Body and Sign–Pinning
I want to pick up on the Body and Sign exchange with parodycenter but from a slightly different perspective. I’ve been re-reading a non-clinical text from 1998 by Hélène Cixous, herself no stranger to the ambivalences and complexities of psychoanalysis. Savoir is a relatively short text in which Cixous articulates not only new ways for pinning word to place but, and more importantly, new ways in which a word can be made to pin different places to one another. Cixous deploys autobiography, religion, theory, and poetic imagination to articulate a myopia that passes, which is to say a myopia that does not register with the fully sighted, and a myopia that is subject to surgical intervention and correction. She, Cixous, the myopic, could see that she could not see; her myopia was the “little nail stuck in the gap” (6) between the worlds of vision and blindness, the nail that is simultaneously the cause for much pain as well as an occasion for the pinning and concurrence of two otherwise incommensurable worlds. As Cixous writes, myopic living is a state of alert where seeing is a “tottering believing” and everything is “perhaps” (6). Myopia is such that it cannot be seen by the seeing who, when confronted with it, are incredulous: “I would not have guessed;” doubting “but you manage so well;” and hence unwilling to come to terms with their own inability to see that they cannot see. As “the mistress of error” (7), myopia reigns supreme over one and all; as much as the invisible divider between the non-seeing and the seeing, it is the invisible connector that exposes our universal myopia.
Still, myopia for Cixous is a site/sight not only of ambivalence, uncertainty, and fear, but also of that possibility from which the limits and ossifications of certainty and its myopia have been expelled. Indeed, if not-to-see is a deficit and a thirst, not-to-see-oneself-seen is a strength, an independence, and a lightness (12), and hence a freedom from the constraint of the image of oneself that one sees in the eye of the other, that very same freedom that analysts invite analysands to explore, know, and cite through the use of the couch, that very same freedom that analysts often cherish for themselves as their analysands lie on that couch. Unwittingly, psychoanalysis participates in a practice that abstracts from myopia as a physiological limitation its virtue as an opening onto a site/sight and a citing that reconfigure the customary and conscious pinnings of self and other as well as of those of word and place and of mind and body.
As a result, myopia is brought forth as neither an object nor a condition but as the mark of a complex set of relationships that one enters into while dealing with oneself and the world. Its psychological significance lies much less in its status as a pathology or deficit and more in the ways in which it is deployed and the purposes it is made to serve, some of which may very well indeed be “pathological”. While at times a handicap, myopia is potentially a tool that opens onto the possibility of a pinning that is the analytic transference fraught with ambivalence and unpredictability, a transference governed by a sight/site, a citing, and a knowledge that are forever in the making.
That, in at least one of its registers, psychoanalysis is an inherently myopic practice should come as a surprise to no one. The dynamic is in fact at the heart of one of its most inspiring of precedents. Indeed, and while a punishment to his incestuous and parricidal crimes, Oedipus’s self-inflicted blindness, with pins no less, was also the opening onto that most sacred and untimely of sights/sites through which he could access a truth that would radically and forever redefine for him what it means to be worldly and knowledgeable. Presumably, and whether real or phantasized, his crime, guilt, punishment, and subsequent redemption are often set up as the successive stages of our own analytic passages. What remains to be seen is the extent to which the pursuit of a psychoanalytic treatment nowadays is confined to a retracing of its hero’s pilgrimage from the gates of Thebes to the woods of Colonus; the extent to which such a pursuit is propelled by, or producing of, the unconscious phantasy of an Oedipal culpability as well as of a demand for an absolution or at the very least an alleviation of its accompanying guilt; and the extent to which the use of the couch is a reenactment of the Sophoclean script, its recapitulation and re-inscription into a world that has presumably given up on the very idea of myth, eternity, and absolution; the extent to which, in other words, the couch is deployed as an instrument of the analysand’s exoneration by a blind or blinding but merciful analyst.
As much as none of this can be adequately articulated and worked through except in the context of a specific individual at a specific moment in his or her analysis, the following question needs to be raised: how much of this dynamic is still the outcome of a counter-transferential implantation and a pinning that, in the manner of a retrograde analysis, extrapolate from a punishment and a redemption, from a couch and an insight, the presence of a preceding crime and guilt; how much is the nature of the crime incestuous and parricidal; and how much of the guilt is indeed an offering and an appeasement? Put differently, how much is the individual analytic experience pinned onto the content and structure of a representation that has already been declared paradigmatic; and how much is such a representation, qua representation and regardless of its content, limiting of the pinning and its possibilities?
This entry was posted on 12 December 2007 at 8:07 am and is filed under Body and Sign, Cixous, Language, MetaTherapeutics, Speaking Desire . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
12 December 2007 at 9:50 pm
“Put differently, how much is the individual analytic experience pinned onto the content and structure of a representation that has already been declared paradigmatic;”
A question, and I apologize if this shifts the subject to something too remote from your concerns–but is not any “representation” paradigmatic? That is, unlike visual myopia, which fails to sufficiently define distant images, representation (which may well occur following myopic failure… mind mapping the unknown to the familiar)… representation is replacement. It ceases to be even interpretation… which holds the interpreted object and the interpretation at comparative distance.
I have a problem with “representation” (as you may have noted from recent posts on my blog) as an aesthetic goal, and there seems to be some overlapping of my concern with what you’re writing here.
I can embrace a metaphorical myopia, which holds the tension between the unrecognized presence and it’s modes of interpretation. But to “represent” that unknown as encountered Reality… seems to me, both pathology, and bad faith.
13 December 2007 at 8:53 pm
Off topic but tangential: I started reading Deleuze and Guattari´s AntiOedipus and found myself perplexed, already in the introductory pages, at how they don´t acknowledge that the density / complexity of metaphors in their initial description of the desiring machine betrays a distinctly LINGUISTIC investment. The text was stunningly wellorchestrated, almost a literary masterpiece in its own right, and it created these 3D animations as well in my head involving industrial processes, flows, and interruptions. There also didn´t seem to be enough thought about the desiring machine that produced AntiOedipus? Their ambivalence towards the Father, maybe? Deleuze´s homoerotic investments?
Interesting what you write about myopia. Since myopia provides the overlapping of two dimensions, a kind of a Gestaltist double-bind image, it put me in mind of the famous Moebius strip, where one gets access to the fourth dimension through the overlapping of 3 known dimensions. This made me think that perhaps the point is not to abolish Oedipus, or pretend like its dynamic isn´t operative, but to find a way to work through it in order to get to the portals that it has opened or something like that.
But you know I think all these discussions would be much more interesting if we could draw on the clinic, because this is what´s lacking from the theorizing. Don´t you have interesting stories to share in this regard?
14 December 2007 at 12:18 am
Jacob; I’ve been following your posts but have preferred to just read because most of the texts you mention I have not read. In any case, we’re thinking about the same scenario but I think we have slightly different takes on it; I’m not so comfortable qualifying “any” representation as paradigmatic; here’s the link to Body and Sign–Pinning–2 which, I hope will make it clearer as to where I’m going with all this.
Parodycentre; I’ve posted on the Anti- before and you might like what I said there. Check it out and let me know what you think.
The discussion might be more interesting when it draws on clinical material. I’m thinking of the parallel to a discussion on the philosophy of science for example that has no science in it. BUT, I can tell you all you want of the “clinic” and still not make things any more interesting–theoretically at least. The only thing that would make a difference, IF a difference is necessary, is to actually do the clinical work as opposed to read or hear about it.
14 December 2007 at 1:53 am
The “Anti-“ is hence one of neither repudiation nor substitution; its effects are momentary and the final word has not been and, thankfully, never can be spoken; the machines will invariably regroup and desire will circulate once again.
quite, but what I meant with my clinical remark was not that i´m fishing for entertainment, rather some concrete and practical context where we could examine for example how the overinvestment in the linguistic metaphor would hamper the analytic process or blur the analyst or the analysand´s vision. We too often end up analyzing movies or books, instead of psychological examples that both Lacan and D/G were dealing with.
14 December 2007 at 6:37 pm
Hey, I have nothing against entertainment and I have even less against curiosity! :)
Recounting a clinical vignette, for me at least, feels very much like discussing a scene from a book no one else has come across. Odd, no? Boring even, without a context and a background.
Sure, you could say it might pique people’s curiosity and get them wanting to go read the book. But the point is not about reading a particular book; it’s about getting people to read period.
In a sense, this is precisely what we’re talking about: the experience versus the recounting of that experience or, as you put it, “the overinvestment in the linguistic metaphor [that] would hamper the analytic process.”
Interestingly enough, Deleuze and Guattari never discussed specific clinical material; granted, Deleuze never had any since he was not a clinician; and Guattari the clinician never disclosed his analysands’ associations. That’s been my point about their book: it itself is the clinical material, the “machine” that produces flows as it triggered those images for you. The book+images is as good a material as any.
15 December 2007 at 4:45 am
Here´s an example of what I meant: some time ago I tried to open a thread with the narcissistic cat dr. Sinthome on this Hocquenghem, a theoretician who derives from Anti-Oedipus in that he was pursuing a way to dismantle the phallocentric order (of which as he claimed psychoanalysis was the servant) and that by discovering the Body without Organs in his own asshole. Dr. Sinthome was busy with other pursuits, so the thread was dropped, although I have never stopped teasing dr. Sinthome´s ass. Whatever Hocquenghem´s book might have had as an elaboration of alternative Marxist theories (of socialization), when it came to pointing concretely to what exactly would be a way out of the Oedipal quagmire, the book disappointed me immeasurably, as he mentioned male non-Phallic orgasm, that is to say coming out of his ass. He even went so far as to postulate an ass orgasm that is continuously in the Becoming, reaching ever newer plateaus. All we had to do to get to such an ass was basically abolish capitalism… and then men when all those juices start FLOWING, revolution would just never end.
15 December 2007 at 4:32 pm
…and while it is quite possible to derive physical pleasure from the stimulation of the prostate gland, as well as from skin contact present in anal sex, the anus is not capable of producing direct orgasm - it cannot be a desiring machine, except metaphorically.
16 December 2007 at 10:12 am
Yes… Yes…
You’re trying to start here what you couldn’t finish at Larvalsubjects. There was something quite funny about that exchange as you were translating the text for him and he kept telling you he wasn’t (or is it that he didn’t want to be) familiar with it.
Do let’s move on to something else instead.
16 December 2007 at 10:41 am
I think the narcissistic cat didn’t want to be familiar with it because she’s a suave beast; she usually avoids confrontational, or impolite dialog.
So in essence this is the kind of an example I’m looking for, something that would in a plastic fashion explain why and how and what use we could have of say visceral reactions in an analytic setting…other than just lamenting that language oppresses us.
16 December 2007 at 11:30 am
What you’re asking for is in a sense what I’ve been trying to do, maybe not as explicitly. The “Body and Sign” series continues.