3-1-11 Cheng, The Melancholy of Race

Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief

Summary: Cheng works through the intersections of seemingly oppositional concepts (theory/practice, power/powerlessness, self/other, among others), seeking to develop a vocabulary to speak about the ambiguity of where they meet in order to work through questions of racial melancholia.

“The gasp reveals the spectators’ complicity in the very disguise they are there to see dismantled.” (116)

The process of self-building, for Cheng, lies in the structure of the in between, of the gap, of the disjunction, of the oxymoron.  Her project is to begin to find the vocabulary to talk about this structure, and one way she does this is by talking about fantasy.  It’s not the content of the fantasy that is telling; it’s the way that the structure reveals itself that matters.

What is a gasp?  For Cheng, it’s the language of the process of self-building.  The gasp is the revelatory mechanism, the thing that enacts the reveal.  But a gasp is a catching of breath, it’s an inhale without speech.  Usually, one makes a sound when one gasps, but that is because the intake of breath is so abrupt and quick that it makes a sound that just breathing usually doesn’t.  What’s more, the gasp is a result of surprise; it’s convulsive.  A person can gasp consciously and on purpose, but Cheng concentrates on the gasp that the audience made on impulse.  Their reaction to what was happening on stage was not studied or purposeful. They didn’t mean to do it, and in fact, Cheng says that they really shouldn’t have because the knew the “reality” of the situation already.  For her, the gasp gets at something deeper than the surface or the reality.  The gasp reveals the unconscious.

But if Cheng wants to develop a vocabulary for talking about the gap, then why does she focus on a gasp as the revelatory mechanism?  A gasp isn’t really language.  A gasp is ambiguous in that way, just like the gap, and this connection is supported by each word’s etymology.  Both gasp and gap originate in Old Norse, where gap is the root word for gasp.  The OED’s entry for gasp: “The root *gap- (see gape v.), whence German dial. gapsen to gape for breath, belongs to a different vowel-series, but the sense of ‘opening’ is apparently common to both.”  In this way, the vocabulary for the gap is the gasp, an opening.  It’s not the content; it’s the structure.

The ga(s)p, then, reveals because it is structured that way, as an opening.  It’s an inroads to the unconscious.  I say unconscious here because the gasp is coming from the spectators, but they have no control over it, as it arises from surprise.  It’s more like an impulse than an utterance.  According to the structure of the sentence, the gasp is also an opening to the complicity of the people who are watching the reveal happen.  But this spectatorship is not distanced or neutral, because the thing that the gasp is revealing belongs to the spectators (“reveals the spectators’ complicity”).  Interestingly, complicity doesn’t just mean being an accomplice; it also indicates a state of complexity.  The presence of the ga(s)p is a complication, something to be worked through.  Cheng’s project is to tease out the threads of this complication, and the way she does that is not by defining or uncomplicating, but by outlining the structure of the threads themselves.  What they actually are is less clear. 

The thing they are complicit in is the cover up, the disguise.  The spectators are complicit in the cover up, but their gasp is the revealing mechanism.  Teasing out the complexity of this structure, I’m lead to the idea that the spectators are actively disguising (they are accomplices in the disguise) but that they are unconsciously revealing their complicity through the gasp.  Yet, the purpose of their being there is to see the disguise dismantled.  Here, even though the spectators know what is hidden, and even though they are there to see the structure dismantled, their surprise (the gasp) reveals that they were involved in its construction.

What is at stake here is the way that the structure of language and narrativizing reveal the process of self-building.  The gasp cannot be identified as anything other than a sound (it’s not an utterance), but it nonetheless is an opening which reveals the methodology of hiding.  By focusing on this non-utterance, Cheng opens up her argument to an alternative way of looking at narrative. Narrative isn’t an identity but a process of identification.

Writing this post was at once frustrating and fascinating, because I know that there is much more going on in this passage (and in the book as a whole) than I can clearly articulate at this point.  I wanted to examine Cheng's methodology here, as it is repeated over and over in the book in multilayered and complicated ways.  I think this could be a matter of not choosing the best sentence to examine, but Cheng's sentence structure is pretty straightforward most of the time.  She indicates throughout the book her intention and outlines her project, but as we can see from this passage, intention is a cover up for complicity in building the very structure one is trying to dismantle.  I think my next reading of Cheng would look at how her methodology interacts with the gap between performance and performativity--where does Cheng have agency in dismantling this structure (performance) and performativity (the gasp).  In doing that, I might get to a performance of Cheng's methodology rather than the gasping my reading seems to be doing right now.

2-21-11 Freud, Mourning and Melancholia; Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel

Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”

Summary: Melancholia is a pathological form of mourning, where the loss of the object causes a narcissistic identification with that object and self-hatred.

 

Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel

Summary: Abraham and Torok believe that the subject’s difficulties originate in the parent’s prohibition of masturbation leading to the failure to introject, which manifests itself in haunting, fantasies, and phobias, the secret to which can be unlocked through speech and expression.

“Only when its initial and precise meaning is restored will the concept of “introjection” reveal its effectiveness in clarifying the clinical facts noted above, as regards both their genesis and evolution” (111).

Torok begins this section by emphasizing the importance of defining a word that “has undergone so many variations in meaning that is mere mention is enough to arouse in me the suspicion of confused ideas, not to say verbiage” (110).  This single word is so incredibly important to the practice and performance of psychoanalysis that restoring its original meaning is the only possible way to clarify the raw data of psychoanalysis.  Rand makes this clear in his introduction to this section, saying that “Abraham and Torok found that patients suffering from a secret identification with a departed love-object invented particular forms of obfuscation in their speech.  The patients obscured beyond recognition the linguistic elements that might reveal their secret’s existence and contents to themselves and to the world” (105).  Obfuscation is a word that appears frequently throughout this text, and it is the thing that psychoanalysis, presumably, aims to remove from speech.  But I want to return to the word that I started out with at the beginning of this post: introjection.

Torok begins with “only,” which makes it seem like there are no other options than the one that she sets forth here.  Rather than close off other avenues to restoration, though, the word “only” emphasizes the process, because it is paired with “when.”  The temporal nature of the word “when” indicates that restoration will take time.  Torok could have presumably used the construction “only if,” which would make this restoration more absolute, more either/or.  Thus, in this sentence, there is a performance of the process of restoration and its movement over time, and presumably, language.

This process, at least in this sentence, is one of etymology.  Torok returns to Ferenczi, who coined the term then picked up by Freud.  It would be interesting and productive to do an etymology of the term through The Shell and the Kernel, but I don’t have the space for that here, so I’ll go to the OED: “A term used by S. Ferenczi … to denote the forming of a subjective image of an object and the transfer to it of emotional energy previously given to the object itself.”  That’s the definition, and the first usage noted is: ”One might give to this process, in contrast to projection, the name of Introjection.”  Incidentally, the first usage calls introjection a process.  When Torok says that we need to return to the initial meaning, it’s more clear that she is talking about the beginning of the term “introjection”.  Since she’s talking about a temporal process, the temporal word “initial” works well here.  It’s less clear, though, what she means by “precise.”  Precise is more spatial than temporal, and so there are a few connections I need to make to the rest of Abraham and Torok’s work to take away some of the obfuscation.  Just before this sentence, Torok mentions that interjection “gives shape” to Ferenczi’s discoveries about psychoanalysis.  Additionally, the process that I’m talking about has everything to do with speech, as Torok and Abraham emphasize over and over again in this book.  Indeed, the meaning of precise is “characterized by definiteness or exactness of expression,” “of the voice or tone of voice: distinct, clear,” “overly formal, fastidious”.  These definitions point to space (formal) and speech (expression, voice).  Presumably, the process of introjection needs to be precise before it can even become that process. 

But I want to challenge and push the limits of “precise” here.  The process I just went through above was not precise, exact, or even overly formal.  In fact, I couldn’t just define introjection in order to get at its initial and precise meaning even in this sentence.  I had to point to context, to what came before this sentence, to things outside this sentence, and I had to make connections to other, seemingly unrelated terms in the rest of the book.  Indeed, the process of introjection is much like oscillation.  The verb structure is where I think oscillation comes out most clearly in the above sentence; much like the reading I did last week, the passive structure makes it hard to locate a subject.  The meaning of introjection is being restored, but then introjection can reveal itself.  What’s more, it’s interesting here that I am talking about the process of introjection, but I’m not really talking about introjection itself—I’m not really discussing its definition or what it means to psychoanalysis in the most “precise” way possible, yet I’m still talking about introjection by explaining how introjection looks like this sentence.  I focused my discussion around introjection, but it seems like I did anything but—I’m no closer to its initial and precise meaning than I was at the beginning of this post.

2-15-11 ed. Felman, Literature and Psychoanalysis

Shoshana
Felman, “To Open the Question”

Summary: Felman seeks, through this anthology, to deconstruct the psychoanalysis/literature, master/slave narrative by saying that both are enfolded within each other (implicated), aiming to get away from the idea that literature is always interpreted by the knowledge contained within psychoanalysis.

Felman, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation”

Summary: Felman situates the critical debates surrounding Henry James’ Turn of The Screw so as to demonstrate that criticism is a performance of the text’s ambiguity, and the unconscious is simultaneously that which reads and that which is read.

Gayatri Spivak “The Letter as Cutting Edge”

The autonomous self, or the “union of the subject and object in the act of the mind” as constituted in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria needs to be deconstructed, and psychoanalysis is a way to do that by attending to the unintelligibility of the text.

Peter Brooks, “Freud’s Masterplot”

Brooks discusses how Freud deals with plot and narrative in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, saying that repetition in the text mediates between desire for origin and desire for ending.

John Brenkman, “The Other and the One”

Lacan overturns philosophical idealism by making the argument that lack is inherent in desire—desire is not a condition for the development of completeness, which is in opposition to Socrates’ idea of desire in the Symposium.

Barbara Johnson “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida”

Johnson looks at the ways that Derrida and Lacan quote or paraphase Poe’s “Purloined Letter”, what they put into/leave out of the text to demonstrate how, in trying to correct or write over Lacan’s “wrongs”, Derrida only repeats them.

Close Reading from Felman’s “Turning the Screw of Interpretation”

  “The scene of the critical debate is thus a repetition of the scene dramatized in the text.  The critical interpretation, in other words, not only elucidates the text but also reproduces it dramatically, unwittingly participates in it.  Through its very reading, the text so to speak, acts itself out.  As a reading effect, this inadvertent “acting out” is indeed uncanny: whichever way the reader turns, he can but be turned by the text, he can but perform it by repeating it.” (101)

In this passage, Felman compares the text to the unconscious in many ways.  In my close reading this week, I want to plot the ways that she does this in the above passage.  Later on in her essay, Felman says that, “For Lacan, indeed, the unconscious is not only that which must be read, but also, and primarily, that which reads” (118).  By making this comparison Felman also says that the text has an unconscious, and so I’d like to track how that is operating in this passage. 

There are two subjects in this passage: the reader/critic and the text.  The text as subject is most apparent in the subject of the sentence “The text acts itself out.” The reader is a more implied subject, as readers are the ones that make “critical debate” and “critical interpretation” happen.  Additionally, the reader appears toward the end of the passage as he who is turned by the text and he who performs the text by repeating it.  Yet, the structure of that sentence belies the reader taking prominence as a subject in this passage.  The passive structure “the reader can but be turned by the text” indicates that the text is doing the turning, making it more apparent that the text outweighs the reader as subject.  In the next part of the sentence, the reader is the subject of an active structure, but the reader has no choice but to perform the text. 

However, I don’t wish to suggest that the text is the only important part of this passage.  Here, I do think the text is the subject both grammatically (subject of the sentence, also foregrounded as the thing with an unconscious), and psychoanalytically, but it’s more unclear if the text is the unconscious or if the text is the subject with an unconscious.  To start working through this question, I think we need to discuss how Felman is using repetition here. She makes it clear that the scene of both the reader and text is built upon repetition.  As I suggested last week, the relationship between the subject and the other is one of oscillation or repetition, and the thing that is being repeated is speech, not the unconscious.  What is being repeated in this passage?  The first sentence says that the scene of the text is repeated through the critical debate.  In terms of oscillation, the scene of the text bounces off the other of the text, the critical debate, and then returns to the text in such a way that it performs the text.  But I don’t think that it’s easy to identify exactly what the text is in this passage.  Is it the content or the “thingness” of the text?  Brooks gets at this when he says (particularly highlighting oscillation):

“Repetition is a return in the text, a doubling back.  We cannot say whether this return is a return to or a return of: for instance, a return to origins or a return of the repressed.  Repetition through this ambiguity appears to suspend temporal process, or rather, to subject it to an indeterminate shuttling or oscillation which binds different moments together as a middle which might turn forward or back.” (Brooks 288)

I don’t really know how to answer the many questions that I’ve raised in this post.  Some of them are: is the text the unconscious or does it have an unconscious, and if so, what would that unconscious be?  What exactly is the text?  Does Felman say that the text works in parallel ways to the unconscious?  Here, I want to foreground the idea that ambiguity in this matter might be more beneficial to my reading than trying to figure out what each of these elements are in the text.  What matters is the process of oscillation (the process that Brooks says supports ambiguity).  I also was reading this essay trying to decide if Felman is successful at thinking about literature and psychoanalysis as more than just things that can be mapped onto each other (as she says in “To Open the Question”).  Felman is performing the scene of the text here by tolerating ambiguity in this passage.  She prioritizes the performance, and as my sort of circular and looping and questioning post has demonstrated, this ambiguity is what is being performed.

2-8-11 Lacan, Ecrits

“The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”

Identification is one of the earliest processes of recognizing the other and provides a foundation for understanding the I function in psychoanalysis.

“The Signification of the Phallus Die Bedeutung des Phallus”

Lacan deals with the anatomical distinction that makes it difficult to interpret cases of women by arguing that the phallus is not a fantasy or an organ but a signifier of the Other’s desire.

"The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis"

 “For the function of language in speech is not to inform but to evoke.  What I seek in speech is a response from the other. What constitutes me as a subject is my question.” (247)

In the passage I have chosen, the use of “for” followed by several simple, declarative sentences signals that Lacan is making an important point here.  His use of declarative sentences stands out among the majority of the rest of his writing, as he does not use complicated clauses or piles of prepositional phrases.  I am struck here by this apparent simplicity, but I want to explore it further to tease out its complications.

The use of “for” refers to what has come before this passage.  This word does two things here: it makes the sentence into a very long prepositional phrase of sorts, and in doing so, it references what has come before it.  Immediately prior to “for,” Lacan says that “. . .what is redundant as far as information is concerned is precisely what plays the part of resonance in speech.”  Here, we can assume that “speech” in the first sentence of this passage refers to redundancies and resonances.  On the other hand, the use of “for” at the beginning of the sentence as a floating preposition unmoors it from context.  In the OED, it’s apparent that the meaning of “for” depends heavily upon context: its placement as a preposition, its situation within a phrase, and even the word that it substitutes.  In this case, it’s less clear what “for” substitutes in reference to the prior sentence, but it is clear that Lacan uses this word as a signal of emphasis, of substitution, and even possibly of transference.

Next, “the function of language in speech” acts as the sentence’s subject, and the construction of the prepositional phrases indicates that language, as a broader category, functions in specific ways when it is put into the category of speech.  Here, it is clear that Lacan is not talking about the ways that language functions in the unconscious or in writing; instead, he is referring to the ways that language functions in the act of expressing language vocally.  Here, I think it is important to consider the implications of the vocal act, where speech is considered to do something in particular ways.  For Lacan, speech evokes.  Speech, of course, can inform, but that is not what this particular verb is referring to in the sentence.  “Inform” and “evoke” both refer to the function of language, and so they are most strongly linked to language here rather than to speech.  Speech is an act, but it is active because of the way that language functions within it.  Therefore, language is evocative rather than informative.  It does not merely describe; it calls forth and makes associations.

The aural implications of speech are also evident in this passage, as the sentence to which the “for” refers makes clear.  Where information (the informing that language in speech does not do) seems redundant, it is this redundancy that transforms into resonance when put into the context of speech.  Resonance is the active part of repetition, as it also has implications of calling forth or evoking.  Instead of just a string of repetitions, resonances bounce back and forth, and the sound gets amplified as it goes.  The following two sentences (“What I seek in speech is a response from the other. What constitutes me as a subject is my question.”) achieve this resonance aurally in terms of their cadence and rhythm.  They are repetitive in that they are structured the same way and inform us as to what Lacan is saying, but they are resonant in that they act out what Lacan means about language in speech and the way that they call forth associations between the subject and the other.  Even though these sentences are written, they were originally delivered as a talk.  This complicates the idea that Lacan was only talking about speech here.   Can these categories be cordoned off from each other so cleanly?  Does language function differently in different contexts?

In this passage, the objects that amplify this speech, the surfaces that sound bounces between, are the subject and the other.  The idea that these sentences are not merely declarative (they don’t just inform) is evident when we consider the subjects of these sentences.  The sentences are not structured as questions, but the subject of both of them is “what”.  A simplification of what these sentences look like: “What I seek is a response.  What constitutes me is my question.”