Archive for the Body and Sign Category

Body and Sign–Pinning–3

Posted in Body and Sign, Cixous, Language, MetaTherapeutics, Speaking Desire on 16 December 2007 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        Clinically, we have understood and practiced the pinning of word to place and of psyche to soma as exclusively gendered. We have adamantly organized our notions of law and desire, of history and identity, around those physiological traits that mark us as male or female. We have glorified these traits, sanitized, disavowed, decried, and sanctified them; we have traced their implications, tabulated their dangers, celebrated their privileges, and suffered their failures.

        In this respect, there is hardly anything new to the claim that the pinning is multiple, that its modalities and purposes have varied according to the uses and values, agendas and intentions of the gendered individual to whom they belong. However, the multiplicity that Cixous’s text points to, the one I would like to carry further, has as much to do with the locations and purposes of the pinning as it does with its intensities and qualities.

        The psychoanalytic discourse on identity has been enmeshed with the heading and perspective of gender difference at the expense of all others. The world of a Rome to which all the political roads led, of a heavenly deity at which all redemptive supplications were directed, of an absolute knowledge to which all scientific inquiries aspired, and of a primary dynamic around which all bodily desires were organized, that is a world that is no longer ours, assuming, indeed, that it ever was. Rome, God, Truth, and Oedipus have long since been unseated from their respective thrones. In their stead, we recognize not so much the radical absence of any singular organisational principle, for the claim to such an absence itself is singular and principled, but the simultaneous and incessant pull of a number of hubs and coordinates around which our practices have come to be organized. In its hay day, Rome may have wished itself the sole centre of power and commerce; the fact of the wish itself speaks of an altogether different reality. Moreover, the empire has long since been displaced by a number of others, including itself under an unfamiliar and not entirely favourable guise; as much can be said of God, Truth, and Oedipus. Of this we can be certain: no contender to a throne is without a match, and no throne is everlasting. Sexual difference has often claimed for itself the primary, indomitable, and matchless ground upon which are erected psyche, soma, and, by extension, the channels via which these two have communicated. It has arrogated for itself the title of queen and has condemned any questioning of its primacy and supremacy as enmity, folly, betrayal, or misguided-ness. This has been the case for psychoanalysis as much as for feminism.

        In the face of such despotism, one could advocate the overthrow of the powers that be in favour of a presumably more inclusive or even egalitarian structure that would accommodate the various bodily markers as legitimate sites of psychological identifications, differentiations, and alliances. One could then argue that disability, and lack thereof, is potentially as constitutive of the unconscious and its dynamics as is gender. In its early years, a visually impaired or hard of hearing child, for instance, is as liable to endure the presence and absence of sight or sound as much as, if not more than, that of the penis. In a familial triangle marked by such a dynamic, the traffic in identification and ambivalence is shaped as much by the fact that some can see or hear while others can’t as it is by the fact that some have a penis while others don’t.

        The triangle is hence as much a triangle of ability as it is one of sex and gender. With some modification, the argument could also be extended to show how the same triangle is, at times, equally a triangle of race for instance. Any body part that is available for the child as a site of differentiation between self and other is hence potentially yet another site of pinning and triangulation. It is in this much more fundamental sense that the pinning of psyche to soma is synchronically multiple; its locations are not limited to the erogenous zones; they can and, as is becoming increasingly evident, they very often do include most organs, limbs, senses, and skins.

        One could; but one shouldn’t have to unless the material itself is such that the sites of psychological differentiation and pinning are indeed multiple. The despotism of multiplicity is no less stifling than that of uniformity.

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Body and Sign–Pinning–2

Posted in Body and Sign, Cixous, Freud, Language, MetaTherapeutics, Speaking Desire on 13 December 2007 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        I would like to focus on the title of Cixous’s contribution: Savoir (thank heaven the translators of the text into English chose not to mess around with it!). “Savoir” references both the French for the verb to know as well as the verb voir, to see, preceded by the feminine declension of the possessive article, sa. Cixous’s linguistic pinning of, supposedly, the masculine categories of knowledge, depth, and power to the feminine preoccupations with surface, appearance, and gaze uncovers their questionable determinations. This pinning also uncovers and makes seen our very need to see in order to distinguish between not only the abilities but the genders and their sexualities as well, for nothing makes us more uncomfortable than the inability to see the markers of such identifications, and nothing makes us more volatile, if not violent, than the inability to know to which of the categories their bearers belong. Invariably, the confusion remains ours as much as it may sometimes be theirs, and so does the responsibility to tolerate it.

        While transmogrified into an English Id as a proper noun, a privileged and hence, by the very exercise of its naming and pinning, a properly contained agency, Freud’s es holds on to its most ubiquitous and common of characters with the French rendering ça. Another variation on Cixous’s title is then the one that writes a savoir but also speaks and hears a ça-voir, an it-to-see, and hence a seeing that belongs to and indeed defines as a gerund that which lies at the heart of the unconscious, and hence psychoanalytic, enterprise, a gerund that is only subsequently bifurcated into that which supposedly belongs to either a sa or a son, a feminine or a masculine, a ça or a son, an thing or a sound, an object or a word, ultimately, a body or a representation.

“Avant elle n’etait pas une femme d’abord elle etait une myope c’est-à-dire une masquée” (17): “Before she was not a woman first she was a myopic meaning one masked” (10).

        Cixous’s refusal to punctuate her words “properly,” to fix them in a logical order and a structural hierarchy, which is to say to pin them to, among many other things, a pre-formed gender, underscores the varied ways in which they are to be understood bodily, sensually, as they are read and/or heard. Depending on its pauses and stresses, “Before she was not a woman first she was a myopic meaning one masked” could point to any one of the following: she was already myopic before she had become woman; while myopic and woman, the site of her primary difference lay in her sight and not in her genitalia; myopia had afforded her a mask behind which she could be whatever woman she chose, if and when she chose; she is now the woman who had once been masked by her myopia; she had once held a myopic meaning that one masked (while available to the English translation, this last reading is significantly absent from the French original).

        These are but the beginnings of a potentially inexhaustible series of meanings that points to the instability not so much of meaning per se but of the gendered punctuations to which we have pinned it, forcibly, exclusively. Much of what has been said and written of sexual difference over the last century ascribes it the status of an access code to most of what constitutes and is legitimized as, amongst others, feminist, psychoanalytic, and cultural theory. Much remains to be written of that code’s complications and ambivalences. In the meantime, what needs to be articulated is a reassessment of the very practice of coding as it ascribes to any difference, be it of gender, sexuality, ability, class, race, or what not, a primacy over and above any other bodily marker. In her Savoir, and whether wittingly or not one has no easy way of telling, Cixous points to a network of markers that may be prioritised, i.e., given shape and perspective, only in relation to and in the context of a specific body and a specific life. Gone is the practice of investing this or that quality with a universal privilege, the one with which every therapeutic, intellectual, and/or political project must comply, the one to which every move must be pinned. Cixous indeed opens the door onto a practice that is not only concerned with the specifics of a certain relationship between femininity and myopia, gender and vision, body and perspective, but with the implicit but not any the less crucial redefinition of the practice of pinning as inevitably and synchronically multiple.

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Body and Sign–Pinning

Posted in Body and Sign, Cixous, Language, MetaTherapeutics, Speaking Desire on 12 December 2007 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        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?

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Body and Sign

Posted in Body and Sign, Freud, Klein, Lacan, Language, Speaking Desire on 3 December 2007 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        For the longest time, sign language was considered a kind of pantomime, a crude iconic code lacking the sophisticated complexities and potentials of language. Its speakers were often relegated to the realm of the childish, pathological, or primitive because of their supposedly restricted capacities to communicate and therefore to think symbolically. William Stokoe has since corrected this view. Through its use of the three dimensions of space (from the directionality of its nouns, verbs, and adverbs to the perspectival qualities of its narrative) as well as its inscriptions in time, Sign exploits to their fullest the grammatical and syntactic possibilities of language that neither speech nor writing can even begin to approximate (“Syntactic Dimensionality”). The “deaf and dumb” are so only because most of us the hearing do not have the experiences, or perhaps even the cerebral capacities, to grammaticize space, to use it linguistically (Sacks, Seeing Voices, 76), to, in other words, cross into a mode of expression and thought that surpasses the one-dimensional recording of speech or the two-dimensional recording of writing.

        Is it any wonder then that our civilisation has consistently valorized the so-called “properly” linguistic at the expense of the visual? And is it any wonder that the psychoanalytic field has picked up the bias and extended it to the point where the two-dimensional structure of language (its metonymy and metaphor à la Lacan) and its testimony to a higher capacity to mourn (as a symbolic representation à la Klein and Segal) have colonized our understanding of the unconscious and relegated any non-linguistic presence in the analytic session to the realm of the unmetabolized and acted out resistance or, better still, the symptom of a regression to the so-called “pre-verbal”?

        One of the principal effects of language as a machine is to produce, regiment, and prioritize structure over experience, to relocate and devalue the non-verbal as pre-verbal, which is to say infantile. As much as, and hence precisely because, the body is available for verbalisation, it is also, in at least one of its core registers, a body without language, a body whose tremors and passions often cannot be spoken.

        If that is the case, then what is one to say of the ego as Freud had conceived it, of the ego as first and foremost a “body ego?”

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