Poster by Jeffrey Bagraim¹
¹ University of Cape Town, South Africa
TIME: Thursday, 16 July, 12:00 – 13:15
Location: Break Room
Session: Poster Session
Abstract
Practitioners successful in changing organisations and critical scholars focused on radical socio-ecological transformation exhibit related yet distinct forms of hubris. The first is well-theorised yet rarely applied reflexively: the metamorphic effects of power, wherein successful influence transforms the influencer through inflated self-perception, devaluation of those subject to intervention, and psychological distancing from the less powerful. The second is the epistemic arrogance of critical consciousness, the conviction that one possesses privileged insight into how the world operates whilst others remain ideologically captured. Practitioners accumulate symbolic capital within field logics consecrating effective translation of psychological knowledge into organisational outcomes. The psy-complex, within which they operate, functions as apparatus of governmentality, producing self-regulating subjects through frameworks that individualise structural contradictions and pathologise resistance. Yet the posture of unmasking ideology carries its own seductions. Vanguardism haunts critical scholarship no less than hubris infects practitioner success. The universal intellectual whose theoretical sophistication becomes warrant to speak over those experiencing domination enacts a parallel corruption. In both cases, repeated success or insight activates narcissistic structures and self-serving attributions. Feminist and postcolonial challenges to presumptive knowing remind us that critical consciousness can calcify into its own regime of authority, reproducing the hierarchies it contests. We propose a framework for disciplinary self-examination drawing on three intersecting domains: the political economy of expertise, power and subjectification, and the psychological dynamics of power-holding. This framework offers coordinates for diagnosing hubristic tendencies and cultivating reflexive practices capable of interrupting them. Such inquiry assumes urgency within the current polycrisis, wherein psychological governance expands continually. The uncomfortable proposition is this: the metamorphic effects of power operate upon those who critique power no less than upon those who serve it. Before we transform the world, we must examine what our knowledge and our convictions have made of us.