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Subjects

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.

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.

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.

Animation, resilience, irrelevance

April 5, 2009
Culture, Found Object, Subjects, Transitionals, Winnicott

For it to qualify as found, Winnicott highlights three interlocking moments rather than, say, characteristics or qualities in the life of the found object and, one would have to conclude, in that object’s life for the subject that finds it: animation, resilience, and irrelevance (∗). The found object must possess a modicum of vitality evidenced through warmth, movement, and texture for instance (think here of a child’s experience of a teddy bear or a blanket’s satiny border). Second, the found object has to be resilient enough to survive the loving and/or aggressive manipulations of the individual that finds it (teddy bear and blanket must withstand, among other things, the child’s hugging, gripping, tossing, pulling, or dragging), with the proviso that, and herein lies the found object’s third necessary feature, it must be allowed to be gradually decathected. The blanket or the teddy bear, again, “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).

The found object can therefore hardly be confined to the earliest experiences of the subject. On this score, Winnicott is careful to remind us of the fact 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 [or, more accurately, ought never be] 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.
________
(∗) To each of these characteristics corresponds a quality of the subject that allows it to experience the object as animated, resilient, and/or irrelevant. I shall refer to these qualities provisionally as recognition (by this I do not mean that it is but what or who it is, as animation), aggression, and indifference. That the subject may be unaware of such qualities or that it may exercise them without conscious intention or design does not in any way diminish their reality. I shall return to these qualities later.

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