Archive

Repetition

Intelligibility – Ownership

April 21, 2009
Dreams, Found Object, Play, Possession, Repetition, Secondary Revision, Transitionals, Winnicott

If the found object must begin as animated and vital and only later can it move on to become irrelevant and inanimate, an object properly speaking and, hence, potentially a possession, then property and its corresponding experience of privacy may not be entirely childish but instead the effects of a process of concretisation and a rendering static, a “this is mine and you may not have it, use it, or change it” that the subject brings to bear on the object. I am expanding the references of “subject” and “object” beyond “child” and “teddy bear”; I have in mind any subject, regardless of age, and whatever object it may “find”—be it a toy, a body, an idea, a work, a grouping, or a property.

To my mind, this process of concretisation runs parallel to the systematising secondary revision Freud had identified in the work of dreams. Indeed, the principal function of secondary revision is to lend cohesion to the otherwise fragmentary content of a dream, “to establish order in material of that kind, to set up relations in it and to make it conform to our expectations of an intelligible whole” (The Interpretation of Dreams, 641). Secondary revision moulds the material offered to it “into something like a day-dream” (ID, 633) (∗); it re-writes, corrects, and edits that material so as to produce a definitive and self-evident story, the “official” story as it were, whose pleasure depends on its ability to pre-empt the need for any further explanation, and hence any further work, by either the dreamer or anyone else for that matter. This is a story whose pleasure lies in the fact that it does not stimulate(∗∗), that it does not produce other, which is to say different and hence unsettling and potentially transforming, stories. Therein lies secondary revision’s status as a form of censorship; it is a revision that may not be revised and a process whose aim is not only an “intelligible whole” but also a consolidation of that whole and a prohibition against anyone else to “have, use, or change” it, to dismantle it and, in so doing, to expose the richness of its underlying disorder and unintelligibility or, equally dangerously, to introduce into it the opportunity for new and unforeseeable uses or transformations, disorders or unintelligibilities. Ultimately, secondary revision is an injunction against mutation, and hence against transitionality and against finding.

It seems to me that secondary revision and private property are meant to secure the wish for, respectively, an incontrovertible intelligibility and a possession beyond doubt; together, they secure and authorize the ownership of intelligibility and the intelligibility of ownership. Utterances such as “this is so” and “this is mine” are not statements of fact but “demands” (∗∗∗) that are designed to eliminate any and all room for movement, for fragmentation, and, most importantly, most threateningly perhaps, for loss. Everything fits at the end of a revision; if the story is to be told again, the same elements must be recounted in the same order and in the same tenor, otherwise the result is a threatening distortion if not an outright falsehood (including the falsehood of a claim to ownership). Similarly with possession, its story ought to be clear as to where and to whom everything belongs so that it may both enforce the right to exclusivity and pre-empt the disorder of theft (including the theft of intelligibility).

My hypothesis is that neither property nor revision need be reduced to the expression of an unshakeable repetition compulsion or a primordial death drive (∗∗∗∗) ; rather, each may very well be the fulfilment of a wish to preserve a certain state and protect against anything that might threaten its stability (∗∗∗∗∗) . In light of this, the found object’s eventual loss of meaning (TOTP, 233) is never truly definitive and its relinquishment is hardly an outright rejection nor is it evidence of an irrevocable abandonment as with secondary revision’s finality, its “once and for all.” Much as the found object’s meaning is eventually displaced onto newer objects, its reappearance can, and often does, trigger a charged fund of memories of people and places, thoughts and activities. This object is relinquished not so much when it becomes utterly irrelevant or when its destruction is of no consequence to its finder but rather when its destruction is not a looming danger, when the other to whom it is relinquished is trusted, invested with the hope, and entrusted with the responsibility not to destroy it and along with it those parts of its finder that have become intertwined (“woven”) into it. Perhaps then the subject’s possessiveness, its “this is mine and you cannot have it, use it, or change it”, ought to be understood as a “this contains, and hence is, part of me and I don’t trust you (or at least not yet) not to destroy it and me in the process.” When given over to the other, the object is liable to manipulation and transformation, to mutation; and while the subject may be confident that the found object can survive its own aggression, it may be less than certain that the both of them together can survive the aggression of that other.
________
(∗) We shall revisit this daydreaming effect soon enough under the Winnicottian heading of phantasying and its logic of the dead end.
(∗∗) While this may sound highly counterintuitive, it is precisely in terms of such a stasis that Freud understood pleasure.
(∗∗∗) Freud is very clear on this quality of secondary revision; see The Interpretation of Dreams, 642.
(∗∗∗∗) In a topographical context, secondary revision belongs to the system of the pre-conscious; it is hence far removed from the strictly speaking unconscious workings of any such compulsion or drive.
(∗∗∗∗∗) Short of adopting Freud’s principle that the libido is pleasure-seeking and that stability is the guarantor of survival and hence the epitome of libidinal pleasure, the question as to why stability is so desirable remains unanswered.

Work

April 26, 2008
Dreams, Freud, History, Machines, MetaTherapeutics, Re-Parenting, Repetition, Schizoanalysis, Work

        Freud grounded psychoanalysis in terms of a collaborative uncovering of the unconscious as dynamic and over-determined. That such uncovering occurs in a fraction of the time “psychoanalysis” occupies or that it necessitates much preparation does not deny it its status as the core and defining element of the practice; if anything, it reinforces it as the however infinitesimally small but not any the less defining marker of a practice that is singular and specific, a practice that is irreducible to this or that of the modes of relating with which we are already familiar.

        That such uncovering leaves open the questions of “efficacy” and so-called “therapeutic value,” that, in other words, the uncovering does not necessarily make people “feel better,” assuming we already know and agree on what the expression actually means, the way doctors and parents are presumably supposed to make patients and children “feel better,” may be a concern for those attempting to justify the practice in the eyes of a culture grounded in the principles of expediency and comfort. But it is precisely the work of such a culture that psychoanalysis has been designed to counter. This is no less true nowadays than it was in the time of Freud. Sadly, the practice has become increasingly consolidated around the safety and satisfaction certain objects may bring to the process of reproduction and less around the complexity and unpredictability of our desires.

        It is for this reason that, I believe, the parental metaphor has continued to hold great sway over the profession. Unlike all the other models that have enjoyed varying degrees of success (I am thinking of friendship, education, witnessing, or even healing) parenting comes closest to elevating repetition from a basic physiological need and/or a pathological compulsion to the status of a stable and overarching principle of psychic life.

        However, and by the standards of not only this or that of the various leading orientations in psychoanalytic theory or practice but by those standards that the discipline itself has held as its foundational and distinguishing mark, repetition could not be any further from the either the truth of the unconscious or, for that matter, the history of its science. As regards the former, and even at those times when the unconscious is trapped in the most monotonous and debilitating of cyclical scenarios, it is still, and however minimally, an unconscious that dreams, phantasises, mourns, defers, displaces, remembers, thinks, and compromises; it is still an unconscious that works. It is a machine that affords a rest only once in its lifetime, in that very same ground where it finds its final resting place. Otherwise, it is in constant movement. As for the science of the unconscious, it has managed to thrive precisely because many of its practitioners, famous or otherwise, have resisted the institutional demands and methodological requirements for repetition and homogeneity.

Antigone

April 8, 2008
Anouilh, Antigone, Laughter, Oedipus, Repetition, Sophocles

        The generally held view, the one that psychoanalysis has recapitulated but not yet fully explored, is that the kernel of the Sophoclean script treats of a three-sided violation: Oedipus was doomed as much for his attempt at defying the Delphic oracle as he was for his parricide and incest. The latter were of a common quality to the classical Athenian mind, at least in the context of a mytho-theology that was replete with incidences of what we nowadays might consider as even more obscene and absurd passions and events. This did not make the king’s treatment of his parents any the less heinous, but it did render it in paler colours in comparison to his even more sinister and intolerable defiance as a mere mortal. His refusal to submit to the dictates of the higher deities, his though well intentioned but not any the less desperate and misguided wish for the fallibility of their oracles, which is to say his willed ignorance of these oracles’ influence and authority, and, in the process, his attempt to arrogate as his own their powers and privileges, his, in other words, refusal to recognise and abide by his station as a flawed and powerless human in an otherwise rigidly organized cast system is what ultimately cost him his royal privilege.

        Two aspects of the example of Antigone are instructive on this point: the first is political the second psychological. Her father’s daughter, Antigone thought that she too could circumvent the laws of the state in favour of a heavenly commandment to which she declared herself subject. To her mind, she also became that commandment’s enforcer, protector, and agent. Initially its tool, she subtly but steadily transformed herself into its master; subject to it, she became its subject. Anarchist, resistance fighter, or proto-feminist she may have for her modern readers become, for most of her Athenian audiences she, like her father, would have probably remained the blasphemous pretender to a seat at the Olympian high table; her hubris would have been a trigger for her audience’s indignation, dismissal, and pity. Quite likely, her death would have been seen as the product of a misplaced and disgraceful sense of allegiance rather than a lofty sacrifice since, and to the mind of her contemporaries, suicide was cowardly self-indulgent and she was but a woman, irrational and unenviable. On the other hand, Creon’s final torment at his loss of honour and family may very well have been the play’s climactic moment and the worthiest of its audience’s compassion and sympathy. On this score, and while his restaging may have served specific political purposes at the time of the Nazi occupation of France, Anouilh did not escape the trap of casting the intransigent and overly self-assured as resistor when she could have been equally cast as fascist.

        The other aspect to Antigone’s scenario worth noting here is that, sadly, her psychological structure has completely eluded much of the current analysis of the Theban trilogy. Let us pause for a moment and consider the following: Antigone is the product of incest; her father was a murderer and her mother had committed suicide; her two brothers failed at containing their sibling rivalries and eventually killed one another; and much of her adult life was spent ministering to a man toward whom she must have felt some hint of revulsion. Would it be too much of a stretch to suggest that, as one might say these days, she had “baggage?!” Would it be even remotely possible that, as someone who had lived in the midst of and been shaped by so much unmitigated hostility and destruction, she could only come to act on her envy toward Creon as the one relative who was not manifestly implicated by the oracles and their damned and damning prophecies? She is carried away by her rage at her (grand-) uncle; she will trigger a chain of events that will leave him weak, sexless, and childless. She will effectively castrate him. True to her name, Antigone is portrayed as not only the one without progeny, but also as the woman who will arrogate for herself the manly power to bring an entire family’s lineage to its end. She will effectively embody that vision of femininity men have reviled and women have fought against.

        Il seems to me that Antigone is more deserving of recognition than she is of either the ruthless dismissal she must have suffered at the hands of her Athenian audiences or the abstract elaborations on psyche and community she has come to endure from her modern readers. If these latter are on the right track then it would be quite the comic feat of justice if, two and a half millennia from now, their psychologies and politics were to be filtered through whatever traces will have survived of Beaches or Days of Our Lives.

Why no longer?

April 3, 2008
Deleuze, Guattari, History, Mourning, Repetition

(This review is forthcoming in the fall issue of Symposium)

        In his most recent book, Jay Lampert leads us back to one of Deleuze and Guattari’s most complex philosophical expositions of time and repetition without fuss or fanfare. He weaves for us an account of history that is both rich and concise. In a wonderfully honest and generous paragraph near the end of the penultimate chapter of Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History, Lampert asks: “How is someone trained in philosophy supposed to know how to name even one genuine event of ‘today,’ let alone analyse one convincingly as part of his book? What qualifies someone like me to diagnose it in an interesting way, so as to avoid making amateurish or pop-postmodern pronouncements? … Does any case study, short of one that inaugurates an entirely new world-historical Regime of Signs, show what a historical event is qua event, or show in general how the now captures the ‘why?,’ or how the ‘why?’ captures the now?” (154). Lampert’s poetic modesty does not preclude scholarly rigour; it reinforces it. Witness not only his illuminating digressions on Hume, Hegel, Bergson, and Derrida but, and much more encouragingly, his sense of responsibility to detail: 4 arguments for intratemporality, 13 for the pure past, and 2 for the dark precursors of the future; 4 major genealogies of the syntheses of time, 4 similarities and 6 differences with Derrida on dates, and 7 confrontations with Hegel on that selfsame topic; 13 layers to Alice’s obsession with size, 12 features to discuss in relation to the question of why an event occurs when it does, 5 senses of “falling back into history,” and 4 elements to the theory of consistency.

        Lampert unpacks a most subtle and challenging set of questions that have preoccupied, if not defined, the long tradition of western philosophy. From Plato to Hegel, the rehabilitation of multiplicity, of difference, and indeed of chaos under the rubric of the One has had to confront the question of repetition and time, time after time, only to relegate it quite often to the status of a seduction. Contra those who have understood repetition as the reproduction in time of an origin or a preceding state of affairs, Deleuze elaborates a repetition “for its own sake” (« une répétition pour elle-même »), a repetition that accounts for that which does not return, for that which is a becoming without origin or destiny. This is a repetition that does not operate in time; it produces time. This is the repetition Lampert deploys to elucidate not one grand “Philosophy of History” but—count them—nine forms of past, of present, and of future, nine forms of succession and simultaneity, and, finally, nine “movements of the name of history.” Lampert braids his concepts, crosses them, stacks them, aligns them, serially, co-extensively, but always deftly and rigorously, in order to argue that “the succession of befores and afters is a triple by-product of there being three simultaneous simultaneities. What takes the place of the classical concept of history is nothing other than these multiple forms of co-existence with their multiple subordinate forms of serial distribution. Once it is proved that an event’s present status and its past status are independent yet simultaneous, it will follow that the succession-effects of the names of history run simultaneously, and that the past is a real place on the body” (9).

        Here, the typical questions of a philosophy of history, of a universal history, (“How come?” “Why now? “What next?”) are all questions of contingency. I believe that these questions very quickly extend into the broader concerns around memory, desire, and life. Indeed, repetition does not belong exclusively on the stage of world historical events with their progressions, interruptions, and recapitulations; repetition also pertains to the passage from one affect to the next, from one performance to the next, and from one observation to the next. A philosophy of history that takes the syntheses of time for a point of departure, a philosophy of history as thought by Deleuze and Guattari and subsequently pursued and elaborated by Lampert is hence a philosophy of psychology, of art, and of science as well. This is why Lampert’s text is neither an introduction to one aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought nor is it an exhaustive account of that aspect. It is rather a plateau, as Deleuze and Guattari deployed the practice in the second volume of their Capitalism and Schizophrenia, a plateau that revisits and repeats, which is to say rearticulates, the as of yet unarticulated—or perhaps that which is beyond articulation—becoming.

        I would like to take a moment and consider not Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History but Lampert’s History of Philosophy. I am convinced that Lampert is qualified to “diagnose” (and this is his term), and has indeed diagnosed, the genuine philosophical event “Deleuze-Guattari.” This is why I would like to invite him to deploy his philosophy of history as a measure and an understanding of his history of the philosophy of history, of his history of philosophy tout court, with all of its attendant simultaneities and serialities. If the past never actually dies, if, as Lampert affirms, “an event’s present status and its past status are independent yet simultaneous … [and] the past is a real place on the body” (9), what then is the status of Deleuze and Guattari’s own past on their philosophical body? What, for instance, is the status of their long standing investments in psychoanalysis, intellectually, as with Deleuze from his Presentation of Sacher Masoch to Difference and Repetition, to both volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and clinically, as with Guattari the Lacanian-trained psychoanalyst, member of the Ecole freudienne, and institutional psychotherapist at the La Borde clinic? I pose this question of the so-called “past” because I am not sure how to reinterpret Lampert’s deployment of the double dating of any event—that the first time it appears is when it appears for the second time—without Freud’s nachträglichkeit or Lacan’s après coups. I am also not sure how to re-assess the discussion in Difference and Repetition without Deleuze’s treatment of Freud’s elaborations on the pleasure principle and its beyond as a founding mechanism of repetition. I am even less sure how to understand the syntheses of desiring production in Anti-Oedipus as the “motor of history” without reference to the laws of the dynamic unconscious (condensation and displacement) and their structuralist renderings (metaphor and metonymy)?

        Deleuze and Guattari’s psychoanalytic past is nowhere to be seen in Lampert’s account. It has become “imperceptible.” Is it excess baggage or last year’s fashion? Is it a passing phase which, once “diagnosed,” is easily overcome? Has it been castrated and/or repressed? Has it been excised, sublated, or deteritorialised beyond recognition? Is it no longer? Lampert, via Deleuze and Guattari, and as far as I can observe, never poses the question of endings, of how the “why?” not only captures the “now” but can perhaps sometimes suffocate it and render it “no longer.”

Freud’s Oedipal Bind-1

March 26, 2008
Double Bind, Freud, MetaTherapeutics, Oedipus, Repetition, Sophocles, Speaking Desire

        Though reverential, Freud’s investment in the Sophoclean script as a founding principle of psychological activity is not without its ironies. Freud understood the myth as a representation and, in so doing, broke his own golden rule of never mistaking manifest content for latent thought or symptom for process. Much more significantly, though, Freud thought he had apprehended Oedipus on the street, in the bedroom, and on the couch. In the process, he demythologized and made common that which he had spent an entire life revering. And by making the myth common, he found himself as implicated in its dynamic as his next-door neighbour, and in ways that may not have been entirely explicit for him. By solving the Sphinx’s riddle, Oedipus had precipitated both his access to the Theban throne and his subsequent destitution. Perhaps the solver of psychological riddles had detected in his hero’s downfall what lay in wait for him should he too speak the truth of desire.

        Perhaps this, amongst all the other by now familiar reasons, would shed yet a different light on why the young Freud, so eager to prove his legitimacy and originality, did not press the Oedipal issue as much as he might otherwise have with his mentor and sounding board. One would expect that the radical discovery of incest and parricide as universal psychological bedrock would have merited more than its three measly references (dated 15 October, ’97, 5 November ’97, and 15 March ’98) in a Freud-Fliess correspondence that had lasted an additional seven years beyond the initial mention. This, amongst yet other equally familiar reasons, would shed further light on why Freud never committed himself to a comprehensive account of the myth’s dynamics and echoes. Instead, he offered but a smattering of observations and hypotheses hinting at his insights while sparing himself the fate of his accursed hero and model.

        Such explanation and light cannot but be analytically hypothetical in nature; they treat much less of Freud’s conscious processes than of the unrecognized and hence unresolved inhibitions his Oedipal axioms could not but have produced. For his part and to his credit, Freud could not have been any more consistent: he believed his hero’s entanglement in an exhausting and yet unavoidable circle of causes and effects to be the fate of one and all. One can only begin to imagine the frustration, if not the fear, of a researcher caught in the vice-like grip of a truth he so desperately needed to speak but whose logic dictated that its utterance be the ground for silence and its sight the ground for blindness.

        It is no surprise that, with time, Freud’s Oedipal identifications found refuge in yet another mythological entanglement. While speaking Oedipus, the psychoanalyst began to live the logic of a Sisyphus, barely glimpsing the open landscape of relief only to have to wearily give it up and descend the slopes of blindness he had just scaled, and begin all over again. Caught in the logic of such hopeless repetition, no wonder his analysis had become interminable. Meanwhile, and yet again, Freud’s reenactment of this second myth illustrates, and in the strictest of psychoanalytic ways, the extent to which our conscious experiences of fate and punishment are often grounded in covert but no less potent choice and collusion.

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