Thinking the uncommon

In one of the most interesting post I have encountered recently in the blogosphere–Object-Oriented Psychoanalysis and Derridean Deconstruction–Cengiz Erdem argues that the common things of everyday existence are produced out of the depressive position or abnormalities. As the author comments, psychic development is complemented by the death drive. Whereas this relationship is typically represented as a binary opposition in mainstream discourse, it is here presented as a reciprocally determined double-bind. Erdem’s claim, following Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion, is that “for a healthy creative process to take place giving birth to new thought” an antecedent disintegration or fragmentation of common sense is required. In other words, the breakdown of one’s consciousness and knowledge is the necessary condition for the possibility of reintegrating novel ideas and producing creative new thought.

In psychoanalytic terms, this entails the negation or considered dissent of the predominant symbolic order in which one explicates the problems inherent to the structure of society. In this questioning process–given that individuals are necessarily complicit in socio-symbolic acculturation–the subject loses him- or herself, splintering one’s formerly stable and consistent identity. That is to say, since subjects are constituted by symbolic structuring, to interrogate this is to persecute one’s very self. As the author says later on, “The subject of the death drive shakes the foundations upon which is built its own mode of being”. But following the confrontation of the “banalities of symbolic societies” the subject tends towards the reparation, reconciliation, and reconstructing of the symbolic order, albeit in a structure otherwise than before.

This becoming self-consciousness doubtless entails pain and subjective intensity. In the case of Heidegger’s being-towards-death, this process involves hopelessness, despair, and angst. Or in Kierkegaardian terms, it is the anxiety or dizziness of freedom. But rather than focus on escape as the solution, as the existentialists understood Platonic rationalism and Western culture as a whole doing, this interior angst should be valorized as the creative agency constitutive of the subject. As Nietzsche put it, pain, suffering, and horror are prerequisites for the novel becomings of existence because the creation of new thoughts and uncommon individuation requires the destruction of old forms to clear space for the new.

Erdem identifies a similar theme in critical theory: “The critical theorist breaks down the meaning of the text and out of the pieces recreates a new meaning, which is to say that creativity bears within itself destructivity and inversely. It may not be necessary to destroy something intentionally to create something new, but to have destroyed something is usually a consequence of having created something new”. In Derridean terms, the peripheral meaning of a text internally contradicts the dominant meaning, causing the text to split and collapse on its own accord. In this sense, the creative drive of a text that brings it into being and the destructive drive that causes its ultimate dissolution “are within and without one another at the same time”. In the final analysis, Erdem concludes that Derrida and his deconstruction project are ineffective when it comes to the generative strategy of re-creating objects or texts out of disintegrated ruins, claiming that he “perpetually postpones” effective or affirmative action, a judgment I will let stand as is and let the reader decide on.

Given my own interest in Deleuze, the psychoanalytic notion that creative thought emerges out of meaningless chaos strikes me as very close to Deleuze’s objects of encounter as considered in Difference and Repetition. What engenders thought or what forces us to think, as Deleuze tell us, is an object of encounter, something that is not immediately recognizable to the dogmatic image. That is to say, it is discordant from the vantage point of recognition and identity. It “perplexes” thought and “forces it to pose a problem” (p. 140). In this way the violent encounter of something unthinkable unhinges common sense from its streamline functioning, creating a discord in the faculties of recognition, and compels thought to grasp that which is not immediately intelligible. In a memorial passage Deleuze states the experience of an uncommon object in this way: “It is not a sensible being but the being of the sensible. It is not the given but that by which the given is given. It is therefore in a certain sense the imperceptible” (p. 140).

So while the object of an encounter indeed stumps thought, it can only be said of intensive objects that thought truly begins. In this sense, familiar thoughts and opinions are only ever the product of events in which thought is disturbingly faced with what it does not directly identify as something previously observed. Or to express it in a simple sentence, thought is engendered by introducing aberration into thought. All of this suggests that objects of encounter are the necessary condition for possible new and stable thoughts to emerge. This is, for Deleuze, what it means to think an original, novel or uncommon thought: neglect the common values and sensible concerns of how things stand in society at large. Knowledge is only conditioned by the unidentifiable condition of the uncanny, the imperceptible.

Neoconservatism in an Age of Secularism

According to psychoanalysis, in the natural state of existence (genealogically/archeologically speaking), before there was Law and transgression, there existed an infinite amount of possibilities; no obstacles but freedom itself. The catch was that such an abyss of freedom was brutally dizzying and some constraints needed to be made to “free oneself” of freedom. In short, humanity was a helpless animal “deprived of immediate instinctual support” or innate instincts and the “too-muchness” of nature was overwhelming.

In order to counteract the dizziness of freedom a withdrawal took place in which symbolic norms and regulations were imposed and enacted for the purpose of setting a firm limit to absolute freedom. Thus, freedom was redrawn to constitute a freedom to violate the Law, which was much better than the previous state of things. So the story goes. The resultant situation, in retrospection, is a condition of arbitrarily imposed laws that were set up under the guise of “natural authority” in order to set limits for us all. In other words, the responsibility that should have been ours to “decide upon the undecidable” is already taken care of for us by an “external master.” This circumstance suites us fine, however, because it conceals from ourselves the burden of defining our own limitations. Ironically, we now experience this limitation – a firm limit imposed to liberate us from dizzying freedom – as suffocation.

It seems absurd then, from this point of view, to call for a recovery of traditional values, as if they were somehow supported by an ahistorical, vertical dimension. This is precisely what neoconservatives attempt to do in pushing forward (or is it pulling from behind?) old ideology. Žižek elaborates further on the following topic:

For Lacan, the Kantian overcoming of the “dialectic” of Law and desire—as well as the concomitant “obliteration of the space for inherent transgression”—is a point of no return in the history of ethics: there is no way of undoing this revolution, and returning to the good old times of prohibitions whose transgression sustained us. This is why today’s desperate neoconservative attempts to reassert “old values” are ultimately a failed perverse strategy of imposing prohibitions which can no longer be taken seriously….That is to say: with Kant, the reliance on any preestablished Prohibition against which we can assert our freedom is no longer viable, our freedom is asserted as autonomous, every limitation/constraint is completely self-posited (The Parallax View, pp. 93-4)

Frail Identity, Part II

As we have looked at before, the bifurcating logic of proper-clean and improper-dirty are simultaneously constituted in a given symbolic system. This is no less true for the religious, especially for peoples of the Book. Only on this account it is logicizing between abomination and the sacred. In the tradition of what I’m calling the “peoples of the Book” impurity is always what departs from the symbolic order, or divine precepts in this case. Of course the anthropologist or psychoanalyst would way that there is nothing impure in itself; “the loathsome is [only] that which disobeys classification rules peculiar to the given symbolic system” (Powers of Horror, p. 92).

For the religious, impurity generally becomes a metaphor for idolatry and immorality. Therefore, whatever has no immediate relation to the sacred is excluded from the given symbolic order. Holiness then is the struggle individuals face in attempting to become subjects to the Law. By logically conforming with the established taxonomy of pure/impure distinctions the subject is protected from falling outside the bounds of religious orthodoxy.

The great threat to identity is intermixture. If we might think of purity as a symbolic oneness then defilement is that which unsettles boundaries between the pure and impure. Therefore idols in particular are those objects that erase the differences between strict identities and introduce confusion and disorder to the prevailing symbolic establishment.

However, the prophets of the Hebraic tradition revealed the inescapable and inseparable abjection of our selves. “The impure is neither banished nor cut off, it is thrust away but within—right there, working, constitutive” (p. 106). To put it otherwise, the abject is interiorized. This logical complicity with abjection in fact permeates the entire Bible and is found in such notions as “leaven” in the Old Testament and “tears” in the New. What happens in Christianity is precisely a new arrangement of differences; the impure/pure topological demarcation remains but is reversed from being an external logic to an internal one. As Kristeva puts it, “Christian religion is a compromise between paganism and Judaic monotheism. Biblical logic remains nevertheless, even though it is inverted (the inside is to blame, no longer the outside): one uncovers it in the persistence of processes of division, separation, and differentiation (116-7). In other words, “the threat comes no longer from outside but from within” (p. 114). The internal danger, which was previously an external threat, is a heterogeneous and a potentially condemnable self. The self no longer is characterized by unity but is internally, contradictorily split. He is tormented from within rather than from without. Jesus’ pronouncement, following those of the prophets, is that man is defiled by what comes from within, rather than by what surrounds or enters him. This means for Christians that they are always divided, incomplete and lapsing in respect to the ideal Christ sets forth. In this internalizing move the boundaries between pure and impure become much more porous and an unsurpassable heterogeneity arises.

The sort of ambiguity is further confounded in another insight of Christianity, the origin of sin. The fall of man [sic] usually belongs to the feminine temptation to eat the fruit of a particular tree in the Garden of Eden which promised an epiphany of knowledge. It was Eve’s enticement of Adam that implanted the power of sin within the flesh.

And yet, the tale of Adam’s fall opens up two additional channels of interpretation throwing light on the ambivalence of sin….Man would thus accede to divine perfection only by sinning, that is, by carrying out the forbidden act of knowledge….It takes only one further step to suppose that the invitation to perfection is also an invitation to sin….In that instance, the fall is the work of God; founding knowledge and the quest for consciousness, it opens the way to spirituality (pp. 126-7)

These two currents on the ambiguity of the flesh engender a hermeneutical plurality on the constitution of sin. Furthermore, it also seems as though defiling sin is the proper condition for remission. Sin appears with law which appears with grace.

By the same token, abjection will not be designated as such, that is, as other, as something to be ejected, or separated, but as the most propitious place for communication—as the point where the scales are tipped towards pure spirituality….abjection becomes the requisite for a reconciliation… (p. 127)

As a final example, blood carries a particular ambiguity when it comes to pure/impure demarcating strategies. Menstruation was clearly a defiling element that targeted women in Hebraic societies. But while it indicated the impure, blood also signified a vital element to life. Not only did blood represent death, but it also referred to the assurance of life and fecundation. “It thus becomes a fascinating semantic crossroads, the propitious place for abjection where death and femininity, murder and procreation, cessation of life and vitality all come together” (p. 96).

Frail Identity

In lieu of my previous post on the ambivalence between demarcating the categories of saint and sinner I thought a psychoanalytic example would further clarify the blurring of complimentary opposites. In psychoanalysis, as in anthropology, it is generally taken for granted that the sacred and the profane are inextricably linked with the establishment of a symbolic system. Necessarily, the logic of prohibition founds the abject and constitutes the social order in a binary logic of proper-clean and improper-dirty. Although this demarcating imperative varies between cultures, the pattern is universal. Once the social has been classified and organized in this way defilement is taken as a threat to one’s own clean self. In other words, “the danger of filth represents for the subject the risk to which the very symbolic order is permanently exposed, to the extent that it is a device of discriminations, of differences” (Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror, 69). Without this differentiation of inner and outer borders the subject is at risk of falling outside the symbolic order. To safeguard from such defiling elements primitive societies would hold rites of purification which would excluded and jettison the danger of filth to the margins of society. Furthermore, this hierarchical establishment was vigorously defended against the threat of “outsiders”.

This social mapping, however, becomes highly problematic when the outside/inside boundary is internal. Just like the Saint/Sinner paradox, the outcome is a frail identity. No longer is the abject foreign or external to the individual but internal to his ego. In sum,

…the non-constitution of the (out-side) object as such renders unstable the ego’s identity, which could not be precisely established without having been differentiated from an other, from its object. The ego of primary narcissism is thus uncertain, fragile, threatened, subjected just as much as its non-object to spatial ambivalence (inside/outside uncertainty) and to ambiguity of perception (pleasure/pain) (Powers of Horror, 62)

Dealing with the abject

For most, the abject–the despicable, impure, loathsome, defiled–is that which crushes and gags us. The abject is what we balk at, but it is also what we jettison, expel and separate from ourselves . Vomit, feces, blood, the Other. It includes all that infects life with filth and interferes with our routine narcissism. For the pyschoanalytic, it is that which we repress. But what is philosophy’s role in insuring purity? For Julia Kristeva, passing on the lesson of Aristotle, it is a transvaluation by rhythm and song (see the Poetics).

What is involved is a purification of body and soul by means of a heterogeneous and complex circuit, going from “bile” to “fire,” from “manly warmth” to the “enthusiasm” of the “mind.” Rhythm and song hence arouse the impure, the other of mind, the passionate-corporeal-sexual-virile, but they harmonize it, arrange it differently than the wise man’s knowledge does. They thus soothe frenzied outbursts… (Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 28)

Kristeva is not the most easily read I will be the first to admit, but the content of the work makes up for the obscurity. Kristeva’s “poetic purification“, so to speak, is not an act of ridding the impure of the self–an impossible task that nonetheless makes up culture–but rather of rearranging it in repetition and harmonizing the abject through refrain. In other words, difference does not constitute lack but can be unified in a greater whole from its “original impurity.” It is re-evaluated a second time. Her analogy of music is especially poignant in that individual notes in a melody, while aberrant stand-alone, form a “heterogeneous and complex circuit” that smooths the frenzied. The cathartic process of Kristeva is certainly more harmonious wisdom than the run-of-the-mill abject phobic.

The Inherent Cultural Criticism of Psychoanalysis

It is often assumed that psychoanalysis or clinical psychiatry is in the business of “curing” individuals. Their main function is to restore those who are “sick” to normalcy and reintegrate them back into society. In this sense they are in service of the state by keeping its citizens in line with preestablished standards of normalcy. But while psychology certainly does function in this capacity it also extends beyond this limited framework.

What Freud undertook, and psychoanalysis after him, was to interpret civilization and culture as a whole. In doing so he was not going beyond the limits of psychoanalysis but, on the contrary, was manifesting its ultimate intention to be a general hermeneutics of culture. In other words, psychoanalysis is not only a therapeutic branch of psychiatry but also seeks to analyze how culture makes us ill. This is particularly acute in our (post-) industrial society in which there seems to be many factors that make us sick. The analyst is not only working to interpret and change his/her patient but to also transform the world by interpreting it. What makes the viewpoint of psychoanalysis unique however is that it interprets humanity as a whole from a narrow yet rigorous topographical model of the unconscious. By doing so it touches on the essentials of existence as a result of its single pont of view. Let me explain.

Freud grasped the whole phenomenon of culture as a means to exorcise us of our internal and external conflicts. Interpreted by Ricoeur reading Freud, “Culture is indeed made up of all the procedures by which man escapes in the imaginary mode from the unresolvable situation where desires can be neither suppressed nor satisfied.” The most famous example is that culture creates gods to sublimate our suffering and substitute it with divine and hopeful illusions. Of course this does not completely provide a refuge from the cruel world but merely covers it up. This does not matter much to civilization because it has easily appropriated it for utilitarian use in taming aggressiveness and reinforcing feelings of guilt when our “anticulture” instincts manifest themselves. By “curing” us of our natural “illness” professional psychology is most decidedly in league and in service of the established order of society. This is precisely why Deleuze and Guattari are Anti-Oedipus!

The other option, as mentioned above, is to think of psychoanalysis less as a technique in therapeutics leading to a cure and more as a nontechnique that is after truth. In our technical world of domination, manipulation, and control classical psychiatry would hope to tame and direct our desires. Psychoanalysis as antitechnique on the other hand is a “public iconoclasm”, a method of veracity and not of technology. “What is at stake in analysis is access to true discourse, and that is quite different from adaptation, the tactic by which the scandal of psychoanalysis has been hastily undermined and rendered socially acceptable.” For Ricoeur, who is quoted above, psychoanalysis can do better but he can not yet see how its full consequences might be played out. He simply knows that its sociopolitical implications are lurking there—something Žižek has popularized today. At the very least for Ricoeur it belongs to the enterprise of self-knowledge and concerns the loss of humanity’s most cherished pretensions.

Ricoeur on Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics or the interpretive problems anyone faces when dealing with a text was common-coinage when Ricoeur wrote The Conflict of Interpretations. What he offered though was an original and rigorous analysis of the full consequences of hermeneutics extended into other fields such as psychoanalysis and religion. However, we would do well reviewing the basics of hermeneutics before preceding into how this enriches other fields. In a word, interpretation is the work of deciphering the many hidden layers of meaning immanent to a single text. This process of discovering analogous meanings contained in symbols has a long history in biblical exegesis but it was only relatively recent that this was appropriated by philospohy to apply towards more general problems. The idea is that every text has a surface meaning conditioned by an immediate and simplistic understanding. Concealed within this literal interpretation though are unsuspected stratums of significance. We might say that every text has a hidden depth of meaning. Ricoeur expresses this layering of multiple significance as polysemic, meaning, every word possesses a certain opacity and richness. Language has a surplus of meaning, overlapping interpretations that make meaning overdetermined and equivocal or polyvocal. Confusing to be sure, but the more arduous and roundabout path of unlayering a plurality of meaning is better than sticking with the narrowness of a single interpretation in Ricoeur’s estimation. The work of the hermeneut then is to explicate the multiple determination of symbols and tease out different interpretations by using a variety of frames of reference or considering the text in different contexts. For the hermeneut the real sin is to only see or promote one dimension of meaning in a reductionistic and confined way.

This mode of suspicion bears real fruits when applied to psychoanalysis. If we think of the self as a text then it follows that the subject shows and conceals layers of meaning. This was Freud’s radical vision of interpreting the dreams of his patients. (For those unfamiliar with Freud his idea was that dreams were wish fulfillments that had been censored and distorted by our consciousness to hide our true unconscious thoughts. Our most shocking wish according to him was the male’s desire to sleep with his mother and kill his father). He mistrusted the manifest content of the dream (it was distorted) and worked to uncover the real motives and latent meaning behind it all. He arrived at this hidden meaning by working backwards from the confusing dreams of his patients (the analysands) would recall. Like the hermeneutics of a text, the concealed truth was revealed by transcending the simple previous meaning therefore following a progressive interpretation of the analysand. The upshot of the abandonment of an ideal, univocal ego profoundly transformed the cogito and sparked the ongoing discipline of psychoanalysis. Because of Freud we now know to be suspicious of our consciousness. But its tricks have been unmasked and we are better because of it.

The same applies to the phenomenology of religion (Ricoeur is speaking of Christianity here). It’s not difficult to think of faith as having lower and higher dimensions. What is more disturbing for many though is the threat that once we apply a suspicious hermeneutic to faith there is no recovery of simple faith. Of course if faith does survive this chastisement it would be more informed and critical sans superstitious and pretentious ideas. Ricouer’s idea here is that by undercutting many of our “taken-for-granted presuppositions” a higher dimension of faith, one grounded more in hope than certainty, would emerge from the ashes of a fallen faith, much like a phoenix. The death of God therefore is interpreted by Ricoeur as the death of an idol. What displaces our old sedimentary conceptions of God is the God who is to come, more an icon this time than an idol. Through this progressive hermeneutic Ricoeur understands a mature faith to be open and ongoing rather than stifilingly enclosed. And rather than faith existing in spite of doubt and criticism they are strongly alloyed.

This plurality and confusion of meanings simultaneously benefits and haunts the whole of philosophy as has been briefly shown. If we read philosophy as a text (or the world for that matter) it appears that meaning is in motion. In Hegelian terms the spirit is realized in the dialectic process of history; surpassing and overcoming previous meanings but retaining traces of their existence through every stage. In this way philosophy draws us out of our infancy in the same way psychoanalysis does for the subject and phenomenology does for religion. Philosophy just happens to be more meta-critical, viewing a wide range of problems rather than narrowly focusing in on the small details. In Ricoeur’s terms “philosophy itself becomes the interpretation of interpretations.” In other words, philosophy reflects on the reflections that other disciplines have made and attempts to see larger trends, what we might name the spirit of the day.