One of the main controversies in the history of the psychoanalytic movement has coalesced around the meaning and relevance of insight as a clinical category. A divide has often separated a more classic epistemic orientation from a concern for the analysand’s affective well being which, supposedly, may or may not have much to do with the making conscious of conflicts and/or deficits. Through the conjunctive (it’s me and so it’s mine…) synthesis, Deleuze and Guattari are effectively redefining insight and in the process rearranging the terms if not the relevance of the debate here. The conjunctive synthesis is ostensibly a “so that’s what it is!” moment of insight and a clarity identified by its effect to reorganize radically not only delirium (thought) but hallucination (perception) and intensity (experience) as well. The “so that’s what it is!” is not so much a revelation or an uncovering of the subject to itself but the making of a subject. Instead of simply eliciting in the analysand a greater sense of subjective responsibility, or a greater capacity to tolerate anxiety and its ambivalence, or even a broader affective vocabulary or repertoire, the conjunctive synthesis is quasi traumatic in its quality for it is the signpost of a radical shift in the subject’s thought, perception, and experience, which is to say in the subject’s way of deploying itself for itself and for others. Insight is that rare moment of tremor in the clinical situation that marks for both analyst and analysand a transformation, not only in understanding but also in being and in relating. However, and whereas the trauma (of war or abuse for instance) dissociates the subject from its experiences, thoughts, and perceptions, and in so doing robs it of its agility and ossifies it, insight, analytic or otherwise, multiplies the connections between the components; it produces new recordings, experiences, subjectivities; it makes such multiplications and productions tolerable.
Archive for the Associations Category
Breaking Down
Posted in AO-Mistranslations, Anti-Oedipus, Associations, Connective Synthesis, Dreams, Machines, Productions, Schizoanalysis on 10 October 2007 by Fadi Abou-RihanIn the context of a connective synthesis, a machine or a chain of associations works only when it breaks down. It works by breaking down, continually, by having the flow it produces interrupted and consumed by another that is inevitably produced by it.
“Breaking down” in the French original is actually “detraquée.” The word suggests not so much a malfunction but the impression of something gone awry, derailed. The “breaking down” of a machine is tantamount to the detours of slips, dreams, and symptoms that psychoanalysis has rightly marked as not so much proofs of the unconscious but rather products of its inner workings. As much as they are compromise formations designed to appease the demands of the secondary process, slips, dreams, and symptoms are odd, slippery.
The question that has so far preoccupied psychoanalysis has been the identification and resolution, or at least containment, of the conflict that underlies such formations through a retrograde analysis; schizoanalysis marks them not only as effects but as causes and machines as well. How can they be re- or differently aligned? What can they be made to produce? What new sounds, significations, or formations do they point to? The question of effect and machine is always double: “Given a certain effect, what machine is capable of producing it? And given a certain machine, what can it be used for?” (3).
Connection
Posted in Anti-Oedipus, Associations, Connective Synthesis, Machines, Productions, Schizoanalysis on 6 October 2007 by Fadi Abou-RihanOf the connective synthesis of production (and… and… and…): the chain of free associations is not simply a representation of an underlying dynamic, a metaphor for latent peculiarities, or a symptom of as yet undisclosed conflicts and possibilities.
In its vagaries and detours, this chain is a machine whose flow is recorded and consumed by an ear, be it that of the analyst or the analysand. It produces an effect, an impression, and an experience that, in turn will engender further associations and impressions.
To speak of psychoanalysis is to speak of a journey along a complex and multi-layered network of such chains. At best, and though the analyst may be familiar with the terrain, it is the analysand who also steers the process, decides which nodes or junctions to traverse, or, better still, which nodes or junctions to create in order to traverse. The analyst has no way of telling in advance how the adventure will unfold, let alone end, for it is the analysand’s as well. The couch disencumbers both from some of the weight of identification.
I close my eyes as my analysand’s sounds become my images, thoughts, intensities, not so much of where or what she’s been but of what she is now making of where or what she thinks she’s been. It is not she that I see through her words but what she produces in me, which is not entirely me. What I say, if I say anything at all, and what I do not say, what of all that I do not say she chooses to hear, may or may not link up with what she already sees, thinks, and experiences. The flows of words, hers and mine, are products that not only record (speak) pre-existing, and hence consumable (heard) identities, understandings, and affects; they also produce further associations and understandings.
Fragment
Posted in Associations on 13 August 2007 by Fadi Abou-RihanSomewhere, Hakim Bey once suggested that it is only a fragmented theory that can do justice to a fragmented reality.
Among other things, a fragment is a residue not entirely covered over by time. Its presence is unsettling. It invites us to excavate for another to which it may retell its story. Its misshapen contour triggers in us a sense of ambiguity, of dislocation, of something that does not belong to the here and now. A fragment is a knot and a complication. Abstraction hopes to conceal its pressure but, inevitably, the crack is laid bare. The complication becomes a pointer to a parallel yet unspoken, perhaps even unspeakable.
Memory is often called upon to reconstitute the fragment in such a way that it is no longer jarring. Recollection hints of a loss not only of what was but also of what might have been or has yet to be. In the meantime, the fragment remains crucial; it is an anchor much as the mark of a question that requires the stability of the solitary dot beneath the curve. Ironically though, the fragment is stressed by the typographical gesture. It is brought to the fore with the convenient separation between riddle and solution, mostly as a pretext for further riddling.
The fragment is now a link in the chain it previously interrupted. Rather than merely assimilated, it is charged with the task of securing a malleable continuity, of assuming a function, utilitarian perhaps, or maybe even anaclitic. The sequence and hierarchy associated with such an arrangement are much less static than generally granted.
The fragment for its part remains neither formal enough to satisfy the requirements of academic discourse, nor immediate and conclusive enough to be of any particular use to those so-called frontline activists in search of strategies or solutions. Perhaps this renders it duplicitous in its inactivity or thoughtlessness, depending on the side of the purity divide from which one wishes to approach it. This, perhaps, lends it the possibility of engaging, once again, in new forms of thought or action, arrogant at times, and yet fully aware of their aleatory micro-political and/or micro-theoretical relevance and limitations.
