Archive

Subjects

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.

3, 4, 2

August 18, 2008
Found Object, Play, Subjects, Transitionals, Winnicott

       In the early 1950’s, Winnicott had identified the transitional (object, phenomenon, and space) as the bridge between the inner (life) and the outer (reality) that the subject must set up and continually cross if it is to pursue its developmental journey and reach its full potential as subject. Twenty years later, Winnicott declared that the clinical focus on psychic reality, as private and inner, and its relation to external reality was eclipsing serious consideration of the experience grounded by the found object. In an attempt to redress the paucity of the psychoanalytic literature’s treatment of this experience and its cultural repercussions, Winnicott decided to republish his seminal paper on transitional objects and phenomena as the first in a collection (Playing and Reality) that would recast transitionality not only as a function that speaks of a particular psychological configuration but as a process that is key in the life of individual and group.

        I believe there is more at work in Winnicott’s position from the 1970’s than the simple expansion of a previously elaborated point of view or the redirecting of clinical attention toward a crucial but under-investigated dynamic. And while there is much inconsistency to Winnicott’s position, inconsistency of which, I would imagine, its author was not entirely unaware, there is also much that remains to be mined and reconfigured. The following are some (interrelated) points to consider.

        Point One Many of Winnicott’s critics, big and small, have been keen, and perhaps not unjustifiably, to point out that the found object cannot be a bridge between inner and outer unless the subject has already identified and somewhat mapped both sides of the divide, unless, that is, the subject has already acquired some sense of its own reality’s structural and pragmatic demarcations. Put differently, the subject must consolidate for itself a position and a point of view from which it can distinguish between the inside and the outside, the me and the other-than-me before it can even recognise and utilise the object as found. Contra Winnicott and the classic developmental line that first locates the subject’s most primitive experiences in an undifferentiated and omnipotent state, an “oceanic feeling” as Freud was often fond of saying, and then posits frustration as the driving force behind that subject’s subsequent awakenings to reality and its demands, the found object cannot “antidate” (TOTP 236) reality testing.

        Point Two Winnicott started out with the insistence that the found object’s richest quality is its ability to open up for the subject a space for the experience of illusion and play, a space that, in a sense, is free from the constraints of both rough concreteness and solipsistic hallucination. Structurally, Winnicott reached a count of 3 here.

        In light of this count, the actual object itself will be eventually decathected to the point where it will lose all meaning; the interaction between subject and object is what is most important. The fact of this interaction must undermine the claim that the found object is merely a bridge to object relationship since it is none other than the found object that makes the encounter and interaction possible. Contra Winnicott (again!) the bridge that is the found object is not to future object relations; the bridge is itself an instantiation of that to which it points.

        Point Three By the early 70’s, and with the help of one of his patients, Winnicott introduced a distinction between “fantasying, which paralyses action, and real planning [or dreaming], which has to do with looking forward toward action” (“Dreaming, Fantasying, and Living” 33). Doctor and patient came to see that fantasying about an action and dreaming about it belong to two separate orders (DFL 26):

… fantasying was about a certain subject and it was a dead end. It had no poetic value. The corresponding dream, however, had poetry in it, that is to say, layer upon layer of meaning relating to past, present, and future, and to inner and outer, and always fundamentally about [the subject] (DFL 35).

        In addition to differences in depth, Winnicott pointed out the two orders’ different qualities in the experience of time; he will note: “[the patient] then made some excursions into imaginative planning of the future which seemed to give a prospect of future happiness that was different from the here-and-now fixity of any satisfaction that there can be in fantasying” (DFL 35).

        With depth and deferral, the difference between fantasying and dreaming has less to do with objects and more with relations. This suggests not so much singling out an experience grounded in reality but an experience aware of its interconnectedness with and relatedness to reality. The differentiation between dreaming and fantasying may hence be between experiencing and dissociation (DFL 26-7), with the proviso that the dissociation is never really complete and, within its logic, the experiencing is only a seeming-to-experience (DFL 28-9) and a doing that is there only to fill a gap. The seeming-to-experience interferes not only with a participation in external reality but also with a living internally since dreaming too belongs to living. As for the dissociation, it is telling of stasis and ossification; it lies on the other side of illusion and play.

        But, interestingly enough, this would also suggest that the ossification and fantasying are located in a transitional space, a negative transitional space that impoverishes, if not altogether deadens, the inside as much as it does the outside. Another definition of fantasying is that it is a hallucination that does not enjoy the luxury of infantile obliviousness. Twenty years after he had first introduced his tripartite structure, Winnicott will have moved from a count of 3 to a count of 4.

        Winnicott will have flushed out his triadic structure and introduced in between hallucination and concreteness a transitional space of activity that is of two possible qualities: fantasying and dreaming.

        Point Four While much remains to be said of the psychic and theoretical factors of chronology and topology, of the ways in which they bring about, enfold, and intercept one another, I am mostly interested in the qualities and dynamics of Winnicott’s transitionality, in the experiences and effects the found object allows or inhibits. It seems to me that the distinction between the pre-, during, and post-, the inner and the outer, of the subject’s relationship to the found object, or any other object for that matter, is much less useful than the distinction between the types of relationships that the subject sets up with the various objects it encounters, whether bodily or psychic, internal or external. The paralysis of the “dead end” of which Winnicott speaks applies equally to hallucination and concreteness as it does to fantasying. At the end of the day, the Winnicottian count is a count to 2 (instead of 3 or 4); it is a count that distinguishes between 2 types of relations, as opposed to 2 objects, 2 locations, or 2 uses.

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

August 4, 2008
Displacement, Fetish, Found Object, Play, Possession, Productions, Speaking Desire, Subjects, Transitionals, Winnicott

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

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

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

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

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

Found

July 29, 2008
Found Object, Play, Possession, Productions, Speaking Desire, Subjects, Transitionals, Winnicott

        This post is the first in a series that finds its point of departure in the activity Winnicott terms play, the activity 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. (Obviously, 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, identify, understand, suffer, deploy, question, and/or normalize this desire.

        It seems to me that the relationship between subjectivity and desire is one of (chorno)logical simultaneity. Desire is neither an innately differentiating marker of what it means to be a human subject, for instance, nor a process that is undergone by the subject in accordance with the demands of a pre-existing superordinate 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 productions of desire lie. As well, and with regard to the subject, it is much less the expression of an autonomous and atomistic “will,” even if it be unconscious, that manipulates and consumes the objects it previously desired and has since been fortunate enough to locate—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 as well as by other subjects. It is the ambiguity that seems to be inherent to this bi-directional and at times, indeed, circular finding that I wish to pursue and elaborate.

        To begin: a rough sketch of the idea of the found object. Winnicott tells us that such an object is part of the world of the real—and is hence not the product of a mere delusional effort—while also belonging to the subject’s inner reality. Here, Winnicott sets up the triad inner reality/experience/external life and locates the found (aka “transitional”) object and its corresponding phenomena in the inherently illusory but no less crucial event of “experiencing” (“Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena” 230-31). At first glance, the found object facilitates the passage from oral erotism to object-relationship; it bridges the otherwise insurmountable gap between omnipotence and solipsism on the one hand and encounter and interaction on the other, between limitless delusion and limited and/or limiting action. In this sense, the found object makes it possible for the subject to transition, in the words of Winnicott, “from (magical) omnipotent control to control by manipulation (involving muscle erotism and coordination pleasure)” (TOTP 236). Like any such pleasurable manoeuvre, the transition will exert a toll on the subject; indeed, “some abrogation of omnipotence is a feature [of the found object] from the start” (TOTP 233).

        In its earliest manifestation, the found object is the first other-than-me possession (a toy or a piece of fabric, for instance) the subject will incorporate (“weave”) into an already existing personal pattern (TOTP 231). It is more than an object that the subject discovers only to observe and catalogue, and then perhaps reserve for a future time when it may be of use. The found object is hardly inert; it is found at the very moment, and insofar as, it introduces itself into an already existing schema in which it will participate; it is an object that unsettles, disorganizes, and reconfigures. Moreover, and as much as it is put in the service of and, in the process, transformed by the psychodynamic needs and/or wishes of the subject that finds it, the found object is more than an object in use. It, in fact, displays many of the qualities that grammar has traditionally reserved for the subject, including activity, production, and effect. The found object is, and at least as far as its finder is concerned, an object that is other-than- and hence more-than-an-object, an object that has already been subjectivised. I will have to come back and treat this aspect in greater depth later. In the meantime, it is important to stress how, for Winnicott, the found object is not an object that is available for, say, consumption or assimilation; it is instead the ground for an experience at the boundary between primary creativity and objective perception, an experience that points to nothing short of “the early stages of the use of illusion, without which there is no meaning for the human being in the idea of a relationship with an object that is perceived by others as external to that being” (TOTP 239).

Reading

March 6, 2008
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze, Guattari, Machines, Productions, Reflexivity, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Subjects

        From Plato and through to Hegel, the distinction that has governed the analysis of desire is that of production versus acquisition, with desire invariably subsumed under the heading of the latter. At those rare moments when it did depart from this schema, psychoanalysis could conceive of desire as productive only in terms of an internal or “psychic” reality, of a fantasy and a mimic, of a representation of the real, desired, and hence lacked object.

        Deleuze and Guattari offer us the linchpin of a critique of the notion of desire as lack and, by extension, of the subject as lacking, as well as the elements of a desire whose three constitutive moments (production, recording, and consumption) are both transitive and reflexive. Paradoxically, the anti-oedipal level of abstraction here opens up the possibility for desire as a machine whose satisfaction is not equivalent to having (consumption) or to being (performance); it is rather a matter of doing, which may include having and being but is limited to neither.

        This, I believe, is most evident in the context of the reader’s relationship to the text: does Anti-Oedipus carry with it a measure of either the descriptive or the prescriptive? The former requires an appeal to neutrality that the text has doggedly resisted: indeed, and rather than on entities, its focus has been on events and relations, and, most importantly, on its and its reader’s inevitable implications in them. In the process, the text thwarts that reader’s demand for an ethical or clinical guideline since such a demand can be satisfied only in a context whereby the agency that makes it and the agency that fulfills it are identifiable and discrete.

        If anything, the Deleuzo-Guattarian schema reverses the responsibility for satisfaction; the question that is most pressing now is the one that regards not the text’s meaning and application but the reader’s experiences and/of use. Dismantle, rearrange, and reassemble; the status of the anti-oedipal schema is that of a machine that is distinguishable from the wanderings of its meta-psychological counterparts; it is not so much that we have an account of psyche, text, and institution that can better fulfill our analytic, epistemic, or political demands; rather, we are offered and drawn into an understanding that obeys the laws of its own inquiry. If the Deleuzo-Guattarian subject is conjunctive, provisional, and indeed situational then, as a textual, theoretical, and methodological subject, so are Anti-Oedipus and its readers.

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