Rearticulating Motives (Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences) 3031434935, 9783031434938

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Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences

Morten Nissen

Rearticulating Motives

Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences Series Editor Jaan Valsiner Department of Communication and Psychology Aalborg University Aalborg, Denmark

Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences fills the gap in the existing coverage of links between new theoretical advancements in the social and human sciences and their historical roots. Making that linkage is crucial for interdisciplinary synthesis across the disciplines of psychology, anthropology, sociology, history, semiotics, and the political sciences. In contemporary human sciences of the 21st century, there exists increasing differentiation between neurosciences and all other sciences that are aimed at making sense of complex social, psychological, and political processes. This series serves the purpose of (1) coordinating such efforts across the borders of existing human and social sciences, (2) providing an arena for possible inter-disciplinary theoretical synthesis, (3) bringing to the attention of our contemporary scientific community innovative ideas that have been lost in the dustbin of history for no good reason, and (4) providing an arena for international communication between social and human scientists across the world.

Morten Nissen

Rearticulating Motives

Morten Nissen Department of Education Aarhus University Copenhagen NV, Denmark

ISSN 2523-8663     ISSN 2523-8671 (electronic) Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences ISBN 978-3-031-43493-8    ISBN 978-3-031-43494-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43494-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Series Editor’s Preface: Desire for Agency— The Aesthetic of Motivation

Motivation is the central issue of human psychology. Yet it is gloriously understudied within the kind of psychologies that have flourished over the past century. This book—Rearticulating Motives—makes a difference. Not only are issues of motivation brought back into the theoretical center of psychological science through this book, but the whole issue of motivation is appropriately situated within the field of our societal discourses about addictions, therapies, standards, and ordinary human strivings to be some-body in the middle of many-bodies. The unifying theme of this new look at motivation is its aesthetic nature. This is a new focus in psychology at large—to start the inquiry from the most complex phenomena and move analytically downward to the simple, elementary parts of the whole. The whole—Ganzheit (Diriwächter, 2013)—is the target of our scientific analysis. Such complex states of affairs are represented in this book by empirical material from striving human beings who are often dismissed by the rest of us as “addicts.” These “addicts” are often viewed as victims of their own habits—overlooking their efforts to overcome these habits. This is a serious gap in our understanding of the human psyche. The author of this book has spent more than two decades studying practical work. This is the best possible empirical arena for the study of motivation as it reveals the complexity of willful striving to overcome a personally fixed need (what we label “addiction”)—sometimes successfully, but often not. It is here where the personal striving to overcome oneself is situated in the societal demand system of “cure” that is presented to the persons under the various forms of “care.” And it is here where the focus on mete-motives becomes necessary. The meta-motives complement and direct the motives. While motives are socially created inclinations, meta-motives are set up for transforming them. And it is here where culture—in the form of hierarchical self-guidance systems—enters. We create sign systems to which we then attribute the role of external control over us (Valsiner, 1999). Such guidance leads to personal agency supported by social guidance—but at its inception it is still generated by oneself. We have evolved as homo sapiens creating for us as species the potential for the personal desire for agency. The actual creation of this agency takes place through performances—in daily life, v

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Series Editor’s Preface: Desire for Agency—The Aesthetic of Motivation

or on a theatre stage. The latter is the special case of the former. Agency involves innovation—human living is a continuous emergence of improvisational play that leads to construction of motivation and its higher-level counterpart of meta-­ motivation. I find the duality of the motivation and meta-motivation—together with the possibility of their directional vectors varying in their direction—important theoretical innovation. Thus, an athlete motivated to reach highest level of athletic performance can support it with meta-motivational direction vector oriented in the same direction (META-Mot à Motà ENHANCED performance), thus leading to performance escalation. In contrast, a drug addict who tries to overcome the performance of drug consumption (META-Mot à Motà BLOCKED-performance)—leading to performance attenuation. The hierarchical duality of regulation of the motives in action guarantees flexible adjustment for perceived future performance possibilities. There is a general meta-motivational message for psychology as a theoretical science that underlies the specific new look at motivation. Psychology as science needs to consider that performative nature of human striving for agency—and it is here where the role of creating new dramatic events in life comes to our attention. Some of these dramas are set up institutionally—“therapy”, “testing,” and “counseling” are all small theatrical events that involve specific actor roles distributions and librettos for the unfolding of the dramatic performances. Consider the following transformation of ordinary human encounters. When I meet another person and chat with her our social roles are equal, but from the moment she or he becomes designated as a “client” I am turned into a “counsellor”—together with the inequality in the interaction process. This framing sets up my role in unequal terms—that of an advisor. I am expected to give suggestions rather than demands for specific actions. The social power hierarchy becomes further steepened if the other person assumes (or is ascribed) the role of a “patient”—together with my changed social role changed from “advisor” to “curer.” This social role transformation is the result of positioning—which entails the corresponding process of counter-positioning. It is in the relation of these two processes where agency arises. The emerging agency transforms the context of communication. The following exchange (reported on page 167 and highlighted by the author as a crucial changing point in his own thinking) gives us an example of how agency is born in the middle of a “play of counselling” that includes psychologists’ usual measurement tools (rating scales) as applied to impossible objects of measurement: Therapist: But how much would you be willing to do? (referring to putting a marker on a 10-point rating scale introduced before—a usual psychologists’ “measurement” tool) Emily: But I don’t know! Therapist: Make a guess! Emily: (Apologetic laugh) But I do not know! (In English:) I really don’t know. Therapist: I could ask other people, but if I ask you, how worried should I be that it suddenly turns this way? (Points down) Emily: (Changes her voice) Well, there’s a chance it suddenly goes WAY down, like, if I forget to take my MEDICATION, or something like that, right? And of course, that’s not SMART, is it, because, eh, then I could get HOSPITALIZED.

Series Editor’s Preface: Desire for Agency—The Aesthetic of Motivation

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Therapist: (meekly) You wouldn’t want that. Emily: (in a sarcastic tone mocking an adult’s reprimand) I wouldn’t, but this could, AS SUCH, be necessary IF things really go badly. (Nods gravely) For the sake of your OWN health! (p. 164, boldface added)

This example—as the author of this confess as a crucial turning point—constitutes the emergence of agency through parody of the frames of “measurement” and “counselling” into a dramatic performance of the societal game of reprimands in the flow of communication. The push by the therapist to give a “measure” of something that does not exist (and by that act made to be known) resisted by Emily and suggested to be done by guessing leads to her qualitative “jump”—first to the focus on the therapist’s assumed need to worry about Emily, and then to creating a parody of the “therapy play”—the usual reprimand based on a scenario of threat of hospitalization (“for the sake of OWN health”). Not only is the interaction between the two moved from measurement situation to that of ordinary counselling scenarios but the latter is turned into a parody—so we play the game of ordinary invocation of unpleasant future scenarios. Pointing through parody to the ridiculousness of the given counselling situation is a powerful commentary on the habitual action routines of the sincere people who attempt to give care—which might be resisted as it is not trusted. Dramatization is one form of resistance. “We care!” is a frequent claim made in society by various institutions. In our societal discourses, social norms are often introduced by “care” for our own well-­ being. Wearing masks at times of epidemics, going through airport security controls, and giving up smoking are all presented to us by others as if acts of care for our own well-being. Behind the benevolent stated effort of care are social control efforts suggested to be examples of “care.” These efforts might not be directly answered, but it can be done in implicit ways. Parody, irony, and sarcasm can be the main ways to give personal agency to the person in relation to the social control— by laughing off its threats to keep the agency of the person in place. And here is the starting point of meaningful way to distance oneself from the mundane reality through aesthetic performances. Affective generalization through the aesthetic makes agency possible. Affective generalization creates imaginary worlds where agency moves around freely. These worlds are created in space—heterotopias or “other spaces” as indicated by Foucault (1967/1998). We pass through such “other spaces” on our move from one place to another. We do not stay in these spaces. The counterpart of heterotopias in time is heteroduration (to expand Henri Bergson’s notion of duree)— the liberating time segment during which the dramatizing agent laughs off the serious efforts of social institutions to superimpose on conduct a standardized normative frame. Such moments of laughter and ridicule preserve the internal freedom of the Self and grant the possibility for agency. If these were to disappear, as Foucault suggested in his example of ships as prime case of heterotopias that need to be protected: In civilizations without ships the dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police that of the corsairs. (Foucault, 1998, p. 85)

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Series Editor’s Preface: Desire for Agency—The Aesthetic of Motivation

Analogically—if the readiness to create a dramatized novel moment of feelings were to be suppressed, human agency would disappear and human beings become homogeneous mass of social rule followers with high accuracy—but without innovation. The question about counsellors in terms of heteroduration is—are they adventurers together with their clients, or spies of the ways in which the Others are being human? If laughter and parody were to end then human beings would turn into living robots that carry out manualized treatment routines. The general message of this book—motives must be rearticulated in the process of a generalizing, expansive development, in a process of self-overcoming—makes the field of motivation studies inherently developmental. And here it faces a new difficulty—the developmental approach as a whole has had great difficulties to be accepted in psychology since the times of James Mark Baldwin (Valsiner, 2009) and Heinz Werner (Valsiner, 2005). Development is an open-ended process that leads to innovation. This is a basic axiom of the general program of developmental science that makes it distinctly different from the rest of psychology’s ontological assumptions. In each state of being is the process of becoming. The latter is, in principle, unpredictable ahead of the performances that bring something new into being. The focus on motivation and meta-motivation in this book is thus also promoting the understanding of basic developmental functions from the perspective of aesthetic synthesis. Meta-motivation triggers such synthesis in regular motivational processes. So the present book—in its author’s own words—is to outline …multiple movements of thinking that the project of cultivating motives and meta-motives occasion, held together by the story of how they encounter and overcome creatively the alienations and emancipations of psychology, counselling, and aesthetics (pp. 212–213)

This creative overcoming of alienations is something psychology needs for over a long time. It is not an utopia, but a new direction in the human sciences. Hence the focus on meta-motivation as an aesthetic generalization sets the stage for a new look for understanding the depth of the human agency. Aalborg, Denmark Berlin, July, 7, 2023

Jaan Valsiner

Some of the Author’s Debts and Gratitudes

As all academic texts, this book results from the work of many people besides the author. Networks of human practice, and the conditions that make them possible, are widely distributed and mostly unnoticed, and my mention of some names here should be accompanied by the realization that these are only tips of a landscape of icebergs that I am able to see, and acknowledge. But I do so with humility and pleasure. The theme of the book arose from a collaborative work on “rearticulating the formation of motivation” in an interdisciplinary research program by that name (ReforM). Since 2016, this program has provided the kind of community of research that is indispensable for academic work, and through its discussions, the profile of my own approach gradually emerged. Warm thanks for this to my program colleagues Hanne Knudsen, Dorthe Staunæs, Kristine Kousholt, Jette Kofoed, Jens Erik Kristensen, Søren Christensen, Malou Juelskjær, Lisa Rosén Rasmussen, John Kreisler, Charlotte Mathiasen, and Stine Jacobsen. The ReforM program served also as venue for important exchanges with many nice colleagues—such as Paul Stenner, Monica Greco, E Summerson Carr, Steve Brown, Johanna Motzkau, Uffe Juul Jensen, Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen, Emily Martin, Jérome Denis, David Pontille, Gerald Moore, and Nikos Mylonas. The empirical work represented here is also the fruit of collaborations. Obviously, professionals, users, and artists at and around U-turn in Copenhagen—such as Kristian H. Kofod, Søren Bjørn Larsen, Josefine Gråkjær Nielsen, Line Degl, and Morten Halberg—should be thanked for this. But also junior colleagues and research interns such as Mads Bank, Kathrine Solgaard, Tine Friis, Sigga Waleng, Sebastian Tobias-Renstrøm, Cecilie Ramsing, Maria Valeur, and Emil Bech contributed significantly. In the process of writing the book, I have had the priviledge of inputs from readers of parts of it. Thus, apart from those already mentioned, Erik Axel, Peter Busch Jensen, Pär Nygren, Yngve Hammerlin, Arne Rolland, Ib Ravn, and Jeppe Pasgaard have also in different ways helped me understand what I was doing.

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Some of the Author’s Debts and Gratitudes

I also want to thank Julie Kordovsky for the strange and bold artworks that illustrate this book and for the many other ways I have learnt about aesthetics through engaging with her work in drama and drawings. I began this book when the covid epidemic had interrupted my sabbatical in Paris in 2020. I had been in the fertile research communities at and around the Center for the Sociology of Innovation, École des Mines, and not least the Institut de Recherche et Innovation, Centre Pompidou, and the activist network of the Association Amis de la Génération Thunberg. It is too late now to thank Bernard Stiegler for his generosity and inspiration, but the inclusiveness and the activist spirit of the ‘Stieglerian’ community—of Anne Alombert, Vincent Puig, Maël Montévil, Michal Krzykawski, Marie-Claude Bossière, Anne Kunvari, and many others—and the urgency of the climate and care crises they address were an important impetus for my project. As will be clear from the following chapters, my own “science studies” are closer to practice-based theories like the “sociology of translation” of the CSI, but such differences pale in the face of that challenge. When one morning, in my clumsy French, I asked Stiegler how he thought of Bruno Latour’s recent works, he nodded approvingly and replied something like: “At least, now he is concerned!” Indeed, this “political turn” in the STS community, so impressingly expressed even in Latour’s last book (2022) could tempt one to hope to bridge the gap between those two great approaches to science and technology (perhaps more widely recognizable as versions of Critical Theory and Pragmatism). I hope that a small part of this work could be the present “post-psychology” of care.

Metalogue on Meta-motives (with Julie Kordovsky)

“Metalogue” was the name Gregory Bateson gave to the reflections that formed the first part of his Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972). He suggested that the form of a fictive dialogue allowed the literary structure of the text to “be relevant to the same subject” (p.  2). The literary “meta” was perhaps what freed him from having to argue that relevance more precisely, since it stands out so brilliantly. In the present book, the aesthetic motives of Julie Kordovsky’s illustrations have commented on my text that proposed, as a key term, meta-motives. Yes, and more than that. In allowing that commenting, this text, your text, is itself taking a first step towards hybridity as it is transcending its conventional institutional framework— the (traditionally oral and written) research. Towards encompassing the visual and inviting in the multiple readings of multimodality. Towards extending the dialogue between the text and its reader to also include visual inquiry as a type of ‘engaging with the discourse’. My illustrations are prototypical (re)readings in the sense that they came into being, as I was ‘drawn along’, before the book was printed. But they are made as an invitation to everybody. To encourage every reader to proceed from here. To create “a work of art” and be part of that dialogue in their particular way(s)…

This exchange, this metalogue, seeks to cultivate an understanding of that dialogue. Yes, and to open up for others to join in too.

Oh, certainly, but also metaphorically. In material practice it is we who write this, Julie, you and I, by inserting still further comments into each other’s text. Dialogical and noo-diverse (Cf. Stiegler et al., 2021)—yet resulting in a fixed artifact. Let’s hope the reader can follow… and indeed, make of it her own “sculpture”… No matter what we write here, this meta-text will spawn further questions. Yes, so let us make the questions and ideas we have worked with transparent to the reader while we are at it…

(- even if such transparency, here as always, will revert to become meta-enigmatic). Here is an excerpt from my field notes in the early days of the illustration process: I had made a sketch of a person (M) seen from the back, sitting on the floor looking up, looking at an artwork. This was my model for our dialogue about the text. I wanted the person to be xiii

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Metalogue on Meta-motives (with Julie Kordovsky) present in the picture because I see this text as an expression of M’s (more or less accessible) monologue. I presume he will argue that the text actually holds an invitation to a dialogue with the reader, but as illustrator I am also the reader, and this text can be difficult to completely fathom. I picture myself—and other readers—falling from the edges of the book holding on to complicated passages about the entire world and everything and humanity... and maybe, I think, the illustrations could work as anchors for those of us, who sometimes during reading need to see that M is there. See that there is a living person working, writing to convey his scrutiny on these pages in what can seem like infinitely complicated sentences. We need to be reminded that the human M is there. M is quite a friendly person, so it helps me to visualize him…. “…writing is the destruction of every good voice, of every point of origin”, says Barthes in the text The Death of the Author (2016, 142). I drew my version of your motive after reading that. Did you want me to ‘kill’ you/M?

Well, at least I wanted the objectification, even of ‘human presence’, to stand out as inevitable and fertile, sharing Boris Groys’ vision that aestheticization emancipates by consigning ‘status quo’ to the museum of a book (cf. section 3.8). Anyway, that was what visually happened after we read Barthes.

But, we might insert the question: should we really discuss our discussion? Adding another lamination would perhaps seem to crowd our imagination and exhaust the resources of our ‘system 2 thinking’ (cf. section 2.4), if any were left at all. Why not let the skewed and far-fetched dialogues between text and artworks speak for themselves? Well, because this story is an important one to tell too. It is a story about microsteps of inclusion and diversity in research practices and the communication of it. About the motive ‘to break free from confinement’, like the pencil drawing you drew of a woman squeezed into a small and imprisoning box

(the drawing was meant to sketch the concept of ‘motivation’). And about finding ways to renegotiate frameworks. In my notes I wrote: We were on our way out from the museum, when M stopped and looked at an artwork by Marcel Gromaire— Le marchand de moulages. I think I heard M express some sort of distaste or irritation with the piece, which he said, ‘wanted too much’. Nevertheless, or perhaps, exactly for that reason, we stood there talking about the painting for a long time. We ended up using exactly this annoying artwork as a starting point for all the illustrations.

Who gets the last word? Who stamps the last image on the reader’s mind? Are these lines really a misplaced obituary, wailing a blues for the (metaphorical, I hope) suicide of the author that any text is bound to commit? Again, I turn to my notes on our conversations about the visual refraction of your text, and find a description of exactly this, heaving out more time, more text, more thoughts…The situation reminded me of the interaction that often plays out with clients in therapy. You end the therapeutic session, and the client is on the way out, but standing in the door, on the threshold, in the second before being gone, something important comes to mind. Something absolutely central or revealing. A nugget of gold. An insight. Something non-existing said in the room. Not there, because the therapeutic space has been determined. But still words and thoughts shared. But yes…

Enough. Let the text begin, albeit in the middle of things, as always.

Contents

1

Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 1.1 Motivation, Needs, and Meta-motives����������������������������������������������    3 1.2 Rearticulating Technologies and Their Motives ������������������������������    5 1.3 Human Nature����������������������������������������������������������������������������������    7 1.4 Rearticulating the Many Psychologies����������������������������������������������    9 1.5 Collaborative Research as Applied Science Studies ������������������������   14 1.6 Counselling Traditions as Precursors to a Post-psychology ������������   19 1.7 Aesthetic Dissensus and Cultivating Meta-motives��������������������������   22 1.8 Reading (This Book) Is Sculpturing: Overview of the Book������������   25

2

 Post-psychology of Motivation������������������������������������������������������������   31 A 2.1 This Is Not a State of the Art������������������������������������������������������������   33 2.2 Brackets and Boundary Objectivities������������������������������������������������   36 2.3 Energy and Activities: The Substance Versus the Forms of Subjectivity ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   41 2.4 Bypassing the Self—Behavior Design and “Nudging”��������������������   47 2.5 Pragmatic Utopianism and the Scientific Articulation of the Common-Sense Self ��������������������������������������������������������������   51 2.6 The Calculating/Calculated Subject��������������������������������������������������   54 2.7 Needs or Brains? ������������������������������������������������������������������������������   62 2.8 Quantified Humanism: Self-Determination Theory��������������������������   64 2.9 Understanding the Glue��������������������������������������������������������������������   68 2.10 Sciences of Subjectivity: Off-Mainstream Objectivity as Theory Relevant to Transforming Institutional Practices ������������   73 2.11 Functionalism and the Objectivity of Activity Theory ��������������������   77 2.12 A Space Free of Objectivity: Holzkamp’s Reinvention of Phenomenology Within Critical Psychology��������������������������������   86 2.13 Drives and Desires����������������������������������������������������������������������������   93 2.14 Stieglerian Repression: The Pre-psychological Temptation ������������  100

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Contents

3

 Theoretical Reconceptalization: From Needs to Meta-motives ����������  107 3.1 Methodological Reflections: The Role and the Objectivity of Theory in a Critical Post-psychology of Motives������������������������  109 3.2 The Desire for Agency in Osterkamp’s Motivationsforschung��������  118 3.3 Individualities of Subjects and of Persons����������������������������������������  130 3.4 We and I: Care as Practice, Beyond the Oedipal, and the Rational��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  137 3.5 Framing, Meta-motives: Boundary Objectivity in and for Itself������  143 3.6 The Pharmaka of Liminal Technologies ������������������������������������������  148 3.7 Affect and the Liminal Materiality of Meta-Motives ����������������������  157 3.8 Aesthetic Cultivation Beyond Function��������������������������������������������  161

4

Rearticulating Counselling����������������������������������������������������������������������  171 4.1 On Rearticulating Activities and Practices���������������������������������������  173 4.2 Infested Autonomy: Choice or Competence? ����������������������������������  178 4.3 The Pragmatics of Signs With/Without Reference ��������������������������  183 4.4 The Contents of the Empty Form������������������������������������������������������  192 4.5 From Signs to Aesthetics������������������������������������������������������������������  197

5

Writing Poetic Selves ������������������������������������������������������������������������������  201 5.1 Aesthetic Documentation������������������������������������������������������������������  203 5.2 Context: The Revolution of Self-Writing�����������������������������������������  208 5.3 A Golden Yarnball of Convoluted Words������������������������������������������  218 5.4 Write!������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  223

6

 Re-/Presenting Care for Motives������������������������������������������������������������  233 6.1 Texts for Care – Texts on Care����������������������������������������������������������  235 6.2 The Wiki Manual������������������������������������������������������������������������������  242 6.3 The Role of Theory in Prototyping Motives ������������������������������������  254

References ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  261 Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  281

Chapter 1

Introduction

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Nissen, Rearticulating Motives, Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43494-5_1

1

1.1  Motivation, Needs, and Meta-motives

1.1 

3

Motivation, Needs, and Meta-motives

The motive—or, as we shall see that it could also be phrased, in aesthetic terms: the motif—of this book is to mobilize you readers, and provide you with resources, for engaging in the at once inescapable and urgently required project of understanding and cultivating motives. It may seem that this project is already ubiquitous: Are we not incessantly reminded of the problem of motivation, of how we must understand our brains and our affects, so that we can motivate others and ourselves? Certainly! But our understanding is itself part of the problem. Most of our reflection and cultivation of why we do what we do, as individuals— often informed by psychology—assumes and cultivates a pragmatic self-regulation of “motivations,” as mixtures of natural process and rational calculation. Meanwhile, we lose sight of their sense and meaning. We are perhaps no longer entrapped in some collective metaphysics of specific needs and values. When psychology entered the scene, as a science, around 1900, it proposed to free our understanding of motives from à priori commitments to moral and religious ethics. Still, in their first half century, psychological approaches to motivation remained largely based on concepts of needs, which revealed underlying conceptions of the universally and ethically human. Needs were thought to be keys to motivating students and workers to do what teachers and managers needed them to do. Growing demands led to expanding notions of human needs. Complex (psycho-) analytics would suggest themselves for the depths of how needs could be rooted in eternal Nature yet express themselves in inclinations judged by cultural standards of the time as im-/moral, ir-/rational, or a-/normal. But it gradually turned out that what works in pragmatic governance is much simpler than our hopes and fancies about who we are—at least if we ask about “what works” in sufficiently limited ways. If the banalities of the now dominant behavior design or cognitive motivation theories are perhaps less flattering mirror images, they do appeal to us as easier to grasp and to handle. In yet another emancipation from the burdens of a morally charged and opaque Humanity, we become proud learners of facts about ourselves. Such facts are handy when we engage in our “autonomous self-regulation,” regardless where we want to take it, and why. And regardless of the consequences on a larger scale and in a longer run. We may still, it is true, be attracted to progressive narratives that present roughly the same liberal utopia in the shape of “self-determination needs” that ought to be recognized and set free in a better society, a more enlightened governance, an improved leadership, and a more reformist education. But such progressive concepts of needs do not really disturb our pragmatic ease with any deep questions about the plight of humanity. They still only summarize scientifically proven facts; and harnessing them can be shown to work, at least in those moments when we choose to ignore the constraints of current social life. Despite their ideological appeal, such claims about needs in contemporary mainstream psychology are purely pragmatic, too. They are not accountable to any theoretical, let alone ethical or

4

1 Introduction

ideological, questioning beyond the dogma of pragmatics. You can have your metaphysical cake and eat it, too. This movement of the concept of motivation—which I will attempt to trace in Chap. 2—constitutes a fragmentation not only of understanding but also of self-­ reflection, governance, and practical competence. It is a cynical emancipation that allows us to choose our own ends and means, but leaves us unable to discuss how to connect those ends-means-relations in meaningful, ethical, and sustainable ways. As free individuals, we can, of course, still choose metaphysics, even fundamentalisms. Dogmatism pairs surprisingly well with freedom of choice. Religions are reshaped to fit into the marketplace of beliefs. The more a religion is itself emancipated from collective ethics and moral obligation—in an ancient word: from God— the easier it is to choose, to pick among other offers on the bookshelf of metaphysics. And then to go all in. The wisest of those who, at once humbly and proudly, proclaim themselves to be “addicts” are well aware of the paradoxicality of this injunction: Believe!—in just anything!, “it works if you work it, it won’t if you don’t.” Better than to be powerless in the face of the cravings that we are so free to indulge. If we deceive ourselves that we know better than to believe, we could be left with just accepting our addictions—a shameful surrender to habits that kill some of us and hollow out the lives of many more. Yet, without claiming to know better how to cure addictions, this book seeks beyond the choice of belief in calculation or calculated belief. My suggestion is, half a century after Abraham Maslow’s introduction of the term (Maslow, 1967), that we need meta-motives to drag us free: Motives for transforming our motives. But, beyond Maslow’s focus, we also need to think of them and to cultivate them collectively. In fact, we should even consider that this is what we are already doing when we do well, even when we perhaps imagine that we are mapping preferences and solutions, confirming self-efficacies, or choosing to surrender to some phantom of our choice. The wager here is that cultivating such meta-motives can proceed through rearticulating motives. To rearticulate means to affirm something as important, as real— at least in its consequences—and to reinsert it into a wider context that allows us to reflect and transform it. A bit like what is known in the art world as “ready-mades,” except that, for that to work in the “exhibition space” of sociocultural theory, that requires a thorough work-over of that space itself.1 As I will attempt to show, just this kind of work is increasingly important, not only for the theorist but also for anyone confronted with frequent offers of ready-­ made technologies: tools, knowledges and methods, and the motives they suggest or require. The work of refurbishing the “exhibition spaces”—such as institutions, cultures, or lives—to fit the ready-made technologies inserted into them is widely underestimated. It is not just that we are all faced with confusion, stress, loss of capacities, and moral standards,  when a complex machinery quite suddenly

 Yet again, in fact, did not the introduction of ready-mades transform art museums, too? Cf. Groys (2008), Rebentisch (2019). 1

1.2  Rearticulating Technologies and Their Motives

5

becomes the new normal. It is easy to diagnose the shock of disruption at times of rapid technological change. What is more demanding, but also more encouraging, is to focus on the laborious processes of recultivation, of rebuilding ourselves, our ways of living and thinking, that come with the reassessment of such technologies—as these are articulated (i.e., emerge and unfold, become what they are, as intertwined) with the contexts we remake for them. This focus can be identified as the object of a new kind of (trans-) professional competence (which I will sketch in Chap. 6).

1.2 Rearticulating Technologies and Their Motives Technologies and their contexts—how is that about motives? At an immediate level, motivation psychologies are used in order to articulate “techniques” for motivating people—that is, procedures collected in methods. These are imbued with knowledge, including scientific knowledge, referenced to infrastructures such as journals and libraries, and taught in schools and universities. They may be organized in professional networks (e.g., the “Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers”) and perhaps traded as commodities. They stipulate positions and relations between them (e.g., supervisor/counsellor/client). They are inscribed into devices such as books, videos, and images, even machines—i.e., standardized ends-means-structures delegated to complex artefacts, which you must be skilled and disciplined to handle correctly. Taking all that into account, they are not simply “techniques,” but technologies proper—even if, on the face of it, they may seem to be just utterances and gestures that can be performed “in the naked”.2 And these technologies are like all other technologies in that they imply, suggest, or even require certain activities and thus motives. Now, obviously, any action can be performed with a variety of ultimate motives. It is crucial to the sort of understanding this book aspires to present that one can always take the “why”-question one step further. Actions and their motives are entangled in endless networks and shifting hierarchies of implications and concerns. But most of them come in clusters. If you cut wood, you’ll want to hold the axe in a certain way, make sure it is honed, take care not to cut yourself, keep children at safe distance, etc. It is only possible if somebody delivered that wood, and it only makes sense if someone will use the pieces you cut. Even if each motive or concern, as well as the whole thing, can be neglected or discarded—with various consequences—there is still such a thing as “cutting wood” that forms a meaningful standard cluster of actions, relevantly identified and understood as a unit: an activity.  The concept of technology is discussed more extensively in Chap. 3. In this introduction, I use a rather loose terminology to meet the reader half-way: When I write of ‘technologies, practices and knowledges’, it is not to imply that technologies do not include practices and knowledges (or motives). Rather, I mobilize the meanings of this semantic network in ways that highlight different aspect more or less. 2

6

1 Introduction

On top of that, most technologies require engaging with conventions in order to make any sense at all. If you write, you’ll want to spell and arrange the words so that they can be read by others. The activities of writing and reading are a cluster of actions whose internal relations are deliberately and collectively structured—i.e., standardized—by the conventions of literacy. These conventions must be acquired and applied for the technology to work, even if any such rule can be broken, and even if we may still be in doubt whether we want the technology to work at all. To engage with motives as thus entangled with activities, it seems obvious, at least for anyone with a background in twentieth century European psychology, to take off from sociocultural historical activity theory, a.k.a. the Vygotskian tradition, and from the debates in that tradition over how to understand motives (see Sect. 2.11). One tricky but fertile issue there is that motives shift and change between the objective and the subjective aspects of activities. Why we do what we do is for the most part built into our habits, into the standards of our activities, and into technologies. Buy a smartphone, and before you know it, you’ll want to check emails and So-Me updates as you wait for the bus. This is not a recent thing: The invention of iron—to make weapons much cheaper and widely distributed than those of bronze— prompted widespread insurrections; the advent of newspapers spurred national sentiments (Anderson, 1991); new drugs enable new cravings, and corresponding 12 steps fellowships then cultivate a desire for “sponsors,” “speaks,” and “prayers.” Human motives are artificial. This means they can be criticized as problematic, alienated, perverted, or pathological. Historically, a large part of the theoretical work that identified the artificiality of motives has been critical. It is not from the Vygotskians, but from the traditions of critical theory and critical psychoanalysis that most people have learnt about this, as critiques of commercialization and consumer capitalism. Such critique is often connected to dreams (or, with Ernst Bloch: to abstract utopia) of a pure humanity of motives or desires that are to be found, untainted, and authentic, underneath the artificial. It would be unfair, it should be said, to attribute that connection to the tradition of critical theory; if nothing else, critical theorists also remind us that the dream could turn into a nightmare of unbridled raw drives coming from the same depths of human subjectivity. If artificial motives (desires) are alienated, natural passions (drives) are perilous, at once vital and lethal. Still, the notion of a primordially inartificial human subjectivity—whether as paradisiacal nature or original sin, or mixtures of both—seems to go along with the identification of artificial motives. This is one theme where critical psychoanalysis reveals a surprising commonality with its otherwise “opposite” or complementary tradition, that of sociocultural-historical activity theory. It has a long prehistory in religious reflections on human nature, and it is no wonder that it is hard to overcome, even for the most ardent atheists. Especially as long as studies of artificial motives seem to thrive by leaving that legacy untouched as a base of resonance, or, at most, remix its elements to fit – the arbitrariness of those elements, in turn, confirming and purifying the (more essential) artificiality of human motives. Vygotskians and critical psychoanalysts alike have mostly accepted the division between the

1.3  Human Nature

7

healthy and the pathological and adopted it as a tool to confirm their normative positions. One implication of this legacy is that the standpoint of theorizing, the position from which one can think about motives as artificial or primordial, virtuous or wicked, is inherited from that of the priest (vicar, imam, rabbi, etc.). Elevated from earthly matters, it either regards itself as purified and idealized or despairs in fits of doubt and self-loathing.3 Those missionaries who wish to rearticulate motives know themselves at heart to be hypocritical, sinners among sinners, even as they now wave the humanist banners of emancipation. From there, it is obviously tempting to leave behind the whole critical endeavor and to embrace the pragmatics of mainstream motivation psychology, or to earn a more steady living minding the machinery of behavior design. But meta-motives are artificial, too, and to cultivate them is to harness our natural inclination for the self-consciously artificial. This is where hope and joy can arise. I am aware that this statement runs against most expectations and logics, and so, it must be unpacked. Of course, that is the project of this book as a whole, and in particular, of Chap. 3, but a few words are already in place here.

1.3 Human Nature “Human nature” is a tricky issue. The problem is that “nature” is the non-artificial, yet in a non-dualist thinking, the natural and the artificial are co-extensive and co-­ constituted. Without a supernatural entity, we can’t think of anything artificial that does not, viewed from another angle, belong to nature. Thus, the only reasonable way to define “nature” is as what we deal with when we bracket ourselves as dealers and doers, along with our products, technologies, activities, our thinking—which, of course, include that same act of bracketing. A focus on something as “natural” is a conditional abstraction from everything artificial, including that focus itself: It is unnatural to think of nature. The artificiality of that movement is either disregarded, or it asserts itself as separated from nature … and we find ourselves back in a (perhaps religious) dualism. Once we realize this, however, we have confronted ourselves with the paradoxical artificiality of any determined4 concept of nature and of anything natural. In other words, whether as ontology or as epistemology, the “natural” and the “artificial” keep transforming into each other as moments of a larger movement. Who are “we” to speak of “our natural inclination,” if not children of Nature itself, yet precisely as “self-consciously artificial”? Is it not Nature that enacts and naturalizes itself by way of Artifice, as what Spinoza called natura naturans (cf. Spinoza, 1997; Bloch, 1967, 767 ff.)?

 Philosophically, this is one way to learn from Marx’s 3rd and 10th “Thesis on Feuerbach”,  Determined – that is, once Nature becomes more than indistinctly ‘Other’; once it matters.

3 4

8

1 Introduction

Something along these lines can be derived from several philosophical sources since Spinoza, besides Ernst Bloch; most recently in Latour and Schultz’ manifesto on the “new ecological class” (Latour & Schultz, 2022). My own background leads me to think of it as “dialectics,” even as I am aware that some readers will frown skeptically. I could have also referred to it as a “deconstruction”—adding raised eyebrows to the grimace: It is no small claim, by a philosophical amateur, that Hegel and Derrida would give the same advice (even if I feel confident to claim that such continuities were important to both of them, along with equally important differences).5 But rearticulating motives would not be possible if we were not allowed to recontextualize those “ready-made” philosophical offers. In any case, philosophy alone—taken as a discipline—will not open the road to these investigations. The contradiction and the différance of the natural and the artificial only come to life as ways to think of more specific practices, technologies, and knowledges. Human nature has a very specific and problematic place in how psychology works as a way of understanding and inventing ourselves and our motives. If much academic psychology operates a rather vague universal “nature”—organism, psyche, brain, information process, etc.—to frame their “science,” some psychologists engage in investigations or speculations about the human species and its phylogenesis and prehistory. However, given disciplinary divisions, few of these take seriously the epistemological implications of the fact that it is a motivated self-­scrutiny that guides the “artificial” focus on any such “natural” evolution. If we want to know what we’re doing, we cannot simply correlate survey findings and experiments with contemporary European or American student volunteers, about a modern problem such as “achievement motivation,” with paleontological data and observations of primate behavior. We must begin with asking, more profoundly: How do we understand the human history, the social life, the cultural creations, and values, to which we now seek the evolutionary proto-forms? When such questions are rarely taken up in psychology, it is because psychology, in its specialization as a scientific discipline, is part of those same cultures, histories, and politics, providing answers to its questions, but often neglecting to question them in turn. In a word, psychology is a kind of ideology. Theories of “human nature” are expressions of emancipatory and/or contributory ethics and vice versa. Regardless how convincing are the data to which they refer,

 Does dialectics imply an abominable totalizing system of escalatory teleology, carried by strong beliefs in “synthesis” as canonical resolutions of contradictions? Not in my book. At the bottom, the question is whether the revisions of Hegelian dialectics that began already with Kierkegaard and Marx and continued with Sartre, Bloch, etc. should lead to discarding the term or not. Most of the ardent refuters of dialectics—especially French philosophers such as Derrida, Rancière, or Stiegler—perform what I, along with more recent proponents (e.g., Žižek, Jameson, Højrup), would characterize as dialectics. The word is used, or not used, to refer to a deeper current in modern and contemporary onto-/epistemology. Of course, there are numerous specific philosophical issues at stake (as always), such as how to think of/move beyond the notion of “superseding,” or what are the precise relations between dialectics as ontology and as epistemology. And of course, dialectics develops rather than remains in its original form. Hegel’s dialectics is greatly advanced compared to Plato’s. But the overall reflectivity of the historicity of our concepts and their inner contradictions/différances, as part of a dynamically conceived world that includes those concepts, is largely shared across that often affectively charged terminological divide. 5

1.4  Rearticulating the Many Psychologies

9

statements about human nature are interventions into cultural, ideological, and even political debates. They are no less weighty for that, and they cannot be reduced to pre-given patterns of interests and ideologies—or at least, that irreducibility is a mark of their quality, their power to intervene. But they also cannot be purified as innocent. Built into them are presuppositions from and implications for ethics, social theory, political philosophy, etc. They cannot escape the framing movement from contemporary culture, norms, practices, etc. to something universally human, the relevance of which is some promise of emancipation (or perhaps to discourage that emancipation). This is no less the case when what is claimed as universal is variability, modifiability, adaptability. Various versions of the transcendently human as thus purely negative—naked, open or empty, “tabula rasa,” vitality, etc.—have presupposed different theories of society, culture, persons, etc. and have suggested what to do with these—from grand scale social and human engineering to an ethics of individual self-fashioning. Conversely, emancipatory aspirations imply standards of what is humane—or perhaps just “non-inhumane” (Stiegler, 2016)—as distinct from the inhumanity from which we hope to be emancipated. We can choose to taboo those standards from explicit debate, but the likely result is that we are guided by less emancipatory ideals—typically some version of the ideal of unalienated authenticity. This is no different when the refusal to engage with the human is argued as objections to a “species-centered” humanism. It is indeed wise to embed our thinking of the human in a wider understanding of life, even in “natura naturans”; but why ignore the fact and neglect the concern that we who do this (together, and with our technologies) are still only human? I shall argue in Chap. 3 that being human is to be artificial through and through, to engage in collective and individual self-creation, in the always emerging “ensemble of social relations” (Marx, 2018), to remain ourselves only by self-overcoming, continually deferred by supplements (Derrida, 2016). However, this amounts to something more and something else than placing human nature as a blank, arbitrary, easily modifiable, “negative” non-/essence. Our artificial motives are natural inclinations, as are our meta-motives for transforming them—which implies that they have a natural prehistory and an anthropogenesis. Along with the emergence of human culture, we have evolved as homo sapiens with potentials and desires for the agency that unfolds in and through these engagements, these emancipations, and these transformations, deferences, and supplements. As well as for reinterpreting, rearticulating, and recultivating the sensuous-vital needs that appear to us—in pleasure or in pain, lack, or fulfilment—as the substance of natural drives. The implications of the artificial nature of our being is not reserved for “intellectual” or “cognitive” aspects of our human nature.

1.4 Rearticulating the Many Psychologies Developed from Ute Osterkamp’s theory of “productive needs” (1975, 1976, see Sect. 3.2), this amounts to a theory of human needs that surpasses functionalisms to articulate the intersubjective normativity that is inescapable when one attempts to rearticulate motives and meddle with meta-motives. This resonates with progressive

10

1 Introduction

intentions in the much more well-known Self-Determination Theory of needs (see Sects. 2.7, 2.8 and 2.9), but it works in a very different way: A theory of human needs cannot claim a non-normative status as scientific—it is accountable for its theoretical and ethical as well as its empirical presuppositions and implications. And Osterkamp’s legacy is taken up here to oppose the liberal presuppositions, which make it possible for Self-Determination Theory to naïvely base on data harvested from people’s given world-views and preferences. As we shall pursue in Chap. 2 and further, conceptualizing meta-motives as expressions of a desire for agency implies problematizing notions that have been fundamental to motivation psychology. Thus, the idea of arriving at a scientific objectivity of subjectivity itself by way of standardized activity, whether quantifiable through experiments or surveys or by relying on and proposing to rearticulate institutional (clinical, educational, organizational) practices, is based on a utopia of human science that obscures how such objectivity is established by aligning divergent and opposing subjective viewpoints, interests, and pursuits. The objectivity of intersubjectivity is a boundary objectivity organized around boundary objects. With contradictory, but pragmatically accepted concepts, it proposes forms of ideological discipline, forms of power, and selfhood. Such boundary objectivity extends the utopia of a scientific discipline to become the disciplining of the people it is about. In theories of motivation, probably the most important boundary object has been the notion of energy. Generally wavering between metaphor and theoretical concept, energy has suggested a “substance of subjectivity,” as a kind of relay between the intersubjectively identifiable and the objectively establishable and perhaps measurable (or, in both cases, mostly, what can be credibly enough hoped for as such). This shows how, in our relations to Nature, including our own Nature, we have appointed “resources” to be exploited for our instrumental activities, in ways we now realize have been deeply problematic, as a basic aspect of the Anthropocene. Imagining that what people want is itself a supply of energy that can be calculated and governed in a pseudoeconomy (libidinal economy, attention economy, etc.) is consistently alluring, even in critical theories. Perhaps the most radical recent expression of this idea was in the sci-fi film The Matrix, which depicted human bodies as captured and passivized to provide energy for the Master robots/programs, while their minds were kept busy in a fake cyberworld. Such films are indeed the best place for that notion of energy, exoticizing it as they can do, to make us reflect how little it really helps us understand who we are and what we want, except perhaps precisely as a rendering of our attraction to that perverse image of ourselves. As I propose to see it here, energy remains a fulcrum of the psychology of the Anthropocene; sustainable understandings of ourselves, by contrast, must situate, individualize, contextualize, and cultivate motives. Rearticulating motives is to address the activities, knowledges, and technologies of which they are part, and this means to rearticulate also psychology as performative, as implicated in shaping the “psyche” itself. This can be called a post-­ psychology (Staunæs, 2015; Nissen et al., 2016; Nissen, 2020), a trans-psychology (Nissen, 2012a, b, c), or a second-order psychology (Stenner & Taylor, 2008, Brown & Stenner, 2009a, b, Stenner, 2018a, b). Just like “post-modernity” is not an era that

1.4  Rearticulating the Many Psychologies

11

comes after the “modern” to replace it (since that would be a modernist trope), so the post-psychological does not replace or refound psychology—it is a psychology that includes a reflection of itself as forming part of its own subject-matter, which, in turn, means it cannot remain only psychology, within the bounds of the discipline—it must be also a trans-psychology, i.e., a transdisciplinary interest in “the psychological.” This relies very much on the important work on the history and theories of the scientific discipline psychology, both in general and in various specific forms, which now is referred to as “theoretical psychology”6—and which is increasingly expelled from the discipline’s mainstream. But psychology as an ideology, i.e., as a discourse that we take on to form who we are, is in play far beyond what is identifiable as scientific or even professional knowledge. I have already mentioned “motivational techniques” as technologies that more or less refer to scientific psychology. More or less—since such technologies are much more complex than the idea of “applying scientific knowledge” allows us to understand. Beyond the discipline, the profession, and the teaching of psychology, there is a wide landscape of technologies (knowledges, artefacts, activities) that are more or less psychological in that they take “mental” processes and states of individuals as their objects and that these are taken to be scientifically knowable rather than only immediately felt or approachable in other registers such as aesthetics or religion. Thus, when a school teacher arranges for “visible learning” in the shape of signs (pins on charts) representing learning progress for children to manipulate, it may be uncertain how much of John Hattie’s work (2008) s/he has in fact studied. But the institution of the school defines teachers’ activities as accountable in scientific terms that include psychology, and psychology is referenced widely in infrastructures that connect teaching to school management and to political discourse (including the private companies that sell “visible learning,” cf. Nielsen & Klitmøller, 2021; Bjerre et al., 2017). Further, the intentions espoused by the teacher, and likely her students, too, if we ask them, will refer to mental states and processes—learning, monitoring, self, self-confidence, etc. This case is rather straightforward, even as it remains debatable how much “psychology” does or should inform teaching practices, compared to other sciences or forms of knowledge. Probably, if we took up an example from some “clinic,” we would be even more inclined to assume an “application” of scientific psychology, since “clinical psychology” has tried harder than “educational psychology” to imitate the success of medicine in aligning science, institution, artefacts, and activities into what Latour (1987) calls a “black-boxed” technology. Yet, even such technologies would, at a closer look, be configured and articulated together with nursing, medical, and social work standards, which only partly belong to the black boxes of evidence-based practice.

 As one can find, e.g., in journals like Theory and Psychology, Review of General Psychology, International Review of Theoretical Psychologies, Subjectivity, Outlines  – Critical Practice Studies, Mind, Culture and Activity, Forum Kritische Psychologie. 6

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1 Introduction

But even further, cases like this, where professionals partly trained in academic psychology act in institutions whose infrastructures, archives, and regulations easily reveal traces of the discipline, are still only part of the “landscape of the psy.” As it is described by studies such as those of Rose (1996, 1999), Illouz (2003, 2008), Parker (1997), Martin (2007), Hacking (1995), Madsen (2014), or Balz and Malich (2020), psychology in various forms has drenched popular culture and everyday life. The first thing any sports champion is asked to do in front of millions of TV viewers is to verbalize “how it feels right now”—before she goes on to talk about how she motivated herself. It is impossible for a psychology student to interview anyone for her BA thesis without making use of an already established vocabulary (which her supervisor must then advise her to reflect critically). This has all been well established in cultural studies/anthropology for long, and it has given us a range of more complicated cases. One set of examples that we shall encounter in the following are the 12 steps fellowships that have risen to a global prevalence and prominence as a way to deal with (the motivational problem of) addiction (Mäkela et al., 1996; Rice, 1996; Valverde, 1998, 2002; Rafalovich, 1999; Keane, 2011; Schüll, 2012; Keis et al., 2016). Taking addiction as a “disease,” the fellowships are easy to classify as doing lay medicine or lay (clinical) psychology— and then to ask for and perhaps measure their efficacy as a form of treatment or cure. Yet, at a closer look, already the facts that the disease is seen as partly “spiritual” and that etiological explanations are deemed irrelevant, since submission to a “Higher Power” is what works (if you work it), point to something more than a colorful lay wrapping of a “psychology” that we academics can comfortably begin to rectify. The religious roots and vocabulary are far from insignificant relics, even if many participants disclaim any traditional religious belief. While academic psychology increasingly emphasizes individual autonomy and self-regulation, the 12 steps fellowships’ emphasis on surrender even appears directly anti-psychological, just as the strictly mutual-help dogma confronts psychologists and other professionals who would offer help to such self-help. Still, as we shall discuss (in Chap. 4), the 12 steps fellowships can be seen to organize a pragmatic mirror image to the psychology of self-regulation, rather than its revolutionary overturning. The global success of the 12 steps fellowships challenges academic psychology by its lack of “evidence-base” (despite numerous attempts and claims). Its academic defense rests on the tautology that it only works if you work it. Since “evidence-­ based practice” still cannot escape contextualizing scientific cause-effect-­knowledge in situated dialogues with “user preferences” (Sackett, 2000), the demand for evidence can be effectively deferred by staging rituals of choice (of choosing to “work it”). As a “psy technology,” the case of 12 steps fellowships requires a much wider regard than the epistemology of “applied psychology” can offer. This, in turn, helps us understand lay psy technologies and knowledges that become increasingly visible in the landscape because of new Internet-based infrastructures (cf., e.g., Rabeharisoa & Callon, 1999; Callon & Rabeharisoa, 2003, 2004, 2008; Akrich & Méadel, 2009; Akrich, 2010, 2013; Akrich et al., 2013, 2014; Rabeharisoa et  al., 2014). Of course, cultural studies have pointed to how radio, magazines, cinema, and TV have for long and to a great extent shaped psy cultures

1.4  Rearticulating the Many Psychologies

13

with their images and infrastructures. Yet, in the twentieth century, the lay knowledges represented there were still largely seen as derived and secondary to the real psychology of academia. And the idea that true enlightenment is threatened by the massive access to dubious knowledge offers on the Internet—the assertion of “factfulness”—is still the dominant approach to the many self-help, user, or patient communities. My intention is not to deny this, nor to denounce the scientific scrutiny of facts, nor to question the general ideal of skepticism toward … well, toward all kinds of knowledge. I merely wish to open our academic eyes to an increasingly significant part of the landscape of psy knowledges and technologies, a part that should be understood rather than simply dismissed. For one thing, this is important because academic psychology, as a way of understanding ourselves, is defined and constituted, not least, in its relations to other ways on offer. Thus, in its earliest phases, academic psychology would derive its fundamental justification from being (as a science) different from religion, as well as from philosophy, from the other social sciences (and later, from psychoanalysis and other non-positivist approaches). Now, in the age of pragmatics, after the virtue of metaphysics, how is psychology going to remain particular? How strong is its “evidence” faced with tactics such as that of the soaring 12 steps movement? How far can it go in a pragmatic direction and still claim to be different from “lay” psychologies? But, beyond the interests of the discipline (or the interest in studying it), it is important because—as it is so exhaustedly utilized by the cognitive wave—motives are self-regulations increasingly informed by psychologies, that is, they are partly formed by psy technologies of all kinds. The artificiality of human motives is also in part our self-conscious use of psychologies. We motivate ourselves, and when we do this, we relate to ourselves in a way that is just as artificial (just as culturally formed) as when our ancestors defended their honor, searched their poor souls, or psycho-analyzed their neuroses. This is not just a new vocabulary for something universal. For instance, organizing routine tasks on time schedules with frequent “rewards,” announcing healthy intentions in order to commit one-self, self-tracking jogging activities with GPS watches, and going on a romantic weekend trip to revitalize one’s marriage—all that and much more are the application of recent motivational technologies to organize, educate, and improve one-self. When “psychology” thus unfolds in technologies and practices far beyond the academic discipline and the profession, and is part of how we form ourselves in everyday life, the traditional “big questions” must be approached in ways that are quite different from the classical debates within the discipline. For example, it is easy to identify a “biological reductionism” when someone talks of her brain as an agent of various impulses, e.g.: “My reptile brain makes me buy the candy on display at the counter.” But, if we take it seriously, what is going on there is more complicated. Obviously, a person with a more-than-reptile brain is speaking, perhaps asking for acceptance of a momentary lapse of a moral self-control that is, by the same trope, confirmed to be overall in place and overall relevant. Or, we may know the person as someone who would say such a thing in order to save the face of someone else whom she thinks is uncomfortable with being chubby. Or, again, we may sense the half-ironic tone that suggests the (epistemological and moral) limits

14

1 Introduction

to that way of talking about one-self, the list of options could be expanded endlessly. As an (inter-) action, as an utterance in a conversation, references to “human nature” have quite varied uses and implications, and it would be very reductive to simply call them reductionism.7 We may expect something more solid and professional when, e.g., a social worker refers to the “same” “reptile brain” as an explanation of his clients’ impulsive actions. But we should then be mindful of how the reference points to a certain “popular” literature, to certain talks given at a course or on the Internet, and/or to conversations among his colleagues (that is, to artefacts, genres and communities that are very different from those of the academic discipline). And we should recognize that, at least potentially, it may work as a “psycho-education” that establishes a dialogue with his client, and which perhaps stresses a “human nature” that is shared by all of us, as an alternative to the many utterances that mark differences between the normal and the pathological (for instance, by invoking “impulsivity” as a mark of “ego-weakness”). Articulations of motives stretch all the way from theoretical statements about human needs and motivations, in psychology and far beyond into philosophy and other social and human sciences, to statements that seem vaguely similar in many kinds of activities and technologies that are more or less structured, in a wide landscape of everyday and not-so-everyday life. To rearticulate motives is to move between many bodies of knowledge, many academic (and other) communities, and many “states of the art.” This amounts to a challenge: Far too many theoretical, practical, scientific, and cultural traditions must be taken up for any one scholar to understand. As Derrida has demonstrated, we are all in an ongoing process of learning more deeply the contradictory backgrounds and meanings of the concepts we have naïvely and superficially adopted. Post-psychology is, at least partly, a work of digging into our own presuppositions, a work that must begin with scratching surfaces. I ask the reader to please help me, help us all, with this—and to grant forgiveness, too, for the plenty of more texts that ought to have been read or understood, videos I should have watched, places I should have visited, conversations I should have had, for this to really make sense! Oh, and for the opposite, too: for the depths and nuances I should have dug out more affirmatively, for my always insufficient engagement with any one of the works I discuss.

1.5 Collaborative Research as Applied Science Studies Yet, my ambition is not to remain at the level of generalities, attempting to overview the whole landscape of motivational technologies. A large part of this book (Chaps. 4, 5 and 6) is devoted to more concretely pursuing a rearticulation of motives, in

 Cf. to this Goffman’s concept of the “primary frame” (1986), and Garfinkel’s “case of the real thing” (1984). 7

1.5  Collaborative Research as Applied Science Studies

15

particular fields of practice where it can be said that a care for motives and thus a cultivation of meta-motives are taking place. The purpose is double: It unfolds the general approach and theory, putting it to the test of analysis (rather than only illustration), and intervenes into those fields as important in their own right. As the reader will have probably already guessed, the field of practices that address addictions is prominent among those taken up here. This can be explained by the simple fact that I have collaborated for many years with practitioners (social workers, counsellors, psychologists) and users/clients in this field. But it is, more widely, a field that is often taken as prototypical of issues around motivation. In this field, it appears in a particularly succinct way that we must care for motives and seek to develop or transform motives. Motivation seems to be the problem here, not only one, however important, dimension of the activity that we perform to solve problems or attain goals. As Valverde (1998) puts it, addictions have been constructed and addressed as “diseases of the will.” It is no coincidence that probably the most widely used contemporary technology that explicitly claims to modify motivation, Motivational Interviewing (Miller & Rollnick, 2012), originated in this field (see Sect. 4.2). Since practitioners and users here are already in the business of rearticulating motives—this is my claim, at least—they are fruitful partners in dialogue. It is they who can teach us about those technologies, and it is they who might be interested in concepts that suggest a way to think of and to handle them, even transform them, to cultivate meta-motives that include and supersede them. This way of working with theoretical issues that are also practical continues a methodology of collaborative research that has many names: practice research, (participatory) action research, action science, dialogical research, recherche contributive, etc.8 When the critical and self-critical ethos of research unfolds in such practical collaborative activities, we strive for standards of what has been called affirmative or immanent critique (rather than moralizing criticism, cf. Raffnsøe, 2016a, b; Nissen, 2020), that is, a critique that recognizes, rearticulates, recontextualizes, and thus develops the (ready-made) activities, thoughts, intentions, and motives, of our partners. This way of thinking has a long history (Foucault? Marx? Hegel? Spinoza, or even Descartes? Or was it Socrates?), but it is still not the most common way to conceptualize how to approach technologies. The affirmative impetus has led most scholars in the “science and technology” tradition to adopt the “etic” but descriptive ethnographic position of observer, of someone who “follows” people, rather than collaborates with them, let alone engages in critique. Probably, this has been the only way to approach the crucial fields of natural, technical, and medical sciences and their infrastructures and institutions, given the very polarized debates over epistemologies, qualitative or quantitative, empirical or theoretical, etc., the so-called science wars (Latour, 1999). Not unlike in the classical anthropological situation, an ethos of “thick description” and of understanding people’s moral and technical  Regrettably, the many nuances and differences in this family of methodologies are not well mapped by the use of those names as distinctions; perhaps that is why we are so often tempted to invent a new name. 8

16

1 Introduction

reasoning given their circumstances was the only way to get past the gate-keepers and to achieve some level of dialogue at all; a dialogue that assumed and continued a situation of mutually respected parallel languages and worked through a minimalistic vocabulary of translation.9 However, this “etic” ethnographic position is not quite as obvious when it comes to technologies or activities with people trained in the same theories as the researchers, people who are themselves keen to transform their technologies, and the ways they use them and think of them. In practices of care, and in some more than others10, it is relevant to use the forms of knowledge of the humanities—emphasizing theory (and thus theoretical plurality), self-overcoming, context—in order to establish dialogues that problematize and transform given standards. The situated work of tinkering to (re-) establish the more or less smooth functioning of machines, algorithms, procedures, etc. cannot be primarily tacit, embedded in a purely local common sense, when what is clearly at stake are existential issues, cultural differences, marginalized lives, problematized selfhood, social problems, and thus meta-­ motives (cf. Chap. 6). The researcher who endeavors to articulate the human side of such technologies of care immediately faces not only articulations already in place but also such articulations as multiple and debated, as reflective. As the field already adopts an “etic” relation to itself, he/she is soon engaged in dialogues, not only about the truthfulness of such articulations, but about their relevance, performativity, and ethics. Minimalistic vocabularies of translation may still be attractive, but the dialogue partners will be mindful of their limits. In addition, technologies of care are often “low tech” in the sense that they are malleable, “fluid,” and recombinable to a greater extent than more fully standardized practices structured more around machines (Elgaard, 2001a, b). This is partly a question of scale: zooming out to larger infrastructures, cultures, and political communities, care becomes “high tech” and its main features and structures prove hard to modify. But local activities can be redefined, reframed, and reconfigured with a relatively small effort. An infrastructure of care technology is a bit like a bush: You can bend or break any twig or leaf, but the bush itself remains in place and it takes a big effort to move it. This means that experiments are easy to perform, but hard to learn from. Research can be collaborative and experimental rather than descriptive, because similar dialogues and development projects are already happening as part of the field. This is exciting for an action-researcher, and it seems obvious and straightforward to  This may be a key to understanding the theoretical minimalism of “actor-network theory,” which is perhaps only a surface appearance, but important nonetheless. Its soaring popularity can be explained by its success in operating flexibly between its minimalist entry point—often liberating as an alternative to much mumbo-jumbo of the academic humanities (such as the present text) — and the ongoing theoretical refinements and complexities for those who identify with the movement and go all in. Actually, a classical modernist strategy. Cf. Rancière (1994). 10  Obviously, medical practices have moved much further than other care practices into a situation where machineries and standardized activities are structuring the technologies as a whole, pushing aside the “human” aspects to the domains of nursing, social work, self-help, etc. Jensen (1987, 2007), Mol (2002, 2008), Rankin and Campbell (2006). 9

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engage in an affirmative dialogue. The troubles begin when description becomes analysis and analysis becomes publication: What is selected and generalized and for whom? The “low tech” and heterogeneous structure of experience leads many to reject abstraction and generalization, because the canonical definitions of these methodological concepts rely on standardization. Yet, it is hard to deny that any kind of research produces representations or models that select certain aspects as relevant and are multiplied in the hope of a wider relevance.11 This contradiction requires us to rethink generalization as part of relations between the technologies and infrastructures of care and those of research. For this, we shall discuss the concept of proto-type and revisit the wider issue of knowledge about how to cultivate meta-motives in Chap. 6. Proto-type means something in between “not yet type” and “first of the type”12: something that is viewed as possibly generalizable, yet must still be understood as singular and situated. This is suggested as a good way to think of how we learn from singular local practices, contextualizing them as modifiable yet substantial technologies, rather than assuming and imposing standardization in order technologize them. Thus, if we read one of the million plus copies of A.S. Neill’s account of the Summerhill school (1960), Freud’s introductory lectures to psychoanalysis (1977), or the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book (2001), it is not with a view to adopting a standardized program loyally (i.e., identically). Learning to work academically with such accounts does not consist in imitating the gestures described in those books, nor in the ability to use standardized protocols in order to judge their efficiency, as machines inserted into a foreign time and place. We rather reflect on the specificities of the time and place of their origin and the cultural, political, and ideological movements they represented and addressed, and out of this, we create a complex lesson, the relevance of which is to be probed in our situation—perhaps a century later, in a different country, facing different challenges. This includes identifying certain epistemological and theoretical positions, as well as tracing how concepts are related and configured; but we are soon confronted with how such works cannot be reduced to those, if we wish to understand their impact and implications. If the empiriscist epistemology of evidence-basing is insufficient, so are the meta-theories of the classic humanities. For example, Freud’s or the AA founders’ references to medical science contribute only modestly to understanding psychoanalysis or 12 steps fellowships, then and now, and so does speculating about whether or not their writings should be classified as “phenomenological.” This is not to say that pursuing theoretical problems or genealogical traces would be futile. Theories are only productive to the extent that their conceptual articulations are recognized as recalcitrant; they must be taken seriously in their own right. Rather, it is to situate such theories and genealogies in much wider landscapes of historically evolving technologies and cultures than those of traditional  For interesting attempts to deny this, however, see Newman and Holzman (1997). Cf. Nissen et al. (1999). 12  The Germanic etymology of “first” (først, erst) is something like “utmost before” or “before-st,” “the ultimately preceding.” 11

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1 Introduction

(prescriptive) theories of knowledge that organize debates within disciplines about their foundational concepts and methodologies (see Chap. 6). The academic cultivation of care amounts to a kind of “applied science (and technology) studies,” in the sense that it implies understanding practices, knowledges, and technologies of care both internally and externally. It is a kind of academic reflection that keeps moving back and forth between a—perhaps “nerdy”—questioning and mastery of their meanings and presuppositions in-depth, tracing their tradition, and a problematization of their place and their implications in situations, cultures, institutions, lives, and the ways that their meanings transform with that contextualization. My claim is that this is what any teacher, social worker, nurse, therapist, etc. must do on an almost daily basis, confronted with a wide variety of knowledges and methods, carried by many kinds of models or representations, belonging or referring to different traditions and separate or connected infrastructures, and in a range of genres. And I propose that this kind of academic competence is internally related to cultivating meta-motives, since such technologies imply and suggest motives. It is routine but complex to move between genres and technologies such as social media, emails, pamphlets, Wikipedia, legal documents, clinical records and archives (on paper or electronic), poems, TV series, and cult music, not to speak of rituals, jokes, tattoos, or hairstyles. Which motives are invoked and perhaps problematized when we watch an art video with the close-up view of a young client of a drug treatment facility, in the middle of a street festival, singing karaoke with his headphones on: “You ruined everything / in the nicest way” (cf. Nissen & Friis, 2020)? And how different is this, really, from asking about the motives performed and represented when he talks about his habit (or his brother, his education, his anxiety, etc.) in a counselling session? Is the conversation that we call “counselling” ritualized to such an extent that we might gain from analyzing it as a kind of performance art in order to grasp what client and counsellor are doing and why? The institution of the treatment facility and the frame of counselling suggest that the client wants to be helped with kicking the habit. But, as mentioned, the habit itself implies wanting the opposite, too, and “addiction” means that the ambivalence is persistent. Yet, our immediate assumption reflects a moral judgment that frames counselling: The client ought to want to be helped, to be cured. The ambivalence and the moral injunction add up to framing the conversation by a moral deficiency, even as it aspires or pretends to treat a morally neutral disease or predicament—and even when client and counsellor are both aware of this paradox. Any word that is uttered will inadvertently refer to this complex structure of motives, and any listening will be drenched by concerns for its implications. Such complexity calls for a care for meta-motives. It is at this point that we can perhaps begin to see the point in a suggestion as counterintuitive as regarding a counselling session as a work of performance art.

1.6  Counselling Traditions as Precursors to a Post-psychology

19

1.6 Counselling Traditions as Precursors to a Post-psychology Various traditions of psychotherapy and of counselling in the twentieth century have broken with the common-sense approach to conversations as the exchange of utterances that represent inner states (including motives) and are motivated by a wish to convey them.13 The very idea of a “talking cure” prompts a professional concern with “talk” as an object of scrutiny and intervention sui generis, and this leads to widening the range of media, genres, etc. The “talking cure” is generalized to become a carefully framed and staged encounter within a therapeutic time-space, with various— more or less explicit, but generally non-ordinary—rules for producing and exchanging utterances of various kinds. Psychological “presenting problems” are then dealt with, not only as given inner states for which utterances are data but also as signs or representations problematized in their performativity. In these counselling/therapeutic traditions, then, we find precursors to the methodology of rearticulation and the “post-psychology” presented in this book. At this point, I can only sketch some main contours of a rearticulation of this huge field of practices and technologies, and with an exclusive view to this aspect—which will be unfolded further in Chap. 4. Psychoanalysis would first articulate the presupposition, essential to legitimizing psychotherapy, that clients’ pathology would be reflected in their utterances in ways unknown to themselves, with the claim that any wish to convey inner states would be blocked by repression and counteracted by resistance, and that these messages from the inside would therefore be encrypted. The work with utterances and their genres was framed by the positioning of clients as diseased in their relations to themselves. “Free association” utterances were primarily taken as signs of client pathology for the therapist to decipher, and although conversation was the default set-up, other genres such as art could also be useful for this purpose. In the first decades of psychotherapy, this led to multiple experiments with genres of representation, including play, poetry, performance, and drawing. Conversely, techniques that originated in psychoanalysis were taken up in art, most famously the idea of an uncensored expression—e.g., as “automatic writing.” Therapists’ utterances, on the other hand, were meant to elicit such material, which, first of all, required holding back, accepting, and mirroring by “recap” (i.e., summarizing). Therapists’ interpretations would be thought of as instances of analysis administered to fit the slow process of the clients’ learning about herself and overcoming resistance. The genre of interpretation would not be aesthetic, but “analytical,” that is, an argumentative form derived from that with which psychoanalysis was itself constituted as a scholarly community. Generally, this was a humanities scholarship, often with a wide range of cultural references taken to be common, but framed within the clinical encounter, with the purpose of bringing unconscious feelings into conscious awareness, in order to cure problems conceived as pathologies.  Foucault’s genealogical tracing of this form further back to pastoral exchanges in religious institutions (the confession) seems credible. Cf. Foucault (1967). 13

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1 Introduction

Clients were at once bundles of pathological “libidinal economies” and highly cultivated bourgeois recipients of academic analyses about those. The precise ways that such self-learning would actually cure pathologies remained hard to establish and dubious, even with the intermediary notion of transference. Transference was at once how the encounter represented and how it intervened into pathology. It recast clients and therapists in child/parent roles and staged a specific double entendre (the client speaking to the therapist is also the child speaking to her mother, etc.), through which the exchange was thought to both elicit and affect the client’s libidinal “material.” This constellation of “arts and sciences” was established on the basis of a clinical authority, lodged within a hierarchy of analysis and supervision, and taking a certain cultural competence for granted, along with a certain “motivation” derived from general power differentials around the clinic, mostly in the families of the patients (e.g., fathers paid for the analysis of their “neurotic” daughters). However, with the gradual spread of counselling, beyond bourgeois patriarchies and other authoritarian contexts, and with the rise in commercial or pseudo-commercial public governance, these relations changed. Clients were increasingly constituted as “users” or “customers” rather than as “patients,” and they would more often be recruited from middle or lower classes. This would necessitate more emphasis on establishing the therapeutic alliance and on preventing drop-out and, thus, on speaking and exchanging within a wider common sense. This movement created a problem, since the non-ordinary framing of the encounter that legitimized psychotherapy as a professional intervention could no longer be imposed by authority. As a response, therapeutic traditions either moved toward rejecting or hiding the artificiality of the exchange, or toward emphasizing it and inviting clients to co-constitute it. In various cathartic traditions, of which Gestalt Therapy is probably the most well-known (Perls, 1992), the encounter was only framed artificially as a way to efface that artificiality, since it was seen as an expression of the general cultural alienation that caused pathology. Psychotherapy was a mobilization of clients to the utopia of a healthy, immediate authenticity, and therapists won legitimacy as the “gurus” of that vision. Verbalizing repressed inner feelings and arriving at a more authentic self-presentation would at once constitute cure and sociocultural reform; and even a verbal articulation would be considered less healing than the inarticulate cry. The concept of “therapy” widened far beyond any specifically determined pathology and treatment. As described by Illouz (2003, 2008), Carr (2011), and others, this approach has had a wide cultural appeal, and it resonates with some philosophical currents (Taylor, 1989, 1991), as well as with aesthetic movements that sought to redefine art as dissolving itself into life (Groys, 2008, Rancière, 2014a). Today, utopian emancipation through authenticity seems as outmoded as psychoanalytic authority, and the now dominant (mostly cognitive-behavioral and client-­ centered) counselling paradigms are keen to present a pragmatic common-sense image of representation, communication, and learning. Clients are attracted not by a widened concept of therapy but by its narrowing to a field of science that can be left to experts without infringing on their own freedom. This is another, opposite way to meet the “user,” and it is often framed in opposition to psychodynamic

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mysticism and authority. Clients are relieved to engage in a collaborative inquiry rather than to disclose unconscious childhood drives or being pushed to cry. While cathartic therapies purified the dynamic side of psychoanalysis, client-centered and cognitive traditions emphasize rational self-learning and optimize it by substituting “no-nonsense” positivist evidence for the complex cultural and theoretical resonances of psychoanalytic interpretation. But the problem of legitimizing psychotherapy as a professional intervention must then be solved in a different way. This is achieved by separating the front-stage client-centered collaborative communication from a back-stage professionalism that treats conversations as objects and instruments of manipulation. The latter aspect is generally represented simply as scientific evidence of effect (and typically as such inaccessible to clients, except as a general institutional trust). Yet, as any other kind of evidence-based practice, it then still has to engage with client preferences and situational contingencies. Since this engagement unfolds in the very same interactions that are supposed to “cure,” these are viewed in two ways that contradict each other: collaboration and manipulation. This resembles the structure of a conversation between a customer and a salesperson, except that what is on sale here is nothing more than that same conversation itself. In most cognitive-behavioral therapy, this contradiction is simply shoved into the epistemological gulf that separates evidence from dialogue and situation. Carr’s analyses of Motivational Interviewing (cf. Carr, 2013; Carr & Smith, 2014) take the problem one step further: Counsellors’ handling of the dilemma is articulated as a “poetics of practice,” a situated rhetorical competence that is downplayed because it clashes with the ideal of authenticity and the progressive democratic face of client-­ centeredness. Still, in these client-centered traditions, such poetics rarely evolve into poetry, since the artificiality of the encounter and its artefacts must be concealed.14 Against this background, it is promising to turn to traditions that have moved in the opposite direction and have taken up again the explicitly non-ordinary framing and experimented with forms and genres of representation. First of all in the trajectory from systemic through constructionist and narrative therapies, an experimental focus on communication, discourse, and narrative has emerged, along with post-­ psychological reflections on the performativity of representations and of the technologies they were part of, with the help of social theory and philosophy. In different ways, these therapies would involve exotizations or externalizations of the forms of utterances. For this to work without any taken-for-granted authority, this implies, in the long run, to invite clients to co-constitute the encounter as artificially framed: It is “Let’s play a game of therapy!”—taken as a suggestion. This is interesting in the context of this book because it implies addressing the meta-motives for (or against) counselling. In Chap. 4, we shall engage with this “post-clinical life of signs,” the reflective use of signs to engage in a collaborative reframing of counselling that is also a

 However, this does not mean that aesthetic practices such as creative writing cannot be articulated in a generally cognitive approach as therapeutic. Cf. Peterkin and Prettyman (2009). 14

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1 Introduction

cultivation of meta-motives. And we shall then (Chap. 5) discuss the use of aesthetic practices and artefacts that evolved from this—this time not viewed as expressions of pathology, nor as self-effacing inauthenticity, but as edifying yet contradictory fabrications, typically co-constructed by clients and therapists.

1.7 Aesthetic Dissensus and Cultivating Meta-motives Toward the end of Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, the young protagonist breaks down crying when she hears Chopin’s music from a piano on the steamboat headed for France, away from her lover. There wasn’t a breath of wind and the music spread all over the dark boat, like a heavenly injunction whose import was unknown, like an order from God whose meaning was inscrutable. And the girl started up as if to go and kill herself in her turn, throw herself in her turn into the sea, and afterwards she wept because she thought of the man from Cholon and suddenly she wasn’t sure she hadn’t loved him with a love she hadn’t seen because it had lost itself in the affair like water in sand and she rediscovered it only now, through this moment of music flung across the sea. (Duras, 2011, 113)

Is it possible that artworks can touch and move us to realize and feel the motives that we do not understand because they have been lost in our affairs “like water in sand”? If yes, could this be an approach to care for meta-motives? The question is complicated. There is an important tension built into viewing and using aesthetics as (post-clinical) ways to cultivate meta-motives, and this tension concerns fundamental questions about how to understand aesthetics as well as how to understand practices and technologies of care. As testimony to the inevitability of scratching surfaces confessed above, trying to penetrate into a theoretical core of these questions means revisiting ancient philosophy, in the audacious expectation that this will clarify cases such as the art video mentioned above with the karaoke-­ singing young man. If we think of it as therapeutic because it helps to reconstruct a meaningful narrative by displaying the client and his song as virtuous and beautiful, we may be revisiting Plato’s view of art as subsumed to ethics, to the coherent purposes and values that establish criteria for “the art of…” any practice or technology. Or we might, instead, go along with Carr’s notion of a “poetics of practice” that recognizes what is “artful” in its own right, even if it seems to contradict our values. The young man does not, in fact, sing very well, but we identify and feel sorry for him—and that just might lead to some resolution that helps him get over his addiction. Just as accepting clients’ “bad” motives can help her develop “good” motives in Motivational Interviewing. This may be a Neo-Aristotelean approach (as is the general idea of a poetics of practice). Or again, we might object to the whole discussion of art and poetics as more or less virtuous or useful, because that implies misrecognizing art as sublime, as an activity with no purpose outside of itself. This objection is presently made in debates over the health effects of art, but it dates back to the recognition of art as a specialized practice (with specialized institutions such as art museums, concert halls, literature, etc.) from the renaissance and on, as

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reflected by Baumgarten and Kant. And the very idea of an activity with no external purpose comes from Aristotle’s praxis as distinct from poiesis (which, incidentally, also structures the notion of intrinsic motivation in “self-determination theory”). Recent philosophical reconstructions of aesthetic theory, and especially of how art forms blend into each other and into other social practices, tend to refer back to the renaissance as well as to the ancient Greek philosophers (Adorno, 1997; Groys 2008, Rancière, 2013a, b, 2014a, b; Groys, 2016, Raffnsøe 2016). This is because what is at stake are (again) the definitions of art as a kind of activity and a kind of artifacts, and these have implications far beyond art itself. Art teaches us that the self-determination of praxis is not an absolute autonomy, freedom from external constraints, criteria, or concerns, nor their “authentic” endorsement, but rather moments of their creative transformation. This is in line with the broader history of the concept, from Aristotle to (post-) Marxism: “Praxis” gradually overcame its dependence on a fixed place in the ancient class structure, to finally recognize how production implies revolution (Bernstein, 1971; Bloch, 1995; Bernild, 2007). Which, in turn, implies that praxis must overcome itself in favor of a wider conceptualization of care (Stiegler, 2010a, b; Latour & Schultz, 2022). As mentioned, even as we focus on an activity as a unit, the sense it makes can never be isolated from the endless networks of meaning it is part of. But it also cannot be simply derived from them. However small, it makes a creative difference in the world. Art is prototypical in this regard. What we aim to reconstruct, then (along with these and other theorists), is that aesthetics cannot be understood in useful and interesting ways as either instrumental or secluded. Rather, it should be regarded dialectically as externalizing and overcoming itself and as thereby transforming the other activities that it addresses (and vice versa)—just as it is the case with research and with specialized practices of care such as psychotherapy. When I call this a dialectics, it is not to claim a teleology that could be stipulated as necessary. Any teleology we can propose will be human projects that can be modified or discarded. But it is, on the other hand, to distinguish the movement from one simply toward hybridity. We do, as an immediately accessible approximation, describe these aesthetic activities that are also care and research as “hybrid,” since one standard does not impose itself to frame the others and turn them into mere instruments. What we shall be dealing with are not exhaustedly characterized as, e.g., “narrative means to therapeutic ends,” nor as “outsider art,” nor as some “poetics of knowledge,” even if each of these denominators do describe movements that transcend their proper institutional framework (therapy, art, research). There is more to be said than the negative move of dissolving those standards and pointing to some “entity” that is exclusively characterized by its heterogeneity (perhaps unfolding in a “smooth space” or a “heterotopia,” etc. —cf. Sect. 3.1). Pointing to hybridity is only a first step. Moving on from there, we must pay attention to the practical experiments, and contextualize them as prototypical, not only in a contemporary landscape of institutional, infrastructural, economic, political, etc. conditions but also by tracing their genealogies and the tendencies that they mobilize. This implies a special way of reading the theories that emphasize aesthetics as transformative, notably Ranciére’s concept of dissensus: The construction of

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1 Introduction

different or clashing “regimes of sense” (Rancière, 2014a, b). In this reading, it is not the purely formal equivocality or difference (or, with Derrida, the movement of différance) in itself which is interesting but a movement from something substantially important in a direction that is less than arbitrary. Even deconstruction and dissensus are edifying and cultivating, not by effacing or closing off differences but by fabricating consistencies that, by superseding differences, represent and embody an infinite movement that keeps opening without falling apart (cf. to this Stiegler, 2015; Chap. 3).15 Dissensus never just exists in itself—it consists in the world. This overall approach is going to help us consider (in Chap. 5) aesthetic creations, in particular: poetry, articulated with technologies of care institutionally defined as treatment, counselling, consultation, or teaching, for how they cultivate meta-motives. In this endeavor, we shall use the term “motif.” In some languages (German, Scandinavian, French, and likely more), the same word (Motiv/ motiv/motif) is used for “motive” and for “motif.” The word points to intentions attributed to a person and to what a work of art is about. It unites or conflates the psychological category with the aesthetic. One way of making sense of this is the psychologizing move of seeking the motif of a work of art in the motive of the artist, either as his/her intention, purpose, etc., or more psychodynamically as the hidden drives or unconscious conflicts that more or less inadvertently express themselves in the artwork. Here we should note that, far from merely a penetrating gaze, this kind of “seeking” is a rearticulation of the artwork into a psychological register. The implications of this rearticulation are usually ignored in the psychodynamic or phenomenological approaches that share the notion of and the emphasis on expression, and thus the assumption of inner (motivational) states that can or should be expressed in order to achieve understanding and perhaps cure, and the belief that such expressions remain essentially parallel. The alternative I suggest (in Sect. 3.8) is that aesthetic motifs can be meta-­motives for which artworks are prototypes. Aesthetic dissensus is a reconfiguration, a problematization of sense, and the making of a new kind of sense. Artworks do not as much point to or express motives as they touch and move them. Art elicits an affect that is indistinct and often felt as disturbing, since it is something else and something more than the emotions that we knew; and it offers a form through which to relate and endow this novel sensuous experience with sensible meaning. This is to do with how art emancipates things from their meaning as objects (from their objectivity) and suggests new kinds of meaning, beginning from their sensuous presence. In this, art is a cultivated, overt, deconstructed version of boundary objectivity. This is also why art is in no need of explanation, yet, paradoxically, is profoundly affected, even co-constituted, by the inter- and context provided by “explanations” along with many other models and representations and their infrastructures, institutions, and technologies. However penetrating, explanations do not reveal a truth of the  It is more like a tree that grows with ever new bifurcations than like a mycelium that annuls movement by dissolving it into an arbitrary network. It is not that I claim (or suggest we must claim) to know or sanctify one root or one tree-top: it is “more than one but less than many” (Mol, 2003) because we are trying to make a difference by building an understanding, not only by refuting one. 15

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artwork or of the artist so much as suggest their reconfiguration. Rearticulations such as those that we shall see in Chap. 5 are “supplementary,” yet, a bit like titles and catalogues at art exhibitions, or like covers to music albums, they contribute to embedding artworks as “ready-mades” into networks of meaning, and thus co-­define them as art. The cultivation of meta-motives going on in hybrid aesthetic/care/research practices is one that keeps recontextualizing and thus externalizing given motives in ways that open to their reflection and transformation. Thus, when the motivational structure of addiction counselling that I mentioned above—around the moral deficit of not being sufficiently motivated—is not only “expressed,” but recreated carefully in artworks that are taken seriously and dwelled with as such, even as they are recognized as contingent, meta-motives do not suggest or impose themselves as “solutions” or as “coherent/preferred narratives.” They relate in more complex ways to the dissensual consistency of the artworks. They emerge as the formative and normative dimensions of the collective and individual subjectivities or selves that are individuated between the artwork and its motif, as it is repeatedly recontextualized, in multiple ways including academic texts such as the present.

1.8 Reading (This Book) Is Sculpturing: Overview of the Book This is, finally, a challenge to the project of this book. We began with its motif of mobilizing you readers to a project of understanding and cultivating motives. Writing it, I assumed that the expectation of any reader will be that the present text attempts to convey a knowledge that represents motives and that this is claimed to be useful when we cultivate motives—as the text urges us to do. That is how I read it, too. But there is more. The arguments presented here, which will be further underpinned and unfolded throughout the book, disturb the distinctions between understanding, representing, and cultivating. They amount to rearticulations that affect any acts and artefacts of cultivating motives by recontextualizing and recreating their meaning. They are “about” cultivating meta-motives, not only in the sense that they describe and analyze them but also in the sense that this cultivation is their intent and purpose. In the terms that Stiegler modified from Joseph Beuys, this text aspires to a “social self-sculpturing”: In this approach, culture, arts and knowledge can all be viewed as transindividual processes (producing what Simondon called the transindividual, that is, shared signification) through which groups, and individuals within these groups, cultivate themselves (as one cultivates a garden), ‘sculpting’ themselves by sharing and through common practices, as well as by bringing these practices into confrontation with each other. It is in this sense that the artist Joseph Beuys spoke of social sculpture. (…) this is how, faced with the Anthropocene event, a new ecology of educational subjectivity can be formed, taking account of its technical conditions and related evolutions, that is, of the development of exosomatization, by fighting against its toxicity and by cultivating its curative potential for new psychic and collective individuation. (Stiegler et al., 2021, 119–20)

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1 Introduction

Propelled into this overlap between aesthetics, theory, and “sharing common practices,” it is hard to steer clear of the Scylla of “representations” taken to (more or less accurately) imitate a reality and the Charybdis of taking utterances as performative without any reference that can be reasonably criticized.

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Yet, to “disturb” distinctions is not to dissolve or to blur them. The distinctions remain unavoidable. At least, I would not be able to let go of them if I tried, nor would I hope to. But neither is it quite to reconfigure. I must admit that, as the author of this text, I am not quite up to the task of reconstructing all the philosophical implications of the performativity of rearticulating motives. Perhaps that is for you? What I envisage, in the meantime, is that we, as readers of the following, should keep moving between reflecting statements as performative and representative, as doing, and as showing, locutions and illocutions (suggesting perlocutions), and that, at certain points, we allow ourselves to lean back, taste, and reflect on the motives that emerge. I am aware that this may appear to over-exhaust the demands on my readers of an already (perhaps at places unnecessarily) complicated text. Yet, again, my assumption is that this way of thinking about utterances is roughly what is implied in all kinds of care work. Except that the complex landscapes of models and technologies that most care workers deal with do not usually include texts dense with theory. But it may be useful to think of reading this as a kind of sculpturing. All you have to do is chisel away the superfluous material, and you will find the sculpture is already there inside the marble block.16 You can translate that to saying: “Take what you want and leave the rest”17—as long as you make sure to pride yourself that, doing this, you are, perhaps inadvertently, creating a work of art. --If you are curious about how I, as the first reader of this text, make sense of it, you can consult the recapitulations and summaries I have written in many places, mostly at the end or the beginning of chapters and sections. The first of these follows here. After this broad introduction, in Chap. 2 you will be offered a “post-psychology” that traces concepts of motivation and motives through various theories relevant to my project. The most important problem, around which this “immanent critique” is centered, is that of scientific objectivity: How to make of subjectivity a scientific object? Or, how to move beyond this contradictory ambition? As already mentioned, the concept of “boundary objectivity” around objects such as “energy” are suggested as central. We shall discuss prevalent strands of positivist psychology (behavior design, cognitive theories, self-determination theory) and then off-mainstream traditions. Of the latter, I focus mostly on the Vygotskian (socio-cultural-historical) tradition, including its version of critical psychology, but I also venture to find parallels to (critical) psychoanalysis. When off-mainstream traditions seek a scientific objectivity for their concepts of motives, the idea of (biological and social) “function” becomes important, as it configures the necessity of needs, defines pathologies and cures, and translates those into activities. This has spurred attempts to overcome such functionalism and the dualisms it entails, attempts which then run into troubles

16 17

 This suggestion is attributed to Michelangelo.  This is an AA motto, also taken up in cognitive-behavioral therapy.

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1 Introduction

with how to think of objectivity. That contradiction is the germ cell from which the position of this book has emerged. Chapter 3 proposes a theory with which to understand motives and their re-/ presentation. After having argued the usefulness of such “positive” theoretical propositions, I reconstruct the main points of Ute Osterkamp’s theory of motivation from 1976. Her concept of desire for agency, as participation in a general performance of collective anticipatory care, promises a way to overcome the dualism of functionalisms without being trapped by the pure negativity of antifunctionalism. But her theory was largely forgotten, because a lack of attention to the question of how subjects and activities are constituted, framed, and individuated pushed her tradition into a phenomenological cul-de-sac. So, the rest of the chapter unfolds an alternative theory of how care and desire for agency can be analyzed, taking off from those aspects. A dialectics of how We/Us and I/Me are constituted and individuate is proposed (as yet another “retake” of the Hegelian dialectics of recognition). The concept of “liminal technology” is then borrowed from Paul Stenner, in dialogue with a row of theorists of technology (Stiegler, Latour, and others). The technology of text and its “re-/presentation” of activities and motives is highlighted as a fundamental kind. This approach helps us address in a materialist way how activities, participation, and motives are formed as objects in such becomings, as well as how to understand transitional moments of (affective) indeterminacy. This finally leads to a section on aesthetics as a way of cultivating meta-motives, beyond function, with Rancière, Adorno, Groys, and others. Chapter 4 is about counselling—yet, in continuation of the previous chapter, the key proposed is to regard activities as contingently framed as such. This contingency of framing is a general approach, argued first as a way to reflect the rearticulation of activities and practices. However, it becomes relevant especially when people’s (clients’, users’, etc.) recognition as autonomous subjects with reliable motives is at stake—in the field of addiction, where, for that reason, practices are developed that address motives directly. The general contours of that field are outlined by a discussion of the two kinds of practice that, as mentioned, are dominant in the field: 12 steps fellowships and cognitive-client-centered counselling. On this background, we move into analyses of concrete prototypical counselling practices, performed and endorsed by my collaborators, who refer to the tradition of “solution-­ focused brief therapy.” This is interesting not least because it directly opposes the epistemology of objectivity, which we saw was a crucial aspect of motivation psychologies in Chap. 2. But my interpretation is that, once the frame of counselling is in place, objectivity is hard to get rid of. This leads to proposing aesthetic activities as an alternative route to overcoming the boundary objectivity of clinical practice. In Chap. 5, a more unfolded analysis is presented, of practices called “aesthetic documentation” at a Copenhagen facility for counselling young drug users. A general introduction places those practices as prototypical for one way to develop “post-therapeutic” approaches in this field, and especially for taking up aesthetics as a way to cultivate meta-motives. The specific activities studied, in close collaboration with participants, are those of a “creative writing group.” This requires a contextualization in the current cultural revolution of forms and genres of writing and

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of self-writing, in art, self-help, and beyond, spurred not least by technological developments. Introduced by a sample poem, we then discuss the writing group in dialogue with the writer of the poem, before we dive into a recorded sequence of the writing group activity, to see how the aesthetic dissensus of poetic re-/presentation works as a form of externalization and generalization that allows meta-­motives to be addressed in a caring way. The final chapter, Chap. 6, is about re-/presentations of and for care—of which this book is itself proposed as an instance, along with the texts we discussed in Chap. 5—and about how these carry the competences in care work, as well as make out an important field of concern for care work (a field currently under transformation). As an alternative to the presuppositions underpinning the movement of evidence-­basing care work, the prototypical, performative nature of texts on and for care is emphasized and argued, along with how re-/presentations of and for care should be understood and cultivated as landscapes of diverse infrastructures, genres, voices, and forms of knowledge (with Stiegler: “noo-diversity”). This is demonstrated prototypically with an analysis in progress about—and contributing to—an ongoing effort to develop a website “manual” for the care work of which we discussed parts in Chap. 5. I attempt to place it in intertextual “dialogue” with textual re-/presentations of the dominant approaches to care in the field and to discuss its noo-diverse nature. A final section reflects on how theory (such as that of this book) is relevant to the competence in care, as synthesizing, dialogical, reflective, and innovative meta-knowledge; how reading theory requires a submission yet leads to the metaphorical “death of the author”; and how it overlaps and dialogues with art in a creative “poetics of knowledge.”

Chapter 2

A Post-psychology of Motivation

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Nissen, Rearticulating Motives, Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43494-5_2

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2.1 This Is Not a State of the Art When, in 2018, I attended a conference on motivation psychology,1 it was clear that two broad approaches were overwhelmingly dominant: Cognitive approaches building on the works of Bandura and others (Bandura, 1977, Bandura & Schunk, 1981; Wigfield, 1994; Schunk et al., 2014) and self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000, 2017; Rigby & Ryan, 2011; Martela & Ryan, 2016). The two approaches seemed to merge under the rubric of (controlled versus autonomous) “self-­ regulation” (as in Scholer et al., 2018). My participation at the conference was planned as an ethnographic fieldwork, but I found that positioning hard to accomplish. I got far too frustrated. And I was too pleased when, occasionally, I spoke with a fellow attendant who had dutifully presented her study—of, say, whether “hand-raising behavior” in school indicated “intrinsic motivation” (as measured by subject’s “agreeing” with survey statements such as “I did the tasks as well as I could”)—but who confided to me that she knew of the limitations to this whole enterprise if the aim was really to understand what people want to do and why. In my fieldnotes from the first conference day, I confessed to myself: After this dose, I’m just fed up with variable-psychology!2 Can’t help reacting emotionally, reminded of Bourgois’ discussion of the ethical issues with doing ethnography on problematic practices (Bourgois, 2003). In general, it seems to me just now that the variations found are of very little relevance, address extremely limited foci, contribute almost nothing to understanding the processes studied, and that variable-psychology is forcefully fetishized. It makes me think of earlier experiences with psychoanalytic dogmatics where relevance faded out and it was hard to stay motivated. Right now I’m thrown back to critical psychology classic, as the distortions of the basic concepts keep me from addressing this practice ethnographically or rearticulating it. Better perhaps to ask: What is achieved with this distance, this irrelevance, apart from, obviously, academic credit? How is this knowledge used? But, still: The contradiction of variable-psychology to any self-determination is screaming into our faces, and no one seems to notice!

I recount this experience in order to emphasize at the beginning of this chapter that this is not a state of the art in the usual meaning. In this and the next chapters, I’ll take issue with a number of theories and studies relevant to understanding motives and how to rearticulate them. Some of these define themselves as psychology; others do not. But common to them is that they are viewed here—and some of them view themselves—through problematizing the borders and the constitution of the discipline. When we address motives, “the art” of psychology is unstable, whether viewed from the inside or from the outside. Then the point is not to stabilize it by reconstructing and authorizing its “state,” but to understand what is at stake and what is going on whenever a “psychology” is established and its borders are drawn up.  The EARLI special interest group 8 on motivation and emotion conference “Design for Motivation and Emotion”, Aarhus 2018. 2  Klaus Holzkamp”s (2011) term for the kind of psychology that proceeds by correlating two variables to find what causes behavior. 1

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In contrast to a “state of the art,” a genealogy (or a history of ideas) is often presented as serving an opposite purpose: The destabilize, to open the field of possible ways of thinking (e.g., Foucault, 1985; Danziger, 1994, 1997; Rose, 1996, 1999). This could seem a logical consequence of rejecting the authorizing of a state. Yet, while it is true that research (including genealogies) should feed into our ideas about who we are and what we are doing, it would be unfair to pretend that destabilization is the endpoint, or that no more could or should be said about the projects that we hope to serve by such destabilization. As I have argued elsewhere (Nissen, 2012b), a genealogy should reflect explicitly what it is for. Our projects of building understanding and of cultivation guide which of the many possible histories (of the past or of the present) are relevant and which deconstructions will open the most promising paths in the jungles of traces that we take up anew and rearticulate. What you see when you look back depends on where you are heading. The project of rearticulating motives should look in the rear-view mirror to identify, in the terms of Ernst Bloch (1995), tendencies as latencies it might actualize, rather than imagine itself to be the first or the only alternative to an oppressive or imbecile totality. To Bloch, this is the difference between concrete or abstract utopia—hopes that either articulate and develop real possibilities, or revert and thus mirror a given state of affairs by sanctifying an abstraction that signifies a mere wish for alternatives. In order to achieve concrete utopia, our post-psychological rearticulations must take those given languages and theories of psychology seriously. Not only to be able to communicate with readers, but also because it is the only way to identify and suggest the development and enhancement of the tendencies and hopes that are internal to them, and which make it worth the while to engage with them. In this sense, rearticulations must try to perform immanent and affirmative critiques (Raffnsøe, 2016a, b; Nissen, 2020). The understanding that we wish to construct and claim by engaging with them is one of overcoming and expanding their standards, not one of simply applying external standards (cf. also Sect. 3.1), which leads, unsurprisingly, to the converse risk of “internalism,” as argued, although in other terms, by Derrida: The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting them in a certain way, because one always inhabits, and all the more when one does not suspect it. Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion from the old structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say without being able to isolate their elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work. This is what the person who has begun the same work in another area of the same habitation does not fail to point out with zeal. No exercise is more wide-spread today and one should be able to formalize its rules. Hegel was already caught up in this game. (Derrida, 2016, 24)

Of course, Derrida never formalized the rules of debates over rearticulations or deconstructions, except to the extent that textual arguments such as the present can be called a “formalization of rules” (and thus Derrida already formalized rules by mentioning the issue).

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One such “rule” could be the awareness that, since research is about reconfigurations of basic qualities, utopia are important aspects of scientific and theoretical projects and, not least, of how they co-configure motives. There is a hope of radical sociocultural change built into human and social sciences. This was famously articulated in Marx’ 11th Thesis on Feuerbach (Marx, 2018), but Bloch demonstrates that it is a more general quality. Thus, he shows how medicine was founded on hopes of overcoming suffering and even death (after all, as Canguilhem, 1991, noted, medicine is life studying life, in the interest of life). Bloch was committed to the dialectics of a Marxist Modernism, even as his philosophical work led him to problematize canonical versions of that, enough that he had to flee from the GDR/ East Germany. But his dialectics should itself be read as a philosophy “just-in-time” (Jensen, 1999), rather than as an eschatology. He was not deriving a true (blissful or dreadful) endpoint of history from philosophy or Critical Theory; rather, he engaged in immanent or affirmative critiques of previous and contemporary articulations of hope, always in dialogue with the hopes he articulated himself. Retracing tendencies as latencies to actualize does not amount to reconstructing an ineluctable teleology, only to attempt to articulate our own project dialogically and situate it in a real history with real possibilities. The historical tendencies toward a post-psychology of motivation move back and forth around the borders of “psychology.” We have already encountered one example of this. In the introduction, I briefly retraced kinds of counselling or psychotherapy as precursors to a post-psychology that might help us understand the cultivation of meta-motives. Characteristically, all through the history of psychotherapy, from Freud and Lacan through Perls, Beck, and Palazzoli to Miller and Rollnick, de Shazer or White, it remains uncertain or undecided whether we are dealing with “psychology.” That example is useful because what all these therapists were concerned with were the (therapeutic or post-therapeutic) practical implications of the kinds of knowledge they worked with. Their theories merged with the talk they hoped would cure (perhaps through complicated hierarchies of supervision, archives of records and academic texts, etc.). And one key issue was always how to stage or frame therapy, in moves that would at once perform and legitimize (or delegitimize) “the psychological.” The point is, generally, when psychologies are viewed as performative, the very move of constituting a “psychological” understanding (or of rejecting it) is consequential. Post-psychology is not some obscure wrinkle on a purely academic history or philosophy of science. It is an empirical and practical field. But it has a theoretical history just the same. This history of the post-psychology of motivations, then, can be distinguished in two moments. The first moment is just that of states of the art. That is to say, of moves to constitute and delimit a “psychological science” that regards itself and claims to be always-already constituted as such, based on the objectivity of its truths. These knowledges and technologies of motivation psychology offer themselves as authoritative. They speak on behalf of a science. The second moment is, by contrast, critical. Here, the crisis of constitution is addressed. If knowledge is presented as given, it is to discard it or to reconceptualize, to rearticulate it.

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Again, as in Chap. 1, when I write of “moments,” it is because they cannot be separated completely into distinct theories or approaches. They tend to presuppose and move into each other. Although it seems simple and obvious to distinguish “mainstream” from “critical” psychology, it gets complicated already when we realize that even the most mainstream psychology offers itself as a utopia, as the hope of a science, constituted in its opposition to ordinary beliefs, ideologies, and superstitions. And, conversely, that much “critical” psychology retains—or, at least, can be read as—an authoritative voice arguing the utopian potentials of a science based on its truth.

2.2 Brackets and Boundary Objectivities What is common to psychologies of motivation is the hope that scientific knowledge will improve our conduct of ourselves and others as wanting subjects. This implies a detour that detaches knowledge of such conduct from its normative implications, temporarily and contingently, by an operation of bracketing. When “motivation” was established as a term and a field of psychology a century ago, the word was no longer used only for morally obliging accounts of reasons behind actions that specifically stood out as requiring justification, as it had been the case before (and still is elsewhere, e.g., in legal discourse) (Danziger, 1997). Rather, it now signified abstract and generalizing claims about what causes any and all kinds of “behavior.” This claimed knowledge was sometimes presented as relevant to specific fields of practice (education, industry, etc.), or even as a general ethos of a social and human engineering. But this relevance was bracketed as not pertaining to the objectivity of the knowledge itself. Objectivity was regarded as a stamp of universal quality derived from transparent procedures in a free community of scholars; and central to this was the very move of bracketing. In their critical moments, psychologies would evoke the utopian perspective of a science to come, as part of a general Enlightenment. But the true success of this move is achieved when it is itself black-boxed. That is, when its presuppositions are taken as self-evident, unquestioned; when the bracket they impose is allowed to frame any dispute over the “facts” proposed about “human motivation,” any critical procedures set in place to arrive at objectivity. Still, the normativity and performativity implied in positing subjectivity as an object is inescapable; psychology remains a “moral science” (Brinkmann, 2006). Whenever normativity is temporarily pushed aside, it remains active as an implicit understanding. Morality was never eliminated, only ever bracketed. Deconstructing it means rearticulating it in total, including what is inside as well as what is outside of the bracket, as well as the bracket itself. It means to trace the workings of this kind of bracketed relevance, in its constellations of utopian appeals and prosaic promises. A key mechanism to this black-boxing are divisions of labor that establish disciplines as infrastructures not only of knowledge but also of professions and

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institutions and thus identities. Schools, clinics, management consultancies, etc. constitute and stabilize subjectivities with this move of bracketing. Writing in the framework of a psychology of motivation is to constitute communities of scholars and professionals and to confirm their identities as such. However, these subjectivities of black-boxed objectivity are always also constituted in relation to others, by whom they must be recognized. This is the case, generally, when professorships in psychology are announced, when monographs are published, when courses are offered, when professional discretion and ethics are instituted, etc. And it is the case every time “psychology” comes into play, or is offered, in the handling of human affairs. For instance, the school psychologist may have been comforted in her professional identity reading an article on, say, self-­ determination theory (SDT), but then she confronts a teacher and a pair of parents who are skeptical in different ways about what to do with a notion of “autonomous self-regulation” when it comes to dealing with a child’s “absenteeism.” Of course, adherents to SDT will claim to have general answers to any such skepticism, based on abundant evidence (see Sects. 2.8 and 2.9), but it remains precarious, as those answers will always only be suggestions about how to approach the problem at hand and in which language. In the fields of practice, they cater to, such suggestions very rarely if ever, become stabilized and black-boxed enough to be quite taken for granted, nor even to motivate the effort of tracing the evidence carried by the scientific technologies and archives referenced. And those “black boxes” seldom acquire enough stability that they can be used as building blocks for integral scientific bodies of knowledge. Elsewhere, I have suggested the notion of a boundary objectivity: “an objectivity established with a boundary object” (Nissen, 2004d, 79) to capture this uncertainty and its remedies. Psychological concepts such as “autonomous self-­regulation” can be said to establish boundary objects, and their precarity opens the question of objectivity. In the original formulation by Star and Griesemer (1989), a boundary object is defined as … an analytic concept of those scientific objects which both inhabit several intersecting social worlds (…) and satisfy the informational requirements of each of them. Boundary objects are objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and the constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common use, and become strongly structured in individual-site use. These objects may be abstract or concrete. They have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable, a means of translation (p. 393)

In Star and Griesemer’s broadly pragmatist approach, “objects” and their meaning are seen as established in different practices, in communities of practice, or (with Anselm Strauss’s term) in diverse “social worlds.” So, the interest in these science studies is in those practices and their objects, rather than in the textbook definitions and disputes that establish “objectivity” stipulatively, from above, so to speak. In this respect, it is similar to the work of Berger and Luckmann (1966) that gave the name, eventually, to “social constructionism.”

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This is not, however, as it is sometimes read, to reduce “objectivity” to arbitrary rhetoric or purely local truth. Rather, the question then becomes, how are “objectivities” accomplished in practice, when different communities or “social worlds” intersect. Star and Griesemer noted two distinct ways this is done: Standardizing methods and boundary objects. The relations between these are further unfolded in the magnum opus of Bowker and Star (1999). Here, standardization is defined as “….agreed-upon rules for the production of (textual or material) objects”; that “span more than one community of practice” (p. 13). While some objects emerge loosely as boundary objects, then, others are established in procedures of agreement. Now, agreeing is far from always simple and harmonious. The contentious nature of standardizations and the objects they define is crucial; in fact, agreement may be another word for successful coercion. Indeed, Bowker and Star take up the example of the classification of “races” in South African apartheid. In Star and Griesemer’s article, too, this contentiousness of agreement is recognized, as they remark that The production of boundary objects is one means of satisfying these potentially conflicting sets of concerns. Other means include imperialist imposition of representations, coercion, silencing and fragmentation66, (p. 413)

crediting in that note 66 …an anonymous referee for drawing our attention to the limits of the cooperation model, and the importance of conflict and authority in science-making (ibid., 419).

Conflict and authority are crucial, but they do not seem to arise organically within a conceptualization of collaboration across communities. And Bowker and Star seem to still, a decade later (1999), place cooperation and coercion on different occasions: Sometimes boundary objects are created that allow for cooperation across borders. At other times, such as in the case of apartheid, voices are stifled and violence obtains (p. 283).

The concept of “boundary objectivity” presented here, by contrast, points to the coincidence of the openness of collaboration with the power of standardization. One does not rule out the other.3 Boundary objects can be quite weakly structured and plastic, thus facilitate and frame various kinds of collaboration between people from different “social worlds,” yet still be used to impose a standard, an objectivity. Such concepts as “intelligence,” “the unconscious,” or “personality” have simultaneously sanctioned an objectivity of knowledge, framed interactions, and subjectified participants—precisely with their relatively weak structures and openness to often contradictory sense-making in different communities. An example of this is the use of clinical diagnoses in most fields of psychological practice. It is fascinating how smoothly a diagnosis such as dependence or ADHD can (a) establish an essence in counselling and (b) form an identity in the everyday life of clients, while it (c) counts as a mere description of behavior patterns in science and d) works as an institutional classification in governance. People in each context refer to the  In Chap. 3, we shall dive more deeply into this issue, as we consider the relations between signs as things and as objects. 3

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objectivity of those concepts as established in those other domains because that reference works. We might refer here to Žižek’s interpretation of Lacan’s “subject supposed to know / supposed to believe”: The pragmatic reference to “knowledge” as established in other places by authorized procedures (the “Big Other”) is sufficient to establish objectivity, but as a boundary objectivity, which allows for the submission to scientific authority to coincide with preserving diverging ways of making sense of it—thus upholding a contradictory ideological common sense (Žižek, 2011).4 In the following sections, we shall encounter several versions of the boundary objectivity that makes of psychology a science. As demonstrated by Porter (1996), one important technology for such boundary objectivity is quantification. Counting or measuring a quantity requires, sometimes through laborious efforts that are often ignored, a reduction of multiple qualities to just one and the temporary abstraction from the semantic networks in which that quality is embedded (Nissen & Barington, 2016). This is a powerful and fruitful technology in stable structures of meaning. However, when quantification is no longer a tool within given practices but becomes a mediator between different communities with different structures of meaning (different “social worlds”), it takes on a logic of its own. Numbers count because they “never lie,” i.e., they rest on transparent procedures. But across different “social worlds,” that same transparency either occludes the ways that those procedures are differentially contextualized and interpreted, or it imposes a standardized technology on contexts and interpretations, with unknown consequences beyond the range of vision imposed. Most typically both: The representation shapes the represented as well as vice versa. Bowker and Star (1999) write of this as the convergence of map and landscape, which is generally overlooked (or even repressed). Thus, when “learning outcomes” govern university teaching, the academic learning going on is represented, yet in certain ways also concealed, since all complex or contentious qualities are pragmatically bracketed. Against centuries of educational research, “learning” is reduced to performing identifiable skills and reproducing information. Everybody knows this is a very limited view of learning. But the easy common sense of visibly planned and monitored learning is not only administratively workable but also a vagueness of reference that makes it feasible to handle and interpret in different ways, suited to local circumstances. These differences and circumstances are systematically erased or bracketed. Yet, we are far from simply free to use them for our purposes. These structures and artifacts of governance (evaluations, gradings, etc.) are performative: They standardize not only representations but also activities and motives. Students demand a teaching that helps them meet requirements; professors prefer students to pass exams even with meager accomplishments to avoid hassle; etc.  Another example is given in Solgaard and Nissen (2021): The use of personality tests in practices of hiring. Here, participants are vaguely aware of the limited validity of test scores, but move back and forth between referring to them as given facts, negotiating their meaning, and reflecting their implications. 4

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To Porter, such “trust in numbers” rises to become a generalized form of governance as states increasingly become dependent on catering for heterogeneous civil societies (with multiple “social worlds”). Political legitimacy at all levels is achieved with numbers, even as everybody knows that these numbers are, in principle, questionable.5 Porter considers psychology an advanced science in the sense that these dynamics have been crucial since its beginning, and psychology has found ways to deal with them. As we shall see in Sects. 2.10, 2.11, 2.12, 2.13 and 2.14, whereas mainstream psychology has largely adopted quantification as the technology with which objectivity is established, off-mainstream psychologies rely, rather, on standards that are objectified and accepted in institutional and professional infrastructures and practices (standards of learning, cure, etc.). Here, the boundary quality of scientific objectivity does not evolve (and hide itself) in quantitative standardization, as much as in the ways that the utopian horizons of theoretical innovation are anchored in institutional notions of functional necessity. Thus, here, the bracketing of normativity is much more unstable, and traditions keep branching off into anti-functionalist ontologies or nominalistic epistemologies, or perhaps moving on to post-psychologies. The question of how objectivities are constituted is all-important to a post-­ psychology. In Chap. 4, we shall look more closely at how numbers work to install a boundary objectivity in some kinds of counselling, where the vagueness of reference is taken to extremes. By contrast, we will then look into how aesthetics can suggest other ways of approaching the semantic openness of the boundary objects of psychologies. But first, we shall discuss some general ways that motivation was and is established with a boundary objectivity in psychology. Again, we shall not follow the structure of a “state of the art,” nor presume a comprehensive history of the psychologies of motivation. Each of the following sections discusses texts, practices, and technologies that would deserve a much more thorough deconstructive reading or a much deeper ethnographic exploration. My ambition here is more modest: a rear-view mirror genealogy of elements of psychologies of motivation that seem relevant to consider in a post-psychological rearticulation. The guiding principle

 This sets in motion a continuous process of verification that gradually undermines veridity because the formal transparency of procedures masks rather than reconciles or overcomes contradictions of meaning. Hans Rosling’s popular and well-intended “factfulness” (Rosling et al., 2018) is to pee in your pants to stay warm in the deepening winter. The rise and fall of the Danish antienvironmentalist Bjørn Lomborg, who was endorsed and financed by liberalist and neoconservative Danish governments to promote “climate skepticism” with pure evidence, is an illustrative case. Jamison (2004) laments Lomborg’s contempt for real science and calls for new procedures to secure factfulness; yet his reconstruction of the political and institutional backgrounds of Lomborg’s rise to fame rather suggests a wider contextualization of such “facts” in ideological struggles. Lomborg’s trick was precisely to substitute a formalized procedure of evidence for the consistencies of climate science that were and are intimately related to the politics and the publics of climate activism, both before and after Lomborg. While Lomborg’s easy rise to power is an occasion for grave concerns, his fall is encouraging; yet, what has been generally learnt from it? 5

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will be that of identifying and reconstructing boundary objectivities in the interplay of utopian ideals, imposed standards, and pragmatics, which govern “motivation.”

2.3 Energy and Activities: The Substance Versus the Forms of Subjectivity The move of bracketing moral implications was and is a move of naturalization. If “nature,” as I claimed in Chap. 1, is a view that brackets ourselves and our interests, then an essentialist science of “motivation” must posit some natural process as its object. This is, obviously, a precarious move when the will or the wanting itself is targeted. The difficult task is to at once address and bracket subjectivity, to distill and harness its natural element. It is to this task that the notion of energy is devoted. In Kurt Danziger’s reconstruction of the “Naming of the mind” (Danziger, 1997), “the powerful metaphor of ‘energy’” was crucial to how the academic discipline of psychology could lay claims to motivation. It was a …resource that was readily available for bridging the gap between the subjective experience of striving and ‘motivation’ as an object of control. (…) This metaphor had emerged in the nineteenth century and promoted the naturalization of the will. By the beginning of the 20th century, it had become highly popular as a vehicle of self-understanding. What would once have been described in voluntaristic terms as an action of the will is now more often represented as a mobilization of energy. (…) James (1911, 32) tells us that ‘the idea of one’s honor, for example, unlocks energy,’ and generalizes as follows: ‘The physiologists call a stimulus ‘dynamogenic’ when it increases the muscular contractions of men to whom it is applied; but appeals can be dynamic morally as well as muscularly (James, 1911, 15). This ambiguity of the ‘dynamic’ language of psychological energy, this sliding between the moral and the muscular, was to provide the magic formula that brought the psychology of motivation into existence. (Danziger, 1997, 115–116)

In the wake of thermodynamics, “energy” could be construed scientifically as a quantifiable force fueling the reproduction of any given system or structure. The (animal)6 organism is a neg- or anti-entropic process of temporarily canalizing physical energy to maintain and unfold its structure (Longo et al., 2015). It seems inescapable that the overall “economies” of such sustenance—i.e., the prioritizing of resources and engagements within the limited time and capacity given with the various finitudes of life—are indeed important aspects of subjectivity. This “economy” ranges from the existential fact of mortality, through the rhythms of everyday life, to the immediate bodily limits of effort and attention. As it was demonstrated very early on, energy is involved in the functioning of the nervous system; we can make the legs of a frog jerk by electrical stimulation. It appears straightforward to conjecture that the same must be the case with humans and human endeavors at all levels of complexity. All psychology needs to do (that is

 This is true of plants as well, but the scarce resource in plant “economy”, is nitrogen, rather than energy. 6

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the idea: what hubris!) is disentangle how energy is converted or flows from one of these levels to another! Short-circuiting the myriad and complex mediations between these levels, however preposterous it may seem, has been central to the dream of a psychology of motivation. The utopian promise of such a science has served as a place-holder, scaffolding a future structure of mediators that were never to materialize. Metaphysical connections between ethics and nature were already built into the physical sciences of energy, as reflections of values of “work” vs. “waste,” and of nature as a passive manipulable reservoir (conservation) vs. the “arrow of time” (entropy), cf. Daggett (2019). Like “capital,” “energy” conceptualized labor at its ultimately abstract-general level: Another reason for the dominance of thermodynamic approaches is that, as a governance strategy, energy was attractive. Thermodynamics offered easily applicable tools for making the environment legible, and thus governable. Biological organization, or resilience, is a great deal murkier than the inflows and outflows of matter and energy, which can be counted and tracked. (ibid., 122)

The abstraction of “energy” promised to serve as another device for the governance of “human capital,” except that the economy of energy was originally projected into the “standing-reserve,” which, according to Heidegger (1977, 14), modern technology “demands” of nature. In a sense, psychology set out to retrace these connections in a backward movement—not as a reflection on the evolving science and industry, but as an attempt to expand science and industry to also gain control of those inner connections as if they were simply part of nature, as “human resources.” To this, Heidegger would object that, since “man” [German: der Mensch—the human], is involved in the “process of ordering,” “he” can never be “transformed into a mere standing-reserve” himself (ibid.; 18). Yet, this philosophically impossible attempt has been prevalent and consequential by the name of psychology. The use of “energy” as part of the utopia of a psychology to come can be identified in other early psychologies besides that of William James. Thus, the early Freud shared with the behaviorist Clark Hull the idea that all behavior strives toward the reduction of energetic tension. And even in Vygotsky’s Psychology of Art from 1925, we can read his key hypothesis (to which we shall return in Sect. 3.8) formulated thus: Aesthetic reaction as such is nothing but catharsis, that is, a complex transformation of feelings. Though little is known at present about the process of catharsis, we do know how the discharge of nervous energy (which is the essence of emotion) takes place in a direction which opposes the conventional one, and that art therefore becomes a most powerful means for important and appropriate discharges of nervous energy. (Vygotsky, 1974 [1925], 214)

“Little is known at present,” but “we do know” that “discharge of nervous energy” is “the essence of emotion,” and in order to structure the accumulation of further knowledge that we hope for, the point is to establish the direction of “important and appropriate discharges” for which art can be understood psychologically as “a most powerful means.” The valuable contribution of Vygotsky’s analysis of art has

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nothing whatsoever to do with his vision of a science of energy, and this vision has played no role at all in his general legacy. But its metaphorical and utopian force helped organize a science that allowed for a fresh start in the approach to the mechanisms of the “appropriate” and one that could partly defend its increasingly precarious ideological autonomy vis-á-vis political governance. In general, the place-holder has not in fact served the erection of future structures of knowledge. But its metaphorical function has prevailed and kept its place for other reasons. This has also determined the meaning of quantification. When “energy” becomes a boundary object that metaphorically unites physiology with psychology, in order to bridge the gap between control and experience, its quantifiability becomes itself metaphorical. That is, quantity is referred to with various key theoretical terms, but no actual counting or measuring of this “energy” takes place. In other words, energy comes to designate a paradoxically unquantifiable quantity: the abstract or empty notion of quantity as a substance of subjectivity.7 Danziger describes how, in the 1920s, academic psychology reacted to demands from industry, marketing, and education, to address “topics that psychoanalysis had put on the agenda and threatened to monopolize” (1997, 111). Psychoanalysis had already established energy as a boundary object. The concept of libido, with its incessant “sliding between the moral and the muscular” and its pseudo-­quantification, was the very principle of psychoanalysis from the offset. Psychodynamics was all about metaphorical and unquantifiable amounts, accumulations, releases, and exchanges, even “economies,” of such moral and muscular energies. This way, Freudian meta-theory would eventually offer potentials for post-­ psychological reflections on the cultural meanings of “energy.” Most of the time, however, Freud and his followers harnessed the boundary objectivity of references to “energy” as an unquantifiable quantity. What unites these two epistemologies within (post-) Freudian theory was the indistinctness of libido, preserved as the cornerstone of a psychology that is itself structured only by the demands of socialization (and the pathologies that mirror these), offering libido as the generalized Other to these social structures.8 This remains a key contradiction all the way from Freud to his most recent descendants, such as Stiegler or Parker (see Sects. 2.13 and 2.14). Rearticulating the workings of this boundary objectivity, we must contextualize this theoretically articulated “energy” in practices, communities, and technologies. As discussed by Isabelle Stengers (1997) (among others), Freudian psychoanalysis aspired, first of all, to a clinical science that could tame the paradoxes of intersubjectivity and irrationality and affirm its objectivity by curing pathologies. Diseases  The pseudo-mathematical representation of theories is a more general trope in psychology (Lewin, Valsiner, and many others), as well as in other social sciences. Rather than a false dressing designed to be allowed access to “science,” this form should be analyzed as a way to invoke the hope of a science that can cumulate a body of knowledge through formalizing stipulated theorems. 8  Even with the theorizing of life implied in sexuality, in self-preservation and the death drive, psychoanalysis never (to my knowledge) thought of basing the idea of a libidinal economy on the finitude of life—everyday life as well as life course – as it would be developed in existentialism. Perhaps this was a result of its clinical focus, life viewed as “zoë” rather than as “bios.” 7

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anchored the boundary objectivity of psychoanalysis. The inscrutability of libido as an object of self-reflection handed over authority to the psychoanalyst (and to his supervisors in scholarly and therapeutic hierarchies), as long as the whole apparatus, which the “analytic setting” at its core, could be legitimized as a way to handle diseases. At the end of the twentieth century, Stengers could summarize that, although this clinical framing had been key to the success of psychoanalysis as a science, it also ended up undermining it, since the promises of cure never quite materialized (Chertok & Stengers, 1992; Stengers, 1997). She credits Freud himself for realizing this toward the end of his life (Freud, 1937): An “interminable” psychoanalysis is no longer identifiable as a cure in the medical sense. Psychoanalysis is not able to specify and quantify the libidinal economy of “resistance” enough to reliably predict therapeutic success or failure. We might add that Freud’s famous 1920 revision of his theory of “energies” to include a “death drive” (Thanatos: entropy) already pointed beyond the medical functionalism on which the psychiatric nosology rested in theoretical terms (Freud himself establishes the connection in his article, ibid., p. 240 ff.). In any case, psychoanalysts must increasingly do without the “objectivity” of the clinic when they seek recognition for their services in dialogues with clients and colleagues. The boundary objectivity of “libido” is fading, as it is no longer kept in place by the clinic and its specifiable cures. Although Danziger speculates that psychoanalysis threatened to capture the whole field of “motivation,” and although the key object of “energy” was most richly articulated in that tradition, “motivation” proper, as a problem to address scientifically, appeared mostly in other fields of practice and as articulated with other theories. In behaviorist and cognitive psychologies, motivation was in fact quantifiable: “Energy” itself is an unquantifiable quantity, but “motivation” can be measured and controlled when that “energy” is directed to sufficiently standardized activities. With the historical rise and spread of standardized activities, the substance of subjectivity could be stabilized and given a quantifiable form as “motivation.” Psychology could offer technologies for this standardization with experiments, surveys, and tests, which could be mapped onto factories and schools. Abstract concepts such goal, task, achievement, etc. suggested a utopian horizon of a universal science of motivation, and they worked as ways to translate between scientific installments and sufficiently standardized activities. This relevance was first of all in industry and education. Historically, we could ask why the army and the clinic could not play much the same role, since—as famously reconstructed by Foucault (1967, 1973a, b, 1997a)—in these fields, standardizing sciences of activity were also practiced and articulated, along with the question of will. We could add convents and theaters as other early forms and ask: Why was the question not articulated there as one of “motivation” at the time of early psychology?9 This “counterfactual” question is relevant to a genealogy

 Later, “motivation,” as an already well-established object, does appear there, as well as in more recent standardizations such as health promotion and sports. 9

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because in these practices, it could be said that “neighboring” objects and problematics were established, which can help us draw the contours of the discourse of “motivation,” and which, despite being external to it, keep nourishing its practices and technologies, as parts of the ground from which our figure stands out. In the case of the clinic, one possible answer is the encounter with the pathologically irrational, which put psychodynamics and libido at center stage for decades. It was only when “patients,” “clients,” and “users” were more widely recognized as rational agents that their “motivation” for engaging in “psychotherapy,” or, more generally, for complying to doctors” prescriptions, was problematized in ways that were not completely subsumed (as “resistance,” etc.) to nosology, that is, to the theories of diseases. “Motivation” proper would arise as soon as clients and therapists began to meet on the basis of common sense. This is in large part the background to “Motivational Interviewing” and other contemporary client-centered and cognitive forms of counselling. The army, on the other hand, confronts existence. Soldiers’ activities could for long stretches be conceptualized as the rational execution of well-defined tasks, as drill. But, at least since Von Clausewitz (1950), it was known and articulated that troop morale met its truth in war. In the face of overwhelming contingencies and death, operational rationalities and their instrumental motives fade in importance. Especially, around World War I, the masses had to mobilize a rather blank, self-­ sacrificing courage, while their officers could still think of themselves in the traditional terms of will and honor. It was not until the end of the twentieth century that death could be almost effaced from the surface of some armies. With death as imminent prospect, “motivation” is just far too narrow as a concept of the will. The discourse of “motivation” excludes madness and existence. It also avoids any too noticeable reflectivity. Convents and theaters, too, standardized activity, if never quite on a mass scale. But the aspect of staging activity was too obvious for a boundary objectivity to be established. Convents prefigured 12 steps fellowships in that ritually confirming submission permeated each and every operational detail, to the extent that this generalizing symbolism overrules any objectification derived from activities. Activities were often important and productive, but the will was never subservient to practical accomplishments—quite the opposite. The monk’s every movement was a display (to others, to himself, to God) of his will to piety.10 “Motivation” always dissolved into the question of faith, which juxtaposed reflectivity with existence. The theater, too, subsumed execution to display, even when (as in Stanislavski, 2008) the most artful display was seen to derive from a focus on execution. For subjectivity to be reducible to the raw substance of “energy,” intersubjective and existential reflectivity must be bracketed. For that “energy” then to be stabilized and objectified, standardized activities must be sufficiently established, as in schools and factories, and as in the scientific technologies that could most credibly emulate  Valverde (1998) recounts how some early 20th century alcoholism programs—before “motivation” —would emphasize displays of will, taking inspiration from the gymnastics of the time (which, in turn, reappeared later as “fitness” and “body-building”). 10

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those in the abstract: experiments and surveys. Specifiable and measurable actions gave form to a substance which had to be mentioned, but must be itself left indistinct. In general, the academic psychology of motivation still today retains this structure of a core of undefinable “energetic” substance and an elaborate quantifiable form. Thus, a recent state-of-the-art textbook wants to …offer a general definition of motivation that is consistent with the cognitive focus and that captures the elements considered by most researchers and practitioners to be central to motivation: Motivation is the process whereby goal-directed activities are instigated and sustained. (Schunk et al., 2014, 5)

The cognitive focus leads to emphasizing the measurable, objective side so much that subjectivity only appears convoluted within “process.” The authors continue: Let us examine this definition in depth. Motivation is a process rather than a product. As a process, we do not observe motivation directly but rather infer its presence from actions (e.g., choice of tasks, effort, persistence) and verbalizations (e.g., ‘I really want to work on this’). (ibid.)

After then commenting briefly on each of the other “elements,” the authors summarize: In short, motivation is an energized internal state that results in goal-directed behaviors. (ibid.)

There is no explanation of the term “energized,” nor of precisely how “process” has been converted into “state.” “Energy” seems to be equivalent to the indirect presence inferred under the label “process.” Everything specifiable has been abstracted from the question of what people want and why, so much that the “process” we are left with, finally, equals an “energized internal state.” This is superficially analogous to physics, where states of potential energy are converted into a process of expenditure or discharge of energy measured by observable movement. The difference is that physical energy is quantifiable as such because such quantities can be exchanged across the media with which they are measured—the translations having been established and stabilized—so that you can reliably convert energy back and forth between its measurable expressions (although with some “waste”). This is articulated in the two “laws of thermodynamics,” conservation and entropy. In psychology, by contrast, no such transfer of energy is taking place—only statistical correlates to support generalizations between scientific experiments and surveys and onto their fields of relevance. The analogy requires some measure, as it were, of belief. That is, the analogy carries the hope of a science that, beginning from the foundation established by a simple objectivity, can cumulate to become a stable structure of knowledge. It covers over a crucial feature of academic psychology: Its absent core of subjectivity. It is the imperative to manipulate or persuade people into action that is articulated as a potential movement residing within them as a process state. This may be criticized as an inadequate representation; but we should note that it is first of all just that representation that does the job (albeit to a moderate extent): It is through this kind of scientistic utopia that we use psychology to regulate ourselves, and the selves of each other.

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2.4 Bypassing the Self—Behavior Design and “Nudging” In “Experiments of the Mind,” Emily Martin (2021) explores ethnographically the experimental cognitive psychology that informs a steeply increasing part of today’s governance, i.e., that which is accomplished directly by designing and deploying machines. If ergonomic work interfaces seem innocent, and the “addiction by design” of gambling machines in Las Vegas (Schüll, 2012) appears a special case, the algorithms of search engines and social media are global and attracted attention as a grand-scale political issue in 2021 by apparently sending masses of Trump-­ supporting conspiracy theorists to storm the US White House. These algorithms base directly on the “grammar” and the findings of experimental psychology, and the big data collected through our interactions with them turn them into further experiments on a mass scale. The engines gradually “learn” how best to manipulate us into staying connected and into buying certain products. Technologies are more than machines, and if we want to understand the impact of such algorithms, we must situate them in political and commercial cultures. But it is obvious that such “behavior design” is an increasingly important problem to consider, at an “age of surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff, 2019). In fact, this is another case of governance without “motivation,” which can serve as the ground on which the figure we are studying stands out. It is not that the question of what people choose to do in which circumstances is not addressed in experimental psychology. Far from it: Since behavior is the main measure of any psychological function (even fMRI brain imaging still needs to be correlated to behavior), such propensities are always present, even when the target of an experiment is some hypothesized neurocognitive process. This is why this science turns out to matter in the world. The experimental means to understanding basic cognitive mechanisms are translated into means for influencing behavior. As Martin demonstrates, the technologies of experimental psychology are socio-­ material-­cultural networks that have evolved over a century, and these include motivated and morally evaluated activities. One of Martin’s main points is that subjectivities are stabilized, through statistically cancelling out individual differences, but also by setting up tasks and procedures that require a training and a compliance that are generally ignored and taken as preconditions that are rarely discussed. The experiments both utilize and contribute to a wider culture of individualized “behavior” that largely matches commercial relations in which we all participate without taking notice. These widespread but specific sociocultural practices produce the universally and naturally human propensities that do not depend on subjectivity (except as their tacit precondition), but which we should all take into account as “our” nature. This is the realm of cognitive bias and automatic-affective responses, of the “fast thinking” that is built into us because it helped our distant ancestors survive on the savanna, and which still economizes our effort and attention, and takes over in emergencies. This nature “we” can only to a very limited extent cultivate, but “we” can perhaps learn to retain it within its proper enclosures and harness its mechanisms to “our” purposes.

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Daniel Kahneman’s bestseller Thinking, Fast, and Slow (2011) reports numerous psychological studies that testify to this, many of them directly presented as experimental tasks for the reader. He thus sets up a conversation with us readers through which we discover our minds working as both “System 1”—the intuitive, fast but biased thinking—and “System 2”—the slow, reflective, and rational thinking that he teaches, the one that takes account of the statistical laws and calculations that govern his psychology. While System 1 is automatic, System 2 requires spending effort and paying attention11 and thus motivation—it is a “lazy controller.” Like the experiments in Martin’s ethnography, the Kahneman text persuades us to carefully separate the two systems, with the effect that the cultural preconditions and specificities of each are cancelled. The “Linda problem” is an example. Kahneman reports an experiment (originally published in Tversky & Kahneman, 1983) where undergraduate students were first presented with this description of “Linda”: Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations. (Kahneman, 2011, 156)

Then they were asked to rank the probability of eight scenarios, of which the last three were: Linda is a bank teller. Linda is an insurance sales person. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement. (ibid., 157)

More than 85% predicted the probability of the final scenario to be higher than that of the first of these three. In mathematical terms, this is obviously incorrect, since all instances of the latter scenario must be included in the set of instances of the former. To Kahneman, this reveals a “conjunction fallacy,” since it erroneously judges the conjunction of two events to be more probable than one of them alone, seeking to construct a plausible and coherent story. However, as argued by Hertwig and Gigerenzer (1999), it is less obvious that mathematical terms should apply. In ordinary English language, the word “probability” is far from unequivocal, and people generally assume that information (such as the first description of Linda) is given because it is somehow relevant. In terms of the total communication, the latter scenario does perhaps make more sense (if only “probably”). Kahneman’s rational System 2 is really a semiotic game of taking certain words literally within a specific disciplinary semantics, fenced off from other situated concerns, much like that which Minnick (1993) identified as the kind of specialized interaction children had to learn when they entered primary school—as important, but still only as one among others in everyday life. This abstraction to mathematics purifies rationality as separated from its content and its context, while also reducing

 Kahneman, who earned a Nobel prize in economics, makes a note of how apt that phrase is: Paying attention. “You dispose of a limited budget of attention” (ibid., 23). 11

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the irrational propensities of System 1 to formal qualities. Kahneman provides, as a colorful context of his presentation, that The audiences who heard this description (of ‘Linda’ MN) in the 1980s always laughed because they immediately knew that Linda had attended the University of California at Berkeley, which was famous at the time for its radical, politically engaged students (Kahneman, 2011, 156).

But the laughing of the audience is as irrelevant to the point he makes as the description of Linda is to the “problem” he wanted the students, and now wants us, to solve. There is nothing in our understanding of UC Berkeley that matters to his psychology, because all it does is feed the conjunction fallacy with arbitrary local substance. He appears to count on his readers being Americans (familiar with US institutions and sympathetic to Israeli warfare), but our more or less comprehensive knowledge of those local vocabularies and values seems only a question of how well he succeeds in communicating his psychology to a wider readership. In his own judgment, he won’t succeed well. Kahneman was not optimistic about teaching his psychology (ibid., 170 ff.), i.e., his statistics, even though he tried to write his book mindful of “some quirks of our minds, yours and mine” (ibid., 29), using “useful fictions” such as casting those “Systems” as active agents, dressed in words short and familiar enough to spare short-term memory and in sentences with active voice.12 And, sure enough, even though his intention was implied to be the noble System 2 project of raising rationality and taming intuition, the overwhelming social relevance of the psychology he presented has been to provide techniques for manipulating people by harnessing their System 1, regardless of their rationality or ethics. And those who wish to manipulate—or “nudge”—people toward worthy ends such as buying healthier or less food (Thaler & Sunstein, 1976) then run into ethical issues, especially once they gauge the real power balances between the agencies who perform such “nudging” (Marteau et al., 2011). Thus, although there are many findings that could speak to an understanding of motivation as the question of prioritizing efforts and “paying” attention, this question of “attention economy” is consistently reduced to assertions of the finitude of these resources (the “laziness” of System 2), or to how the quantity spent on a given task depends on conditions such as other simultaneous tasks, alcohol intake and tiredness, or lack of glucose in the blood. We do have “energy” as the basic notion of effort (even directly related to physical energy), but the only way to think of why any specific System 2 effort is worth prioritizing is if the experiment includes instructions to do so. We do have an awareness that the critical issue with cognition is choosing which problems to address, but only in the shape of choices that are wrong or right in terms of mathematics and compliance (typically: substituting easy questions for the harder questions that were asked). The meta-motivation issue is

 Anyone writing in English will be familiar with the warning built into the algorithms of the Word program: “Passive voice. Consider revising.” Apparently, passive voice spends the reader’s limited System 2 budget. And I don’t even have to know how or why—just trust and go on writing the canonical language. 12

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blocked by the pre-structured nature of the empirical studies (delegated, perhaps, to their ethical procedures, etc.), and motivation itself is tightly regulated into a mathematical measure of either automatic-affective responses or spending an effort structured as performing that math itself, so that what is left is the relative likelihood of people making specific choices among given options. But this is precisely why it proves so useful in a largely commercial world of behavior design. The economy of attention remains exclusively a technology of manipulation; we who are manipulated are lucky that this technology is limited to the presuppositions of a commercial structure. We have only to curb the temptation to waste our lives away in empty pursuits. What we have here is perhaps the purest form of the “variable psychology” that Holzkamp (2011) identified (as we saw above, p. 33): Behavior as the dependent variable in a science of control. Let us recall Emily Martin’s point that, although this psychology seems to ignore or bypass subjectivity completely, so that the image of control is simply one of influencing unconscious processes of the brain, this could only succeed in so far as that subjectivity has been already stabilized. What appears as natural cause-effect relations requires cultural set-ups, technologies, taken-for-­ granted assumptions, inclinations, and habits. This was the case in the experiments, and it was and is the case in our commercially governed relations to the algorithms of search engines and social media, and to healthy or unhealthy nudges; and it is the case when we read and make sense of texts such as Kahneman’s. The boundary objectivity here is accomplished through accepting, adopting, or just leaving unquestioned these assumptions, inclinations, and habits along with the imposition of certain sub-disciplines of mathematics as defining scientific rationality, thus establishing such thin and vague notions of subjectivity as the “lazy controller” or “System 2,” as boundary objects, defined in the relations of that disciplinary rationality to the nature of “System 1.” The separation of the statistically trained and knowledgeable (yet, mostly powerless) “System 2” from the “System 1” mechanisms of her own mind that form the object of the experiments facilitates the specific selfhood of behavior design, that is, the reconnection of those separate “systems” as universally “human” vs. “nature,” emptying both of their sociocultural qualities. As a form of selfhood, attention economy only lends itself to a structure where some manipulate the “nature” of others. Or, to be more precise, to forms of governance and governmentality that achieve “behavior design” through infrastructures largely delegated to machines, the emerging algorithms and hardware qualities of which13 accomplish the specific shapes of the power differentials that result. This structure matches the abstraction to statistical aggregates that makes out the core machinery that molds both the data and their proposed relevance. Commercial and scientific abstractions converge in the identification of elements of the psyche as  Probably first of all the interactive or customizable nature of “hyper-text” and the coexistence of multiple platforms on the same hardware device; as we shall see in Chap. 4, this logic of a commodity or brand defining a fixed frame with customized items (all standardized) is recognizable also in domains such as counselling. 13

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propensities of our universal nature that can be pragmatically harnessed, rather than confessed, eradicated, pruned, cultivated, or replaced.

2.5 Pragmatic Utopianism and the Scientific Articulation of the Common-Sense Self The form of this identification still, or once again, performs the trope of emancipation from moral or ethical hopes and values, by stating the value of facts as empirical findings—a value that is paradoxically absolute because it is purely pragmatic: It “merely” identifies “what works best” in given kinds of situations with pre-given parameters. Adopting these premises is a purely pragmatic choice, backed up, however, by all the forces of status quo (a status quo that evolves blindly into the Anthropocene), while their problematization would require difficult collective discussions of “metaphysical” beliefs. This way, pragmatics is a way of dodging any attempts at critique and becomes, in effect, dogmatic. At the same time, pragmatics is like all other dogmatisms in that it promises salvation, even if, ironically, from precisely the errors, biases, and falsehoods that come from utopian beliefs. Each pragmatic closure of questions and doubts is justified by a hope of at once emancipation and consensus—a hope that is never quite redeemed, but repeatedly reaffirmed.14 There is no divinity involved in establishing the dogma of scientific objectivity, only pragmatics. The solidity of beliefs that are held for purely pragmatic reasons is a true wonder. This hypothesis of an utopianist ideology of scientific pragmatics has many general sources. I could mention the critiques of hegemonic instrumentalism in Critical Theory from Adorno and Horkheimer (1979) through Habermas (1970) to Rosa (2013), or in Heidegger’s concept of modern technology as a “challenging enframing” that “orders nature as a standing reserve” of energy (1977), David Harvey’s identification of the “process utopia” of capitalism (2000), Theo Porter’s analysis of “trust in numbers” as the rise to dogma of civil society common sense (1996), or Bernard Stiegler’s diagnosis of the dream of knowledge without theory that is built into contemporary technologies (2015). Finally, theories of ideology as constituting subjects on horizons of hope have helped conceptualizing the mechanisms of submission involved (Billig, 1991; Bloch, 1995; Højrup, 2003; Žižek, 2004, 2011). My humble contribution is to use these general ideas to understand psychologies of motivation. The dogmatic-utopian promise of a pure pragmatics is key to the puzzle of why the psychology relevant to governing behavior, after decades of building ever more complex images of human needs and motives that must be catered for if “we” are to mobilize humans to do what “we” must make them do, returns to what appears to

 The “Copenhagen Consensus Center” initiated by Lomborg is a case in point—see (June, 2023) https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/. 14

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be radically simplistic models. Still in 1975, Ute Osterkamp could retrace the history of motivation psychology as one of a gradual recognition of human needs, historicizing, and with her own theory expanding, Maslow’s famous pyramid of needs. Needs were increasingly acknowledged to be directed toward no longer only immediate rewards, but social relations, self-actualization, and even self-­ determination (Osterkamp, 1975; see also Danziger, 1994, 1997; Rose, 1996). In Bloch’s terms, she could rearticulate a history of tendencies as latencies for her own theory of motivation for participation (to which we shall return in Chap. 3), as well as for the democratization of governance that it proposed. As we shall see, I have somewhat similar aspirations with the present text. But that project appears to stumble over the reappearance of crude “behavior design” and “governance by incentives,” ghosts from a distant past of Taylorism and primitive behaviorism that manage to occlude that history, and to prevail despite, not only wiser theory but also ever so convincing “scientific facts” about our needs, and about how people such as us academics are really motivated by recognition and autonomy, rather than by pay rises (“facts” that we shall revisit shortly). I propose the ideological workings of a dogmatic pragmatics as a way of understanding and rearticulating this apparent regression, which forces us to zoom out from the statements and contents of this psychology to the larger framework of how it is taken up and how it shapes our aspirations. This is important in terms of the methodology of a “rear-view mirror genealogy”: When the order of my argument here is to move from the simpler to the more complex psychologies, it is not because that is an ineluctable historical teleology. Rather, it serves to build a cumulative argument and to be able to trace and harness the dialectics of tendencies that seem to both simplify and complicate. The framework of “variable psychology” remains in place when we consider the more complex case of motivation psychology proper. The two prevalent strands I mentioned on p.  33 above—cognitive studies of self-regulation and self-­ determination theory—are both defined as “empirical,” i.e., as committed to basing their knowledge claims on statistical correlations of variables that lend themselves to causal inferences. The experiment and the survey are the two general kinds of technology designed to produce such data. The standardizations of meaning that these accomplish and presuppose—along with how they are designed to feed into infrastructures of scientific publishing and the disciplinary-bibliometric governance of research, as well as those parts of the practices of teaching that are most closely aligned with “psychology” as a discipline—are all consequential and key to rearticulating them. But here, in contrast to the automatic responses, the algorithmic governance, and the nudging that we discussed in the previous section, the self is targeted, problematized, and articulated directly. A science constituted on the self as object is different from one that stabilizes any “self” as a tacit, vital but external, precondition for purifying the natural processes of the mind that the “self” should take into account. The self as object implies a less consistent dualism. The writers and readers of a science of self-regulation must identify not only as rational humans confronted with nature but also with seeing that rationality itself as object, in these forms, as studied,

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described, and manipulated. They must identify pragmatically as pragmatic beholders and manipulators of pragmatic humans like themselves. A science of self-regulation is at the same time a science for self-regulation. That is to say, once that science finds a relevance, explaining “universal mechanisms” involved in self-regulation is offered as a plausible way to impose reasonable motivational structures, and perhaps solidify them as habits.  Conversely, accepting those explanations as relevant facts requires a submission to those motivations as reasonable. To be sure, this “subjective” aspect of the science is pushed aside as irrelevant to its contents, its knowledge, and so, my claims will appear off the mark to most of the scientists and to those who “merely” take account of their knowledge pragmatically, accepting its objectivity as “enough to go on with.” But, when we reintroduce the normative dimension that is bracketed by the reference to a boundary objectivity, we can understand how, rather than accumulating a structure of objective knowledge, psychology works by repeatedly reconstituting itself with appeals to common sense reasons for actions, partly dressed up as causal explanations of actions.15 My overall hypothesis is that the transparent procedures that establish the numbers with which mainstream motivation psychology claims empirical objectivity are constructions of common sense.16 Further, a crucial aspect of these constructions is how they include a boundary objectivity—an academic black-boxing of subjectivity that facilitates pragmatic moves of surrender by vague and inconsistent conceptualizations. The Danish humorist Storm P. once claimed that “psychology is what everybody knows, in a language nobody understands.” This was in the middle twentieth century, at the heyday of the complex theorizing of the “Copenhagen School” of phenomenology. The characterization is still apt as a description of current mainstream motivation psychology. But the flip side of this is paradoxically emerging as its supplement. Theoretical idiosyncrasy is receding, and common sense seems much more directly present in psychology, so the task of disclosing what is hidden from view is different: Now, psychology is, increasingly, what nobody suspects, even though it is written in a language everybody thinks they understand (enough for all practical purposes).17

 The idea that causal explanations in psychology masked the affirmation of a generally accepted rationality was already proposed by Holzkamp (1993), who, in turn, based partly on Smedslund (2012 [1988]). For my purposes, I propose to free this hypothesis from its place in an argument for a new realist psychology of reasons (cf. Sect. 2.12). Instead, my attempt is to use it in a post-psychology that seeks to understand the performance of causal psychologies addressing reasons. 16  Note that the concept of “common sense” is not, as I intend to use it, pejorative. Rather, I think of it as an object of study and of a reflective self-overcoming – mindful that the task of a theorist is to suggest new ways of thinking, thus to move beyond common sense, in ways that are always precarious (cf. Nissen, 2012b, Chap. 7). 17  In Bowker and Star (1999), these are dubbed NSS statements: No shit, Sherlock? – too obvious to be taken seriously as instructions to nursing practice. Yet, mainstream psychology is virtually made of these. 15

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2.6 The Calculating/Calculated Subject How does the academic formulation of common-sense work to conceal its power, when in the shape of a quantitative science of the self? 1. It constitutes and refers to forms of activity that are standardized enough that the transfer of quantities seems plausible, but not enough that it can be delegated to machines and ignored. Actions must be articulated as identifiable and quantifiable as “tasks,” embedded in ends-means calculations, and they must be given and taken on as such. At the same time, those ends-means relations are explained as causal mechanisms constituted as independent of the subject, that is, as essence.18 The relations between rationality and causality are unstable, and boundary objects such as “association” and “construct” serve to relay or mediate between them. 2. Standardization is accomplished with quantification and aggregation. Statistical objectivity detaches itself from anything singular, any individual situation, person, or event, except from the moment of calculation itself, where such individuality is transformed into differentiation on standard scales, and the moment hides itself. It thus parenthesizes relevance, but provides a language (or maybe just algorithms) for the customization of standardized forms of activity to fit individual preferences and abilities—as assessed by herself or by others. 3. It operationalizes and institutionalizes contradictory meaning into common sense. The objects presented are apparent banalities that smuggle in dubious premises. The achievement of this common sense is mostly through deference of meaning with reference and representation. Although statements seem to reflect obviously rational behavior and thinking, they rely on surveys and experiments that are taken to represent pure statistical associations. They are presented as relevant and objective by their reference to partly similar facts established elsewhere and detached statistically from the situation of their relevance. The deference of meaning is what allows a pragmatic bracketing of the move of surrender, where subjects accept the overall frame and defer the question of overall sense. To substantiate these points, I have chosen as a case a fairly recent article that argues the merits of recent motivation psychology—“the new look approach to motivation”—for explaining addiction: “Motivation and Self-regulation in Addiction” by Köpetz et al. (2013), hereafter called MSA. The article is chosen for its clear display of the features of such texts, especially in terms of arguing relevance—something which is a framing move in all articles, but which stands out in this case. Also, the choice of an article that addresses addiction makes sense as a way of helping readers see continuities and discrepancies with the other technologies discussed in this book. And perhaps I can establish some identification with

 Thus, as “Nature” as defined in Chap. 1. This may, but need not, be “anchored” in an “ultimate” reference to an organic substance – most typically, the brain. 18

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readers who all, like myself, have experiences with trying to understand and cultivate habits, including our own. 1. While the bulk of studies in motivation psychology address relatively standardized activities in institutions such as schools, work places, and treatment facilities, in this case, it is the article that proposes addiction as such. For motivation psychology to be relevant, addiction must be regarded as a goal-directed activity, the ends and means of which can be mapped onto the scientific findings it reports, coming from surveys and experiments. It is consistently assumed that, even though individuals and drugs differ, and states and situations vary “dynamically,” the overall pattern remains identifiable as the same. Motivation concepts have been invoked to explain why people behave as they do and what makes individuals shift from one state to another (Allport, 1937; Atkinson & Birch, 1970; Kruglanski & Köpetz, 2009a, b). The processes that translate motivation into action have been referred to as ones of self-regulation (Carver & Scheier, 2011; Shah, 2008). They include setting a goal (as a desirable and attainable end state), finding appropriate means, warding off distractions, and negotiating conflicts. As such, they underlie most of our behaviors, whether stopping for a cup of coffee, choosing a vacation spot, or, indeed, using drugs. (MSA, 7)

Since addiction is negatively defined (as a disease or a problem), it becomes shaped as tasks that people should take on in the form of “saying no” to drugs (MSA, 14). At some points, addiction is mirrored by preferable activities that are directed to other goals, such as seeking health by dieting, exercising, etc. (ibid.), but mostly, it is assumed that the goals set for addiction are normal and should only be achieved by other means: …the teenager for whom socializing and being accepted by peers is a top priority and for whom alcohol and drugs are the only way he could achieve this goal may be more vulnerable to develop pathologic substance use than a counterpart for whom socializing may be equally important but for whom drinking is only one way (means) of socializing in addition to playing sports or going to the movies with friends. This is so simply because in the former case individuals have a stronger association between using drugs and the motivation that this behavior fulfills, which facilitates the transfer of affect and may increase the likelihood of the drug use becoming a motivational force in itself. (MSA, 10)

Alcohol, drugs, sports, and movies figure as exchangeable means to the normal and identifiable goals of socializing and being accepted by peers: common sense goals that require no further articulation. The “self” with whom we identify as setting those goals and calculating these means (in the first part of the quote) is resting on a ground of causal explanation (in the second part): “This is so simply because….” This juxtaposition is the general rule of the argument. Knowledgeable action is explained by causes and likelihoods. Or, indeed, conversely, it explains them: When the individual [the same socializing teenager …, MN] knows that he could hang out with friends and family or go to the gym to release stress and to feel good […although his goals seem to have changed, MN], the likelihood of alcohol becoming uniquely used as an emotional coping strategy and therefore becoming a desirable end state […and they keep changing, MN] in itself decreases. (MSA, 11)

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The relation between the two parts—causality and teleology—is unstable. On the one hand, the relation between ends and means is obviously (tautologically) instrumental. For instance, as we saw, you can “go to the gym to release stress,” or “use alcohol as a coping strategy.” We are not surprised to learn that Effective self-regulation requires the individual to select and implement the appropriate means to his or her goals. (MSA, 7)

This is all identifiable common sense. One the other hand, common sense is presented as causes and effects manipulable for indisputable health purposes. Sometimes this comes down to pure behavior design: Similarly, reminding hungry participants of their dieting goal reduced the number of foods hungry participants considered for lunch and resulted in a healthier choice of nonfattening, low-caloric foods (Köpetz et al., 2013) (MSA, 14)

Perhaps any responsible employer should have all the company’s computers programmed to come up with health reminders just before lunch. Such findings could be built into machines to design the appropriate behavior. Never mind whether we decide or are manipulated: This works and makes sense. The unstable relations between causes and reasons are most often held together and kept open with the idea of cognitive constructs of elements that are simply interconnected, associated. … according to the interconnectedness principle, goals are cognitively associated with other relevant constructs, such as their means of attainment (Kruglanski et  al., 2002). (MSA, 7; italics in the original) According to the interconnectedness principle, when the goal becomes salient, it will automatically activate behavior representations and resultant action tendencies. For instance, Aarts et  al. (2001) manipulated participants’ thirst and showed a subsequent increase in the accessibility of drinking-related objects. In this manner, a certain circumstance may become capable of activating a representation of an outcome (goal), which will in turn activate the behavior known to produce it. (MSA, 12)

The concept of “association” (a.k.a. “interconnectedness”) has a long history in psychology as a boundary object. Since it is the qualitatively minimal way of relating two concepts (it captures only their relatedness), it is well suited to purely statistical inferences, translatable back and forth to either rationality or causality (just like “energy,” it is at once muscular and moral, cf. above p. 42). The advantage of “association” or “interconnectedness” is that the rational/causal arrow can be pointed either way. Reasons explain causes, and/or causes explain reasons. Association also allows means to become ends, by “emotional transfer,” without problematizing the overall frame of “addiction.” Such strengthening of the association between a goal and a means facilitates a process of emotional transfer. More specifically, the motivational value (desirability) of the goal is transferred to the objects or activities that are strongly associated with the goal and are deemed instrumental to goal attainment. This process of emotional transfer from goals to means is known as means valuation and has been widely supported by recent self-regulation research (Brendl & Higgins, 1996; Brendl et al., 2003; Ferguson & Bargh, 2004; Fishbach & Ferguson, 2007; Fishbach et  al., 2004; Lewin, 1935 [sic!]; Markman et  al., 2007). (MSA, 9)

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Another way to fuse common sense rationality with cause and effect is by using normalizing arguments. With “motivation,” the dubious self of the addict is comparable to anyone wanting anything—even something as noble as love itself: Motivation for love with a specific person has been long associated with patterns of behavior that bear striking similarities to addictive behaviors (Peele & Brodsky, 1975). Being with the person one loves elicits euphoric highs that conjure up a permanent craving of togetherness, elicits time- and energy-consuming behaviors to be with the loved one, and even produces withdrawal-like symptoms (cf. lovesickness) upon separation from the target of one’s affection. (MSA, 6)

By phrasing normal, identifiable, or even idealized, everyday activities in the same language of association and behavior, “we” are persuaded to accept the generalized notion of “motivated behavior.” And thus, Evidence across domains seems to converge on the conclusion that addiction is, after all, a motivated behavior where drug administration is initiated and maintained due to its rewarding capacity—that is, its ability to fulfill a motivation. Yet jogging, drinking a cup of coffee, or eating a piece of cake elicit a similar effect. All reflect individuals’ attempts to attain a desirable end state. (MSA, 6)

What matters here is the conceptual form of the statement (the “rewarding capacity,” etc.), rather than the content or the implications of postulates such as how to understand love. Here, the reference is quite old (for this genre) and off-standard. Peele and Brodsky (1975) do not in fact support the statement in the manner implied here (they discuss literature, psychoanalysis, etc., and would never have passed the peer review of Perspectives on Psychological Science). That reference is not at the center of the support mobilized, but it serves to generalize and normalize addiction into a universal “motivation” that is articulated in this particular form, yet precisely recognizable and identifiable in everyday life, as “underlying most of our behaviors.” This is about us, writers and readers—is the point made by Köpetz et.al. by invoking our identification with such everyday life activities, or such gallant romance, in the same breath as offering causal explanation. 2. Having established the general alignment of common sense with “motivated behavior,” the core part of the argument goes on to differentiate quantitatively. That is, within the frame of addiction (or of saying no to it), various gradients, trajectories, and distinctions are presented, which all pertain to maintaining either drug use or abstinence. Various studies are reported that document how addiction/abstinence are correlated statistically to personality traits, to patterns and emotions previously “stamped” into the brain as memory (and, oh yes, dopamine is in fact involved!) (MSA, 6), and to “dynamic,” variable circumstances. Tautologies and/or causal relations are mapped onto calculable gradients. The greater the number of means associated with a goal, the weaker the association of each particular means to the goal. Conversely, the greater the investment in pursuing a given goal, the less resources should be available for alternative goals or means (Baumeister et al., 1998; Gailliot et al., 2007; Muraven et al., 1998; Vohs & Heatherton, 2000) (MSA, 13)

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The more an addict has learnt to associate stimuli with attaining his goals with drugs, the more drug-related stimuli are valued positively, and therefore noticed (“attention bias”). Thus, hardly surprising, …across different substance-use categories including drinking, smoking, and cannabis use, substance users associate their drug of choice with positive affect more strongly than do non–substance users (see Houben et al., 2006, for an extensive review). (MSA, 10)

If one gradient is how much the person likes and wants the drug, another is how much she is able to resist it: When the resources are scarce (either chronically at the trait level or momentarily at the state level), behavior becomes susceptible to the automatic tendencies triggered by environmental and internal cues (Grenard et al., 2008; Hofmann et al., 2008; Mann & Ward, 2004, 2007; Ward & Mann, 2000). (MSA, 13)

—or, rather, to be precise, it is about how “susceptible” is “behavior”: In these studies, persons and situations never appear—only as instances of the aggregate. This is consistently what warrants this knowledge as objective. Of course, the relevance of this knowledge, too, can remain at the same level of aggregates. The company whose machines remind employees to eat healthy food may be uninterested in each person, only in reducing rates of sick leave. But, in so far as the associations point to reasons, it is assumed that persons can or should somehow translate them onto their concrete situation. This translation is generally invisible within scientific motivation psychology. As we shall see in Chap. 4, it becomes key to the application of its knowledge in practices of counselling—where “evidence-basing” must involve situated practitioner discretion and user preferences (Sackett, 2000)—but in articles like this, it is generally only implied. However, at certain points, the implication opens itself to deconstruction. Thus, two of the authors have studied why some women engage in sex trade (even though it is risky in terms of health and law) in order to get drugs. The problem, recognized by many, is not that these women do not know or understand the risk, but that they have difficulty resisting such behavior when a crack cocaine craving is induced by contextual factors. This may happen because females who engage in sex trade to satisfy their drug craving may form cognitive representations where the goal of alleviating a drug craving is strongly associated with sex trade as a means toward their goal. Hence, the experience of drug craving may increase the accessibility of sex exchange as a means of drug obtainment and may result in initiating this behavior without conscious intention and voluntary control. (MSA, 12)

So, female crack cocaine users were somehow placed in front of screens with a joystick and “subliminally presented with the word ‘cocaine,’ followed by some “sex trade words” (MSA, 12). Using a joystick, participants were asked to “move” away from rather than toward the sex trade words. The researchers reasoned that when the drug goal was active (after cocaine priming), women with a history of sex exchange (who therefore may have developed a strong association between the goal of obtaining crack cocaine and sex exchange as a means) should be faster to initiate movement toward the sex trade targets than away from them. That is precisely what happened. (MSA, 12)

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Beginning with the rather startling ethics of this procedure, one can wonder how it all must have felt for those “participants.” It seems likely that they did know how to make money in the sex trade to get drugs and that they knew about certain risks. This rational knowledgeability is recognized by the authors and frames the experiment as relevant. It seems less likely that the exercise would appear relevant to the participants in terms of understanding or improving their life situation, even if it would make some intuitive sense to confirm the rather obvious “association” (and perhaps satisfy the researchers, whose instructions must have come across as somewhat ambivalent).19 The obviousness of the “association” stands out here as a highly questionable finding, not because participants could not identify with making it, but because of the “so what” question—the extremely weak and vague match between the correlation and the plight of the women, as mediated by the “association” offered as boundary object. This problem of relevance is of course further accentuated in the “solutions” section of the article. We learn of experiments with “motivational retraining” of alcoholic inpatients, where … they used a joystick task and trained participants to make an avoidance movement (by pushing the joystick away) from alcoholic beverage stimuli (…); following this short retraining treatment (compared with control conditions), individuals showed a strong avoidance bias toward alcohol-related stimuli, (… and …) significantly lower rates of relapse to alcohol use a year posttreatment than their counterparts who received only the regular treatment. It is possible that such motivational training might have reduced the subjective value of alcohol and therefore restrained its motivational power, facilitating abstinence. (MSA, 14)

Imagine that: Inpatient alcoholics learn to abstain, the “subjective value” of alcohol having been reduced, by briefly training on-screen “avoidance movements” with a joystick! The far-fetched nature of the conjecture speaks volumes about the detachment of these correlations from persons in such (or any) situations. Here as in many other cases, the project of understanding what boundary objectivity does is threatened by the suspicion that it does nothing at all. However, the possibility of such a “button to press” has always been a wet dream at alcohol clinics. In fact, their history is full of “magic bullets,” pragmatic utopia imposed onto clients and professionals, including, obviously, wonder drugs (cf. Valverde, 1998). In another experiment, … (Houben et al., 2011), heavy drinkers were randomly assigned to take part in a working memory training program over 25 sessions. The training did result in improved working memory capacity, which in turn appeared to have decreased alcohol consumption by approximately 10 glasses per week from pretest to posttest. Furthermore, this reduction was still evident 1 month later at follow-up. What is more interesting for the current analysis is that such effects were stronger among participants with strong automatic preferences for alcohol (as measured by the IAT). This suggests that improving working memory (through  This can even be argued within their own logic: The priming strengthened the association “cocaine-research” —which was probably already established with the remuneration given to participants—except, in this genre, participants always try to do what they are told, or they are deleted from reported findings. 19

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These participants are not, in the article, granted reflective powers and rationality, not even a hint of a “subjective value,” as in the previous experiment recounted. But, to the extent they actually existed as humans, what they would have to “work for this to work,” would be, for 25 sessions, to “train working memory,” as part of their treatment, and to momentarily regard themselves as relevantly placed on scales from low to high “automatic preferences for alcohol,” as well as high to low “self-­ regulatory resources.” Is it possible that this framework articulated a desperate hope of recovery? Maybe they had other reasons for complying with the program and for providing the relevant measures. At the level of this literature, we do not get much insight into the processes where people—such as counsellors and clients at alcohol clinics— “apply” the knowledge offered and subject to its technology. It is possible that the quantitative differentiations (the scales) in the experiments simply appear as algorithms controlling automatically interactive tests on computers, so that all it takes for each participant is to accept the training in toto, which is probably no small thing. But, as we shall see in Chap. 4, the interplay of the framing standards and the scales they define is often in practice important to customizing practices. 3. We have already encountered the contradictions in the interchanging appeal to empirically demonstrable causes and tautologically given reasons and in how “association” operates to allow either one to explain the other, and ends and means to be interchangeable “constructs” or “states.” We have also seen a few of the many statements in the article, which, at first sight, surprise with their utter banality—such as the fact that smokers “associate” tobacco with “positive affect” more than do non-smokers, or that “effective self-­ regulation” requires “appropriate means to goals.” That is common sense. Here is another: Consistent with the notion that active goals increase the accessibility of goal-relevant information and prepare the organism for action, attentional bias toward drug-related stimuli is assumed to exert important preconscious influences on behavior by increasing drug craving and the tendency to direct approach behaviors toward drug-related cues (Field et al., 2006; Franken, 2003; Palfai & Ostafin, 2003). (MSA, 12)

OK, so: When you are trying to get something, you will look for information relevant to it; that information will, in turn, arouse and confirm your desire and keep you on track. That makes sense—even too obvious to report, it would seem. And in such strange terms. But the language of “organism,” “attentional bias,” “stimuli,” “preconscious,” “cues,” etc. is not innocent or superfluous academic mumbo-jumbo. It directly contradicts that obviousness, while it also relies on it. It is the reconstruction of common sense in a particular form, one that oscillates between automatisms and standardized rationality. This form of common sense is then extrapolated onto situations where it appears far from obvious, such as those we just witnessed with

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crack cocaine users and alcoholics. This problem of relevance then threatens to reveal a contradiction between the data and their purported grounding in real-life situations of real people. For the reconstruction to work despite this problem of relevance, the deference of meaning is key. Articles like this are nodes in traceable networks of texts in the infrastructure of academia. Sometimes, especially in review sections, the terms used visibly misrepresent or thwart those of the reference, as in the example with the argument about love. But more commonly, they represent the achievement of black-­ boxed facts within a community of scholars. Arguing their falseness or irrelevance would be to stand up against strong forces, especially, of course, if you want a career in psychology. The network of meaning in the academic infrastructure is carried not only by writing, storing, eliciting, and reading such articles but also by the data suitable to them. In a universe of “stimuli” and “associations,” joystick tasks are equivalent to prostitution, just as ticking the “quite a bit” box at “I enjoyed [a given activity] very much” in a written survey equals “intrinsic motivation” for an activity (such as sport, or gaming, cf. Przybylski et al., 2012, 71). This is where “empirical” psychology is made. It is here, in these representations, that the technology, the apparatus of psychology, stands out as questionable. But only to the layperson. The myriad questions one could ask about why people would do these things are neutralized by the statistical detachment and standardization carried by the network of references. It does not matter what any person may have wanted or thought, as she operated that joystick or ticked that survey item box. What matters is that psychologists can convincingly map the aggregated data onto knowledge that is already accepted in the academic community—already accepted, as it were, by the “subject supposed to know” (Žižek, 2011, cf. above p. 40). Those methods are validated within that community, within that universe of “constructs” and “associations.” The representations are claimed as valid in a realist sense, but their validity is deferred through a network of references that works as a pragmatic shield, since what is validated is never exactly the point made, but only that approximately similar concepts and representations have been used in other contexts. This appears almost unproblematic when general statements are made. The reference to “Field et al. (2006)” in the quote above does not really confirm “attentional bias,” but rather the “automaticity” of smoking behavior (the commo-­ sense notion of “habit” rearticulated into another language). Still, this way, it does roughly confirm (that is, imitate) the general approach. By contrast, “Palfai and Ostafin (2003)” serve to support the use of the specific technology, which might appear controversial. In this case, the Implicit Association Test (with further reference to Greenwald et al., 1998) as a way to represent “alcohol use motivation,” as measured, in turn, by correlations with a number of other measures of alcohol consumption or preference, most of which in the form of surveys with Likert scales. Each association in this sequence rests on acceptable statistical correlations and acceptable conceptual similarities. We might ask: To what extent are “global positive expectancies” (“agreeing” in a survey more or less with statements about “the degree to which they expected the consumption of alcohol to be satisfying,” Palfai & Ostafin, 2003, 1155) the same as

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2  A Post-psychology of Motivation

“implicit alcohol-approach tendencies”? The answer is: “significantly associated,” i.e., “[r (47) = 0.41, p