Recycling a piece from earlier this year.
As I have been reading the old school coming out of the
woodwork to sign tribunes in support of Depardieu and his woman-beating ways,
my mind drifted to my little comment on the astonishing influence of Maslow on
Cold War culture. Which I didn't think, o tears of things! got enough attention.
There has been, as far as I can tell, no canonical study of
how and why certain ideas – psychoanalysis, Abraham Maslow’s theory of needs,
gestalt therapy – infiltrated into the precincts of that most American of
sciences, organization science, and all its business school progeny, a long
event that is co-eterminus with the eruption of the business school on the
university campus. The ultimate American
utopia is the corporation – those of us on the reservation outside of it just
think of ourselves as the dreamers of the better future. But inside those
corporate walls, that future is manufactured wholesale. And what is a future
without a psychology? And what good is psychology if you can’t manipulate it to
market goods and services?
In 20th century America, war, organization and information
systems formed the sinister matrix to which our best guides are still the great
dark codexes: J.R., Gravity’s Rainbow, Flow my tears the policeman said.
Randall Jarrett’s tailgunner glosses not simply the belly of the state at war,
but the great human product of the 20th century, organizational man.
Maslow’s career, to be read properly, must be read by the
flickering light common to incendiary bombings and the vast, flawless labyrinth
of neon lights that track the corridors of skyscrapers and insane asylums.
Early in his career, Maslow’s major research concern was
what he called dominance. In a paper from 1937, The Comparative Approach to
Human Behavior, he wrote:
“The writer some years ago was confronted with the problem
of the relationships between dominance behavior, sex behavior, and social
behavior. The attempt to study this problem in humans directly turned out to be
a failure. The multiplicity of theories, the variability of concepts and of
terminology, the sheer complexity of the problem itself, the impossibility of
separating the superficial from the fundamental, all combined to make the
project a baffling and even possibly an insoluble one.”
This is a rather odd methodological statement. Why should we
posit special relationships between the behaviours he lists – or even take
those behaviours (such as dominance behaviours) as given? Especially as, on his
own account, there is a ‘variability’ of terminology and theory.
Dominance, here, is certainly the dominant pre-occupation.
The paper suggests that the problem is one that we all know from the sciences –
the problem of being ‘objective’. Maslow’s suggestion that we can get there by
an indirect route – namely, comparison with the less ‘baffling’ behavior of
primates – and so disentangle the bloody bonds of human behavior was, of
course, in the post-war period amply taken up. Yet the method seems to make
headway sideways, for what could make the behavior of primates less baffling
when the original baffle is in the cultural construction of the terms of the
problem?
“It is just this situation, e.g. complex of similarities and
differences, that makes it possible for the psychologist to set up experiments
in which the main variable factor is the relative presence or absence of
cultural influence. If these cultural influences can be controlled out by
experimentation which involves groups of humans and infra-humans, there is then
promised an improved possibility of achieving greater understanding of what our
primate inheritance may be.”
What could ‘control out’ cultural influences mean, applied
to the highly culturally specific notion of experimentation? Maslow here is
participating in the social sciences paradigm that seeks the ultimate Other –
the Other who functions, paradoxically, as the silent parameter, void of all
‘cultural’ properties – for instance, the property of having a first-person
status – and at the same time as the template for the social sciences subject.
The zeroing out of cultural influences to get to the nub of
the subject – this was Abraham Maslow’s project in the pre-war years, but he
had to deal with people, who seemed puzzlingly culturally bound. His
biographer, Edward Hoffman, in a po-faced prose that matches the Cold War
subject, puts the problem in terms of those humans who are, well, women.
“As Maslow’s research progressed through late 1935 and early
1936, he noticed a frustrating pattern. While women high or moderate in
dominance-feeling were usually cooperative in submitting to the embarrassing
interviews -some even volunteering after hearing about Maslow – almost none who
seemed low in dominance-feeling volunteered or completed the interview.
Low-dominance women frequently refused to continue with the interview despite
hours of patient reassurance. Maslow sometimes pleaded with them to cooperate
“for the good of science”, usually to no avail.”
I challenge anybody to read those sentences and not
laugh. I am reminded of the paintings
Alice Neel was doing while Maslow pleaded with “low-dominance” women to
complete his questionaires. In particular, the painting of Joe Gould, who is
shown with sitting naked, his penis exposed, while two other endowed figures,
their penises drooping majestically, stand on either side of him.
Maslow turned, then, to
animal studies to overcome his own frustration. But he returned to the
human, thinking that he could bar entrance to disturbing cultural influences by
actually welcoming them, aiming for the dead center of normality in which the
cultural and the natural would achieve an equilibrium.
Under Maslow’s pyramid one can find a sacrificial victim –
just as major structures were often built, according to legend, over the body
of someone sacrificed to the gods. The gods, here, of dominance. Thus, his
research was directed towards understand ‘normal’ female sexuality. To get
behind this problem, Maslow, curiously (the curiousness is the absolute
blindness to his own cultural subjectivity) culled out Lesbians, Catholics,
blacks and all women who came from families whose fortunes were not in the upper
5 percent of the American income percentile from his research set. He
interviewed the resulting selection of women, all students at Columbia
University, and concluded that the dead center for which he had embarked had
finally been hit. And thus he was able to pursue a problem he articulated in a
journal jotting from 1960:
“the 2-fold motivation of women (1) to dominate the man, but
(20 then to have contempt for him, go frigid, manipulative, castrating, and (3)
secretly to keep on yearning for a man stronger than herself to compel her
respect, & to be unhappy, & unfulfilled & to feel unfeminine so
long as she doesn’t have such a man.”
From experimenting on animals to the ghastly postwar
obsession with the frigid bitch – this is, of course, the dark side of what
appeared, in the sixties, to be a humanizing program. The social structure
should satisfy the needs of the people – isn’t that really what marketing is
all about? Contemplating Maslow, we understand why the center did not hold in
the sixties – cause it was such a damnable place. Look around at the cultural
war against women, among others, and you can see that we have not gotten past
the Maslows of this world.
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