Archive

Speaking Desire

desire, briefly

November 4, 2011
Body and Sign, Finding, MetaTherapeutics, Speaking Desire, Subjects, Winnicott

Desire is neither an innately differentiating marker (as Soul or Drive) of what it means to be a subject, nor a predicament suffered by that subject in accordance with the demands of a pre-existing superordinate law (as History or Structure).

Rather, the relationship between subjectivity and desire is one of simultaneity, both logical and chronological. When individual and experiential—when, in other words, lived—desire is the use (qua both mode and effect) the subject makes of the broad spectrum of physiological, discursive, affective, ideological, as well as psychological objects it finds*; it is in such a finding that the operations of desire lie.

Furthermore, the subject is neither the vessel or voice of a discernible will that may one day come to recognise its unconscious origins and/or ideological determinants, nor a will that, in the best of all possible worlds, may manipulate and consume the objects that animate it, the same objects it previously lacked but has since been fortunate enough to locate and acquire—to find.

Rather, it is the finding that constitutes the subject, for the subject is not only that which finds but also that which is found and is available to be found, repeatedly, by the object, by other subjects, and, most poignantly perhaps, by the subject itself.

________
* as per Winnicott’s use of the term.

Winnicott and Deleuze/Guattari: premise for a new project

September 13, 2011
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze, Found Object, Freud, Guattari, Machines, MetaTherapeutics, Play, Reflexivity, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Transitionals, Winnicott

I want to invoke Deleuze and Guattari’s double-sided interrogation: “Given a certain effect, what machine is capable of producing it? And given a certain machine, what can it be used for?” (Anti-Oedipus, F8, E3).

Such an interrogation has fed its authors’ insistence on the primacy of a “machinic production” for human nature, a production for which the greatest threat is the distorting transformation of its status from a fundament into a goal, from a process that deploys its productions, registrations, and consumptions along typically unpredictable lines, which is to say, from a process that plays, dreams, and associates, as Winnicott understood these terms, into a stagnant and interminable “wreck” (AO, F11, E5) that can only “fantasy” and “dissociate” in its struggle for self-perpetuation and propagation.

This is one of a number of links and relays that I would like to pursue between the presumably post-Freudian project of Winnicott and the supposedly anti-Freudian project of Deleuze and Guattari.

My investment is not in a history of psychoanalytic ideas that hopes to bridge the divide between the French and the British, each a tradition that, for the most part, has thrived on recognising its other only to dispute its legitimacy as fantasmatic and/or mundane, on, in other words, dissociating itself from that other, a history, and by extension a methodology, that would invariably, righteously, grant itself the status of an integration or incorporation that is greater, wiser, or truer than both.

Nor is my investment in exposing and clarifying the ways in which each of these two traditions is, after all and presumably, a metaphor for, or, better still, the metamorphosing outcome of the other. I would much rather spare both my Winnicottian and Deleuzo-Guattarian readers the disappointment and/or irritation of witnessing their distinctive perspectives and strongly held convictions dismissed as the derivatives of some previously or elsewhere more convincingly elaborated views.

Nor do I hope to facilitate a triumphal coupling of the two sets of disparate texts and strategies with the aim of producing a clinical and/or meta-psychological offshoot—-a strange beast indeed—-that is part Winnicottian and part Deleuzo-Guattarian, part post- and part anti-, forever honouring, which is also to say forever hemmed in by, its provenance and heritage.

Nor, lastly, is my investment in a utopian “in-between” that has gripped much of the imagination amongst contemporary readers of both Winnicott and Deleuze and Guattari, an “in-between” whose advocates, I suspect, must forever struggle to keep from drowning in the treacherous waters of the Oceanus Britannicus. On this score, and though the notion of a topographical “in-between” seems to be precisely what brings both projects in line with one another, I find the Winnicottian transitional and the Deleuzo-Guattarian intermezzo, when considered primarily as psychological topographies, to be particularly sparse and unyielding. Moreover, and just as the found object for Winnicott is an experience rather than an “object” that needs to be itemised and localised, I would like to suggest that the transitional and the intermezzo are a playing and a bricolage, a basic form of living (“Playing: A Theoretical Statement”, 50) and a handyman’s tinkering (AO, F7, E1) that have little to do with spaces or locations that ought to be mapped, striated, and/or bound, and everything to do with events, processes, and experiences that are lived. Ditto for the “in-between.”

My investment is primarily in re-posing the question of found object and play and of machine and effect, while doubling its data, so to speak. Given two machines, each with its specific set of clinical and theoretical procedures, what can their juxtaposition be used for and what effects can that juxtaposition be made to produce? At stake here is a process that treats of dynamic effects as much as it treats of developmental causes, of potential products as much as of hidden aetiologies, and of eventual deployments as much as of retrograde analyses. Ultimately, my hope in posing this question is that these effects, products, and deployments may not only communicate to us hitherto unexplored yet constitutive theoretical and/or clinical components about either Winnicott or Deleuze and Guattari, but that they may also shed a new light on, if not indeed instantiate desire, and, in the process, allow us to do with that desire, or do with it differently, as much as it does with us.

In positing this reflexive implication, I take my cue from the “machines” I am considering, insofar as each, in its own way, has more or less relinquished as artificial and ineffectual the distinction between the functions of theory and practice, observer and observed, analyst and analysand. Indeed, by the end of his career, Winnicott was quite unequivocal when he declared that psychoanalysis “has to do with two people playing together” (PTS, 38), that such a doing takes place “in the overlap of the two play areas, that of the patient and that of the therapist” (“Playing”, 54), that, in other words, psychoanalysis has little to do with one subject developing, interpreting, or correcting another subject’s experience according to some externally pre-elaborated path toward truth or health, and everything to do with the playing that occurs “in between” these two subjects. Winnicottian psychoanalysis is therefore as much a practice as it is a theory of transitionality; it is therefore as invested in consolidating and legitimising an Ego, a Self, or a Subject, be it true or false, as a found object could be said to consolidate or legitimise a reality, be it hallucinatory or concrete.

Similarly, and equally forcefully, Deleuze and Guattari identified the principal task of their analytic orientation (which they termed “schizoanalysis”) as the dismantling of the distinction between a subject that emits a statement and a subject about or on behalf of whom, or which, a statement is emitted (AO, F323-324, E271). In schizoanalysis, there is no subject that imparts to another its accomplishments in knowledge, health, or experience; there is only an analytic machine that is neither an imaginary projection, as phantasy, nor a real projection, as cure, but a recurring factor of production among parts (associations, syntheses, subjectivities) functioning alongside one another and under specific clinical conditions. These are the gears that create new gears alongside preceding ones, indefinitely, even if, or even as they seem to function in discordant or opposing ways. As Deleuze and Guattari have summed it up, “That which makes a machine [the schizoanalytic sine qua non] are connections, all the connections that operate the disassembly” (Kafka, 84).

That something may be gained from elaborating a relationship between these Deleuzo-Guattarian connections and the Winnicottian transitional, between, in other words, the machine and the found object, that such a relationship can be productive precisely because it is as fractious and abrasive as it may be smooth, that, in other words, the friction between the presumably incongruous concepts and orientations may set off a spark capable of shedding light on hitherto unexplored territories, these are the principle assumptions motivating the project.

Affect-Time

December 11, 2010
Aevum, Anti-Oedipus, Conjunctive Synthesis, Connective Synthesis, Deleuze, Freud, Guattari, Productions, Speaking Desire, Subjects

This is the text of my presentation at the recent meeting of the ASCP at the University of Queensland, Brisbane.

Keywords: subjectivity, time, affect, love

Affect-Time

I take my cue from Deleuze and Guattari’s conjunctive synthesis, “ah, so that’s what it is, that’s who I am!” (Anti-Oedipus, 16-22), the synthesis that grounds the subject in the moment where affect, hallucination, and delirium (feeling, seeing, thinking) converge.

One gets the impression that Deleuze and Guattari are arguing for a chronological order to the emergence of the subject—post affect, post sensation, and post thought—an order that is at the very least counter-intuitive, if not altogether nonsensical.

Presumably, love, hate, sight, touch, thought, and imagination are events that require an agency by which they may be instigated, an agency that has already acquired the capacity to feel, to sense, or to think. What is nonsensical in Deleuze and Guattari is precisely that which undermines the subject that declares itself sovereign over its various faculties, the subject of reason and fact, of philosophy and technology. This subject sees itself the centre of experience and understanding; it may feel, sense, or think this or that but, surely, it is neither this nor that; it is, in principle at least, greater than both and capable of the repression and/or fulfillment of both. Or so the story goes.

With psychoanalysis, we have come to appreciate the subject as less conscious, less autonomous, less reasonable, as a subject that does not forget, for instance, but as a subject that is founded by an act of primary forgetting, a primary repression, that sets up a complex structure of conscious and unconscious processes that will subsequently endure repression and forgetting. This is a subject that does not enact a forgetting but a subject produced by and as forgetting. This, for Deleuze and Guattari, is also a subject that does not enact feeling, thinking, or sensing, but a subject produced by and as feeling, thinking, and sensing.

Hence the “ah, so that’s what it is, that’s who I am!” that marks the I as a product of the confluence of the three registers affect, sensation, thought. As such, the I is not simply influenced (troubled, pleased, perplexed, or pained) by the changes these registers undergo; it is also re-configured, re-defined, and re-produced by them—radically, differently. She may no longer see herself a woman after a radical hysterectomy in her late twenties; he may doubt his masculinity now that he is sexually attracted to another man; she may experience herself as a doctor differently now that she is an analytic patient; he may have transformed into a new person after his appointment as a university professor; and she may never regain her old self since her last tour of duty. As crises of conscious identity we may witness as well as suffer or enjoy, such turning points bespeak an ongoing process of production, of desiring production, perhaps less patently abrupt, but no less transformative.

Affect, sensation, and thought are no mere qualities or extensions of a pre-existing subject but the ground that makes the feeling, sensing, thinking I possible in a very specific register of time, precipitated by them and belonging to them. As such, the time of the I, the time in which it is created, modulated, and lived is a time of eruption. Ah! So that’s who I am! The exclamation marks a pre and a post to which, strictly speaking, it does not belong. This exclamation, rather, lies on a border between two types of time (the timeless and the timely), an interregnum, if you will, that marks a third time whose laws are distinct from both the timelessness of the eternal Subject (with the S capitalised, of course) and the timeliness of the ever so worldly object. This is a time that shares of both but is neither. This is the time of the I, the time of the verb.

“She sees light,” “he envies her,” and “she contemplates travel” do not depict facts or states of being but verbs that insinuate themselves between two entities, establish their relationship to one another and invest in each its temporary status as either subject or object. As an interregnum, the verb is hardly a bridge that allows the subject to cross over and relate to the object—a bridge that may be as conveniently forgotten as it is crossed. The verb is a weaving that links both sides of the divide, invests them with their particular subjective or objective qualities, defines the gap that separates them, and, in the process, shapes the possibilities of its crossing.

Psychoanalysis, as both a theory and a clinical practice, is replete with references, uses, and deployments of the interregnum. In fact, I would go so far as to say that psychoanalysis is primarily a theory and a practice of the interregnum. Invariably, the psychoanalytic topography is of three simultaneous and yet distinct domains, each with its own set of rules and investments, and of psychoanalysis as a sustained appreciation for and intervention in the second of these domains, occupying the space in between first and third, requiring first and third, and required by them, partaking of both in terms of dynamics and directions, and yet belonging to neither.

I offer three examples from Freud. The drive is the porous frontier between psyche and soma, communicating two sets of demands, mental and physical, in consequence of its connection to both (Instincts and their Vicissitudes, 121-22). Nestled in between a primordial hallucination set on immediate pleasure and a survivalist reality subject to the facts of nature, the dream is a process whose meaning is never a single abiding wish but a meshwork of thoughts that have no definite ending (The Interpretation of Dreams, 525). The transference is simultaneously an “artificial illness” and a “piece of real experience” that creates a region between illness and life through which the passage from the one to the other is possible (Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through, 154).

What is key about the drive, the dream, and the transference, about, in essence, the three founding concepts and experiences in psychoanalysis, is that they tell not only of a space between two otherwise incongruous realms but also of a set of rules initially borrowed from both realms but made particular by that space. This is entirely consistent with the nature of the interregnum, not as an intermediary kingdom but as an inter-kingdom and hence a kingdom in between two kings, itself without a king. Indeed, there is nothing unitary about the drive, the dream, and the transference; the drive is polymorphous, the dream is overdetermined, and the transference is multilayered.

In between primordial psychic goo that knows nothing of negation or death, that, in other words, is devoid of opposites, and an ego that abides by a commonsensical reality and its law of excluded middle and declares these selfsame opposites inadmissible, lays an unconscious that thrives in the concurrence of opposites. In between the newborn’s oceanic feeling in which there is no room, and even less need, for subjectivity and the adult’s sense of a coalesced conscious self we encounter an I that is the effect of the conjunctive synthesis, an I that much of psychoanalysis has sadly prescribed as developmental, conflict-free, depressive, oedipal, name it what you will, an I that is rather produced, situational, transitional. It is to this I that belong the drive, the dream, the transference, and, by extension, the affect, the affect as verb. But if this I emerges at the exclamation point that is the interregnum between the timeless and the timely, what then of its time and, ultimately, what of its affect’s time?

Roughly halfway through the thirteenth century, and under pressure to accommodate a growing ontological diversity of angels, pre-Christian good men, and un-baptised innocents, the scholastic philosophers, starting with Bonaventure and wrapping up with Frederic of Freiberg, articulated the aevum as a new category of time. In between aeternitas, an abiding and indivisible being that is always already perfect, and tempus, a limited and ever flowing becoming that is lack and decay, the aevum is a created perpetuity; it has an origin but is infinite in duration. A quality of neither godly nor human, the aevum is the time of the angels who are eternal in their substance but finite in their actions. The aevum is hence always already a concurrence of opposites, belonging to neither side of the divide but partaking of both; it is a “diminished” eternity where time moves, in succession, in vicissitudo, where each moment tells of a totality rather than a transient passage. The aevum is the time-stop that simultaneously holds all the parts that make up a world; it weaves them into an infinite moment so that, in fact, they do make up a world, one that is passing from without but is “forever after” from within.

I want to take leave of the Scholastics and suggest that, in marking a territory between the two worlds of being and becoming, perfection and lack, the aevum opens onto a much needed, quintessentially human, third. Between sleep and wakefulness is the world of dreaming; between rest and work is the world of playing; between hallucination and practical reason is the world of free-associating. The time of these worlds is the time that does not pass, “ce temps qui ne passe pas,” as Pontalis titled one of his monographs; it is the time-stop (Tick. Tick. Tick…) that was originally designed to measure the passage of time but instead forces time to stand still, as with the note of a bell or an alarm, a time-stop that displaced the flow of sundials and water clocks as a standard of measure, a time-stop first produced in the late thirteenth century, and hence from the same period when the aevum acquired its theological and ontological significance.

The aevum is the time of the libido, perhaps not Saint Augustine’s but definitely Freud’s. In fact, much as he tirelessly advanced the notion that the drive has a history—a radical notion for his time—Freud also held that that history does not unfold in developmental phases. The passages from narcissism to object love, from so-called repudiated homosexuality to paranoia, from any one given modality, object, or aim of the drive to another, from any one bodily locus to another, all happen in a spasmodic, paroxytic fashion. The drive moves through eruptive, discontinuous, and yet self-contained totalities in the style of a vicissitude. Freud writes: “We can divide the life of each instinct into a series of separate successive waves, each of which is homogeneous during whatever period of time it may last, and whose relation to one another is comparable to that of successive eruptions of lava” (Instincts and their Vicissitudes, 131). It is this libidinal stratification that paves the way for psychoanalysis as archaeology, albeit an inverted archaeology, since its object is the unintended (the slip, the dream, the forgotten) rather than the monumental.

The time of the drive remains altogether different from the empirical time that is decay, and the indivisible time that is perfection. The time of the drive is the time of volcanic eruption, of enumerating, in integers; it is the time of the aevum and its vicissitudes. This is precisely why the unconscious does not waft in elegant seamlessness from one configuration to another so much as it hops, in fits and starts, as Deleuze and Guattari declare in the opening lines of Anti-Oedipus. Here, there, and there again. Tick. Tick. Tick… At each location and within each interval, the components are assembled in such a way as to make sense and to lend sense.

Not surprisingly, the aevum is the time of the transference as well. Freud warns that the transference comes about “suddenly” and is “bound to surprise” the clinician; whether as love or hate, its extraordinary powers will recast the entirety of the analytic relationship and give it a new meaning that may potentially “blow away” the success of the work (An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 176). The dream too operates along these lines and it is only as an effect of secondary revision that its images acquire a semblance of chronological sequence or order, a semblance of meaning, no less conjunctive than the Deleuzo-Guattarian synthesis but much more prone to ossification than Deleuze and Guattari think it ought to be.

What, then, of the affect? Belonging to the I that is an interregnum, the affect’s time is tracked not through quantitative changes (more and less) but through abrupt and abruptly redefining vicissitudes, through “a circulation of states” of conquest, capture, and offshoots as Deleuze and Guattari say (A Thousand Plateaus, 21). Belonging to the I that is an interregnum, to, in other words, an aevum driven by the concurrence of opposites rather than their absence or inadmissibility, the affect requires its other, even and especially its most oppositional other. It does so neither out of tolerance or maturity nor out of a reasoned recognition of or a resignation to conflict, but because it is specifically alongside that other that it may begin to breathe, to make sense.

Love does not exist without hatred, not only because love stirs a dependence that inflicts a wound on one’s sense of autonomy and in turn generates a hatred toward the beloved whose very presence now speaks a narcissistic injury, not only, as with the familiar refrain, because the pleasure of desire makes manifest the pain of lack, but mainly because love is neither decaying nor perfect, neither timed nor timeless, but rather both decaying and perfect, timed and timeless, because the fabric of love is a connection (“and… and… and…”) “forceful enough to uproot the verb ‘to be’” (A Thousand Plateaus, 25), because it is the I as interregnum that loves the other and in so doing hates itself as conscious and coalesced, deprives itself of what it holds dearest under the banner of generosity, surrender, and sacrifice without which love would not be possible. Whoever thinks angels are “angelic,” that theirs is the time of beatitude and innocence, has it completely wrong.

I close by ceding to Goethe whose Faust put it thus:
One impulse art thou conscious of, at best;
O, never seek to know the other!
Two souls, alas! reside within my breast,
And each withdraws from, and repels, its brother.
One with tenacious organs holds in love
And clinging lust the world in its embraces;
The other strongly sweeps, this dust above,
Into the high ancestral spaces
(Faust, 1, 2)

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.

Findings

March 29, 2009
Body and Sign, Found Object, Play, Speaking Desire, Subjects, Winnicott

I begin with the activity Winnicott terms play, the play that unfolds between child and “found” object. My premise is that this activity is not an event that the detached and adult Winnicott has merely observed in his young charges; it is also the object the analyst has “found” and with which he himself has gone on to play—clinically, meta-psychologically. Central for me here is the notion that psychoanalysis is much more than a descriptive strategy that may fuel a therapeutic intervention in the service of health. Psychoanalysis is, among other things, a creative elaboration that surpasses the clinical observations it finds, precisely because it has “found” them. I would venture and say that this is equally true of most other strategies, perspectives, and judgements—therapeutic or otherwise. I would like to follow in Winnicott’s footsteps and, in turn, play with his formulations as he ostensibly did with the child’s. I would like to assess the extent to which this very idea of play may shed light on our findings regarding, and indeed “findings of,” desire, on, in other words, the playful but no less compelling ways in which we have come to experience, understand, suffer, deploy, question, and/or normalize this desire.

It seems to me that the relationship between subjectivity and desire is one of (chrono-)logical simultaneity. Desire is neither an innately differentiating marker of what it means to be a human subject, for instance, nor a predicament that is suffered by the subject in accordance with the demands of a pre-existing super ordinate law. Rather, desire—individual and experiential, in other words, lived—is a product of the uses the subject makes of the broad spectrum of physiological, discursive, juridical, ideological, as well as psychological objects it finds; it is in such a finding that the operations of desire lie. As well, and with regard to the subject, it is much less the expression of an identifiable “will” that may one day come to recognise its unconscious and/or intersubjective determinations, a will that, in the best of all possible worlds, manipulates and consumes the objects it previously lacked but has since been fortunate enough to acquire—to find. Rather, the finding, too, constitutes the subject, for the subject is not only that which finds but also that which is found and is available to be found, continually, by the object, by other subjects, and, perhaps most poignantly, by the subject itself. It is the ambiguity inherent to this bi-directional and at times circular finding that I wish to pursue and elaborate.

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