Though their reading seems a little forced, Fred Newman and Lois Holzman of the East Side Institute are finding Marx (specifically, The German Ideology) useful for developing a “revolutionary” performance social therapeutics:
“Our own work can be described as an effort to make therapeutics a way of life. We also describe our work as building community - and the two are inseparable to us. Perhaps of greatest assistance to us has been Karl Marx. Performance social therapeutics, the name we use to describe our Marxian-based, dialectical practice, originated in our group therapy but is also the basis for a continuously emergent development community.”
In their 1997 text The End of Knowing, they argued “that the relevant ontological unit for psychology in these postmodern times is activity,” a position I tend to agree with. Newman and Holzman use the term, however, in a strictly Marxian sense - as “‘revolutionary, practical-critical, activity’ (Marx, 1974, p. 121) - and not as a general reference to human action and/or agency, as many social constructionist and socio-cultural psychologists do,” a position I find somewhat problematic.
If the goal is to “transform existing environments and ways of relating that they find oppressive, painful and destructive of the human spirit into ones that meet their/human needs” then I just don’t see how activity can be thought of outside action and agency. Though I can appreciate the ‘revolutionary’ gesture - which would be more useful in other contexts - I find its impulse toward total renunciation and total transformation slightly fantastic.
If “revolutionary, practical-critical activity” is “human practice that ‘abolishes the present state of things’ (Marx and Engels, 1974, p. 57) by the continuous transformation of mundane specific life practices into new forms of life,” then it would seem to me that epistemology - i.e. what kinds of transformations to enact - ought to have a larger place in this theory.
References
Marx, K. (1974). Theses on Feuerbach. In K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology. New York. International Publishers.
Newman and Holzman, L. (1997). The end of knowing: A new developmental way of learning. New York: Routledge.
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