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Monthly Archives: March 2008

Oedipus — Take One

March 13, 2008
Laughter, Oedipus, Sophocles

        A man, weak in the ankles but strong in combat, politics, and love, is doomed to a life of wandering because of the crimes his strengths had afforded him. Aimless, he reaches a sacred ground; blinded, he sees the truths that had previously eluded him. Those he had rescued will come to suffer the most abominable of deaths; those he had opposed will ultimately triumph and prosper. While many of his innocent subjects will have perished of pestilence, our parricidal and incestuous hero, our criminal par excellence, will die serene and wise at a ripe old age. Previously, he had murdered his father in a roadside altercation, and, in the meantime, his two sons are preparing to slaughter one another on the battlefield. He will die serene and wise at a ripe old age! The women in his family too will suffer their ignoble deaths. Sadly though, and by the times’ doctrines and standards, their suicides will bring them neither peace nor redemption. Still, he will die serene and wise at a ripe old age! And, lest such ironic, if not absurd, twists of fate be not enough to satisfy our hunger for the agonizingly overdramatic, the story of Thebes and its wretched ruling class is riddled with complicated but oh so predictable political intrigues, familial feuds, and psychological torments.

        Is it that much of a stretch of one’s sensibilities, aesthetic and otherwise, to suggest that at least one component of the classical Athenian response to the Oedipal scenario might be in line with what the Italian composers of opera buffa and the American screenwriters of soaps and sitcoms have sought or triggered in their audiences? As much as each of these styles belongs to its particular surround and each has acquired its particular place in the West’s history of cultural production, the thread of excitement and catharsis links them all in a series that runs counter to our current cultural siftings of the proper and everlastingly artistic from the trite and the mundane. Worth noting here is the fact that, had such siftings been dominant at the time, they would have no doubt heaped, and ruthlessly so, both tragedy and opera under the same heading of the common and boisterously distracting. In the meantime, much has complicated our standards and perceptions: historical revisions, national heritages, intellectual and/or artistic pride and territoriality, and, lest we forget, financial returns.

Thou Shalt not Laugh

March 8, 2008
Disjunctive Synthesis, Freud, Jean Laplanche, Klein, Lacan, Laughter, Oedipus, Sophocles

        In his study of the Italian Renaissance, Jacob Burckhardt recounts one of those anecdotes that are “true and not true, everywhere and nowhere,” in other words, one of those anecdotes that are mythic in quality and function:

The citizens of a certain town (Siena seems to be meant) had once an officer in their service who had freed them from foreign aggression; daily they took counsel how to recompense him, and concluded that no reward in their power was great enough, not even if they made him lord of the city. At last one of them rose and said, ‘Let us kill him and worship him as our patron saint’. And so they did. (The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, 15)

        Aside from its all-too-familiar and perhaps even universal juxtaposition of violence with reverence, what, amongst the countless of Burckhardt’s vignettes, marks this one in particular as both mythic and tragic is, ironically but not too surprisingly, the hefty quotient of laughter its recounting often evokes. At another time and in another place, Franz Kafka’s reading of his own quasi-mythic tales of humanity’s despair and absurdity elicited a similar laughter from his Prague audiences; ditto of the response of many a theatregoer to the performance of Ionesco’s despairing La cantatrice chauve. Let us not forget Emily Dickinson, that mistress of suffering, who could not but delight in the humorous nuances of certain stories of death and decapitation.

        One could easily argue, as many already have, that operative in these and most other comic responses is a concealment of and a shield against the poignancy, if not the pain, of the myth and its truth, that, in other words, the laughter is the very confirmation of what it tries to deny. With pain as the normatively posited response, no psychoanalytic clinician or theorist, to my knowledge at least, has entertained the possibility of a reverse and yet equally vital scenario whereby laughter is the target of concealment and tears are its limpid and unadorned but no less obscuring cover.

        And yet, throughout much of its history, psychoanalysis has rightly insisted on the inherently conflicted relationship a subject has with its object. Freud considered the perversions as always paired in the individual: sadism and masochism, exhibitionism and voyeurism are not simply the terms we attach to the separate but presumably complementary roles we adopt in our sexual scenarios, they are co-extensive components of our identities as desiring subjects. As much can be said of femininity and masculinity for what Freud had termed primary “bisexuality” in his Three Essays of 1905 is better captured in our current lexicon as primary “bigenderism.” Klein made the case for a similar dynamic, though hers were much starker terms: sexuality and aggression, love and hate, are our inexhaustible rudiments and much of what we know of the unconscious and its positions is articulated through the ways in which the two are lived and negotiated. As for Lacan, that master of the triad wherever registers, passions, and diagnoses were concerned, he too insisted on the co-valence of the oppositional pair whenever he addressed technical questions of presence and absence, speech and silence, inside and outside,

        Puzzling then is the psychoanalytic refusal to detect anything other than the tortured and tragic in the myth of Oedipus as its founding principle. Puzzling is the discipline’s refusal to grant its hermeneutic key access to its much-treasured logic of duality and opposition, a logic that would uncover in the Oedipal script its constitutive roots in the humorous. No doubt, the clinical commitment to the alleviation of human suffering has often left little room for the consideration of anything other than the stifling and the traumatic. Indeed, there has been much seductive sense to the argument that the time for laughter and, in this case, personal freedom, is possible only after the working through of blockages and inhibitions has been accomplished. (It is worth noting here that such a working through is as much collective and cultural, considering the environment of concrete violence and destruction we inhabit, as it is individual.)

        Still, and by that very same token, the zeal and earnestness with which psychoanalysis has championed the story of the erstwhile king of Thebes as the embodiment of pathos and nothing but is itself the symptom of an inhibition that is in bad need of analysis and alleviation, an inhibition that is all the more potent precisely because of its silence and opacity, an inhibition that functions in the style of an “enigmatic signifier,” as Jean Laplanche has termed it, a constitutive communication, in this case of a clinical guideline, that remains unconscious to both sender and receiver, a communication that operates in the mode of a yet unspoken eleventh (psychoanalytic) commandment: Thou shalt not laugh.

Reading

March 6, 2008
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze, Guattari, Machines, Productions, Reflexivity, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Subjects

        From Plato and through to Hegel, the distinction that has governed the analysis of desire is that of production versus acquisition, with desire invariably subsumed under the heading of the latter. At those rare moments when it did depart from this schema, psychoanalysis could conceive of desire as productive only in terms of an internal or “psychic” reality, of a fantasy and a mimic, of a representation of the real, desired, and hence lacked object.

        Deleuze and Guattari offer us the linchpin of a critique of the notion of desire as lack and, by extension, of the subject as lacking, as well as the elements of a desire whose three constitutive moments (production, recording, and consumption) are both transitive and reflexive. Paradoxically, the anti-oedipal level of abstraction here opens up the possibility for desire as a machine whose satisfaction is not equivalent to having (consumption) or to being (performance); it is rather a matter of doing, which may include having and being but is limited to neither.

        This, I believe, is most evident in the context of the reader’s relationship to the text: does Anti-Oedipus carry with it a measure of either the descriptive or the prescriptive? The former requires an appeal to neutrality that the text has doggedly resisted: indeed, and rather than on entities, its focus has been on events and relations, and, most importantly, on its and its reader’s inevitable implications in them. In the process, the text thwarts that reader’s demand for an ethical or clinical guideline since such a demand can be satisfied only in a context whereby the agency that makes it and the agency that fulfills it are identifiable and discrete.

        If anything, the Deleuzo-Guattarian schema reverses the responsibility for satisfaction; the question that is most pressing now is the one that regards not the text’s meaning and application but the reader’s experiences and/of use. Dismantle, rearrange, and reassemble; the status of the anti-oedipal schema is that of a machine that is distinguishable from the wanderings of its meta-psychological counterparts; it is not so much that we have an account of psyche, text, and institution that can better fulfill our analytic, epistemic, or political demands; rather, we are offered and drawn into an understanding that obeys the laws of its own inquiry. If the Deleuzo-Guattarian subject is conjunctive, provisional, and indeed situational then, as a textual, theoretical, and methodological subject, so are Anti-Oedipus and its readers.

Anti- … … …

March 3, 2008
Anti-Oedipus, Condensation, Conjunctive Synthesis, Connective Synthesis, Deleuze, Disjunctive Synthesis, Displacement, Freud, Guattari, Klein, Lacan, Machines, MetaTherapeutics, Productions, Reflexivity, Schizoanalysis, Secondary Revision, Speaking Desire, Subjects

        One of the most striking qualities of the Deleuze-Guattarian schema is its trinitarian structure: production, recording, and consumption; machine, body without organs, and subject; paranoid, miraculating, and celibate; connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive; and, finally, delirium, hallucination, and experience.

        The question that presents itself at this point is whether such a schema is but the latest in a series of vignettes that articulate the fundamental processes of thought (primary and secondary) Freud and Lacan had already attempted. Are we, in other words, witnessing a departure or simply a reiteration, no matter how varied, of what has been said and done, analytically and otherwise, on numerous occasions already?

        Deleuze and Guattari’s response is that the triangulations of social delirium, be they Oedipal or symbolic, are inherently static and stultifying; their forceful insistence on immutability and universality has now become drone-like and quasi-hypnotic. The schema that Deleuze and Guattari offer instead is grounded in a logic of counter-stability; its structure may be tripartite but, and forever, its modalities are infinite, its meanings multiple, and its subjects aleatory.

        I want to backtrack a bit here: what Freud had posited as his most cruicial contribution to the study of the psyche was not the fact of the unconscious. Freud had posited the fact of a dynamic unconscious as a form of thought and a process, as in primary process, as the basis for his newly elaborated project. I think that as much as Anti-Oedipus marks itself as profoundly anti-psychoanalytic, it remains most faithful to Freud’s core insights. In the name of flows and machines, the text rejects the Freudian unconscious in favour of an unconscious governed by three productive syntheses: connection, disjunction, and conjunction. However, with structural linguistics and its Lacanian appropriations for background, Deleuze and Guattari have essentially recast the Freudian mechanisms of displacement, condensation, and secondary revision in terms that, though unsettling, are no less psychoanalytic:

  • displacement, circulation along the axis of contiguity-metonymy, is now the connective synthesis (and… and…);
  • condensation, circulation along the axis of selection-metaphor, is now the disjunctive synthesis (either… or… or…)
  • secondary revision, the arrangement of disparate fragments into commonsensical and identitarian narratives, is now the conjunctive synthesis (so that’s what it is…).

        Deleuze and Guattari identify a psychoanalytic implementation that can only tolerate a “this and that” (mummy and daddy), a “this or that” (masculine or feminine), and a permanent “it’s me” ego. Deleuze and Guattari advance a schizoanalytic implementation where the connections and the disjunctions operate ad-infinitum and the subjectivities to which conjunctions give rise are partial and transitory.

        The anti-Oedipal criticism can be reformulated in the following terms: psychoanalysis has erected unnecessary and institutionally self-serving limits; it has betrayed its own first principle of a dynamic unconscious. It has not gone as far as it can actually go. Guattari stated as much in his notes while preparing the text. In the recently published Ecrits pour l’Anti-Oedipe, he repeatedly admonished Freud and Lacan for reintroducing the subject into the very realm from which they had previously evicted it, for subordinating the unconscious to the logic of unity and coherence, if not in fact then in therapeutic ideal. For Guattari, psychoanalysis has proven itself incapable of tolerating its own discovery of the unconscious as a primary process; it has become little more than an ossified and ossifying secondary revision.

        I want to suggest that, in adopting the notions of slip and dynamic primary process, Anti-Oedipus belongs at the heart of the psychoanalytic tradition. That it rejects the Oedipal schema in which Freud encapsulated his findings makes it less Freudian but not any the less psychoanalytic. Before and since Deleuze and Guattari, many in the Kleinian and relational camps have rejected the Oedipal drama as a major hermeneutic key. This did not make them any the less psychoanalytic; it confirmed their commitment to the study of the psyche and to the intervention in its workings. Deleuze and Guattari’s failure to separate the discipline from some of its practitioners may be due to the fact that, sadly, the discipline itself has been governed by doctrinaire allegiances to those prominent amongst the practitioners. One often hears certain Freudians, Kleinians, or Lacanians declaring only members of their schools as the “true” bearers of the psychoanalytic torch; outsiders are dismissed as lost souls or impostors.

PS: see also Anti.

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