A “post-psychological” curiosity about subjectivities and standards

A current YouTube video shows an infant first happily operating a tablet, then attempting in vain to zoom in and browse a paper magazine, trying to “pinch” and “swipe” with her cute little fingers. Its title: “A magazine is an iPad that doesn’t work”. ¹

The image of an infant conveys the formation of subjectivities innocently applying standards built into artifacts by other subjects. At first sight, the video displays the funny co-creation of new distinctions and values unintended by designers: the future is marching ahead of us—when that baby grows up, she will never even read a paper magazine. On reflection, however, one wonders whether the video is not precisely a veiled commercial: Apple, brand of the future! Now, gloomy sci-fi imageries begin to emerge, dark fantasies of cold-hearted human engineers applying a psychology of perception, of human-machine interface, etc., to shape the choices of tomorrow’s consumers. Yet again, if this is so, does the video itself not contribute to the evolving resistance to Apple hegemony? Is it in fact the work of a daring whistle-blower?

This special issue on Subjectivities and Standards seeks to develop insights into the relationship between the making of subjectivity (subjectification) and processes of scientific, technological, institutional, educational, and medical standardization. This special issue asks the overall questions: How do human subjects establish standards—and how do standards form human subjects—in the contemporary globalized world? It digs into the interchange of standardizations and subjectifications; and it combines this approach with a curiosity about the role and impact of classic and contemporary psychology itself on these processes.

The magazine/iPad video can be said to prompt such a, let us say, post-psychological curiosity. The term “post-psychology” establishes a sequence: first, the psychology of perception and motor operations; then, the contextualization of it as shaped in historically evolving socio-cultural forms and standards; finally, the reflection of psychology itself as among those latter, and questionably so, in a kind of “second order” psychology (Brown & Stenner, 2009).

It is tempting to take the sequence to describe a linear historical trajectory: post-psychological curiosity comes after psychology. It arises with the recent approaches following and overcoming the modern scientific and/or humanistic psychologies of the 20th century, such as discursive, post-structuralist, post-constructionist, and post-human psychology. Yet the reflexivity in which it culminates turns it back on itself to complicate the—ironically modernist—notion of such epochal change.

For one thing, if post-psychology is after psychology as its second order, it is also itself a psychology. It does not abandon psychology, but rethinks it in a new context and in the light of the complexities of contemporary society, with which psychology interacts and to which it contributes. And as it does so, it itself interacts and contributes, not just as epistemology or science studies, but as a psychology that can be curious about, for instance, how “intuitive design” is conceptualized in the psychology of human-machine interface, how that plays out when infant habits are formed, and how it might spur reflection and resistance. For another, the sequence turns out to be recurring. If it is brand new, it is also at least as old as psychology itself (cf. Teo, 2005). Are not the points made in the video about Vygotskian concept-formations, or Jamesian habits? Just as post-modernism was always an aspect and a possibility in modernism, post-psychology is innate to psychology, as a reflection of itself. A post-psychological reading of Vygotsky or James would not reject them as modernists who would join the hype of scientific human engineering—even if perhaps they would, too—but rather, dig out the critical reflections and standpoints with which they situated themselves and established legacies for the resistance to hegemonic standardizations such as those of Apple technologies.

Why “standards”? A standard is an abstract reproduction of certain aspects of practice and being, used across time and place to shape and regulate them (Bowker & Star, 1999; Busch, 2011). This broad definition summons an ancient issue concerning the performativity of texts and other models, casting them as tools, prototypes, and constraints rather than as immaterial images or res cogitans. Crucially, while standards are (more or less intentionally) made and used by human subjects, they are also crucial in the formation of subjects. Our reflexivity, selfhood, and identity are mediated by them, and we stand out as “subjects” both by submitting to them and by mastering them (Butler, 1997; Nissen, 2012). Although any practice can be said to imply immanent standards, approaching these through their externalization as governance, embodied in, and mediated by, model artifacts, provides the lens of an actuality. Schools have standardized language, knowledge, and learning for millennia, but we all recognize ourselves to be in the midst of new attempts to standardize. Current examples could include the standards of school performance measured and sanctioned in the PISA studies (Programme for International Student Assessment), the health standards embodied in the ICD or DSM, or in the evidence-basing of treatment practices, or of course, the bibliometrics that seem to dictate or thwart the aspirations of academics.

Invoking these examples, we can rely on our readership of theoretical psychologists to implicitly accept that we spontaneously situate ourselves on the outside of the process; after all, we are agentic subjects who reflect on our singular historical situation in complex theoretical terms. And obviously, in the very process of remodeling the model, there is an element of distancing, of escape. Yet, what happens when we thus declare the agentive subjects we are supposed to be? Does not this third-order remodeling itself aspire to relevance, and thus impose second-order standards?

Thus, we have placed Paul Stenner’s (2016) article on “On standards and values” at the start of our special issue, not only on account of the high expectations that our readers will rightly entertain, but also to mark a decisive break with any facile assumptions of externality. If standards objectify values, they spring from the heart of subjectivity, even if they may incur a reversal to parodies of the values they were supposed to maintain. This is not just a fine point of detail; rather, it reconnects critical social science with its own raison d’être in a perhaps surprising way. The project of deconstructing—or revealing the parody in—the false universalistic claims of standardizing sciences tends to result in a world of pure situated multiplicity. Stenner takes up a recent work of Heuts and Mol (2013) for a friendly critique. Yet, as any selfhood, this critical project itself must presuppose—not just the “less than many” with which Mol elsewhere counterweighs her “more than one” (2002), but even “a world of value which points beyond and exceeds passing circumstance” (Stenner, 2016, p. 144)—all the way to “infinity.” See for yourself: is Stenner right in suggesting that we might learn of this from references far from both science and (critical social) science studies, such as Proust, Spinoza, and Kierkegaard, aside from, of course, his principal inspiration, Whitehead?

Stenner can thus be said to push forward the “intra-action” (Barad, 2007) or dialectical unity of standards and subjects, and thus to contribute to bridging the existing gulf in research and intervention between, on the one hand, traditions for defining and using standards, and, on the other hand, traditions focusing on their description and critique. These are important motivations for this special issue. The two terms “subjects” and “standards” are commonly regarded as mutually excluding and opposite. This is not only the case with the sciences that are deeply involved in standardization (e.g., health, economics—and also some parts of psychology and education) and eschew subjectivity as synonymous with error. Even critical approaches often seek to explore or defend subjectivity as opposed to standards. Either it is seen to unfold beyond standardization (e.g., in an embodied, situated tinkering in everyday life) or it is viewed as affected, alienated, or oppressed by standards and processes of standardization. At a methodological level, sciences split up in quantitative and qualitative research that is either defined by or defined against standardization or subjectivity, respectively.

To an extent, this is also Morten Nissen’s (2016) problem. His article on “Standards and Standpoints” originated as an attempt to reconstruct the concept of standard at the beginning of the research project from which the idea for this special issue originated, ² setting off from the wish to overcome the dichotomy. For this purpose, he seeks to unite two ways of accomplishing that unity: on the one hand, thinking of standards as phenomenologically immanent in any practice, primary to any rendering, and on the other hand, seeing them as first of all negotiated, objectified, and imposed to imprint subjectivity. His bid for mediation is critique and hope as implied in both approaches to standards, even if they appear to be mostly descriptive—and not only in the (use of) standards that they study. From this follows a recognition of the difficulties in articulating standpoint, and the proposal of a “dialectics of standard and standpoint.”

In a similar vein, yet drawing on a different set of theories, Malou Juelskjær and Dorthe Staunæs (2016) trace how standards, as models of and for practice, are moments in the movement of subjectivity and vice versa, in their article “Orchestrating Intensities and Rhythms.” They analyze how contemporary post-psychologies, when used as psy-leadership tools in order to reach new standards, create new work around the standards, and may also create new subjectivities. In contemporary education, this implies a shift from a leading of identities, categories, and structures, towards leading and organizing intensities and senses, flows, and rhythms.

The shift is also pointed out by Mads Bank (2016), who analyzes how professionals working with young drug users are critical towards standards from psychology and evidence-based methods and how they are “Enacting (Post)Psychological Standards in Social Work,” by drawing on post-modern and critical traditions in psychology. Through a both critical and affirmative use of governmentality studies, Bank analyzes the difference between (psychological) standards that appropriate subjectivity as an object of knowledge and “2nd order,” “user-driven,” and “affective” standards that subjectify through other logics and registers. These new processes of standardization expand the field of intervention beyond the “users,” and enact a “post-psychological” ontology of becoming.

As mentioned, the deeper concept of standards, which is at stake in this special issue, has a long history in philosophy, but also in theoretical psychology. Psychology has always spanned both sides of the abovementioned divide: defined itself by standards and standardized methodologies, worked to set standards, but also theorized standards as (sometimes problematic) cultural artifacts. This is why a post-psychological approach, continuing this tradition reflexively, simultaneously conceptualizing epistemologies and ontologies of subjects and standards, has the capacity to intervene in current social debates on, for instance, notions of “high standards” and the many reforms aiming at “living up to local, national, and global standards.” Connecting global, local, and national is the key ambition of the article by Katja Brøgger and Dorthe Staunæs (2016): “Standards and Self-Implosion.” While theories of contagion are often used as causal explanations for the spread of standards, Brøgger and Staunæs challenge this approach to standards as something happening to organizations and people by investigating how people take part in the standardization processes themselves.

An underlying thread in all the articles is the temporality and spatiality of these processes. At first glance, standardization stabilizes a given form, and marks an end to a sundry prehistory. Yet of course, this is itself a transformation, and, in later or post-Modernity, there are few who would expect any current round of standardization to be the last. At another level, standardization seems to aim at capturing process—to sanction linear time, to homogenize effects, and to narrow the focus of past, present, and future. Yet this very ambition is perhaps what produces a residual of hybrid and non-distinct temporalities that must be addressed. Standards help or force us to focus, and thus forget. This links the temporal dimension of standards with the spatial: reaching, moving, regulating across topoi, standards establish the local and the global and configure the planes of our awareness. Thereby standards become integral to local as well as global, momentary as well as longitudinal, processes of subjectification. Although standards often appear to stand opposed to anything affective, they are often involved in contagious processes across places and boundaries. Thus the entanglements of standards and subjects can be investigated as spatialities and as possible of both contracting and expanding the world. These temporal and spatial complexities again call for and welcome a post-psychological curiosity. This issue of temporality is at stake also in the contribution by Brøgger and Staunæs, where the high speed of standardization processes and colliding temporalities between past, present, and future result in self-implosion and nausea in and among educational subjectivities. Not because of emotional contagion or sickness, but due to reconfigured temporalities and affective economies put into motion by processes of standardization.

Keis, Nymann Nielsen, and Nissen’s “User-Driven Standards in a Mutual Help Context” (2016) sets out to trace the co-emergence of standards and subjects in a special kind of place that defines a particular temporality: The 12-step fellowships. Addressing addictions as “diseases of the will,” these are known to highlight and radicalize the paradoxes inherent to the prevalent conception of subjectivity, starting from the idea of a freely chosen surrender in the face of an unmanageable life. What this liminal space can make appear is a “logic of care” (Mol, 2008) that can disturb the expected distribution of subjects and standards in what seems to be an unquestioned global standard which anyone is free to interpret and concretize at will.

Refreshingly, the insistence on thinking the co-constitution and unity of standards and subjects soon inspires the question of its possible absence. Matt Allen and Steve Brown’s “Undecided Life” (2016) takes up accounts of the bereaved and survivors of terrorist attacks. Rather than clear expressions of subjectivities formed in positions provided by established standards, what is really problematic is to be de-subjectified by being kept suspended between them in “holding categories”: “There are worse things than being subjectified” (pp. 279–80). It might be an overlooked aspect of subject-formation how the “dividual” of various standards needs support in order to be converted into clear subjective states—rather than simply a heterogeneous gathering of affects and lines of possible actions lumped together in a residual state. If that support tends to decompose along with the crumbling ideological unity of state apparatuses, it seems all the more vital to articulate the civic communities of care that may emerge to address the plight of the “cranked subjects.”

We hope this special issue of Standards and Subjectivities will encourage our readers to think along and challenge some of the analytical lines presented and thereby to keep on theorizing possible relations between, or indeed beyond, subjectivities and standards.

Enjoy!