might add, not only an individual's mind, but their very way of being in the world, morally, as well. Its not what goes on inside an individual's head, but what their heads go on inside of, that matters.

          I now want to apply this account of a culture's attempt to conserve itself, by influencing the shape of person's way of being in the world, to the activities of Bruner's Oxford colleagues - while bearing in mind his emphasis above, on attending to "the practices in which 'the meanings of Self' are achieved and put to use (Bruner, 1990, p.116). For what he attributes just to the "institutionally appalling" and "unhappy" (Bruner, 1983, p.264) nature of the Oxford department - due, he suggests, to the fact that only three British psychologists had ever been elected to the Royal Society at that time, and that there was thus "more than a little self-hatred amongst British psychologists" (Bruner, 1983, p.264) - should, I think, be to an extent attributed also to the cultural practices of academic psychology at large. For at work in our intellectual practices, both in their institutional and textual forms (Shotter, in press), and in their empirical methodologies, are forms of relationship that are, as they unfold, inevitably of a degrading and humiliating kind (Shotter, 1991; Still, 1991). Indeed, as I see it, Bruner's ritual degradation at Oxford and the degradation of individual people's unique 'inner lives' by academic psychologists are all of piece: they both signal the failure to balance the doing of justice to one's own claims to justice with those of a unique other or otherness.

          Garfinkel (1956) defines any communicative work between people, in which the public identity of a person is transformed into a type lower in a local status hierarchy, as a "status degradation ceremony;" and he sets out a number of conditions to be met if such 'ceremonies' or 'rituals' are to be successful. First, among them, is that the victim should be "removed from the realm of their everyday character and be made to stand out as 'out of the ordinary'" (p.422) - which a description of them in the "experience-distant" (Geertz, 1979) terms of a scientific expert, of course, achieves. Secondly, what is unique and utterly idiosyncratic about them must also be ignored, and they should be presented as an instance of a type. Moreover, as such, the type should be presented as a dialectal counterpart to a preferred type - as indeed, entities which are blindly caused to move by general forces unknown to them are, when compared with those who act with foresight and understanding in relation to particular circumstances. Thirdly, the degradation or denunciation must be done, not by a private individual but by public figures who have been, so to speak, licensed to speak with the supra-personal values of the community in mind - as again, scientists in our scientific culture are qualified to do. And finally, the denouncers must distance themselves from those to be denounced, so as not to degrade themselves in the process: the degraded individual has to be seen as "ritually separated from a place in the legitimate order" (p.210). Thus, not only are those we study constructed as not being 'one of us', they are also constructed as monological beings, as self-contained individuals, as "essentially the proprietor[s] of [their] own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them" (Macpherson, 1962, p.3).

          Now clearly, Bruner was subjected in Oxford to just such a ritual, in which he as an individual was ceremoniously excluded from a legitimate place in the proper academic scheme of things. But, rather than having its origins in the self-hatred of any of the individuals concerned, as he suggests, if the account above is correct, we can see it as having its origins in the culture of a set of individualistic and monological institutional and research practices mutually supportative of each other. Indeed, as I see it, it is just these practices, especially when they can function in privileged institutions unchecked by any need to be accountable to any of the ordinary people to whom they are applied, that lead, not just to the fractionation and technicalization of psychology that worries Bruner, but in instatiating in effect the procedures outlined by Garfinkel (1956), to the moral degradation of all to whom they are applied. Their main deficit is that, institutionally, they need take no account of, as Bruner (1996) puts it, the "'network of mutual expectations' that is the matrix on which [a common] culture is constructed" (Bruner, 1996, p.184). But what is involved in doing this? And are the ways in which Bruner attempts to take cultural matters into account adequate? Isn't his tendency immediately to seek explanations for many of the phenomena he studies at odds with his interest in our practices of Self?