I don’t know how to think of Deleuze and Guatarri.

Relatable lol.

D&G has gotta be some of the toughest of the Frankfurt School theorists and their magnum opus, Anti-Oedipus (which Capitalism and Schizophrenia is one part of) is a direct response to Lacan so if you want to truly get yourself right across D&G then you really have to start from Lacan.

I’ve avoided them because they seem to have coming from the psycho-analysis tradtion and isn’t that academic tradition basically bunk?

Yeah, it is and yeah, it is. But I think it’s important to be cautious about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Freud gets derided a lot, especially from psychology (it turns out the call was coming from inside the house the whole time 😱😱) but a whole lot of that is due to them wanting to position psychology as a much harder science than arguably it is, or ever could be, and so they use Freud as a whipping boy; “Look at how scientific we are, we even denounce the forefather of psychology for being insufficiently scientific!!”

Psychology as a discipline is always frantically trying to adorn itself with anything that confers it with the aura of being scientific when tbh it’s just desperate to be something more like biology than it manages to be but also less like sociology which it loathes and which it cannot acknowledge how proximal it is to it.

If you contrast how contemporary psychology relates to Freud vs how it relates to BF Skinner, it says a lot. Skinner made some major contributions to psychology at the time but a lot of his contributions are have been superceded, if not completely disproven by none other than the man, the myth, the self-mummyfying Noam Chomsky just about as soon as Skinner dropped his theory on linguistic development. Sure, Skinner was much more scientific than Freud was but that was as much a product of his time as anything else, and what really gets overlooked is that Freud too made major contributions to psychology in his own time. (There’s also a massive discussion about the sociology of scientific knowledge which I’m just going to completely sidestep or otherwise I’m going to write forever and nobody wants that. Also it’s bizarre because I wrote a comment somewhere completely different on Hexbear on a subject entirely unrelated and I was channeling the spirit of Harry Collins, a big figure in SSK, just before. How odd.)

Anyway, what I’m driving at is that while Freud was wrong about plenty that doesn’t mean that he was wrong about everything or that his conclusions were not valuable. For example, he revolutionised psychology by asserting that the pathology a patient was experiencing could be resolved internally by the patient. Prior to Freud, mental illness was basically considered to be a product of things like “poor moral character” and shit like that, with the solution being that you just beat or torture the patient until they straighten up and fly right, or you just consign them to the asylum forever.

(I’m going to try and rein myself in a bit but there’s another tangent I’m about to spiral off on about the earliest reform attempts of the asylum and the role of Richard Paternoster, who was a colourful character by all reports, and how his incarceration in a mental asylum is a perfect example of the stuff Foucault discussed.)

But perhaps surprisingly, you’d think that psychology would have surpassed psychoanalysis and yet comparative analysis between CBT, the gold standard for psychosocial treatment, and psychoanalysis shows roughly equivalent outcomes. So basically you have a pseudoscientific approach to, like, dream analysis and psychosexual development and whatever but there’s indications that it’s about as effective as the most highly regarded and widely celebrated treatment method in psychology today.

All of this is to say that very faulty reasoning can still arrive at something useful.

And I think that’s what the Frankfurt School does - it isn’t just an effort to extend or defend psychoanalysis, it’s something that gets drawn upon conceptually as an influence. Think like the way that Hegel is to Marx - there are things in Hegel that no materialist would agree with but Marx drew a lot of inspiration from Hegel despite that fact. And although Marx was a Young Hegelian, Marx didn’t just go on to try and extend Hegel’s philosophy in his writings but instead he took what was useful, applied what he thought was most relevant, and discarded the rest.

Once upon a time, when I was younger, I picked up Leviathan by Hobbes. I’m sure you know the only bit that people ever quote from him - that life, in the state of nature, is solitary, poor, nasty, brutal and short. I was naïve about reading Hobbes at the time and I disregarded what he had to say because the foundation that he developed his political philosophy from was so false that I found it to be objectionable. The thing is though, he wasn’t writing as a historian or an anthropologist, he was writing to elaborate on a (then) modern political philosophy. Another more common reason why Hobbes gets dismissed out of hand is because what he argues for, what his Leviathan represents, is essentially totalitarian in nature.

But although I strongly disagree with his conclusions and his muthologising or speculation about humans prior to the advent of “civilisation”, there are still important ideas in Leviathan - there are valuable observations and arguments and, equally so, there are observations and arguments he makes that are important to understand in order to refute the foundations of liberalism.

Learn from my mistake. You don’t have to agree with an author to read them, and you don’t have to agree with the basis of their argument nor even its conclusion to find useful things within it. That was what I was gently encouraging you to take away from my criticisms of McLuhan - his conclusions are crackpot-tier and I’d argue a product of his political and religious convictions but he still made important observations and arguments despite starting from a bad place (imo) and ending up with bizarre fanciful conclusions (imo).