In his chapter, ‘Egocentric Thought and Sociocentric Thought’, Piaget (1995) constitutes the development of rationality as the interaction between three systems: the sensori-motor; the operational; and the symbolic. None of these systems is reducible or can be represented by any of the others, although the sensori-motor and the symbolic systems are necessary interfaces, so to speak, whereby the ratiocinating subject can interact with the world. Piaget relates these three systems to three different socialisation processes. Firstly, there is the development of technical skill through physical imitation. Secondly, the exchange of ideas within the context of non-authoritative relations of mutual respect, which gives rise to rational or scientific thought. Thirdly, the incorporation of the ideas of others as one’s own within the context of constraint or unilateral respect, which gives rise to egocentric thought.

These processes of socialisation are related to the three forms of collective thought [...] technique, science and ideology. Then, just as science is concerned with the liberation of thought from ideological distortion, rational or operational thought is concerned with the liberation of thought from egocentric distortion. This relationship between science and ideology is a clear reference to Marx, whom Piaget cites explicitly. Unlike Marx, Durkheim is, according to Piaget, unable to distinguish between sociocentric and scientific forms of thought. This is, essentially, because Durkheim fails to recognise struggle and conflict . Wallon, on the other hand, claims to recognise the distinction to be made, but attempts to develop rationality out of egocentric verbal thinking, thus again collapsing what Piaget regards as two essentially distinct modes.

Individual cognitive development occurs in a process of equilibration which is the essential quality of the human subject (indeed, potentially any form of life) as an autoregulative being (Piaget, 1980). Disequilibrium occurs constantly via conflict arising between cognitive structures, out of interpersonal experience and out of new internalised actions. Equilibration, then, is the process whereby cognitive structures develop hierarchically in the resolution of such conflict. Piaget (1980) describes three levels of equilibration: the dialectically related processes of assimilation and accommodation with respect to specific cognitive structures; the specialisation of cognitive structures; and the formation of new global structures at a higher level of abstraction.

There are two principal obstacles to the assimilation of Piaget’s position (as I have interpreted it) to my own or to my accommodation to his. Firstly, as I suggested in the previous chapter, Piaget’s appropriation of Marx is a liberal recontextualisation, which fails to recognise Marx’s insistence on the constitutive and so timeless nature of power. A line from the Grundrisse is helpful:

The human being is in the most literal sense a zwon politicsn , not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.
(Marx, 1973; p. 84)

The contextual ‘individuation’ of human subjects is precisely what constitutes and is constituted by relations of power: no power, no society, so no human subjects. This is essentially the same argument as might be used to criticise a naive optimism in economics which fails to understand economic activity as precisely the constitution of scarcity and not the production of plenty.

Equilibration of necessity presupposes a state of equilibrium which is therefore predicated of the equilibrating subject. Figuratively, the inauguration of the human individual within the disequilibrating state of life must be constituted, by Piaget, as an expulsion from Paradise. The psychoanalyst Ignacio Matte-Blanco (1988; see, also, Rayner, 1995) constitutes precisely such an edenic state as ‘being’ which characterises the deepest level of the unconscious. The human individual’s earliest experiences of life, for example, in Kleinian terms (1975), the good breast and the bad breast, disturb this contented slumber in the generation of asymmetry. Subsequent asymmetric differentiation constitutes the higher levels of the unconscious and, ultimately the state of ‘thinking’ which characterises the consciousness of the now social subject. The agonistic nature of the social world (and, in Matte-Blanco’s argument, the three-dimensional nature of the physical world) cannot contain the symmetrical logic (and infinite dimensionality) which characterises the unconscious which is precisely the reason for the conscious/unconscious division and what Matte-Blanco describes as the ‘fundamental antinomy between human beings and the world’.

Matte-Blanco’s formulation appears to have more potential in terms of the reinstatement of power as constitutive of (conscious) subjectivity. Elsewhere (Dowling, 1996) I have initiated a recontextualising of Matte-Blanco’s work in an attempt to introduce a notion of a social unconscious . I shall return to some consideration of the potential of this idea in the concluding chapter to this book.

The second obstacle is Piaget’s employment of what is arguably an underdeveloped understanding of language as naively representational, in other words, it is less of a system than a lexical collection. I want to recognise language as comprising multiple, non-closed systems, which we might refer to as discourses. This is to say that any notional or empirical domain that we might want to constitute as language as a whole or as a specific discourse is both self-referential and also refers outside of itself. This exteriority obtains precisely because of the limit to the saturability of the non-discursive by the discursive and because of the contextual nature of discourse both of which I discussed in the previous chapter. Since language and discourse is thus open to the contingent and the non-discursive, it is necessarily being conceived of as dynamic and partial. Indeed, Piaget’s systems cannot be constituted as entirely closed with respect to each other. Were they to be so conceived, it is inconceivable that they could interact. It seems plausible, then, to envisage the development of rationality as arising out of the interaction or ‘dialogue’ between discursive and non-discursive systems between and within human subjects. Further, dialogical interaction between these systems entails their prior formation or internalising within the dialogic or, shall we say, equilibrating subject. Under these circumstances, what Piaget refers to as sociocentric thought, acquired under at least some degree of constraint or unilateral respect, is a necessary condition for dialogue and so for development; the specificity of the discourse must be permitted to speak.

(Dowling, 1998; pp. 127-9)