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Language

Losing Objects

June 1, 2009
Aevum, Found Object, Language, MetaTherapeutics, Play, Speaking Desire, Subjects, Transitionals, Winnicott

Freud thought the dream the royal road to the unconscious and the dream book itself the jewel of his intellectual crown. While only a few of Freud’s followers would comfortably consider donning that crown, many would not hesitate to lay claim to the title of its most deserving guardian and, in the process, to the authority and authorship of its official story. This is a story that, after so many revisions, has become one of succession and access, rivalry and conquest, ownership and meaning. With his notion of the “found,” Winnicott rethinks the story into one of use and findability, into the story of an object (be it a spatula, a dream, an idea, or a practice) that belongs, when it belongs, “to the arts and to religion and to imaginative living, and to creative scientific work” (TOTP, 242) insofar as it is an object found, conjured, used, appropriated, an object hence relinquished, misplaced, misused, misappropriated. Winnicott’s is the story of “the intermediate area” between what is subjective and what is objectively perceived (TOTP, 231). To that area belongs an “object” that has little to do with the typology of the good or the bad, the fetishistic or the partial , an object that has even less to do with the absolute or the fleeting, the mythological or the real.

In telling such a story, Winnicott had effectively set for himself the difficult task of communicating an original perspective that challenges not only a psychoanalytic orthodoxy as it fosters the distinction between subject and object, but also the very structures of language as they speak both the perspective and the orthodoxy. Much as I appreciate the severity of his stylistic constraints, I am reluctant to carry on with the use of the terms “subject” and “object” for it seems to me that, given their habits and histories, these terms can only detract from the spirit of Winnicott’s project. To my mind, to the “intermediate area” belong neither the subject nor the object but the verb in its unfolding: finding, using, dreaming, playing, relinquishing. This verb is neither a passageway out of the subjective and into the objective, out of hallucination and into perception, nor a bridge across which the subject may amble from omnipotence to culture and along with it libido from childhood to maturity.

As an aevum, the verb speaks a process whose cadence gathers those components that, through it and in its space, get to be qualified as subjects and/or objects. Much as there is nothing to an object that renders it inherently irrelevant, much as, in other words, the object becomes irrelevant only in a given situation and as an effect of it being treated as such by a subject, there is nothing to an object that is inherently object-“ive” or to a subject that is inherently subject-“ive,” even when said object and subject are gathered in a single process. It is the verb, as finding, that founds the process and invests its components with their respective states and qualities.

Some will of course object that to the subject belong an inviolable will and an activity that the object in its inertia lacks. While this may very well be the case in the context of certain textbooks of psychology and philosophy, it is not so with respect to the transitional space, to the finding and playing where, already, the object is subjectivised and the subject is woven into the object. The transitional space knows as little of the “object” that is inanimate and unresponsive, that is dead, as the unconscious knows of death itself, which is to say nothing. And if this space knows nothing of the “object,” it might then make some sense to suggest that that space would know equally nothing of the other to that ”object,” of its linguistic and, presumably, psychoanalytic nemesis, the “subject.”

In assessing the viability of this suggestion, three questions present themselves. First, might the Winnicottian perspective not be enhanced if one were to rethink the distinction between subject and object in light of the “experiencing” that belongs to the found, an experiencing whose modes and itineraries may very well underlie the production of certain categories and their presentation as distinct? Second, what then can be said of the production of such distinctions and/or categories, specifically of its dynamics and relationship to the process of play Winnicott is describing? And, finally, third, what, if any, implications does the process of play have on the ways in which we think and live desire? I believe that the answers to these questions begin with Winnicott’s final contributions in Playing and Reality.

Murky Subjects

April 15, 2009
Culture, Found Object, Language, MetaTherapeutics, Play, Possession, Subjects, Transitionals, Winnicott

Though he insists that any given found object must eventually be decathected, Winnicott does not so much privilege the experiencing that occurs between the inner and the outer over and above the found object. Winnicott grounds the found object in terms of the experiencing, and vice versa. Without the found object, the experiencing cannot take place and all that the subject is left with is hallucinations and/or sensory perceptions; without the experiencing, the found object is precisely nothing but an object—concrete and lifeless. Eventually, and as the experiencing is displaced and/or dispersed onto ever-newer objects and situations, it is also opened up from the singular illusion of play to the plural collusion (as in the co-, and hence shared, illusion) of culture, from the other-than-me to the more-than-me. Presumably, the subject of this experiencing has shifted in its sense of itself as solitary, autonomous, omnipotent even, to the experience and recognition of, which is to say the collaboration with, the other as subject. With such a shift comes the possibility that the subject might get caught up in a grandiosity that undoes the work of experiencing and ends up holding the cultural as, this time, a less-than-me.

The shift from omnipotence to collaboration brings out yet another layer to Winnicott’s understanding of the found object as something that will be relinquished. While an adult subject may come to recognise that a particular found object is not a true possession but the ground for a cultural experience (an idea, a relationship, or a community), a much younger subject is likely to 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 necessarily registered as an “other-than-mine.” Two provisional implications arise here; and both need to be tested. The first implication 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 found. The second implication is that Winnicott may very well have inadvertently paved the way for an assessment of the experience of the object that is “acquired” and “private” as inherently childish.

Much as these thoughts may convey a cohesive and unified theory that describes a developmental journey from object recognition (and objectification) to subject recognition (and subjectivisation), they are not entirely convincing, not to me at least. If, indeed, the found object is found by virtue of the fact that it has already been recognised as more than an object, if, in other words, it has already been subjectivised, then the subject’s capacity to recognise subject-hood, even if at the most elemental level of vitality and animation, is a precondition for the very possibility of an event such as “finding” and “experiencing” rather than its subsequent developmental achievement. Perhaps then a major fault-line in Winnicott’s thought has to do not so much with its attachment to a developmental model, as many (especially Lacanians) have argued, but more with its (and its detractors’) investment in a murky and, I suspect, not entirely warranted language of subjects and objects, at least as far as the psychodynamic underpinnings of “experiencing” are concerned.

Ich/I/moi

February 1, 2008
Anti-Oedipus, AO-Mistranslations, Deleuze, Freud, Guattari, Lacan, Language, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Subjects

        Back to the question of translation though this time the text is encumbered by a move from the German original. Freud’s Oedipal trinity is of the “es/it,” the “Ich/I,” and the “Uber-Ich/Over-I.” While his English translators introduced the “id,” “ego,” and “super ego,” their French cousins remained closer to the original with the “ça,” “moi,” and “surmoi.” It is interesting that the translators of Anti-Oedipus chose to comply with the English Freud instead of the French Deleuze and Guattari. “I,” “me,” and “ego” are the choices they alternate for the single word “moi” (often, it seems, without rhyme or reason). Perhaps it was their attempt to bring closer to their audiences a text that sounded strange enough already!

        Mine is not simply a linguistic concern since Freud had used the term “Ich” to refer at times to the self in its totality and at others to an agency or a part of that self. While it makes his text difficult to read, Freud’s equivocation also suggests that the two senses are co-dependent, that, in fact, one could not speak of a self, of an I, without that part, an ego, that negotiates between the demands of desire, reality, and the Law, that, in other words, and for Freud at least, to speak of a self is to speak of Oedipus. (To speak of a self, for Lacan, is to speak of and to insist on not only the necessity of the symbolic Law but also the unavoidability of a specular and imaginary “moi” without which the entire structure would also flounder.) Much like his predecessors (Kraepelin, Bleuler, and Binswanger), Freud relied on the “ego,” or its absence, to understand the schizophrenic, or at the very least to understand the schizophrenic as beyond psychoanalytic comprehension, and hence intervention.

        To be fair to Freud, in a manner of speaking, and to also be more accurate, conceptually and clinically, it is not on the “ego/moi” that the possibility of therapeutic psychoanalysis hinges. Rather, it is the capacity for object libido, which is to say for the love of an other, that Freud looked for in his prospective analysands. This is not an insignificant distinction. In classic psychoanalytic terms, the I that is capable of love is an I that has already been Oedipalised; it is an I that has passed from ego libido to object libido, from secondary narcissism to the super ego (via the ego ideal). The narcissist, the masochist, the homosexual, the schizophrenic, the woman, in sum anything that is not “Freud,” these are all quite capable of uttering an “I” but theirs has not been fixed enough by its relationship to the familial axes of Oedipus for it to be curable. It is in its endorsement of this non-Oedipal “I/moi” that Deleuze and Guattari’s schizophrenic process is to be distinguished from both Lacanism and Ego psychology. The only “real” relationship—be it of love, hate, or what not—is a relationship of production, of desiring production, of the production of the unconscious. Though he claimed all the names of history, Nietzsche, obviously, did not fail to utter an “I” whenever he fancied it or it suited his purposes. Similarly, the handyman has rarely hesitated to acknowledge an “I fixed it” even though his primary mode is of fixing things rather than of claiming for himself the things he has fixed.

Body and Sign–Pinning–3

December 16, 2007
Body and Sign, Cixous, Language, MetaTherapeutics, Speaking Desire

        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.

Body and Sign–Pinning–2

December 13, 2007
Body and Sign, Cixous, Freud, Language, MetaTherapeutics, Speaking Desire

        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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