Conference Agenda

This paper challenges the assumption – explicit in the conference call and pervasive in critical psychology – that theory operates as a form of political engagement. Different critical strands of psychological theory often present theoretical work as inherently political. I argue, however, that such claims frequently overestimate the transformative capacities of theory and obscure the institutional conditions under which it is produced and circulated. I examine how theoretical claims are shaped by the positionality of their academic producers, the constrained audiences they address, and the disciplinary histories that condition their political reach. Theory produced within academia is structurally limited as a political tool: its political potential depends not on its conceptual content but on its embedding within institutional, pedagogical, administrative, or activist practices. Within neoliberal universities, however, theory circulates largely as a symbolic gesture – a moral vocabulary for scholars rather than a driver of political transformation – since academic labor is shaped by performance metrics, precarious contracts, and distinct institutional cultures. This raises two key questions: from what position can theorists claim political agency, and who is the subject of theory under such conditions? A related question concerns the audience of theory, since universities function as echo chambers in which most theoretical writing addresses only other academics in closed circuits of journals, conferences, and university programs. Critical theory thus remains largely insulated from the social fields it purports to critique. Moreover, psychology’s disciplinary history (Danziger, Morawski, Rose) shows that its political impact has traditionally emerged through its entanglement with governance, administration, and technologies of control rather than through its theory or conceptual critique. Finally, I argue for the temporal asymmetry between theory and political action. Following Hegel’s dictum that the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk, I propose that theory is typically reactive rather than catalytic: it arrives after social and political ruptures, offering retrospective interpretation rather than antecedent intervention. This dynamic is illustrated by a recent wave of spontaneous and decentralized student and civil mobilization in Serbia, which unfolded without theoretical articulation or academic guidance and only later demanded scholarly explanation. The example underscores the limited political agency of theoretical psychology and highlights the gap between theory’s political aspirations and its actual effects.

Why people support political-economic ideologies that contradict collective socio-economic interests associated with their position in society, is a long-standing conundrum. System justification theory explains this paradox “false consciousness” through a palliative function of ideology, serving individuals to regulate negative affect and maintain coherent worldviews by reducing dissonant cognitions and appeasing epistemic, existential, and relational motives. Drawing on this literature, this study examines psychological functions of neoliberal ideology among socio-economically disadvantaged persons. Semi-structured interviews with nine individuals in precarious life situations and long-term unemployment in Austria and Germany were examined using thematic content analysis and hermeneutic interpretation. Respondents endorsed neoliberal logics of individualism, competition, and instrumentality by verbalizing meritocratic explanations for poverty and success, opposition against redistributing wealth, internalized inferiority, and economic utility as indicating human worth. Structural analyses showed how these beliefs served psychological purposes by reducing cognitive dissonance, justifying the status quo, and appealing to epistemic needs for simplicity, structure, order, and predictability of the social environment. Emerging themes were xenophobic stereotypes and group-based enmity. Perceived existential threats of economic crisis were projected onto immigrants, scapegoated for lacking self-reliance, illegitimately appropriating resources, and insufficiently contributing to the host economy. Results demonstrate how neoliberal ideology captures epistemic and existential motives to reproduce social inequalities and tensions in the belief systems of those deprived of status and resources. Amalgamation of free-market ideology with proto-fascist themes explains the widespread rise of right-wing populism in advanced neoliberal societies, leading to a crisis of democracy reminiscent of other dark times in human history.

Theory is often invoked as a moral or political gesture - a means of resistance, enlightenment, or critique, especially in dark times. Yet such invocations often rest on the assumption that theory stands outside the very social conditions it seeks to explain. This talk proposes a different view: theory itself is an operation of observation within the social system of science. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory (Luhmann, 2020a, 2020b), it argues that psychological theories do not merely describe human reality but construct it through their own distinctions, such as normal/pathological, rational/irrational, or resilient/vulnerable. These distinctions are communicative acts through which psychology organizes its visibility - and its blindness.

Against the backdrop of the current theory crisis in psychology (Eronen & Bringmann, 2021; Oberauer & Lewandowsky, 2019), the problem lies not in a lack of models but in a blindness to the very forms of observation through which psychological knowledge is produced. This blindness is not a deficit but the necessary shadow of observation itself – the darkness theory constructs in order to see. It becomes visible in contemporary narrative discourses, where stories themselves function as psychological and social categories that distribute meaning, responsibility, and truth. When we speak of “true” or “false” narratives - about resilience, climate, or war - psychology itself participates in the political production of truth. In dark times, observing this darkness may be the most political act theory can perform.

References

Eronen, M. I. & Bringmann, L. F. (2021). The Theory Crisis in Psychology: How to Move Forward. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 16(4), 779–788. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691620970586

Luhmann, N. (2020a). Theory of Society, Volume 1. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804786478

Luhmann, N. (2020b). Theory of Society, Volume 2. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804787277-fm

Oberauer, K. & Lewandowsky, S. (2019). Addressing the theory crisis in psychology. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26(5), 1596–1618. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-019-01645-2

The objective of this paper is to present Political Epistemology as a field that encompasses the works of the Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers. Even though the term Political Epistemology includes quite diverse schools of thought, such as historical-dialectic philosophy or Foucaultian archaeology and genealogy, the focus here is to discuss this singular approach and its important repercussions in the field of psychology. To this end, initially we will see how Political Epistemology understands that the invention of modern sciences took place through a rare conjugation of certain powers or potentialities which are able to actualize it. The powers appoint an operator, which is the singular way how human and non-human beings produce testimonies. This is followed by the appropriation of the meaning of this operator in a more generalized interpretation and, finally, we have the potency of this device in connecting interests. The creation of these powers also brings into being as counterparts operations that try to produce scientific knowledge through a methodological recipe ou an a priori concept. Without the risk of the operator, these are considered artifactual productions of science. The latter part of the paper examines how Stengers evaluates the methods of scientific operation of certain well-known psychological schools of thought, such as behaviorism, constructivism, and psychoanalysis.