So I've been reading some Zizek. I'm probably supposed to read Lacan but they already make me read Kant and Hegel so they can cut me some damn slack.
OK so I don't *get* Lacanian theory. Or for that matter what psychoanalysis is really about. I've even entertained (fleeting) thoughts about taking a night course on psychoanalysis. There is one problem however.
Reading psychoanalysis generates a sense of uneasiness in me. To borrow Zizek's voice for a moment 'I mean it quite literally'. When I'm sitting there reading about gaps and Others and Fathers I feel anxious. What is Metaphysics style anxiety.
There seems to be a direct psychological impulse behind what speculative realism wants to do. If my more informed readers will allow me to make a crude analysis: speculative realism wants to 'allow' the real in. It wants to collapse some symbolic order that we are not supposed to collapse.
One way to counteract this is to state that psychoanalysis is also correlationist and on this basis sets up a truly imaginary barrier in order to avoid reality. This is too lazy however.
I admit these are crude thoughts but they are also, in my opinion, deeply philosophical thoughts (to be momentarily dramatic). I mean more philosophical than the average problem played out in a philosophy class on freedom or determinism.
Zizek has a famous clip on youtube where he talks about love being evil. I'm not so sure about that but I really appreciate his forays into physics. He calls the world a kind of cosmic imbalance. There is something enthralling about that notion. It makes us a very interesting mistake. He plays around with such notions in his books from time to time but I've always wondered about this physics-philosophy dynamic (it plays a key role in my dissertation argument at one point). The philosopher wants to witness the world of the physicist.
Think of us as Harrison Ford in Blade Runner and the physicist as the android who in his dying speech reveals a world unknowable in its sublimeness. I could talk about the film for hours but I'm not up to the kind of analysis that Zizek can do or anyone else for that matter so I'll keep it as a private reservoir for now.
I suppose I'm here in the grip of wonder. Aristotle links knowledge to sight in the first paragraph of the Metaphysics. Hegel talks about philosophers seeking a home. Heidegger calls our state of being a kind of not-being-at-home (and litters his work with calls from some out of reach primal home). Bachelard locates spatial metaphors in the home.
Where is home? They say every philosopher has one question. I think I've come to identify mine. To be cryptic I locate 'home' (a symbol or cypher) somewhere X. When I fill in that X I think I can claim knowledge. I plan on working toward that X although I sometimes feel I am being worked toward that X (Zizek also discusses this weird phenomenon wherein we imagine the real intervenes).
If I were on the couch now I'd probably inform Dr. Freud that I am a keen amateur astronomer.
I've never really understood this feeling of homeless-ness that in particular marks Existential thinking, but perhaps it is because I understood this feeling that it doesn't feel so odd. That is...home is is verb, not a noun, its a decisive act that can be made at any-time, any-place. So I have not appreciated the dis-placement of either Lacanian theory (the kernel of "gap" that is supposed to make the subject possible), nor the Realist desire to rush right in and plug it up. I don't understand how one cannot be home, that is, unless you forget how to home.
ReplyDeleteWell I'm more or less in the same position. I don't personally feel homeless in the world until I brush up to this phenomena in Lacan or Hegel. You find this desire 'to home' quite a bit in theory, eco-philosophy or a whole host of other new niches. Except philosophers, in paticular, seem to desire an entirely different home than most people (and hence why I find the political impulse in philosophy slightly bemusing...do the people want to go where we want to go?).
ReplyDeletePJE: "do the people want to go where we want to go?"
ReplyDeleteKvond: I like this very much. It consolidates to a very strong degree some of my problems with at least contemporary Marxist political philosophy.
But, and I have not read your blog, are you only humorously "anotherheiddegerblog". How can you digest Heidegger without thrown-in-the-world-ness, his core concept. I'm pretty sure this and related thoughts influenced Lacan just in this area. Neither Lacan nor Heidegger are really in the Real world.
The name is in reference to enowning which is the famous Heidegger blog. It is a little tongue in check in that it was literally the only other Heidegger blog at that time. Minds and Brains is a new one I came across recently so the name is a little bit moot at this stage.
ReplyDeleteI accept a lot of Heidegger without the authentic-existential baggage. I think we are thrown into the world but in a far less dramatic sense to the radical thrownness one finds in Heidegger. If it makes any sense I'm all for the thrown but not too interested in the -ness. Heidegger has a number of similar insights that he translates (needlessly) in the name of his Seinsfrage.
Heidegger is therefore more of a launch-pad into interesting areas as opposed to someone I slavishly adhere to. I really dislike the Thinker-Name worship in Continental Philosophy. I certainly don't think there is much value in dedicating ones life to endlessly explicating another man's thoughts. That is to live the examined life of somebody else.
"One way to counteract this is to state that psychoanalysis is also correlationist and on this basis sets up a truly imaginary barrier in order to avoid reality."
ReplyDeleteI disagree with this characterization of the metaphysics of psychoanalysis. While I haven't entirely sorted out how Zizek fits with correlationism, I am certain that both Freud and Lacan remain thoroughly non-correlationist in their metaphysics. I am now trying to figure out how Zizek's ontology fares under the critique of correlationism, though I suspect he won't come out unscathed.
Recall that for Meillassoux, the key to understanding whether a thinker is or is not correlationist is the question of whether there can be being without thought, "By 'correlation' we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other" (After Finitude, 5). Any system that breaks with the tradition of being = thought is therefore not correlationist. Any system that allows for a metaphysics of the unconscious (Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Freud, Lacan) therefore cannot be considered correlationist, as the unconscious is precisely such a break.
I will be posting a short draft of a piece expanding on this on my blog soon, and would encourage you to read it. Part of my larger project is working through the metaphysics of psychoanalysis in light of Meillassoux and speculative realism more generally. I suppose I'm one of the few defenders of such a metaphysics within the growing group of SR thinkers.
I very much look forward to it Michael. As I tried to explain I'm not well versed in psychoanalysis at all. These remain crude observations. Therefore I'm open to anybody that can help me fill that void.
ReplyDeleteI'd add that Levi would be a natural ally for you here. Plus from a non-specialist perspective psychoanalysis crops up quite a bit so I suspect some kind of relationship that needs to be worked out. Therefore you seem to be on a damn interesting track.
I'm a bit more skeptical as to whether psychoanalytic thought (particularly in its Lacanian variant) can be characterized as non-correlationist. The correlationist thesis is not that there can be no being without thought, but rather that we have no access to being without thought. On the one hand, you thus have subjective idealism (Berkeley) and absolute idealism (Hegel). These idealisms deny the possibility of any being without thought tout court. The first because esse est percepi and the second because the dialectic establishes the identity of substance and spirit. By contrast, most correlationisms are happy to concede that there is being without thought, they simply add that such being is unthinkable and strictly speaking incoherent. So the correlationist thesis is that we can never think any of the terms apart from one another. The thesis that we have an unconscious remains within this dialectic. Lacan constantly emphasizes that the unconscious is what it will have been and that it can only be supposed. In other words, for Lacan we can't speak of the unconscious as a place or domain that is doing something, but rather it is paradoxically something that is produced in the course of analysis. Whether or not there is an actual unconscious is perpetually undecidable.
ReplyDeleteHowever, if one is not convinced by this reading of Lacan, I think the more central point would be that unconscious or not, we always, for Lacan, relate to the world through the symbolic. That is, the idea of a world that is not framed by the symbolic is, for Lacan, incoherent. As he says in Seminar XX, "the universe is the flower of rhetoric".
All of this aside, I think it's a tremendous victory for speculative realism to see so many folks wanting to avoid correlationism. This entails, in some way, that the argument has been conceded even if one hasn't gone the full nine yards and adopted the quilting point of "speculative realist". And the point of speculative realism, I think, is not to throw out this tradition, but rather to rework it from within a realist framework, generating a new set of problems, questions, and perspectives. This is what I have called, stealing Paul's term, "re-construction". This activity of re-construction doesn't leave the thinkers as they were before, but rather liberates the object-oriented kernel at the heart of their thought. Lacan is ripe for such a reading.
Hi Levi,
ReplyDeleteI'm just wondering about this idea of 're-reading'. It's something to do with the relation between philosophy and psychoanalysis. Is it a "philosophical Lacan" that would be produced by this re-reading, or one (also) relevant to the clinic? Does object-oriented thinking have a place in the clinic? What would it's impact be on the way symptoms are thought of and impacted on? Is there a reason why analysts should take any notice of object-oriented thinking? Are there pressing clinical questions it answers?
None of these questions are rhetorical...
ghost
Hi Ghost,
ReplyDeleteThese are really difficult questions. On the one hand, I don't think they are questions that can be answered in advance. Such a reading would actually have to be done to discern whether or not it had payoff for practicing analysts. On the other hand, I think this is an issue to be decided by analysts themselves. With that said, Lacan always strove to stay abreast of intellectual developments and found ways to make use of them in his own work. Also, it might just be me, but back in the day when I was still practicing I noticed a tremendous difference between high Lacanian theory and what took place in the clinic. Where those who have not experienced an analysis or practiced as analysts might have the impression that the clinical setting is simply an carbon copy instantiation of the theory, the experience of the clinic itself really challenges, at least for me, this view. Theory becomes a set of prescriptions and guide posts in the clinic, but does not define what takes place in the clinic in a unilateral way. The real movement seems to take place from the clinic to theory rather than from theory to the clinic.
It does seem to me that Guattari was moving in an object-oriented direction in his own work and made a number of contributions to actual clinical practice. Guattari is often thought of as opposed to Lacanian practice, but it's worth noting that not only did he do his analysis with Lacan but he never renounced his membership in Lacan's school, attended Lacan's seminar throughout his career, and maintained ties between his own clinic, La Borde, and Lacan's school. Guattari's work shed a lot of light on group transference, the role that institutional structure plays in the clinic, and developed a number of additional techniques for clinical practice. In exploring these sorts of issues I believe he helped to shed light on blind spots in Lacanian practice.
If the analyst is oriented by the symptom and the kinds of impacts on it her interventions are having, with the theory following from there, what are the implications of a clinic that does impact on symptoms, equipped with a theory that philosophy challenges. What is the relation here? There isn't no relation, as the ongoing pyschoanalytic interest in philosophy seems to demonstrate... Is the clinic 'correlationist'? What of a 'correlationist' clinic that impacts on symptoms? These questions are strange to put into words, and sound hopelessly naive.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, thanks again for your time Levi,
Ghost
I think I'm also asking these questions because these debates seem to happen on philosophical turf, with Zizek, a non-clinician (as dazzlingly brilliant as he is), the representative of Lacanian thought (though I'm not referring to your references there). Then there's the experience of analysands for whom psychoanalytic interventions have had genuinely transformative effects. Do these experiences count?
ReplyDeleteghost
I took a vacation last week, and listened to most of Zizek's Master Class on Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction. My impression was that most of the things Zizek attributed to Lacan, he also defended by indicating where Hegel had said the same thing in strictly philosophical terms (without a Big Other, Name of the Father, and so on). So it may be that everything Zizek has to say that is important philosophically, can also be explained in strictly philosophical terms, without psychoanalysis.
ReplyDeleteHi enowning,
ReplyDeleteThat may be the case, but my question was to do with the consequences for a 'correlationist' clinic of philisophical challenges, as well as the consequences for philosophy of a ('correlationist') clinic that does in fact impact on symptoms. If analysts pay attention to philosophy, do philosophers have any reason to pay attention to the theory that results from clinical practice?
As I ask these questions, it occurs to me that Levi has in the past questioned the reasons psychoanalysis gives for its efficacy, so that's in there somewhere as well I suppose.
ghost
Ghost,
ReplyDeleteI'm not entirely sure I understand your question or what you're trying to get at. I, of course, think that Lacan is of tremendous significance for philosophy in and through its critique of certain structures of subjectivity that lie at the heart of a good deal of philosophical practice.
I'm of two minds with respect to your remarks about correlationism. First, the philosophical critique of correlationism is directed against those forms of philosophical thought that include the human in every relation to objects. That critique does not preclude certain relations that are nonetheless correlational in nature. The clinic might be one of those contexts.
More interestingly, however, I think there's a perspective from which Lacanian practice is paradoxically a sort of non-correlationist clinic. By this I have in mind the position the analyst occupies in the clinical setting and the manner in which she conducts herself over the course of analysis. As I'm sure you recall, in the ecrits "Direction of Treatment", Lacan remarks that the analyst cures less by what he does than by what he is. Elsewhere he describes the analyst as occupying a position similar to that of the "dummy hand" in bridge. Of course, what Lacan is getting at in passages such as this-- at least read retroactively fromm the perspective of his later work --is that the analyst relates to the analysand not by occupying the position of a subject, but by occupying the position of the object.
The story that I would tell vis a vis the non-correlationist clinic would be that the trajectory of analysis is a trajectory beyond correlation. Here's how I think about this. The structure of the subject in relation to the Other is that of a mobius strip with fantasy filling in the traumatic opacity of the desire of the Other and covering over castration. In the process of traversing the fantasy a separation of objet a and the Other takes place such that I(a) is no longer operative as it was before. Where prior to analysis the analysand is "correlationist" in the sense that it perpetually misrecognizes the difference of the Other as containing objet a, the subject that has traversed the fantasy and identified with the symptom is post-correlational in that it no longer encounters the Other within the frame delineated by the fantasy (which is a correlationist way of relating to the Other). It is this that allows Lacan to say, at the end of Seminar XI, that the analyst wills absolute difference. Hopefully this makes a little sense.
Enowning, as scandalous as it might sound, I think caution should be exercised in treating Lacan and Zizek as equivalent. Zizek often sheds a lot of light on Lacanian theory, but his particular amalgam of Lacan with Hegel, Schelling, and Kant is closer to fusion cooking than straight thai cuisine. That is, it is related but is something new that can't be strictly equated with the clinic. I think this difference comes out most starkly with respect to Zizek's approach to interpretation. For Zizek the entire world is a text that can be interpreted from the position of the master capable of showing how everything fits within a set of pre-defined schema. Clinical interpretation is far more circumspect and cannot be said to "reveal the truth" in the more conventional sense of "disclosing the real meaning underlying the symptom" (though it does get at another truth). In the clinic interpretation is an act, not a revelation of true or hidden meaning, and it is not the case that the analyst "knows" the truth of the analysand's symptoms in a way the analysand does not. Indeed, the analysand does most of the work in analysis and constantly keeps the analyst on her toes.
Your second from last paragraph is beautiful. I like the idea of the clinic producing non-correlationists!
ReplyDeleteMy analysis seemed to happen at a certain distance from theory. There was little sense of a theoretical edifice, more of a method, a way of dealing with speech that was like 'aesthetic thinking' - though that's not a great way to describe it...
With Zizek you miss the sense of the unconscious as a solution - the ambiguity of the unconscious as a kind of relief. I wonder (and these thoughts aren't clear at all) whether that's part of where the anxiety of reading Zizek comes from, that for him, the unconscious isn't really ambiguous at all... And perhaps that's also related to his 'roughness' with language, like he has no ear for it.
Thanks Ghost!
ReplyDeleteMy experience with analysis was similar. I entered analysis my second year of graduate school because I was all lit up with Lacan, was reading a whole slew of clinicians, and wanted to see what the actual practice was all about (there were also a number of things going on in my life that prompted my entrance). I was really surprised by the disparity between the theory I had been reading and the actual practice. It was as if all that theory just disappeared. Initially it was a jarring experience as I wasn't quite sure what to talk about or how to talk. All of this is rather paradoxical. On the one hand, Lacanian theory is among the most intricate bodies of theory you'll find in psychotherapeutic literature. On the other hand, in the actual clinical practice it really is all about the speech of the analysand. I don't know about you, but my analyst never brought Lacanian categories into the clinical setting at all. There was no use of words like "symptom", "hysteria", "obsession", "psychosist", objet a, and so on. It was just whatever was being talked about. To this day I have no idea where my analyst situated me in Lacan's clinical categories. Far from being something negative, I think this is a testament to the Lacanian commitment to the singularity of the analysand. Rather than situating the analysand in a theoretical grid or as an instance of a category, it is instead about the utter irreplaceability of the symptom and the subject. In certain respects this is a bit anxiety provoking on the analysand's end because subsumption under clinical categories and being told what one is can be a kind of relief, but if one can tolerate this absence of categories I think the payoff is profound.
In my own object-oriented ontology I struggle with this issue. On the one hand, I want to get at the rustle of the world, its granularity, the singularity of constellations and so on. In this I'm deeply indebted to Lacan's understanding of the symptom, diagnostic categories, his account of sexuation (I understand myself to be developing an ontology in accord with the feminine side of the graph of sexuation, resistant to totalization and categorization), the remainder or objet a and his theses that the big Other does not exist, that there is no Other of the Other, and that there is no metalanguage. On the other hand, it is a theory and therefore perpetually risking a distantiation from this rustle of being.
(cont.)
ReplyDeleteI very much like what you have to say here about the ambiguity of the unconscious and the roughness of language. When I say the analyst doesn't always know what she is saying, this is what I'm getting at. A good analytic interpretation, in my view, is always polysemous such that it is capable of producing a variety of readings. The mistake to be avoided from an outside perspective, I think, is the view that the analyst is aware of this polysemy. Rather, the analyst is herself startled by the effects of her speech and, I believe, this surprise is indicative of the success of a genuine analytic act. As my own ontology develops I will be developing the notion of "attractors". A good analytic interpretation can be understood as a sort of attractor that actualizes, in an aleatory way, a state of the analysand's unconscious, sending it spinning off in directions unanticipated by either the analyst or the analysand and opening the possibility of shifts in the organization of the symptom. Under this model, a symptom can be thought of as a stable state attractor that repetitively reproduces itself in an infinite variety of ways but which has come to encase the analysand in a sort of mummy-like, paralyzing jouissance. The moment of surprise in the analysand's speech, coupled with the startling nature of the analytic act in the form of the interpretation, promises the possibility of a shift in an analysand's basin of attraction that might generate more direct routes to jouissance or better, or at least more conscious, relations to one's "solution" to the real of the unconscious.
Aleatory is a great word here, and it seems to me as much about the actualisation of 'aleatory-ness' (apologies for the clumsiness there) as it is an aleatory actualisation.
ReplyDeletePsychoanalytic theory, especially the Lacanian variant, is populated by all manner of objects: the image, the ego, objet a, and so on. One might say that the analysand is trapped by all these objects, is in effect objectified and rendered inanimate. Psychoanalysis is a process of subjectivation. The subject emerging from the process is, as Fink describes it, almost an anti-object, the split between ego and unconscious, coming into existence "only momentarily, as a sort of pulselike movement."
ReplyDeleteI'd guess that a flat ontology would say that the subject is no less an object than the others, which of course is ironic from a humanistic point of view. But does a flat ontology necessarily imply a flat psychology? If the subject is no different ontologically from the image or the ego, on what basis does one justify all the time and effort to bring the subject into existence? Is it just that the subject can now join the parade of objects, one among equals? The presumption of analysis is that the subject is better than the objects and lacks from which it emerges. It seems that to become subject is to stop being an object: "What it was, shall I be," as Freud said. Subject-formation is what analysis as a tool is good for.
In its current manifestation, OOO doesn't want to make distinctions or hierarchies among kinds of objects, and I understand the theoretical importance of that insistence. But I'd think that at some point it becomes worthwhile for its own sake, especially in dialogue with antirealism, to characterize what sort of object a subject is.
John,
ReplyDeleteIsn't your criticism here a bit like suggesting that because the object-oriented theorist is committed to the thesis that because both the swine flu virus and the human body are objects we should be indifferent to the swine flu? Flat ontology is just the thesis that no object is more or less real than any other and that no one object like a subject overdetermines all the others. It is not the thesis of an egalitarian free for all among objects.
Not so much a criticism as some observations about how OOO in its current state might inform the clinic. By flattening the subject ontologically to the reality status of other objects, there is (I perceive) a temptation to flatten the subject psychologically as well, to regard the distinctives of individual human subjects as unimportant. Antihumanism takes this position, and OOO seems like an obvious metaphysical ally. For that reason I think your clarification is an important one, Levi: flat ontology doesn't mean indifference to "differences that make a difference" among varying kinds of real objects. Analysis has an agenda that isn't reducible to ontology, and within that agenda the subject retains its privileged position.
ReplyDeleteIn my view OOO is not an antihumanism. You might recall, from a while back, that I proposed the hegemonic fallacy. The hegemonic fallacy consists in reducing difference to one difference that makes all the difference. Antihumanisms consistently commit this fallacy. Thus, the antihumanisms that came out of structuralism and post-structuralism subordinated the human being to the signifier, rejecting the possibility of humans contributing any difference of their own that is not already the result of the play of the signifier in linguistic structuralism or of the ideological state apparatus in Althusser's Marxist structuralism.
ReplyDeleteWhat seems to be missing in your concerns is attentiveness to what I call the principle of translation. The ontic principle states that there is no difference that does not make a difference. Already it's evident from this principle that we can easily ask what sort of difference the Lacanian subject embodies and makes and get all sorts of interesting and important answers. The principle of translation states, by contrast, that there is no transportation of a difference without translation. That is, nothing is ever reducible to anything else. In other words, we can raise all sorts of questions about how the Lacanian subject engages in translation. Onticology does not reject the subject, but understands it to be a specific sort of object. As it turns out, onticology and flat ontology are actually your ally in a number of respects. Where we get, within psychotherapies, all sorts of approaches that commit the hegemonic fallacy by reducing the subject to some other type of difference such as chemical imbalences and whatnot, onticology, in asserting the primacy of a flat ontology, recognizes the irreducibility of that special sort of object known as the Lacanian subject. It's odd that you would take an ontology that begins from the premise of difference and that formulates the hegemonic fallacy and that affirms the principle of irreduction to be claiming that the subject can be reduced to something else. Perhaps you're laboring under certain unspoken assumptions about what objects are and are not attending to the actual positions being articulated within the framework of onticology.
It's also important to note that Lacan's subject is not a humanist subject. And given what I've observed both in this thread and my post on the rustle of being, why do you charge me with claims that I'm clearly not making?
ReplyDeleteThe question under discussion is how OOO might inform psychoanalysis. Of course I'm leveling no charges against you here, Levi. In fact, so far we seem to be in agreement -- as you note, we are allies in this conversation. So maybe we can go forward together.
ReplyDeleteEarlier in the thread, referring to Lacan's "Direction of Treatment" and the analyst's role as comparable to the "dummy" (le mort) in bridge, you say this:
"the analyst relates to the analysand not by occupying the position of a subject, but by occupying the position of the object."
As you say, a subject is a specific sort of object, so for the analyst to "play dead" -- like an object that isn't a subject -- isn't an intrinsically OOO move. Similarly, the analysand's subjectivization isn't an intrinsically anti-OOO move. The proper positioning of the analyst and the desired movement of the analysand are values that take shape inside the analytic paradigm. Ontology, it would seem, has nothing much to contribute either to buttressing or dismantling this scheme of meanings and values, just as it has nothing particular to say about whether a particular human body should fight off a particular swine flu virus. This pointed irrelevance isn't a flaw; it echoes our host's observation on an earlier post: "I stubbornly hold the opinion that philosophy has nothing whatsoever to tell the world about ethical issues."
I understand that, from an OOO perspective, every difference counts and each subject really is a unique snowflake. I'm not sure we need OOO to tell us this, though it does establish a significant break from much of antihumanistic thought. But the abstract categories "subject" and "object" are themselves objects, just as real as any specific and concrete object. In what way do these abstract categories differ from each other? Do you think that your version of OOO will eventually take on the task of differentiating among differences in any systematic way? Or is this sort of detail work left to psychologists and political theorists and novelists?
On further reflection, I'm not sure that OOO is relevant in any sort of anti-antihumanist campaign either. Ontologically speaking, every snowflake on the sidewalk is unique. But if my task is to clear them off the sidewalk, then they're all the same to me. For that matter, I suspect that the sidewalk is indifferent to these flake-differences as well.
ReplyDeleteOh, and also: nice blog and post, Paul.
ReplyDeleteThanks John. I'm happy just to get a taste of how debates in psychoanalysis work. I'm getting in a lot of passive learning just from skipping around the blogosphere.
ReplyDelete