Once Upon a Time,Materiality: A Possible Scenario for Psychology in the Nature/culture Divide

Introduction

Psychology has been confronting itself over the last decade with the post-humanist take on affect. In a certain way, to shift from mainstream conceptions of emotion towards a less-controlled emotion that can be situated outside of subjectivity. Such endeavor has taken the form of ontopower (Massumi, 2015) in that it would intrinsically resist the psychologization (meaning, subjectivity-related) of the “pure” affect. Psychology has, thus, relied on post-humanism to reframe sanity itself not as a specific cognitive and relational condition within this world; rather, as the very act of recovering the ecological wholeness and interdependence we experience in infancy.

This trend in Psychology resonates with the philosophical perspective of New Materialism from the 90s as well and it seems to aim to challenge the influence of socio-constructionism in the humanities. Language, critique, and study of ideologies are all under question due to their apparent cognitive rationalization at the expense of affect, objectivity, and other-than-human entities.

The present paper intends to follow such trend by discussing why subjectivity still plays a crucial role to make sense of human experience, how language and materiality can be critically combined rather than separated, how the vitality of living/non-living/objective is inseparable from agency. I will offer a glance to see differently the intrapsychic realm through a different view on biology, culture, and nature.

This way, I will locate my arguments in light of the recent turn towards ontology rather than epistemology in Psychology (King et al., 2021), but without disregarding or cutting apart the role played by ethics in the very condition of human and more-than-human-existence (Albrecht, 2019).

The overall paper will address “nature” and “culture” to make sense of different framings of their connection, to overcome both human distance from nature and non-human distance from culture. In doing so, I will try to suggest how an ecological approach in Psychology may challenge its clinical, therapeutic, focus (Woodbury, 2019) towards a re-discussion of what means “pathology” and “clinical symptom” from a biomedical point of view (following Kirby’s and Barad’s new materialist perspectives, basically).

Acts Against Nature/Acts of Nature: Agency Between Ethics and the Innate

Thinking outside culture may sound impossible, non-sensical, against human (and more-than-human) existence itself. Even if “culture” is a never-finished entity to make sense of, traditionally humanities have come to terms to what culture is certainly against to: “nature.” While such a debate is not at all new, what is increasingly expanding is the trend towards science-friendly humanities, capable of disruptively re-framing the dualism at stake along with methodological innovation on what constitutes “materiality.”

“Culture” seems not only sitting over meaning-making processes of affect, intergroup relations, social inclusion/exclusion, borders, clothing, etc (Valsiner, 2020). It is enmeshed in the border, it is the underwear, and it comes out as the very processing of molecules, chemicals, and microbiology. Culture stands out as the never-finished effort to distinguish itself from nature, to make an epistemological difference between “acts against nature” versus “acts of nature” (Barad, 2012).

“What if Culture was Nature All Along?” (Eds. Vicki Kirby, 2017, pp. 320) interrogates humanities, first of all, in the quest for different forms of agencies and different foundations for ethics, as it tries to go beyond the Derridean axiom “there is no outside text” for “there is no outside nature” (Kirby, 2017, p. ix). What this call to different constraints to existence/intelligibility might take is the object of interest of the present essay.

“Acting in the name of nature” is not at all a novel attempt in those domains deemed “outside of nature” par excellence: legal systems. As it comes from the legal code of the state of North Carolina: “Crimes against Nature” in relation to “sexual intercourse contrary to the order of nature,” include “acts of bestial character whereby degraded and perverted sexual desires are sought to be gratified” (http://www.ncgala.org/guide/guidecan.htm). The very notion of “crimes against nature” often relies upon criminalization of homosexual acts, especially sodomy (still 71 countries in the world ban sodomy, https://76crimes.com/76-countries-where-homosexuality-is-illegal/). Going beyond the mere biopolitical reading of legal punishment of non-reproductive sex, what is even more relevant is the double-fold nature of “nature” prescribed by law. In fact, according to such legal norm there seems to be natural versus unnatural (cultural?) sex; “acts of bestial character” that should be abolished because neither the nature of beasts should be violated, nor it should be imitated, nor (especially) it should be permitted any crossing between human (culture) and non-human animals (nature). While law does not prohibit mass-killing of wage-animals for human nutrition, it stands as the superior human-culture-signifier of justice and equality through preserving the purity/impurity of nature in sexual intercourses. Such a contradictory approach to nature and culture, as it is visible for sodomy, constitutes the very basis of morality (Harry V. Jaffa, The Los Angeles Times, January 14th, 1989) insofar “to regard the generative distinction between male and female as arbitrary is to regard all the distinctions upon which all morality rests—for example, those which condemn slavery and genocide—as arbitrary” (http://famguardian.org/Subjects/SexualIm-morality/Homosexuality/HomoAndNaturalLaw.htm). What goes against any strict functional or ontological separation of male (culture) and female (nature), then, goes wrong. Morally wrong. This means that mis-recognizing such an essentialist dichotomy is, fundamentally, mis-reinforcing it at a political level.

Rather than conceptualizing “nature” as something passively violated, victim of culture; or, as something threatening (human) culture, it might be useful to look at the material relations of difference and entanglements (Birke, 2010) that make possible “acts of nature,” instead. In this sense, morality would apply to nature as intrinsically cultural, agential, more-than-human. History has already confronted us with harsh cross/boundaries comparisons between human and non-human, for instance, with equivalences between Jews and lice in the Nazi period (see Himmler’s remark that “anti-Semitism is exactly the same as delousing” in Raffles, 2010, p. 142). This is not an act of nature as previously suggested. This is posing the psychological/material burden of extermination as natural/rational process without (deliberate) action, (moral) responsibility, cultural co-dependency, as will be further discussed in the next session.

Responsibility VS. Causality, That is Where Lies Human Role

Localization is epistemologically used to make sense of the principle of unilinear causality, also in psychology. Scientific efforts to determine “objects of study” as specific effects coming from specific causes usually undermine the role of researchers’ responsibility in “providing opportunities for the organism to respond” (Barad, 2012, p. 38). As Barad brilliantly puts it with the notion of “iterative intractivity,” there is a co-participation of the knower in the construction of those conditions under which any phenomenon might or not manifest certain configurations, always as its internal properties re-emerging through certain scientific apparatuses. Back to localization, it is well-known how the Cartesian dualism mind versus brain has been replaced in psychology (often in social sciences in general) by the biological reductionism according to which mind conflates into body: there is no extension of mental activity outside the body and all mental processes are locatable in human neural system (Traversa, 2021a).

The case of allergy in “What if Culture was Nature All Along?” (Chapter 4, Jamieson) shows how the principle of causality cannot be clearly invoked when it comes to the etiology of allergy in immunology. Michelle Jamieson discusses evidences from vast literature in the field proving that causes of allergy are both biological and psychological (p. 70). As it is common across the entire book, even the multifactorial inclusion to make sense of a more complex notion of causality for “natural” phenomena is challenged. And I do think this is one of the major merit of the book, just to radically push thinking beyond the essentialist separability of different, isolated factors, that afterward become reconciled through a different epistemological lens. Most often, assuming that biology is the internal component (pre) existing the environmental/external one. Such an approach disregards the central question of how multiple variables come to arrange the disease of allergy and “how do biological causes actually relate to, and even inhabit, psychological causes?” (Ch. 4, Jamieson, p. 71). This last question re-frames the terms of knowing by focusing on “how” rather than “where” or “why” and establishes an investigation at the level of morphology of multiple causalities. This sounds as a rejection of reductionist localization—even of biological causes—and it is more visible in the examination of the literature over the inheritance of asthma. Martinez (1997) observed that it is not only the genetic parental makeup to trigger asthma in their offspring; instead, asthma inheritance cannot be explained without reference to contingent, immunological events experienced by parents in their life. To complicate such a multifactorial emergence of asthma there is the necessary consideration that if there is interplay between genes and environment, then the quality of parents’ genetic potential may be determined after their child’s birth (Ch. 4 Jamieson, p. 84). This profoundly interrogates notions of location in space, bodies, time, like the skin prick testing for allergy has resulted contaminated apparatus that does not make sense of the unique process of genetic, familial, and environmental that produces the asthmatic individual.

Following Vicki Kirby’s book, we are trained to see more and more how what is usually considered outside the scope of biology turns into a biological matter, as well as how individual specificities in biological writing (Wilson, 2004, on material/semiotic conceptualization of hysteria) speak of the inseparability between anatomy and psychology. This is not only a redundant reminder of psychosomatic experiences and diseases, but from a cultural psychology point of view it stands as a remark of the meaning-making and representation involved in never purely biological phenomena, such as allergy, asthma, or affect. As Wetherell (2015) interestingly puts it, biology in its “viral and random” (p. 154) guise has fascinated social sciences and critical theory in an anti-discursive fashion. Biology has, then, become a sort of shelter to fight against the master-language of discoursivity, in so doing re-naturalizing and de-personalizing well-known concepts in psychology that require social context for their very emergence (Schachter & Singer, 1962, theory of emotions). In this sense, what is at stake is neither the rejection of the empirical nor of social-constructionism. In particular, what is questioned is the social-constructionist anti-scientific position, while the entire book “What if Culture was Nature All Along?” constructively endorses science from the inside (Barad, 2007, 2012, p. 51).

Empirical reality is not reducible to data insofar such framework does not capture how differences are “cut together apart” (ibidem, p. 46) along different scientific apparatuses to form a specific dataset of any phenomenon. Even if this may sound a typical socio-constructionist point, I would stress how Kirby’s perspective of ‘there is nothing outside nature’ truly calls for empirical/material agency made evident in methodological terms. And not to claim that “anything goes” in anti-reality fashion.

Which Materiality for A (New) Psychology?

The quest to overcome the discursive superimposition in social sciences has followed the “new materialism” attempt to re-approach ontology, rather than only focusing on epistemology. As Coole and Frost (2010) put it: “Our material lives are always culturally mediated, but they are not only cultural” (ibidem, p. 27). So, if we look back at what Margaret Wetherell (2012, 2015) was arguing in the previous session concerning the risk of a renovated fascination with objectivity at the expense of subjectivity (e.g., re-naturalization and de-personalization), it becomes clear that it is not only language or mind under severe interrogation. Culture itself is, then, seen as a “property” that is somewhat independent from other non-human entities and, in this way, “exceptional.” In so doing, it is re-instated the same Cartesian axiom new materialism tries to question (Kirby, 2017, p. 9). Such a deconstruction of the epistemological/ontological value of language, structure, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, and their underlining connection to “critique” is quite alarming according to Kirby (2017, p. 29). Psychology is pretty much implicated into this concern due to its theorizing of individual (mostly complex cognitive), interior, and subjectivity. Of course, psychology is seen as profoundly human-centered and even critical psychology perspective suffers from a too epistemological method to study how ideologies, thinking and semiotic practices come to matter (Miller, 2000).

Let us see, now, if a new materiality may re-compose such a subject/object split in psychology (see also Traversa, 2021b).

Rebecca Oxley (Ch. 5, Oxley, 2017) vividly highlights how paternal post-natal depression is not a mere “mood,” psycho-social suffering, what fathers feel several months after childbirth; whereas, mothers only are supposed to experience baby blues or strictly biological symptoms. According to the author, such a sexual division dates back to the Cartesian schema of men having a body to master and to utilize; whilst, women are their body (Kirby, 1997, p. 59). And she goes on asking “Is it possible that the answer to this riddle might be found by refusing to choose sides—either biological or socio-cultural—instead, elaborating how “one side,” here the hormonal/biological, already includes what is purportedly non-biological?” (Ch. 5, Oxley, 2017, p. 94). This is exactly what I find most useful for a psychology capable to creatively materialize its field of knowledge, without research questions constraining reality in neither a dualistic nor even in a (separately) inclusive fashion. To look psychologically through a seemingly only biological phenomenon in order to find complex locations.

With respect to paternal post-natal depression, Kim and Swain (2007) stated that a key role is performed by the level of estrogen in fathers (usually conceived primarily female hormones) that comes to be higher than testosterone levels several months after childbirth. A lower level of estrogen, for men too, would signify a weaker bond with their child and may lead to depression. The move toward a less unvarying and fixed configuration of nature may well take paternal PND as an example of external embodiment; not just in guise of a reaction or mutuality between mothers and fathers, but as an ontological entanglement whereby “the body is never mute” (Ch. 5, Oxley, 2017, p. 105) and does not need reflection-at-distance to make sense.

The open materiality (Grosz, 1994) that psychology may borrow from such entanglements are those processes of daily-routine that (also) turn into political action. Studying how makeup can boost transgender-migrant agency/face—not as a way to hide oneself or to become (finally) someone else but in order to “demonstrate I am still alive […] feminist and very liberated” (Padron, 2021)—despite systemic discrimination, means to psychologically approach the body-politics (Pateman, 1988) in its microgenetic becoming. With no predetermined outcomes. Such a scenario can be investigated through beautification practices of makeup users and non-users women whose ambivalence with “the minimal mask” (Spezzacatena & Marsico, 2021) goes hand in hand with their ambivalence toward “natural face.” This is a further example of daily practice that psychology should embrace in order to elaborate embodiment as a constant natural decolonization (see also Traversa, 2021c).

Is There Anything Outside Intelligibility/There is Nothing Outside Tangibility

The new materialism under scrutiny in “What if Culture was Nature All Along?” implies a rejection of the concept of “structure” as well as “word,” “image,” “representation,” all depending on a lack of other-than-human inclusion. As Ashley Barnwell points out in Chapter 2 (p. 33), such a rejection prevents to see any possible dynamism of structure, and ultimately, to restrict what can count as agency.

This is a well-known debate in critical psychology as well, since Celia Kitzinger’s (2000) to Michael Billig critique to Conversation Analysis (Billig, 1999) as disinterested to socio-political reality and obsessed with minutiae of talk-in-interaction. Even though here the focus was not on the inclusion of non-human agencies, what was at stake since then was how to see discursive markers as evidences of a critical social theory, even feminist ones. Kitzinger tried to reply to such a critique by stressing the importance—especially for feminist issues such as rape and harassment—of coding what is usually not coded in CA as valuable evidences of power-relations (e.g. silence, pause, and overlapping voices). without which contexts of injustice could not be interpreted.

Such a dispute over methodological tangibility and theoretical intelligibility does not capture how race, for instance, comes to be embodied and is not a mere social construction. Contrary to the position according to which “while language can charge or circumscribe a phenotype’s possibilities, while it can affect what the stigmatized person is able to do or say in the particular circumstances, it does not alter the biological expression of a phenotype” (Saldanha, 2006, p. 12, italics mine); Noela Davis in Chapter 6 argues that similar attempts to overcome nature/culture divide actually reinforce it and misrecognize how phenotype is discursive, that is, “necessarily entangled with/in the social” (p. 119).

All along Kirby’s book there are similar arguments aiming to grapple with new bio-graphies, body-logues, and physiological methodologies.

Race is, again, a key-phenomenon inasmuch it shows how visibility is the master-perception for a master-narrative that is imbued with discrimination. First of all, if there is “no outside signification” (Butler, 1993, p. 68) and there is no matter to be visible per se, then how comes that any possibility of change might arise from any different perceptual mode (such as touching, visceral sensibility)? As Xin Liu asks in Chapter 7 (p. 143): “Given the visual connotations of phenotypes, the proposition that the tactility of phenotypical encounters is somehow before and beyond visual perception is indeed curious and confusing. For how are phenotypical differences perceived as such?”

The main problem here stays in the notion of “autonomous and unmediated affect” (ibidem) that on the one hand tries to encompass the vivid, fluctuant, energetic abundance of senses and to disanchor life from cognitive/cultural categories; on the other hand, it re-installs a linear spazio-temporality wherein to place affect before intellect, vision as not embodied process, affect itself apart from the ability to be affected by it.

Concluding Remarks

“What If Culture was Nature All Along?” is a precious effort to engage with what is still experienced as a major threat in social sciences and humanities: nature.

The book offers a very detailed review of vast literature in immunology, epigenetics, microbiology as well as conceptualizations of death, race, depression, from a new material entangled perspective of ontology/epistemology.

If we take the ‘corpse as a figure of relation between life and death’ (Schwartz, 2013, p. 2) into account we may well see how this effort of recovering biology in culture and vice versa is the battleground for evident evidences (methodology) and abstract abstraction (theory). Both of them do rely on the same corpse that might be the nature/culture divide, preventing to see that there is not even “both” strictly speaking in that same corpse.

There are certainly some important aspects that the book, in my view, does not properly address in the attempt to conflate any different potential in biological and socio-cultural pathways. A total ontological collapse between ontology and functionality may pave the way to reinforce uncritically biotechnology, for instance, as a fundamental mean of production/reproduction in the logic of capitalistic healthcare and—even—animal rights. The biocultural focus may leave aside the importance of planning and its consequences (e.g., genetic manipulation) over human responsibility in the planet. Becoming aware of the queerness of life and technology sometimes disregards the decision-making processes involved as well as the redefinition of “freedom” and “subjects” from an ethical point of view. Disrupting certain biological boundaries may lead to a sort of re-adjustment for the sake of the powerful that requires integration, rather than distinction, or conflict.

And certainly, this is the complex reality of phenomena under examination. But some further elaboration over the role played by biotechnologies in deliberately shaping/constraining human and non-human life boundaries (Weisberg, 2015) may better serve the scope to understand new agencies, as well as new structures.