precisely there where

Though it's not that this hasn't happened, or doesn't happen, at other points, this semester it has felt especially hard to maintain a thinking life that short-circuits the text/class cycle. So everything feeds into the classroom, plays out there, is expended there, with nothing left over--with it feeling like there is nothing left over, like everything expended has also been exhausted. But as I'm describing the feeling that this is a total experience, with nothing left over/left out--in the moment of this very expression--the inadequacy of the formulation also presents itself: I have been thinking about things, in fact, about these very things, about "expression" and in particular the expression of the destructive instinct and how, in Freud's thinking and in those who come after him, the expression of the destructive instinct is never total, or never equal to the primacy of the "death drive," from which it can be seen to arise. So the matter here, the thing that those who pick up and talk about the death drive and aggression discuss, is what happens to after the drive is externalized in the destructive instinct, what happens to that "part" that is internalized post-expression?

Jean Laplanche takes up the problem of the before/beyond of aggressiveness in Life & Death in Psychoanalysis, a book I read many years back in Jonathan Hall's seminar on Laplanche, during a period of relative immersion in his work that I shared with my friend Michelle Cho. I have the feeling that my attempt to work through these problems now was already done at that point, in a different way, and that I have long forgotten any of the conclusions I arrived at then but seek them out now, again. In Chapter 5, "Aggressiveness and Sadomasochism," he writes,

And yet, the essential dimension of the affirmation of a death drive lies neither in the discovery of aggressiveness, or in its theorization, nor even in the fact of hypostatizing it as a biological tendency or a metaphysical universal. It is in the idea that the aggressiveness is first of all directed against the subject and, as it were, stagnant within him, before being deflected toward the outside--"subject" here being understood at every level: the most elementary biological being, a protist or cell, as well as the multicellular biological organism, and, of course, the human individual both in his biological individuality and in his "psychical life." Such is the thesis of "primary masochism," and there appears to be massive evidence leading us to suppose that that thesis is profoundly new, that it emerges only with the positing, in 1920, of the mythical being called the death drive. Nevertheless, without wishing to minimize the novelty of Freud's last theory of drives, we shall attempt to show precisely the tenuous but solid link binding it to the thesis evolved in 1915 from both clinical and dialectical considerations concerning the genesis of sadomasochism. That theory--which is implicit, no doubt imperfectly elaborated by Freud himself, and, above all, quickly covered over--entails, we believe, a double armature: the use of the notion of "propping" or anaclisis in the theory of sadomasochism, and the priority of the masochistic moment in the genesis of the sadomasochistic drive insofar as the latter is a sexual drive (and consequently a drive in the true sense of the Freudian Trieb). (86)

In this passage, it is striking that Laplanche wants both to identify the death drive as "new," as not otherwise formulated by Freud, in his earlier work, and to indicate its earlier form in the idea of sadomasochism (which also, and importantly for Laplanche, expounds the notion of "propping" or anaclisis), as developed in "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes." What interests me about this description is the location of aggressiveness in "primary masochism,"which locates or implies the "subject" as being the initial aim or target of aggressiveness. "Propping" or anaclisis is important to this it comes in where masochism threatens to become generalized to characterizing all phenomena. Laplanche writes, "But it remains that the subject is masochistic only insofar as he derives enjoyment precisely there where he suffers, and not insofar as he suffers in one place in order to derive enjoyment in another, as a function of some arithmetic or algebra of pleasure. This may also be formulated as follows: the subject suffers in order to derive enjoyment and not only in order to be able to derive enjoyment (or to pay the "tax" [wonders: is this "tax" like the "incentive bonus" of forepleasure (Vorliebe)] for enjoyment)" (104). What this stress on "precisely there where" does is highlight the extent to which this point of juncture corresponds to the logic of "propping," to the "that leaning of nascent sexuality on nonsexual activities" that Laplanche describes in the chapter on aggressiveness and sadomasochism (88). And this is mirrored in the distinction drawn between aggressiveness (non-sexual) and sadism/masochism (sexual). Propping provides a way of talking about this relation of dependence or emergence that is not actualized as the expression or externalization of an instinct (as in the destructive instinct). Instead, "Sexuality appears as a drive that can be isolated and observed only at the moment at which the nonsexual activity, the vital function, becomes detached from its natural object or loses it." (88). This "movement of anaclisis or propping" (87) yields a "slippage...within the genesis of the sexual drive" and it is this "slippage" that is present even in relations of masochism whose pleasure is "precisely there where" it suffers.

This is all a somewhat roundabout and not yet quite coherent way of getting to the idea that the distinction between paying for the object (precisely there were) vs. paying a "tax" for its future use is relevant to the remainder that is left after the externalization of the death drive in the destructive instinct. In his 1960 essay, "Aggressivity," Daniel Lagache describes this exchange as an abandonment (this is resonant with Laplanche's description of the detachment of the "vital function" from the "natural object" above):

There is a series of actions--scratching, excretion, ejaculation, autotomia--in which the reduction of tension occurs by modifying, destroying, or abandoning a part of the body that was the "source" of an unpleasurable tension and by transforming it into an external thing. It is close to Freud's idea on the constitution of the object by the projection of the unpleasurable. But, it must be noted, this self-mutilation is a sacrifice of the part for the whole. The lizard abandons his tail, but it does not lose its head. In other words, it is only by artificially limiting the field of thought that such reactions can be considered as being favorable to a primary tendency to active self-destruction. ("Aggressivity" (1960) in The Works of Daniel Lagache 1938-1964, 230-231)

With the phrase "limiting the field of thought," Lagache recalls his starting point in the essay, where he stated that "[i]n a limited field, an activity appears to be quite simply an activity. Extend the tempero-spatial field ever so little, and it is enough to look like a fight" (210). These phrases point to the conflict, rather than the harmony, inherent in a the field, and this, in turn, registers the "primary" state (in both "primary masochism" and "primary narcissism") as that "proceeds from the force of things, from circumstances, from a convergence of the child's weakness and the environment's caretaking" (231). From this schema, needs precede wishes, and wishes, in turn, "resort deviously to the demand," and demands go on to become protests when the demand is frustrated. With this chain of relations, Lagache proposes that aggressivity, "the unity of meaning or intention of the world of aggressions," is of greater concern that acts of aggression, for in his view, all actions can become act of aggression. So "aggressivity" thus implies this relation of different impingements: "Aggressivity is mobilized by the endogenous emergence of a need, felt as a threat within the body or, if it is preferred, as an internal frustration. It is logical, in Freudian metapsychology, to consider as secondary the aggressivity with which the wish pursues its aims through the mediation of the demand" (218). Here, we can see that Lagache returns to a point of trying to think the "force of things" but that aggressivity itself still seems to imply some notion of a unity of meaning. Is this the return emergence of the anaclitic relation at the heart of the death drive? Or in the "heart's desire" of the death drive?

picture: Faded Lizard Tail

Words Edgewise

Today, I attended a talk by Eric Hayot at the University of Minnesota, which took as intertext his essay "Against Periodization," although the talk concerned cosmology and poetics; the connection between these is interesting--the desire to challenge periodization of course comes from a perspective that values history. So it's not just that this value produces an ideological blind spot, which goes by the name of "aesthetic experience," as if this is the kind of exception upon which the value of the historical then emerges. Perhaps it's true that every theory has such a spot, but what seems untenable about Hayot's approach is that the critical value of history, which emerges out of a desire to raise the value of the humanities on its own turns, emerges as a theory of everything, a cosmology, if you will. Hayot claims that his interest is in thinking about concepts that can themselves overcome a split that itself functions to signify cosmological worlds and post-cosmological worlds: a split between the premodern and modern.

What my interest is in is looking at the figure of this split. I don't think I would dispute the idea that periodization produces a rupture or fracture that is, perhaps, not all it is cracked up to be. I'm curious about the desire or gesture to unify around this split or to step outside of it from a distance that would render it invisible (Hayot uses the idea of asking his students what we will look like in 1000 years as an example of a distance that would render the division between Victorian and modern periods, for example, invisible), and mostly I'm curious about it because it seems to emerge from the shortcomings of the model of the split or fracture, which, I would propose, seems to assume the psychoanalytic model of projection or projective identification as its fundamental operating procedure. This models presents as the problem to be overcome the difficulty of stepping outside of your own aesthetic experience. When Hayot described the problem of not knowing if the split or rupture was there at the conceptual level (i.e. in terms of a presentist scholarly perspective) or at the level of the event (i.e. actually in history), he was invoking this model of the projection in order to conceptualize this split. Projection usually involves the idea of projective identification; it is there in formulations that make use of the figure of a self and other, in other words to think about how objects are set against and become external to individuals. As is often the case, the ethical problems associated with this model emerge from the difficulty in formulating a relation to the other that involves a problematic understanding of difference. The impulse to find a transconcept, or an idea that would assert the sameness of what lies on either side of the split, or a more general form that could traverse these sides can be understood as a way to negotiate with the difficulty of maintaining an adequate relation between these sides, to manage anxiety about one's blindspots actually--to include everything.

So, to return again, my interest in this moment lies perhaps in my desire to maintain the ambivalence of this split, and the psychical experience that it entails. It leads me, in fact, to a point where I wonder whether one of the real values of psychoanalytic theory is that it allows us to understand aesthetics not merely as a theory of beauty or perception, but as a theory of experience, in particular of sensory experience, or as Freud says in "The Uncanny," "a theory of the quality of feelings." From this perspective, the value of the historical, which I mentioned above, does not just have aesthetic experience as its blind spot, because it would say that it includes it, but the value exerted by the historical encloses the aesthetic within it as a kind of foundational gesture of the split it then goes on to critique. Much like the theory of projective identification, which includes the aesthetic as a form of perception or identification, this model of the rupture-to-be-overcome includes the aesthetic but is not able to let aesthetic experiences stand, as "things" in their own right, "things" that are experiences before they are reified or turned into objects.

This is, we might posit, the value of thought--which is not nearly equatable but always replaced in the institution with the idea of the value of the humanities. The value of thought, however, is less codifiable, less professionalizable, less justifiable. It made me think about how yesterday, when I showed students in my class on the rhetoric of everyday life Masao Adachi's film AKA Serial Killer, they had kind of set up some terms for thinking about being bombarded with the environment. Within the first twenty minutes, it becomes possible to experience even the image of a sunflower as a menace, or as demanding something from the viewer/the camera. In this way, it's about information overload before information overload (1969) and about how becoming desensitized is also, perhaps, a demand. I cite this because the film is the opposite of the mode discussed by Hayot; the mode that would relieve a viewer or reader of the perspective of rupture was one that "humbled" one, a view from a distance. Adachi loses sight of a rupture, split, or fracture because it is continually recast, and recast as the instantiation of environment. Rather than representing desensitization, the film produces an environment in which one is made to feel the demand or need for it. And by doing so, the film refigures the model of projective identification, which is generally assumed as the model of primary relating.

To return, then, to psychoanalysis, this is where both Balint's and Winnicott's ideas about the destructiveness of primary love become significant. According to Balint, primary love is a state in which one partner has all of the interests, desires, and needs and the other partner has none. It replaces or is prior to the scene of projection, because, as Winnicott describes, it is a state that precedes integration/disintegration--a state he calls nonintegration, in which what can be seen is that the primary relation assumed by projective identification (between a self and other, in whatever conceptual terms undertaken) already moves to turn an environmental provision into the demand of an other, an object, a thing. This is always a destructive move. Trying to turn it into an ethical or moral relationship (to an other) or to use it as a "humbling" experience misses the point that Winnicott identifies: that these various attitudes do not help us to "repair" our destructiveness, though they can function as a signal that we could "get to" it, or experience it, and therefore take responsibility for it. The problem is, though, I think, that any sort of ethical or moral or epistemological or whatever gesture often functions to defend against or prevent one from taking what Winnicott calls "full responsibility for one's destructiveness." The destructiveness he's talking about--to return to where I started--and the reason that it's defended against has to do with the otherwise very meaninglessness of aesthetic experience, which is also something that does not sit well with those who value history or (inter-)disciplinary professionalism--in the sense that such meaninglessness becomes intolerable, or always seems to be in need of a rationale, justification, or schematization. This is the scene of obliteration that Denise Ferreira da Silva describes in Toward a Global Idea of Race, the scene that is produced via the deployment of the racial. In the schema I've been describing, it might be possible to see how the state of nonintegration or primary love enforces the idea that the deployment of reparative knowledge (as Silva describes via the racial) always contains within it a moment of violence or destructiveness that it seeks to cover over. What's interesting about Winnicott is that because he's so interested in the psychical usefulness of his theoretical information, he does end up "prescribing" the usefulness of this insight into one's destructiveness. Taking responsibility in this sense is not an ethical or positive formulation; Winnicott suggests that what experiencing feelings of destructiveness allows us to do is "not to mobilize it in the service of hate." To do more than this, to think that one is doing more when one takes responsibility, certainly seems today to be the basis of so many misperceptions about where, for example, the problems of this system of racialized state violence lie.

picture: Sunflower, from AKA Serial Killer (Masao Adachi, 1969)--film reference, Rei Terada. 

Adjuncting Love

Recently, questions about desire and love have come out of the woodwork in conversations about graduate/adjunct labor, the work of academia, and intellectual occupations more generally. Meanwhile, student workers at the University of California are on strike protesting unfair labor practices. In the last five years, writing on the working conditions in California public education has been instrumental in communicating the terms of this struggle to those located within and without; the website Remaking the University and the blog/journal Reclamations are prominent examples of places where this writing is taking place. Even while not the explicit subject matter of this writing, the affective intensity of such work is evident here as well as in the on-the-ground organization, activism, and struggle that much of the writing work grapples with, describes, inspires, and responds to. Two recent examples of work that exhibits this affective intensity are "Why We are Striking," a document signed "some strikers, some friends," which puts forth the terms of the current strike at the UC over unfair labor practices; and Earl Perez-Foust's "Why Solidarity Is Important, or an Open Letter to UC Faculty," which addresses the importance of faculty members supporting the strike as a way of making conversations about the conditions of the academic workplace more transparent.

One thing about the intensity of this work that's worth noting is the way that it considers itself to be destructive, or it understands that this is its potential; this is to be understood in opposition to the do what you love ideology that allows the labor of academic work to go unacknowledged as such. While such a naive "love" is widely recognized as "too much," it also becomes quite clear, as Hannah Black describes in "You Are Too Much," that a model, or perhaps better, a narrative, of love that affirms the fitness of the object is long past. Black identifies the way that the model of heterosexual love is not only not available to those who don't identify with this narrative, but "how blackness or queerness or even being gendered female in a white male supremacist world can make it hard to accept love because you are encouraged from childhood to hate yourself." I'm extending her discussion about race and sexuality to academia, because I think that her central insight about love, that the choice we have about it is reserved for the attitude we have toward hate, poses something worthwhile for the discussion. As she finds, there are two positions indicated by the White Family: over-attachment (the maintaining of a belief in attachment as health, as figured in the overly attached girlfriend) and hate or destructiveness (being foreclosed from the narrative, refusing the narrative). Black writes, "For the White Family love is health, but for us love is at once a symbol of a possible future, a vanishing present, and the sign of the patriarchal white permafrost that threatens to destroy us. If we are ambivalent about love in its present form, it is only because, against the odds, we choose to feel something other than hatred."

We might export these two positions to the realm of academic labor: over-attachment or destructiveness. This invites a brief (as brief as possible) discussion of an essay that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Elizabeth Segran's "The Danger of Victimizing Ph.D.'s." Her argument can be surmised from the subtitle, "No one but you is forcing you to accept low-paid adjunct work," and what's shocking about the piece (in addition to the fact that there's no mention of the "productive" ways that people at her former graduate institution are also, on the same day, attempting to influence the "labor market") is that there's no account of the complexity of "choice," as an instance of coerced volition in a narrative that's not just ideological, but "bad" psychology.

Segran's presentation of this choice ("Yet Ph.D.’s have the power to resist. They can choose to reject academe altogether and find satisfying work elsewhere.") and her valorization of professionalization (if you fail in being a professional academic, you just need to choose another field in which you can be a professional success) is laughable, perhaps, on certain days, at certain times, because the other side of what she presents is all that cannot be included in such choices, including the very idea of a "choice" as something that can be made "freely" by an individual. As 1970s Marxist feminism has shown, and as this article by low end theory also notes (thanks to Michelle Ty for the reference), choices, in particular about objects of love, are always also coercions. I keep dwelling on this insight, now outdated—perhaps too outdated to explain love now, but also, I suspect, not—in thinking about the close residence of love and hate and the role of destructiveness in love. For as much as Black writes against "love," she also gets that the joke about overattachment is not that funny: "One side of the joke — that a woman would have to be crazy to long for entry into a couple — is negated by the other — that a woman who can’t negotiate her way into a couple is crazy." Put otherwise: One side of the joke—that a PhD has to be crazy to long for entry into academia—is negated by the other—that a PhD who can't negotiate her way into academia is crazy. This ambivalence cannot be resolved by simply choosing another object to love, another profession, another .com identity.

At least, it's not a choice of the sort that I'd want to make. There's no "choice," for example, in some strikers, some friends' phrasing "Today’s strikers, tomorrow’s adjuncts." But there is something to think about in the continuity that is asserted between these positions, which are often seen as occupying different places in society: one, choosing to feel something other than hatred (i.e. choosing destructiveness) and the other, overattached, atomized, nostalgic, failed. The continuity is further asserted at the end of the document with the statement, "We are striking so that we do not end up like the fortunate ones."  In other words, I think, we are striking so that we don't have to be the professionals, the ones for whom choice is both a matter of production and consumption.

Although throughout grad school I resisted professionalization and I was a striker, it's taken me quite some time to see where this leaves me, outside of feeling like I am not a part of anything--too far from the UC (and from my life as a grad student) to be anything but a spectator and too alienated from the University of Minnesota (and my life as an academic) to do anything there. But the insidious component, which I've been trying to describe, is the way that my market failure has contributed to my feeling that I also am not worth enough to contribute to these conversations—the ones at the UC that I described above and read so avidly—as anything more than an overattached spectator. It's been harder to resist feeling like my lack of success on the job market is not tied to wanting "too much," harder to think in an un-atomized, de-individualized way about the plethora of rejection and nonadmittance to the institution.

In other words, it's hard to go from being a striker to an adjunct; it's hard to feel like overattachment is your fate (or that the White Family is) and to come up with a way to articulate a resistance to this structure of affective relations when your relation to the institution seems to affirm that fate. But what the continuity that is described by some strikers, some friends suggests is finally quite helpful for thinking about the very real reasons that are there for not wanting to count oneself as part of the "fortunate." For the Tenure-Track Professor and the White Family (and with the understanding that these are not social categories but upheld and often invisible ideals), there is no longer a reason to feel ambivalent about love, or perhaps better, there's always another reason to feel ambivalent about love, but perhaps too there's no longer a reason to feel ambivalent about one's love objects. In addition to the fact that this is "too bad," the loss of such ambivalence, of a relation to a loved object that does not involve the capacity to hold one's destructiveness, is a profound but perhaps less apparent price to be paid for professionalism.

Coup

At one of the Egyptian solidarity protests held at the Saint Paul Capitol Building, my exchange with the other protestors was limited to a single sentence, which is telling, in its various ways. First, of course, because of my personal feelings of alienation from the Twin Cities, and second, for what those words word. For it seems to be the case, more often than not, that words here do rile, they irk, they pry and push at the same time. An effect that seems to be related to the alienation, not the other way around. Thing like this seriously make me question my ability to make it, post-partum, as if still, I can’t get my bearings. The words, “Anti-War Protest March 19 [flyer handed]—it’s all the same thing,” still ring in my ears. And perhaps not just because of this moment, but because the “same” in fact is used in places where “solidarity” is meant to connect one to another these disparately fighting causes. Recalling now LA protests, I got and wanted this in 2003. Even if I wasn’t a part of something particular then, and also hadn’t really done the work to elaborate the causes, I do remember feeling pulled solidly into something. But now that the time of revolution has come, that the person who told me “it’s all the same” will also still encounter the difficulty of such a position, as just a year ago disunited student protestors as UCLA held two versions of March 4, there remains a vague distance in me, one that is at once self-defeating and oppositional. Part of it is the feeling that anything that I think or write, any space that I take, even in my own mind, is a struggle. Taking up space, taking it out on space. While the world seems to be on the move, the space here—in my head and that I occupy—seems to be totally caught up, stagnant, resistant. Moving on, so to speak, is inconceivable. And yet, in writing this, I am attempting to ask whether this position and these feelings also offers something, whether there is recuperation, which, I think would be my first step towards revolution.

picture and artwork by the illustrious Rebecca Ellen Bowden