Archive for the Fetish Category

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other-than-me, more-than-me, other-than-mine

Posted in Displacement, Fetish, Found Object, Play, Productions, Speaking Desire, Subjects, Transitionals, Winnicott on 4 August 2008 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        Of the found object’s various Winnicottian features, three are crucial for it to qualify as found. First, it must possess a modicum of vitality evidenced through warmth, movement, or texture for instance. Second, it has to be resilient enough to survive the loving and/or aggressive manipulations of the individual that finds it, with the proviso that, and herein lies its third necessary feature, its fate is that it be allowed to be gradually “decathected.” Winnicott explains that the found object “does not ‘go inside’ nor does the feeling about it necessarily undergo repression. It is not forgotten and it is not mourned. It looses meaning, and this is because the transitional phenomena have become diffused, have become spread out over the whole intermediate territory between ‘inner psychic reality’ and ‘the external world as perceived by two persons in common’, that is to say, over the whole cultural field” (TOTP 233).

        Manifestations of the found object are therefore hardly confined to the earliest experiences of the subject. On this score, Winnicott is careful to remind us that “the task of reality-acceptance is never completed, that no human being is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality, and that relief from this strain is provided by an intermediate area of experience which is never challenged” (TOTP 240). An inanimate object, an animal, an event, a human being, an organisation, an idea, these are some of the categories of objects to be found, time and again, and are indeed found precisely because of their capacity to be, and because of the subject’s need for them to be, something other than mere objects. The experience of “experiencing” is a bridging and a weaving across inner and outer realities; it takes place in that “transitional” space in which the subject foregoes the certainties of, and, in the process, disencumbers itself from the ossifying demands of, both hallucination and concreteness.

        As the experiencing is displaced and/or dispersed onto ever-newer objects and situations (“over the whole cultural field”), it is also opened up from the other-than-me toward the more-than-me, from the singular illusion (of play) to the plural collusion (of culture). Here, Winnicott is effectively privileging the experiencing over and above the found object itself, any found object. He is also hinting that, in principle at least, such an object is never truly a possession; it is not something that may be “had” and it is not something that may be “lost” either; it is, by definition, an object that can be, and most likely will be, relinquished. This is one reason why Winnicott will go out of his way to mark the found object as something other than a fetish (TOTP 234n1, 241-42).

        However, while an adult subject may come to see that the found object that supports a cultural experience (an idea, a relationship, or a community) is never truly a property, a much younger subject will reject even the slightest suggestion that the toy or blanket it has found is not entirely its own; it will not look kindly upon the adult’s attempts to mend or clean or in any way alter said toy or blanket; it will tolerate even less the prospect of having to share anything it has found with those around it. As the first “other-than-me” possession, the found object is not automatically registered as “other-than-mine.” The implication here is that the passage from “other-than-me” to “other-than-mine” is one that the subject will have to undertake if it is to look both forward and backward in time on the objects it has found, and experienced, and eventually acknowledge them as such.

        Taking this line one step further, it seems as if Winnicott may have inadvertently set the ground for an assessment of the experience of “private” property as inherently childish!

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Situational Subjects

Posted in Anti-Oedipus, Fetish, Insight, Machines, MetaTherapeutics, Productions, Schizoanalysis, Subjects, Termination on 23 January 2008 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        Ultimately, the Deleuzo-Guattarian subject (be it an individual, a text, a practice, or an institution) is produced as the offshoot of a particular constellation of forces of attraction and repulsion, which is to say of a surround and a situation. It is hence aleatory since the constellation itself is an effect of the ongoing process of production and its three syntheses. This subject is producible—differently, persistently; it is mutable, agile; its history knows little of linearity or development, of stages or resolutions, and often only accidentally so. This subject is situational.

        Contra the fetish that ossifies it by subsuming its relations and experiences under the heading of this or that topology or purpose, Deleuze and Guattari offer a more modest and hence potentially more flexible and productive strategy for being, for reading, for intervening. Julia Kristeva’s insistence that individuality requires that in every analysand be discovered a distinctly new classification (New Maladies of the Soul, 9) and Wilfred Bion’s recommendation to enter each session with “neither memory nor desire” in order to be best prepared for that session’s specific productions—its newness—strike a similar cord.

        In this context, the clinical concern is much less with the correction of a pathological present (as the reiteration of disruptive early childhood patterns) in favour of a pre-established adult (read: integrated) identity, and more with what that present is being made to produce or not produce; with the malleable relations and experiences it makes possible.

        The present is about much less a state of being than a deployment of being, for it too is a machine. This is not to suggest that the subject does not admit of a history; its past is a machine that is often called upon in hindsight in order to justify or make necessary, and sometimes even more tolerable, a present as an investment or a relation. Nor is this subject lacking in a capacity to observe and hence modify itself; it is not without will, though its will, and by extension its want, revolve around a simultaneously more visceral and more subtle concern than for simple advancement or acquisition.

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Subjects

Posted in Anti-Oedipus, Conjunctive Synthesis, Fetish, Freud, Klein, Productions, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Subjects on 13 January 2008 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        Keeping in mind the initial definition of process as production, recording, and consumption, a third synthesis is invariably at work, a synthesis of consumption that belongs to the “subject,” a “subject” that is produced by a recording and that defines itself in terms of the recording it consumes.

        How could a recording produce a subject? To begin with, here are two examples from the history and medicalization of sexuality. In the first volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault has outlined for us the recording of homosexuality from the 1850’s onwards and how it has come to produce not only the psychiatric category of the homosexual as presumably pathetic and pathological but also the possibilities for its modern day offshoot: the gay subject. As well, Sandy Stone has given us an image of the recording of the transsexual identity from the 1950’s onwards, a recording in which the shoddily researched notion of gender disphoria (being born in “the wrong body”) has seeped from the clinic and into the discourses of psychology, politics, and popular culture (“The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto”).

        Ultimately, and for us here, the most poignant recording of all is Oedipus itself. As our social delirium and fetish, Oedipus records incest and patricide as primary. Supposedly, the taboo on incest is designed to curb an already existing wish, and guilt to redress and repair the effects of that wish. Freud was quite persistent on both scores and that is precisely why he could never accept the position of the budding Melanie Klein. As far as he was concerned, she had argued that one does not feel guilty because one has murdered one’s father but rather that one phantasizes the murder of one’s father because one already feels guilty. This made no sense to him!

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Fetish-2

Posted in Anti-Oedipus, BwO, Fetish, Schizoanalysis on 6 January 2008 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        The two syntheses of production are subject to fetishistic manipulation: reversal in the case of connection, and exclusivity in the case of disjunction.

        The fetish is specific to a social delirium (an “I think”) of an apparent movement of, for instance, the body without organs as cause of all production (the logic of “without me you are nothing“) or of a decisive choice between two immutable alternatives (either conscious or unconscious, either inside or outside, either analyst or analysand).

        In schizophrenic delirium, the two syntheses overlap; fluidity is the order of the day.

It might be said that the schizophrenic passes from one code to the other, that he deliberately scrambles all the codes, by quickly shifting from one to another, according to the questions asked him, never giving the same explanation from one day to the next, never invoking the same genealogy, never recording the same event in the same way. When he is more or less forced into it and is not in a touchy mood, he may even accept the banal Oedipal code, so long as he can stuff it full of all the disjunctions that this code was designed to eliminate. (15)

        The echo here is to Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty, his presentation of von Sacher Masoch from a few years prior to Anti-Oedipus, specifically to the contract the masochist draws up and proposes to the other, a contract that takes the form of the Law but is indeed designed to generate all that that Law prohibits. The scrambling of codes in this instance operates on at least two levels: at the level of the author of the contract who gets to prescribe the limits of the scene (stereotypically the active “top” but in this case the supposedly passive “bottom”); and at the level of the content and intent of the contract (impropriety, un-pleasure).

        If we are in a position to qualify Anti-Oedipus itself as masochistic/schizophrenic then we should expect that everything that has been said so far to be subject to the same shifts and scramblings. What we are offered is an ever growing and ever confusing set of syntheses and much of what follows will depend on our responses to it, on what we make of it.

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Disjunction

Posted in Anti-Oedipus, Disjunctive Synthesis, Fetish, Machines, Schizoanalysis on 27 November 2007 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        In the face of this “without me, you are nothing” and instead of the all too familiar reversed and hence equally fetishistic and resentful response by the other, Deleuze and Guattari not only insist on the infinitely open quality of the binary series of machines that precludes the fixity of pedigree, they also complicate the situation through the second of the text’s syntheses, the disjunctive synthesis (either… or… or…), the production of recording.

        The surface of the body without organs is taut and smooth. It is without itineraries, or rather, its itineraries are infinite. One can and often does slide from a given point to another in a thousand different ways: either this way, or that, or the other; and on it goes.

        Contra the logic of a social delirium that demands that the itineraries be fixed, schizophrenic delirium is infinitely more flexible, but not any the less sensical, than is often assumed. Indeed, and with the disjunctive synthesis, Deleuze and Guattari explode the constraints of the sequential and binary order of a rigid linear connection: the trajectory from one machine to another is multiplied and both machines are no longer necessarily connected, and when they are so connected the link is not exclusively through the shortest route that is the straight line. The hold of the linear connections of logic (grammar) and causality (time) is loosened as the disjunctions overlay the connections; both are henceforth inscribed in a multi-dimensional space.

        With the disjunctive synthesis, it is linear, chronological time that is most crucially undermined, time as a causal connector and developmental ground for both understanding and intervention, in other words, time as a fetish. For Schrödinger, the cat in the box, the cat we cannot see, is not simply either dead or alive; it is both dead and alive.

        At the quantum level, thinking the physics of the overlay and simultaneity of the disjunction with the connection has given rise to such notions as superposition and the multiverse without which many of our current technologies would not obtain. While the controversy still rages on in scientific circles as to which of these two theories, recordings, inscriptions, is the more appropriate or justifiable, it would make more sense to suggest that both indeed are, that, as incomprehensible as it may initially seem, simultaneity (of states or of worlds) is not simply a peculiar characteristic of a psychological phenomenon identified by a supposedly long outdated dogma. The unconscious, as primary process, i.e., as an a-chronological form of thought that stresses the untimely rather than the serial and exclusive, is not contained within the confines of the archaic or the phantastic; it is our reality, physical as well as psychological, at its most elemental and productive.

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Fetish

Posted in André Green, Anti-Oedipus, BwO, Connective Synthesis, Fetish, Freud, Schizoanalysis, Sophocles on 24 November 2007 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        It is in terms of this tension that Deleuze and Guattari will understand the fetish, not as an object, a commodity, or a body part; but as the movement, event, and relationship that reverse the connective synthesis and fix the machine as fatefully miraculated, as, in other words, owing its existence to some body without organs without which it cannot survive.

        Oedipus is a telling example of such a fetish. Indeed, many a post-Freudian reading has further complicated our understanding of the tumultuous relationship between father and son: André Green for instance reminds us that Laius was not simply the innocent victim of patricide but the plotter of his own son’s murder as well. In this context, much remains to be said of Jocasta’s collusion with her husband’s plot and of the ideological silence that surrounds that collusion to this day.

        Still, the structure and logic of the myth persist to the point where it has become virtually impossible to experience the familial, either phenomenally or ideologically, without its Sophoclean recordings. However, and should art or history be our guide and inspiration, then let us not overlook the episode that Herodotus tells of Hippocrates who refused to abide by the prophecy’s warning that he not father a son or if he already has one to disown him. Pisistratus, his offspring, would go on to conquer Athens and serve as its ruler. Neither father nor son in this case was any the poorer for disregarding the codes of the deities and the directives of their prophets (Histories, Book One #59-64).

        To put it bluntly, the logic of the fetish here is the intolerant and singular logic of the “without me, you are noting” that one party fosters and with which another colludes. Author and reader, teacher and student, analyst and analysand, parent and child, ruler and ruled; these are some of the structural couplets that breathe in the stagnant air of resentment without which, and in an ironically doubled and nested move, the corresponding institutions of Literature, Pedagogy, Psychoanalysis, Family, and State would not exist.

        “Without me, you are nothing” is the logic of quasi-causes, of boundaries and restrictions, of confinements and regulations, through which the leak is construed as a threat and the crossing is supposedly a crossing into illegitimacy, chaos, fragmentation, and disintegration. But it is precisely the impermeable boundary itself that divides, consolidates, and reifies the functions of dictator, father, and super ego. Often enough, the crossing is not into chaos but into a more liveable and freer sanity. Instead of health or truth, it is territoriality and power that are the fundamental concerns of the institution and its fetish.

        Ostensibly, this “without me, you are nothing” is but a thin veil for a deep and desperate projection: “without you, I am nothing.” To admit that much is to renounce the fallacy of the hierarchy that allows me to identify myself as your superior (in health, truth, or wealth); it is to renounce my investment in my phantasy of my superiority over you, which is to say, it is to recognize my aggression toward you as someone I wish to subordinate. Freud’s elaborations on the mechanisms of projection and paranoia in his study on Schreber still hold true, as long as one inscribes them within the circuit of the conditional relations of the inter-subjective.

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