2-26-11 Phillips: Promises, Promises

Adam Phillips, Promises, Promises

Summary: Phillips collects a variety of essays, lectures and book reviews to demonstrate psychoanalysis’s intersections with literature and the ways that they mutually enrich and engage each other; while doing so, he manages to complicate and challenge the orthodoxies of each discipline and to explain the process of and pleasure in reading stories.

“In translating a person—if the analogy is to be of any use—we have to do something different.” (147)

I chose this passage because I think Phillips is analogous without being analogous.

It’s clear in this book that Phillips’s psychoanalytic practice is inflected with his literary training, and it’s also clear that Phillips’s reading practices will be forever inflected with psychoanalysis.  In the relationship between the two, somewhere in the middle, Phillips  manages to challenge the orthodoxies of both disciplines while their practices even richer; he brings them out of themselves and allows each to influence and develop the other.  This is what we have been doing all semester. 

First, I want to attend to Phillips’s inclusion of “analogy.”  Enclosed within dashes, it is both set off (to some extent relegated) and emphasized.  Starting the phrase with “if,” Phillips calls into question the status of the analogy’s use.  We’re not quite sure if the analogy that he sets up is useful or not, but I don’t think that is what matters here.  Of course, analogies, by definition, are useful in that they clarify a difficult concept or draw out the resemblances between two things, which on first glance, don’t seem all that similar.  In this sentence, analogy is not defined, and it’s not meant to clarify, not only because the status of the analogy as such is called into question, but also because we’re not really sure what is being analogized in the first place.  We could infer that translation is an analogy for psychoanalysis from earlier in the lecture, but this sentence blends the two in such a way that they’re unable to be separated out.  “Translating a person” is presumably the analogy, but for what?  The dashes distance the word “analogy” from “translating a person”, setting them off from each other while emphasizing what is within the dashes.  The ambiguous status of the analogy is what is emphasized within the dashes, while the idea that there is a definite analogy, that we can identify what is being analogized, is what is being relegated.

The thing that is being emphasized, then, is the process of analogizing.  Here, it would be instructive to look at two places: what analogies do and the etymology of the word “analogy.”  If the use of analogies is to clarify something by comparing it to something else, the process of analogizing often does the opposite. Analogies that are intended to clarify often end up proliferating meaning rather than shrinking it to something containable.  The worst kind of analogies is the kind that tries to shrink down broad concepts into pithy statements, easily digestible, didactic.  At their best, analogies demand explanation or working with proliferation, which is something that Phillips does in this lecture.  It is a working “in”.  Inside of the idea of “translating a person,” Phillips demands that we “do something different.”  The analogy itself isn’t useful, but the operation of the analogy is.  What’s more, the etymology of “analogy” shows that it has been used to describe the process of word formation over time, tracking a word’s derivations and inflections.  In a sense, the process of analogy is analogous to the process of etymology—it’s a tracking of the way that similarities between two things inflect and enrich each other.

Yet the use of the analogy is not conditioned upon its doing something different.  The “if” is not a conditional statement, indicating that analogies can only be useful if they do something different; rather, the sentence indicates that the idea of translating a person is already conditioned to do something different.  Different than what is not quite as clear, but in the following sentence, Phillips says, “We have to translate while suspending our belief in an original; and in the full acknowledgement that we could never get it right” (147).  If the definition of translation requires an original to translate, we have to do something different by acting as though there is no original.  Phillips suspends the definition of “translate” and sets up a paradox that we have to work out of.  We have to be willing to accept it as such and go from there.  It’s not as if he leaves it at that, though.  He leaves this more open than we would be comfortable with, perhaps, but the paradox doesn't leave us at an impasse.  By putting “translating a person” together, Phillips doesn’t emphasize literature and psychoanalysis as two separate units to be analogized.  The condition of this particular text is such that doing something different is not doing literature, or psychoanalysis, or analogies, or translation.  What it’s doing is putting those things in relation to each other and inviting us to work through the process of this inflection, or “mak[ing] it up together” (147).

4-19-11 Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More

Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More

Summary: Dolar refocuses the psychoanalytic discussion on the voice by tracing the ways that the voice has always been backed up by a source (either the mouth or the letter), coming to the conclusion that the voice is untracable and unmediated.

“If disacousmatization posed the problem of pinning down the voice whose source is hidden, here we have the opposite problem: a source of voice to which no voice can be assigned, but which for that very reason represents the voice all the more.” (69)

I chose this sentence because I think it encapsulates much of what is going on in this chapter, where Dolar does quite a bit of foundational work, making minor arguments before getting to what he is really trying to say.  Throughout this chapter, Dolar says things like “We could argue” (67), “We can recall”, and “We could also read” (69), which operate in similar ways to the above passage by indicating that, yes, these readings are possible, but what they’re really getting at in terms of the voice is somewhere else.  I want to look at the methods by which Dolar diverts his discussion from the gap, by which he makes the gap resonate.

Rather than an “if…then” construction, Dolar uses an “If…here” structure.  This structure isn’t quite foundational, then; the “here” argument doesn’t rely on the “if” argument in order to constitute itself as such.  Instead, there’s a kind of deflection going on.  Dolar relocates the focus of his argument from disacousmatization back to the voice.  While that might seem obvious in that Dolar has been talking about the voice this whole time, the voice over “here” is the not-voice, or just a silence.  “A source of voice” points to the mouth of the scream painting, and so this voice has nothing to do with hearing and everything to do with seeing.  Indeed, Dolar’s imbrication of voice with the gaze is apparent here.  There is no voice that we can hear, and so Dolar’s entire discussion of the voice is not so much about hearing or locating a voice; instead, it’s about the source of the voice or representations of voices.  Dolar’s “definition” of the voice is the not-voice.

What’s more “a source of voice” renames “the opposite problem” due to the colon.  In his deflection of the discussion, Dolar doesn’t simply move it to another place; he moves it to the opposite place.  This new discussion becomes contrary to and different from the one that came before, indicating that the “foundational” work that Dolar did previously is not at all what he is trying to say.  The problem before was trying to “[pin] down the voice whose source is hidden.”  We can’t see the source of the voice at all in this problem, and trying to pin down the voice to a visible source was problematic.  But in his deflection, Dolar says that we needn’t worry about this problem, because the “here” moves away from this problem to a different one.

Where is here?  For that, we need to go to the previous sentence, which talks about Munch’s The Scream.  “Here” seems to be a different kind of text—it’s visual, not auditory, unlike the film discussion that goes along with the “if.”   The “if” of disacousmatization arises from the hidden source of the voice, which exists in a gap: “…the object voice emerges in counterpoint with the visible and the visual, it cannot be disentangled from the gaze which offers its framework, so that both the gaze and the voice appear as object in the gaps as a result of which they never quite match” (67).  The “here,” then, does not concern itself with this gap; rather, it concerns itself with the not-there.  The problem in the “here”, then, seems to be that, now, the heightened representation of the voice in the silent scream.  Even in silence, its “resonance is all the greater” (69).  What is the problem of voice, then?  On the following pages, Dolar, with the help of Zizek, suggests that the voice is forever separated from vision in that seeing the source of the voice only increases its mystery.  The problem is not that we’re forever trying to fill the gap; the problem is that the gap is unfillable, unable to be mediated, yet intensely resonate all the same.  It is the “a source of voice to which no voice can be assigned, but which for that very reason represents the voice all the more.” 

Here is where I want to put pressure on the term “represents”.  In this sentence, the source of the voice is representing the voice in a heightened way.  All the more than what?  Is the source of voice more able to represent the voice than the voice itself?  Or, outside of the “here,” does something else represent voice in a different way?  Is the voice representable as such?  Also, if the source of voice is a stand-in for the voice itself, is that what renders the voice silent?

Finally, I’d like to return to a post from February 8, where I discussed resonance.  Here, Lacan’s discussion of speech was a way of mediating in the gap between the self and the other.  Dolar’s discussion of resonance, then, intervenes in this discussion about the way that resonance functions in psychoanalysis.  It no longer mediates, it represents.

4-12-11 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus Parts 3 & 4

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (parts 3 & 4)

Summary Part 3: D&G set up their argument for the work of schizoanalysis by tying family structure to capitalist desire production, Oedipus being the link between the two.

Summary Part 4: The work of schizoanalysis is to deterritorialize the flows of capitalist production by upsetting the way that myths produce desire.

 “That is why, inversely, schizoanalysis must devote itself with all its strength to the necessary destructions.  Destroying beliefs and representations, theatrical scenes.  And when engaged in this task no activity will be too malevolent.  Causing Oedipus and castration to explode, brutally intervening each time the subject strikes up the song of myth or intones tragic lines, carrying him back to the factory” (314).

I’ll be analyzing the last sentence in the series (in bold); I have the others up for context since the sentence I’ll be examining is incomplete.

What is schizoanalysis?  Or rather, what does schizoanalysis do?  The above sentence(s) don’t offer us an answer to the first question, and since D&G’s explosion of both psychoanalysis and capitalism is all about the process, it becomes less important to figure out exactly what schizoanalysis is than how it enacts this process.  Last week I was concerned with how Anti-Oedipus was different from the psychoanalysis that I’ve been reading thus far, and I think this sentence begins to develop this concern.  Obviously, Anti-Oedipus is anti-Oedipal because it rejects that myth as a structuring, universalizing category.  However, that doesn’t mean that D&G are ready to throw out this category entirely: “…we have envolved in Oedipus, we have been structured in Oedipus, and under the neutral and benevolent eye of the substitute, we have learned the song of castration…” (312).  Here, we’ve learned to live in a certain way because of Oedipal structures; they’ve structured the social world in such a way as to make it all about production.  Oedipus is the socius as we know it now, and structure is the problem.  While this is the most obvious difference between schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis, further differences become more subtle from there.  The main things that I’m concerned with are mediation and the way that schizoanalysis is concerned with literature (which might need to take a back seat in this post).

The bolded sentence elaborates on the “necessary destructions” to which schizoanalysis “must devote itself”.  The process of schizoanalysis (s.a.) is violent, destructive, and brutal, destroying the Oedipal structure.  Continuing with overtones of materiality, s.a. causes explosions.  The things that are actually exploding are songs and myths, which are not material, but because D&G connect them with explosion, they point to the way that these songs and myths act as structuring agents.  Weirdly, the latin root of “explode” means to drive someone off the stage in disapproval, which would indicate that s.a. doesn’t have much to do with fire or blowing something up.  It’s brutal in a more affective sense, where the person on stage is being driven away by shame and rejection rather than being killed or blown up.  Getting back to the way that these non-material things act as structuring agents, it’s not so much about destroying the materiality of the structure than just making it public how bad the structure is.  Boo, Oedipus, get off the stage.  D&G don’t like what is happening on the stage right now, all this myth and tragedy nonsense, and they want to see that the “representative series that psychoanalysis substitutes for the line of production” (305) are revealed for what they really are: horrible actors who are trying to cover up the way they produce capitalist desire by taking on the guise of representation.  To indulge my concern with literature here (and to simplify a whole lot): D&G aren’t rejecting forms of art or literature (after all, Watt is important to their own analysis); they’re instead asking what/who the art/myth/tragedy is serving.

Why isn’t s.a. just another way of structuring then?  In the sentence, this destruction is an effect of s.a..  Schizoanalysis isn’t directly exploding anything.  It’s notable here that the subject is completely missing from this sentence.  This could be an introductory clause, which we can imagine would be followed by the subject and then maybe a being verb, or the subject could start the sentence, which would mean the verbs would have to change.  But that’s not what this sentence does.  The subject doesn’t structure this sentence and so s.a. does not structure this new kind of process that is taking place.  Therefore, the process of s.a. is not only non-structuring in terms of displacing the structure that is there, but it’s also non-structuring in a way that it’s hard to place whatever comes after the structure.

My next concern is mediation.  I want to put stress on the word “intervening” in the above sentence.  It’s something that s.a. does (although not directly, as I’ve already established, even though this construction is more direct than the previous one).  Mediation and intervention are closely related in their etymology, and they mean basically the same thing.  What is being mediated, though?  In psychoanalysis, it’s the myth of Oedipus mediates the story of an individual’s life in service of capitalism.  Intervention can also mean to come between, though, and that is how it is working in this sentence.  The intervention is happening on the stage, where s.a. is coming between myth and capitalism and stealing from both their power to carry the subject back to the factory.  If we’re talking about the way that verbs structure this sentence, carrying is the most direct one in here, connected to myth and what it is doing.  The process of s.a. is to intervene in the process of capitalism and disrupt its flow.  It also matters when s.a. is intervening, and it’s when the myth gets up on stage and starts to sing; s.a. has to intervene in order to stop this process.

4-5-11 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus Parts 1 & 2

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Parts 1 & 2)

Summary: Deleuze and Guattari use schizophrenia to demonstrate that the Oedipus complex cannot be used as a structuring trope in psychoanalysis because it causes a tendency to blame everything on mommy and daddy; moreover, the subject cannot be divided into social realities and desire and fantasy because there is only the social.

“But group fantasy no longer has anything but the drives themselves as subject, and the desiring-machines formed by them with the revolutionary institutions.” (63)

These two sentences follow a passage in which D&G separate out individual fantasy from group fantasy.  Individual fantasy takes the ego as its subject, whereas group fantasy, as this sentence indicates, only has the drives as subject.  In that sentence, “them” refers back to the drives, so the drives are what form the desiring-machines.  I think this sentence is rather confusing, though, as its structure throws off meaning just a bit in two ways: the comma is used incorrectly, and the “with” right next to “by them” (passive voice) obfuscates what exactly is forming the desiring-machines.

First of all, the comma with the coordinating conjunction is used incorrectly, as the clause that follows it is dependent.  Without the “and,” the comma would perform a repetitive function, where “the desiring-machines” would rename the drives.  Without the comma, “the desiring-machines…institutions” would be another phrase parallel to “the drives themselves as subject.”  Both of these phrases would then be two things that the group fantasy no longer has anything but.  The former makes the two phrases closer to each other in meaning, as it performs a repetitive function.  The latter makes the two phrases parallel, where they are two different components of the same sentence subject.  Because both of these operations happen here, the structure is both repetitive and parallel. Whether or not this comma is a typo, intentional, or a result of translation, its presence along with the coordinating conjunction gives the structure of this sentence several layers that are at once conflicting and strangely similar.  I say strangely similar because, either way, the second phrase eventually finds its way back to “drives” as parallel to it (mirroring its shape and direction) or a repetition of it (a loop or a renaming).  In this way, drives acts as a sort of misplaced referent.  It’s not a very strong referent because of the comma mistake, but it’s not entirely misplaced, either.  I’m tempted to say that this sentence is schizophrenic.

Additionally, the structure of this sentence is just awkward.  The sentence says that the drives are the subject of group fantasy, but they’re not the subject of this sentence.  Group fantasy is.  The verb “has” indicates that group fantasy possesses the drives, and in that case, it doesn’t seem like drives has much subjectivity anymore.  Why don’t D&G say that drives are no longer the subject of group fantasy?  What’s more, this sentence refers back to a process of loss, as indicated by “no longer.”  Looking back through the text, this process began when D&G began mapping group fantasy onto the socius rather than the mother and father (62).  As a result of this remapping, group fantasy lost everything else that was attached to it, leaving only the drives as subject.  Whatever those other things were, they’re gone now.  This could have potentially been a violent loss, a ripping away (or maybe not), but the sentence doesn’t really tell us how that happened.  It's a reference to temporality without a view of what happened in between, like a before and after shot.  Group fantasy had more than the drives, but we looked away for a second, and when we looked back, it didn’t.  The structure of the sentence skirts around the process of loss by only naming what group fantasy has now.  There’s a trace of the before, but there’s mostly the after.  What’s more, the “as” makes it feel like the drives are just posing as the subject.  Is it just that group fantasy only as itself as subject, as the structure of the sentence would seem to indicate?  Even if this question doesn’t really take us anywhere, there’s another tricky part to this sentence.  Above, I talked about how the second part of the sentence either repeats or adds to the first part.  If group fantasy only has drives and nothing else, then why is there this repetition/addition tacked on to the end of it?

If the first part of the sentence was awkward, then I think the second part is even worse.  The passive-voiced “formed by them” is probably referring back to the drives, but the passive structure makes that connection rather weak.  When the “with the revolutionary machines” is added, it gets worse.  Are the desiring-machines formed with (using) the revolutionary revolutionary institutions, or are the desiring-machines formed with (along with) the revolutionary institutions?  Additionally, when I read this sentence, I want something to be after “institutions”.  Because of the comma before the coordinating conjunction, I’m expecting the sentence to be finished out with a predicate.  “Formed” doesn’t really act as a verb here.

I picked these two sentences because they seem to describe the process of moving away from ego psychology, which focuses on the individual subject.  Since Deleuze and Guattari are all about process, it’s important to choose a passage for close reading that examines this process more closely.  What is striking about this sentence, though, is that I feel like I’m even farther away from a description of the process than I was before I started close reading this sentence.