Five wolves on a tree of blight;
Why have you come here,
If not to suffer your sight?
If loved and hated objects inhabit the habitus of familiarity, then the loss of that habitus, the symbolization of that pain through the formation of not only object relations, but psychological defenses, the constitution of the depressive position, is the cost of interiority (Britzman 2017). What makes someone crave that loss over and over again? This question is pertinent for anthropologists because we live by losing frequently. Indeed one of the earliest truisms a student of anthropology would hear is that the task of anthropology is to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. As if by some magic, an entire world of relations is to be suspended in a state of non-being but becoming, and then re-constituted all over again. And an entire discipline to claim themselves as the magicians, keeping the trick to themselves in a "pedagogy of mystification" (Spencer 2011, p. 26)? Is the task to expose the tricks of the trade? Or does knowledge come from keeping tricks hidden? Or more strangely, how are hidden tricks being reproduced across generations of anthropology graduate students? Do we suddenly become anthropologists, as if waking from a dream?
Psychoanalytically-oriented anthropologists would argue that fieldwork provides an opportunity to re-constitute the depressive position especially if that process is interrupted in the formation of the self. Peter Buckley(1994) drives a graduate student to a type of fulfillment with his analysis of her pre-and post-fieldwork, remarking about the shift the student went through in her fieldwork:
“In the analysis, it became apparent that in this process of moving from total alienation and loathing of her fieldwork site to a frank love for it and sense of being “at home” there was a counterpart to the shift in her view of the analyst and to some extent of the mother” (15)
As Dimitrina Spencer worries (2011), why is a discussion of the shifts in interiority in fieldwork and in seminar classrooms not a part of the explicit pedagogy of anthropology? Explicit, because, by now, every graduate student knows there is a bag of magic tricks that can only be learned via intimate association with an advisor. And if they don't know, or don't want to pursue that path, they leave. Worse, being in possession of the magic bag of tricks in no way guarantees anything, because the reward for interiority in the regimes of academic life is precarious, emotionally and monetarily. Cynicism reigns as the hegemonic affect in the anthropological seminar. Or in some cases, splitting--keeping the activist and passionate life totally separate. And god forbid if you aren't cynical enough--then you're just naive and have not read enough. God forbid if you're actually passionate. Then you're not professional enough. And even professionalism cannot be a substitute for the lack of investigation of interiority as part of anthropological pedagogy.
An investigation of interiority across the board is even more pertinent because the classroom is not just white men anymore sighing over the loss of their tropics and their mothers. Now, it's people from the tropics doing those same things. And more importantly, they/we know that anthropology has done harm to their communities, yet they desire an anthropological inclination. More importantly, they/we are full of rage, not only guilt and indebtedness. More importantly, rage is now an epistemological project (as it should have been, but of course it occurred in Black, indigenous, ethnic, and gender/sexuality studies departments before it was recognized as an emotion of value in anthropology). Each seminar discussion, therefore, provides an opportunity to not only digress but regress, staging infantile and ancestral conflicts that continue to harm. No wonder I've heard graduate students equating anthropological departments to kindergarten fights.
So, how should grown-ups behave? If we listen to Pandolofo's Imam colleague, the absence of justice can cause madness. There is no justice to be found in an anthropological classroom. At worst, cynicism will make your soul choke at some point, and before you know it, you are writing grants without enjoying the warm sunlight pouring out of your windows. Maybe after a few decades, you wouldn't know how to do that anymore as well. At best, there is only partial fulfillment. But partial fulfillment is a difficult task for interrupted individuals desiring wholeness and wholesomeness. It is a difficult task for anthropological pedagogy because anthropological apprenticeship is still constituted by an intimate emotional regime. And anyone who has ever been vulnerable knows that making interior life public is infused with risk. There is a danger of being removed from legitimate meaning. There is a danger of being poor. The task of anthropological pedagogy, especially if it has to be de-mystified, would benefit from investigation of interiority and intersubjective life (especially advising and collegial relations) through psychoanalytic or other means--getting enough sleep, getting paid a lot more, and just maybe, doing tarot. But this is for another day.
"Yes, Latin America is indeed the name of a concept. I would even go so far as to say that it is the name, in the interwoven histories of humanity and of psychoanalysis, of a psychoanalytical concept" (200)
"what the psychoanalysis of today considers to be the earth. For psychoanalysis has an earth, sole and singular. An earth that is to be distinguished from the world of psychoanalysis" (200)
"psychoanalysis in its becoming-a-world, in its ongoing worldification, inscribes upon the earth, upon the surface of mankind's earth, upon the body of the earth and of mankind" (201)
By what processes has psychoanalysis become/is becoming "worlded"? What, to Derrida, is the difference between this specific institutionalization of psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis?
""map-reading" approach to psychoanalysis" (201)
"I say "foreign body" for two reasons: first, in order to designate something that can be neither assimilated nor rejected; neither internalized nor - since it transcends the boundary between internal and external - foreclosed; and, secondly, in order to cite Freud" (202)
"The first reference comes in a discussion of telepathy and Gedankenubertrangung (thought-transference), and the precise context is the moment when the role played by a particular gold coin (Goldstuck) defeats, and signals the limits of, an analysis. Interestingly enough, it was once again in connection with telepathy and thought-transference that Freud, in a letter to Jones, used the expression "foreign policy" in speaking of psychoanaysis as a global institution, as though this organization were a kind of state seeking to govern its relations with the rest of the world" (202)
There's a lot to think with embedded in this quote. Freud's ambivalent work on telepathy (thought transference) indicates his concerns around the uptake of psychoanalysis as a rational, scientific approach. I would like to think about Freud's "thought transference" more in terms of "non-verbal" language. It's noted difference to Jung's synchronocity (with its wide uptake by the so-called "occult" or parapsychology) is also another site of further thinking.
But then we get to psychoanalysis as a state! There's some great work to be done (or maybe it already/probably exists?) about the sovereignty of psychoanalytic concepts, and then even better work tearing down the assumption of what a state or sovereignty is in this conception. I love the way Derrida plays.
"there is practically no psychoanalysis in Africa, white or black, just as there is practically no psychoanalysis in Asia, or in the South Seas... African psychoanalysis was European, structurally defined in the profoundest way by the colonial state apparatus... I shall do no more than mention the name and the work of Franz Fanon. At that time and in that place it was altogether exceptional and untypical for psychoanalysis to raise the question of their own practice in its political, ethno-psychoanalytical and socio-institutional dimensions" (204)
"I concluded (not that I had to be a genius to do so) that this reference to the economico-geographical realm just prior to the vote on the new Constitution in Helsinki must be a replacement for something else that could not be named" (207)
"the word "country" had been used in this connection - a word that designates something other and something more than a geographical entity, more, indeed, than a mere nation, for it also implies the existence of a political apparatus, a state, civil society - and psychoanalytic institutions" (208)
"that psychoanalysis, that the psychoanalytic sphere, that psychoanalysts and their institutions are involved, implicated in one way or another, sometimes in active or passive complicity, sometimes in virtual or organized confrontation, with the forces that commit the aforesaid human-rights violations, be these directly under the control of the state or no, and whether or not they exploit, manipulate and persecute analysts and their analysands in some very specific way" (211)
"It is thus not merely a question of criticizing the IPA declaration' (213)
"Why is the International Psycho-Analytic Association, founded seventy years ago by Freud, unable to take up a position on certain kinds of violence (which I hope to define more clearly in a moment) in any other terms than those of a pre-psychoanalytic and a-psychoanalytic juridical discourse, even then adopting only the vaguest and most impoverished forms of that traditional legal idiom, forms deemed inadequate by modern human-rights jurists and lobbyists themselves?" (213)
"at present there exists no approach to political problems, no code of political discourse, that has in any rigorous way incorporated the axiomatics of a possible psychoanalysis - assuming always that psychoanalysis is possible" (214)
"The first type concerns the neutralization of ethics and of the political realm, an utter dissociation of the psychoanalytical sphere from the sphere of the citizen or moral subject in his or her public of private life" (215)
"This incredible dissociation is one of the most monstrous characteristics of the homo psychoanalyticus of our time" (215)
"The second type of implication - which may be superimposed upon the first - involves the tretreat ethical-political positions whose neutrality is only rivaled by their seeming irreproachability; they lean, moreover, away from the political and toward the ethical (and here I shall deliberately leave this immense problem in suspense). It is in this context that a doctrine of human rights is evoked - a doctrine, what is more, itself ill-defined - that shelter is taken behind a language with no psychoanalytical nature and that should certainly satisfy no one present here today" (215)
"Even if it is not to be condemned - because it is better than nothing - falling back upon the appeal to human rights seems an inadequate response in at least three ways" (215)
"- the possibility (or impossibility) of forming the notion of a dignity (Wurdigkeit), in the Kantian sense, which would transcend all values, all exchange, all equivalence, all Marktpreis, and perhaps even go beyond the idea of law itself, beyond juridical weighing-up" (215)
"The second inadequacy relates to the formality of the IPA's declaration" (216)
"Any careful reading of the Declaration of 1789 makes it clear that the worst tyrannies could come to terms with it, because every article includes an interpretation clause that can be bent in any way one wishes. The truth is that a measure of strict formality, rising above all individual transactions, is indispensible here" (216)
"Even supposing that psychoanalysis can provide a rigorous basis for a discourse of nonviolence - or of non-torture (which seems to me more fundamental) - I should certainly not venture here, merely touching upon the subject, to remind an audience such as you that this is precisely the subject of your theory, your practice, and your institutions" (217)
"Are the causes of the difficulty inherent to the discourse of psychoanalysis, to its practice, to the institutional forms it requires and to the relations it is obliged to entertain with the dominant political forces? Or are things difficult for reasons which are neither essential nor general, but which derive from a particular dominant state of the theory, the practice or the institutional forms?... if the dominant and representative forces of psychoanalysis in the world today have nothing specific to say or do, nothing original to say or contribute to the thinking and the struggle that are proceeding in connection wiht the concepts and the crude or refined realities of torture, then psychoanalysis, at least within the dominant forces that have currently appropriated its representation ... is nothing more and probably much less than those traditional medical health organizations to which the IPA distributes its principled protest" (218)
"Please understand that I am not trying to drag something of the order of psychoanalysis or of its official representation before the court of the Rights of Man. I am merely concerned to point up a fact or a possibility the seriousness of which ought to precipitate thought and action. This possibility has the character of a symptom, it indicates a state of psychoanalysis (as theory, practice and institution) that should not be interpreted solely in terms of backwardness relative to the political struggles on the national, international and supra-state levels, about which I have just been talking" (219)
"Something which seems like progress for psychoanalysis, namely the reevaluation of the basic concepts of the axiomatics of human rights and of traditional forms of political discourse, is actually merely the opening up of a void; while this process does train analytic sights upon concepts, values, and what I call the sphere of transcend values (e.g. the "dignity" of the individual in the Kantian sense - which is not a value and cannot be grasped by any value-grounded discourse), it does not in any way replace them. In this third category, then, are those theoretical constructs best able to bring out the conceptual inadequacy of the axiomatics of human rights and Western political discourse, and show the way in which these are rooted in deconstructible philosophemes. Now such theoretical constructs, as advanced as they may be, still constitute only negative discourse whose effect is to neutralize, and it is only in a hollow way that they indicate the necessity for a new ethics" (220)
"Is it thinkable that psychoanalysis might be made, as it were, into its own contemporary?" (221)
"On the other hand, theoretical advance posts are established which are unable to support the institutions that could then incorporate them. Such advance posts prove inadequate, therefore, and hence essentially incapable of embodying any concept of their own limitations and the advantages attaching thereto. On the other hand, we see an empirical proliferation of discourses and practices, of microinstitutional affiliations, of ailing or triumphant marginalities - a world of improvisation governed solely by its own currents, by isolation, by the determining inscriptions of biography, history, politics, and so on" (221)
"any traditional institution whose goals are the search for knowledge, health, or mutual aid of a humanitarian kind could subscribe to these propositions... everything here reflects sometimes indeed repeats exactly, in its hackneyed formulations - the most firmly established conventions of the framework of civil, administrative, and commercial law" (222)
"But there is inevitably a stage, in any transformation of a legal code, in which the new law (itself subject to later transformation) must appear from the standpoint of the earlier system as a condition of wildness: this is the stage of negotiation, of transition, and of the transfer of an inheritance" (223)
"telepathy - Freud's self-acknowledged conversion of 1926-1930 to Gedankenubertragung or thought-transfer notwithstanding" (224)
"Here is the text: "Definition of Psycho-Analysis. The term 'psychoanalysis' refers to a theory of personality structure and function, to the application of this theory to other branches of knowledge, and finally, to a specific psychotherapeutic technique. This body of knowledge is based on and derived from the fundamental psychological discoveries made by Sigmund Freud." This is a hapax legomenon. No institution of learning or of therapeutic practice has ever been founded on a proper name" (225)
"To save time, let me proceed directly to the most formal upshot of this, which is that anyone who ceases to appeal a priori, as a matter of dogma, to the authority of Freud's name thereby relinquishes his right to membership in the Association" (226)
"The rest of the world" is divided into two: on the one hand, it covers Europe and all those places where analysis has taken firm root (broadly speaking, the cradle of psychoanalysis in the so-called democracies of the old world); on the other hand, it also includes that immensity of territory where, for reasons of a particular kind but of great diversity, Homo psychoanalyticus is unknown or outlawed" (227)
"What I shall from now on call the Latin America of psychoanalysis is the only area in the world where there is coexistence, whether actively adversarial or not, between a strong psychoanalytic institution on the one hand and a society on the other (civil society or State) that engages in torture on a scale and of a kind far surpassing the crude traditional forms familiar everywhere" (228-229)
"To call Latin America by its name, by what that name seems to mean for psychoanalysis today" (231)
“But, first, does it in fact exist, and if so what is it? Is it the name of something so sufficient unto itself—i.e., as a continent—as to have identity? Is it the name of a concept? And what could this concept have to do with psychoanalysis?”
-it’s just a concept; a construct created by society
“For psychoanalysis has an earth, sole and singular. An earth that is to be distinguished from the world of psycho analysis. It is not my purpose today to inquire how it goes with the psychoanalytic world, or whether psychoanalysis is a world, or even whether it is of this world, but observe the figure which psychoanalysis in its becoming-a world, in its ongoing worldification, inscribes upon the earth, upon the surface of mankind's earth, upon the body of the earth and of mankind.”
-exactly, how psychoanalysis informs the world around it
“It suggests that for psychoanalysis there are continents, semi-continents, peninsular entities—some of them peninsulas thickly settled by psychoanalysts and psychoanalysis, others as yet virgin, half-continents black or white; and that there is more or less one dark continent only, and one more or less dark—dark, that is, as uncleared or unexplored land is dark, black like femaleness, like a sex, like the skin of some, like evil, like the unutterable horror of violence, torture, and extermination. All this made me wonder whether it might not be possible to adopt a sort of "map reading" approach to psychoanalysis”
-another methodology?
“How could an event be expected to take place if one responded only after having understood the question or invitation, only after having monitored the nature and meaning of the question, demand, or provocation?”
“Interestingly enough, it was once again in connection with telepathy and thought transference that Freud, in a letter to Jones, used the ex pression "foreign policy" in speaking of psychoanalysis as a global institution, as though this organization were a kind of state seeking to govern its relations with the rest of the world”
-psychoanalysis is now a way to view the world and a way to interpret life’s unanswerable questions
“The symptom is always a foreign body, and must be deciphered as such; and of course a foreign body is always a symptom, and behaves as a symptom in the body of the ego it is a body foreign to the body of the ego. That is what I am doing here; I constitute a symptom, I am the symptom, I play that role—if not for each one of you separately, then at any rate for the ego, so to speak, of psychoanalysis as an institution”
“These are among those parts of "the rest of the world" where psychoanalysis has never set foot, or in any case where it has never taken off its European shoes. I don't know whether you will find such considerations trivial or shocking. Naturally, there are outposts of your European or American psychoanalytic societies in these regions, notably in Africa, in particular places formerly or still under colonial or even neo colonial rule”
-interesting to consider what information is transferred between cultures and how it evolves and changes
“" It seemed to me that the formulation "geographical and economic circumstances" was standing in place of something that was not being said, and this distinctly not by reason of circumstances of a geographical or economic order.”
“First of all, there is no denying that this protest statement does bear some fairly specific characteristics. It is aimed, we read, at a variety of worldwide health organizations; and it is concerned with psychotherapeutic methods which deprive individuals of their "legitimate freedom," with treatments "based on political considerations," or "the interference with professional confidentiality for political purposes”
“The second inadequacy relates to the formality of the IPA's declaration. Let me make it quite clear right away that I have never subscribed purely and simply to the old critique of the formalism of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, as developed early on in Marxist circles. Not that that critique was without merit—indeed, the best proof of its merit lies in the fact that in countries flying the flag of socialism formal constitutions based on respect for the rights of man have never posed the slightest impediment (even when they are formally respected) to the most horrendous violence”
-the power in who is interpreting the document and who is able to question what is intended
“All these efforts and their products, which have the form of traditional legal pronouncements, are doubtless not as subtle as they might be in their conceptualization, nor as speedy as they might be in their application.”
“Are the causes of the difficulty inherent to the discourse of psychoanalysis, to its practice, to the institutional forms it re quires and to the relations it is obliged to entertain with the dominant political forces? Or are things difficult for reasons which are neither essential nor general, but which derive from a particular dominant state of the theory, the practice or the institutional forms?”
“Under given conditions, once a protocol has been established, naming can become a historical and political act responsibility for whose performance is inescapable”
“To call Latin America by its name, by what that name seems to mean for psychoanalysis today. At least as a start. All I could hope to contribute to that appeal today was: the naming of Latin America.”
Derrida (1991) calls for ‘geopysychoanlysis’ as a response to the lack of political engagement and contextualization in the field of IPA psychoanalysis. This piece is a call to action from the author and speaks to the IPA’s discontinuity, homogeneity and disengagement (with “the rest of the world”) at the time. The quotes below are some of the most salient quotes which summarize the author’s arguments:
200 - “I am sure it will come as no surprise to you that my speaking of ‘geopsychoanalysis’—just as one speaks of geography or geopolitics—does not mean that I am going to propose a psychoanalysis of the earth of the sort that was put forward a few decades ago, when Bachelard evoked ‘The Earth and the Reveries of Rest’ and ‘The Earth and the Reveries of the Will.’ But as inclined as I may be today to distance myself from such a psychoanalysis of the earth, as likewise from the more recent and more urgent theme of an anti-psychoanalysis of territorialization, it is nevertheless upon the earth that I wish to advance—upon what the psychoanalysis of today considers to be the earth. “
202 - “My first hypothesis, formulated on the basis of personal experience, ran as follows: In this particular psychoanalytic world, here in Paris, there was a wish to listen as soon as possible, as early as possible, as early in the day as possible, without losing any time at all, to what this stranger—this "foreign body" belonging to n body, this non-member, in whatever capacity, of any of the psychoanalytical corporations of the world (or of the "rest of the world"), whether represented here today or not, whether European or Latin American—might possibly have to say.”
204 - “My reason for recalling this today is that there is practically no psychoanalysis in Africa, white or black, just as there is practically no psychoanalysis in Asia, or in the South Seas. These are among those parts of "the rest of the world" where psychoanalysis has never set foot, or in any case where it has never taken off its European shoes. I don't know whether you will find such considerations trivial or shocking.”
205 - “The political geography of the world has changed since that time, and intercontinental balances of power have been subject to much turbulence; this can hardly have failed, it seems to me, to have had an impact on the political geography of psychoanalysis. “
230 - “Under given conditions, once a protocol has been established, naming can become a historical and political act responsibility for whose performance is inescapable. This is a responsibility that the IPA has ducked at a particularly grave moment in history—the history of psychoanalysis included. Henceforward, should psychoanalysis wish to take the measure of what is happening in Latin America, to measure itself against what the state of affairs down there reveals, to respond to what threatens, limits, defines, disfigures or exposes it, then it will be necessary, at least, to do some naming.”
231 - “To call Latin America by its name, by what that name seems to mean for psychoanalysis today. At least as a start. All I could hope to contribute to that appeal today was: the naming of Latin America.”
Questions: Due to my lay knowledge of psychoanalysis and the political history of the field, what exactly prompted this piece? What was going on in Latin American and why did Derrida write this? What was the response of the IPA and the psychoanalytic community after this piece? Were changes really made? Have others taken up geopyschoanalysis?
This sentence speaks volumes: "for someone to have an unmystified view of systemic oppression does not intrinsically or necessarily enjoin that person to any specific train of epistemological or narrative consequences" (127).
In other words, if the injustice you face does not anger you, it does not mobilize you, but you have critical consciousness anyway--how do you explain that? How is that some people (academics, activists, philosophers, politicians, educators) get motivated onto a specific train of epistemological or narrative consequence? The answer is pretty straightforward for Sedgewick: "Paranoia knows some things well and others poorly" (128). Or following Kleinian analysis, it is a position, not a diagnosis. And because it is a position, there is possibility.
Sedgwick’s (2003) writing on paranoia and reparative reading utilizes paranoia as a lens for developing critical theory. Like most of the readings from this week, Sedgwick uses Klein’s theories to develop critical theory beyond the psychoanalytic field. “What does knowledge do—the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the receiving again of knowledge of what one already knows? How, in short, is knowledge performative, and how best does one move among its causes and effects?” (124). Sedgwick uses Klein’s work on positions, and parallels the “depressive position,” with the “paranoid position.” Below are helpful quotes that demonstrate these parallels and Sedwick’s ultimate conclusions:
“The very mention of these names, some of them attaching to almost legendarily ‘paranoid’ personalities, confirms, too, Klein’s insistence that it is not people but mutable positions—or, I would want to say, practices— that can be divided between the paranoid and the reparative; it is sometimes the most paranoid-tending people who are able to, and need to, develop and disseminate the richest reparative practices” (150).
“And if the paranoid or the depressive positions operate on a smaller scale than the level of individual typology, they operate also on a larger: that of shared histories, emergent communities, and the weaving of intertextual discourse” (150).
“No less acute than a paranoid position, no less realistic, no less attached to a project of survival, and neither less nor more delusional or fantasmatic, the reparative reading position undertakes a different range of affects, ambitions, and risks. What we can best learn from such practices are, perhaps, the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (150-151).
What does reparative reading entail? Why did Sedgwick use the depressive position to expand to another category, the “paranoid position” ? Why does homosexuality and queerness play such a recurring and vital role in psychoanalytic theories?
“But I just have trouble getting interested in that….what would we know then that we don’t already know?”
-Hmm, this kind of feels counterproductive. Just because we already know how awful something is (i.e., the prevailing influence of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy in this country), does not devalue learning or examining situations which further provide support for evidence of such theories. There is value in these experiences and learning and documenting. Especially since these foundational systems actively work to silence and invalidate all information which purports such depravity (e.g., how the public is responding to CRT), so it’s necessary to uncover history and evidence of such that cannot be disproven.
“I think what I’ve found enabling about it is that it suggests the possibility of unpacking, of disentangling from their impacted and overdetermined historical relation to each other some of the separate elements of the intellectual baggage that many of us carry around under a label such as “the hermeneutics of suspicion.”
-suggesting that “for someone to have an un mystified, angry view of large and genuinely systemic oppressions does not intrinsically or necessarily enjoin that person to any specific train of epistemological or narrative consequences.” – exactly, the knowledge provides something even if it validates what is already known and even if such information may not do something at this exact moment in time.
“Though ethically very fraught, the choice is not self-evident; whether or not to undertake this highly compelling tracing-and-exposure project represents a strategic and logical decision, not necessarily a categorical imperative.”
-but why is that? Is that because the assumption is that gaining such knowledge may not actively change things?
“What does knowledge do – the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the receiving again of knowledge of what one already knows? How, in short, is knowledge performative, and how best does one move among its causes and effects?”
“the imperative framing will do funny things to a hermeneutics of suspicion”
“the man of suspicion double-bluffing the man of guile: in the hands of thinkers after Freud, paranoia has by now candidly become less a diagnosis than a prescription. In a world where no one need be delusional to find evidence of systemic oppression, to theorize out of anything but a critical stance has come to seem naïve, pious, or complaisant.” -THIS.
“what is illuminated by an understanding of paranoia is not how homosexuality works, but how homophobia and heterosexism work – in short, if one understands these oppressions to be systemic, how the world works”
-what does the construct tell us if not about what factors are related and involved in said construct, à becoming a methodology
“paranoia tends to be contagious; more specifically, paranoia is drawn toward and tends to construct symmetrical relations, in particular symmetrical epistemologies”
“Paranoia is an inescapable interpretive doubling of presence” -exactly, at what point does one cross the threshold of paranoia, can one walk it back? Paranoia = awareness, critical awareness, but often only viewed that way when there’s “significant evidence”-something that can only be feasibly determined by the very people who determine one is paranoid; evoking more paranoia
“to practice other than paranoid forms of knowing does not, in itself, entail a denial of the reality or gravity of enmity or oppression” -not all people are able to have such a disinterested stance though, how is that reconciled then?
“Klein wanted to convey, with the idea of position, a much more flexible to-and-fro process between one and the other than is normally meant by regression to fixation points in the developmental phase” – reminds me of the theory of equifinality and multifinality
“They represent a way, among other ways, of seeking, finding, and organizing knowledge. Paranoia knows some things well and others poorly” –
“surprise is precisely what the paranoid seeks to eliminate, but it is also what, in the event, he survives by reading as a frightening incentive: he can never be paranoid enough” -exactly, it’s a tension that can never be solved
“Paranoia seems to require being imitated to be understood, and it, in turn, seems to understand only by imitation” -like calls to like
“paranoid imperative that: if the violence of such gender reification cannot be definitively halted in advance, it must at least never arrive on any conceptual scene as a surprise.” -more dangerous for something to occur than to be unanticipated
“the paranoid trust in exposure seemingly depends, in addition, on an infinite reservoir of naivete in those who make up the audience for these unveiling.”
“because there can be terrible surprises but also good ones” – being able to recognize the hope is important but it can be obscured by the paranoia
“doesn’t reading queer mean learning, among other things, that mistakes can be good rather than bad surprises?”
"to apply a "hermeneutic of suspicion" is, I believe, widely understood as a mandatory injunction rather than a possibility among other possibilities" (4)
I love how Sedgwick's writing opens the field for alternative ways of reading!
"An affect theory is, among other things, a mode of selective scanning and amplification; for this reason, any affect theory risks being somewhat tautological, but because of its wide reach and rigorous exclusiveness, a strong theory risks being strongly tautological" (12)
"What marks the paranoid impulse in these pages is, I would say, less the stress on reflexive mimesis than the seeming faith in exposure" (16)
This reminds me of Latour's critique of critique.
"Furthermore, the force of any interpretive project of unveiling hidden violence would seem to depend on a cultural context, like the one assumed in Foucault's early works, in which violence would be deprecated and hence hidden in the first place. Why bother exposing the ruses of power in a country where, at any given moment, 40 percent of young black men are enrolled in the penal system? In the United states and internationally, while there is plenty of hidden violence that requires exposure, there is also, and increasingly, an ethos where forms of violence that are hyper-visible from the start may be offered as an exemplary spectacle, rather than remaining to be unveiled as a scandalous secret. Human rights controversy around, for example, torture and disappearances in Argentina, or the use of mass rape as part of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, marks - not an unveiling of practices that had not been hidden or naturalized - but a wrestle of different frameworks of visibility" (17)
We are back to the language of visibility and seeing as a form of knowing. I'm wondering how to think outside/beyond/underneath/a preposition that doesn't rely on a spatial metaphor of this locked metaphor of seeing/knowing, and I'm still in the process of identifying Blind and critical disability scholars who are doing this work. Any suggestions would be great!
"Here, perhaps, Klein is of more help than Tomkins: to read from a reparative position is to surrender the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new: to a reparatively positioned reader, it can seem realistic and necessary to experience surprise. Because there can be terrible surprises, however, there can also be good ones. Hope, often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates" (22)
I like this argument for surprise in reading. Too often I think that gets typed as "naivete."
"The desire of a reparative impulse, on the other hand, is additive and accretive. Its fear, a realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self. To view camp as, among other things, the communal, historically dense exploration of a variety of reparative practices is to be able to do better justice to many of the defining elements of classic camp performance: the startling, juicy displays of excess erudition, for example; the passionate, often hilarious antiquarianism, the prodigal production of alternative historiographies; the "over"-attachment to fragmentary, marginal, waste, or leftover products; the rich, highly interruptive affective variety; the irrepressible fascination with ventriloquistic experimentation; the disorienting juxtapositions of present with past, and popular with high culture" (25)
"That pedagogy can be a very sexy matter was no more news to Rousseau than to Plato or Dante" (27)
Love this shoutout from Sedgwick. Nerd moment: this is a really important part of how Dante understands sodomy in Inferno -- I think it's cool that the poetic structure of Dante's dialogue with his former teacher, Brunetto Latini, challenges contemporary readings of Dante's (and whatever broader category Dante's work indexes -- Catholic/Christian/Italian/European etc.) understanding of sodomy, sin, and teaching.
I would add bell hooks' writing on the eroticism within pedagogy which I don't think gets discussed and engaged with enough. This isn't a complaint that Sedgwick does not cite hooks but rather a general statement about how the erotics of pedagogy is not discussed in most circles. My assumption for why this is: desire is scary, and the erotics of pedagogy opens up the problematic of power, teaching/learning, and desire in ways that are uncomfortable for or considered dangerous by most American educators. Too many people interpret-to-dismiss-or-reveal this (i.e. a stereotypical paranoid reading) as "sleeping with students" rather than addressing desire (defined broadly and narrowly, similar yet distinct from Freud's "sex") as an emergent and complicated part of the teaching process.
"The prohibitive problem, however, has been in the limitations of present theoretical vocabularies rather than in the reparative motive itself. No less acute than a paranoid position, no less realistic, no less attached to a project of survival, and neither less nor more delusional or fantasmatic, the reparative reading position undertakes a different range of affects, ambitions, and risks. What we can best learn from such practices are, perhaps, the many ways in which selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture - even a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them" (31, my emphasis)
Queer folks love to read (and clock) each other all the time. I especially like reading folks for queerness -- a paranoid reading that takes pleasure in uncovering hidden desires and unclaimed identifications. I appreciate Sedgwick's appeal to consider an alternative form of reading with different affects -- reparative reading -- that adds rather than reveals. How might reparative reading add to queer reading?
"Stripped of its depth (libido, motive, conflict, drives, body), the cognitive unconscious is technically much closer to what Freud called the preconscious: a system governed by the secondary processes, bound to word-presentations, and separated from the raging unconscious by a barrier of censorship" (159)
"The unconscious "consists of traces and associations of traces that have grown apart from initial experience, and the person can no longer enter into a direct relation with what took place: the experience has gotten lost and forms an unconscious internal reality. And because it is the destiny of experience to get lost the unconscious is not a memory." To put this another way, the unconscious is another neurological scene: it is part of the general play of neurological events, but is not directly mapable with them. For Answermet and Magistretti, fantasy and the unconscious are what happens when neurology becomes relational and strange" (164, my italics)
"Following Ferenczi, I would like to persist with the argument that the neurophysiological body is always/already a fantastic, sexualized body: it requires no associative event to render it relational and strange. From the first, neurophysiology is naturally athwart. Without question, we spend our lives elaborating the entanglements of fantasy, sexuality, biology; but these events draw on substrata that are already entangled each with the other" (164)
"Many of these difficulties arise from how the brain is commonly imagined to be a disembodied organ, even as it is promoted as embodiment par excellence. That is, the embodiment promised by neurological data is grounded too often in a kind of exceptionalism: the matter of mind, it is supposed, is of a different kind from the matter of the body. Mind is to be found here (centrally, cerebrally), but not there (peripherally, viscerally)" (165)
I really appreciate the way Wilson reframes the question of locating "the mind" (not to mention the unconscious) in neuroscience. Her argument opens up a space for her "gut feminism," her relocation of mindedness within different bodily processes.
Recently, I have been thinking about cognitivist perspectives and claims about neuroreductionism (particularly in Matthew Wolf-Meyer's Unraveling). Is the cognitivist perspective a reductionism in the service of understanding the brain (or perhaps we can extend it to "the nervous system")? As Mike explained in class, reductionism is useful so long as the reductionists-in-question understand the limits which operationalize their reducitonism.
1915: "divide the dream into two 'text's - the manifest text, the part Freud remembers when he wakes up, and the latent text, the thoughts and associations that come to him when thinking about the dream. Rather than one being conscious and the other unconscious, it's clear that both texts' are in fact conscious or perfectly capable of becoming conscious. So we have to look for the unconscious in a system that operates on the connection between the two"
Common currency of two systems (conscious + unconscious): thought. What constitutes "a thought"?
1928: Georges Politzer's Critique of the Foundations of Psychology
"The unconscious, for [Politzer], expresses a first-person drama via a "personal dialectic" as he called it (Politzer, p. 69). The job of interpreting the formations of the unconscious - dreams, for example - is one of uncovering these intimate rather than conventional significations... Politzer rejected what he saw as Freud's impersonal characterization of the unconscious in terms of agencies, forces, and psychical economy. Politzer was opposed to any abstraction in psychology"
"Instead of two texts in reality we have just one. The dream isn't derivative of anything... It is simply the same idea expressed differently... We can still say the dream has a meaning, but that meaning is immanent to it in the same way that the theme of a play is immanent to its text, or the laws of gravity are immanent to the forces of nature. It does not exist separately alongside them"
1960: "This second text is inscribed, but we need to look for its inscription in strange places, which he says may range from the body, memories, distortions of memories, semantic evolution, and cultural traditions (Ecrits, 259)"
"Prägnanz is the idea, drawn from Gestalt psychology, that our visual perception has the tendency to organize the images we see into a neat, regular cohesion... for Laplanche, this provides a model for how unconscious and conscious systems interact"
Leclaire: "The unconscious is not the ground which has been prepared to give more sparkle and depth to the painted composition: it is the earlier sketch which has been covered over before the canvas is used for another picture. If we use a comparison of a musical order, the unconscious is not the counterpoint of a fugue or the harmonics of a melodic line: it is the jazz one hears despite oneself behind the Haydn quartet when the radio is badly tuned or not sufficiently selective. The unconscious is not the message one strives to read on an old parchment: it is another text written underneath and which must be read by illuminating it from behind or with the help of a developer" (quoted by Lemaire, p. 137-138)
The way this article frames the unconscious, it seems like the semiotics of the unconscious becomes a necessary task. However, if knowing the unconscious becomes impossible, perhaps a better approach would be an "unconscious of semiosis"?