There is ferment at the nexus between Symbolic & Imaginary

"The vocabulary describing us is lacking" 

                - Gloria (participant in the research of Beemyn & Rankin discussed briefly below)

In a previous post, I suggested that trans authors and activists, scholars and others trying to clarify their terminology and debating this or that term is effectively the process whereby the Symbolic itself grows. The Imaginary too expands and contracts by means of the many batteries of representations circulating in the culture. & dealing with words, terms, debating definitions, we argue over the edges where language meets its limits. 

That is to say, in case it is not clear - the Symbolic is not a singular monolithic "thing" THE Symbolic. I spent a bit of time in yet another pair of earlier posts working through the distinctions between Symbolic, Imaginary and Real (those are found here and here) and while this point is available there, it bears underlining. 

The Symbolic is a multiplicity. Much is undoubtedly shared between various regional manifestations and many aspects probably migrate from this or that to other regional locations. Likewise, if I can safely evoke the theorization of memes for a moment (without committing it that as a final answer to anything), I think that we might be able to use some of that thinking to discuss the ways that concepts and representations in their myriad ways, circulate and either become picked and used and ramified and invested with affect and desire, or they ultimately fail to do so and pass out of commonality until they live only in books.

"The" Symbolic then, as multiplicity, is chock full of holes, inconsistencies, paradoxes, failures, impasses and aporias and is limited in innumerable ways by the recalcitrance of the Real.  But, we - social agents and ultimately subjects of language ourselves - are committed to meaning, to a certain fixing of meaning which is what the Imaginary provides - an image or gestalt that freezes this or that view as the authoritative grid whereby I (as social subject) discern, by implicitly sorting fragments into the categories I've learned to inhabit what there word "means."


There is then a danger in the Imaginary's tendency to fix things, to "establish" meaning, and yet, without the luxury of now and then assuming that one knows what this or that term means, it becomes difficult to operate within one's Symbolic system without feeling the edges of all the paradoxes and aporias that our Imaginarizations of our social world's meanings attempt to fix for us. This fixing is also a means of excluding, for the simple reason "choosing" to understand this or that word in this or that way in a particular context is to exclude the other other possible meanings one knows and all of those meanings which one has not thought of.

Now some readers (I can think of two readily) will view these discussions about the multiplicity of the Symbolic and fixing effects of the Imaginary and so on and so forth and the term discourse will seem to them more readily applicable to what I am discussing, and they may substitute that term in understanding what I am saying here. I think this would be a mistake. There are certainly "entities" (if only notional) that one could identify in the Symbolic which correspond to some degree with "discourses" as commonly discussed (inevitably in a post-Foucaultian mode it seems). But there are a great many other sets of relations within the Symbolic that are not assimilable to "discourse." Here the example of the "Symbolic of the game of chess" from my earlier posting can help specify what I mean. 

But the intersection of Imaginary fixations (productive of "meaning" as well as a sense of "wholeness" but also allow for the sort of identification and projections that underpin both lust and aggression) and Symbolic relational determinations (from which derive the conceptual parts that will be flash frozen as "meaning" in this or that term or representation) is the cite where the turmoil and contestatory battles are taking place, and is also where new significations are taking shape.

That is, what, lacking a better phrase, I called the trans effect - the way that bringing the thought of the material reality of the trans body into conceptual adjacency with this or that body of established thought or practice acts, repeatedly, to unsettle that which had seemed to be established. And given that, as so much feminist work has shown over decades, the sex of assumptions and presuppositions which ground the sex/gender system are foundational not simply for issues of obvious connection to sex or gender but underpin scientific theories, legal positions, language systems, political assumptions, and economic practices (just to name a few areas in an offhand way). And what's more, the fundamental aspect has to be highlighted. Fundamental as in, 'having been assumed in advance, such that in most cases it never needs to be stated' and yet also fundamental in that challenges to the sex/gender regime commonly are resisted with a great deal of Imaginary involvement (that is, people take it personally whether they understand this fully or not, and unsettling their fundamental categories can easily be felt as a threat, even unconsciously, which I think accounts for much of the disproportionate vehemence that one finds in those who resist even considering that the sex/gender regime as is might be woefully inadequate to assessing the lived reality of a great many people).

At present I am reading Genny Beemyn and Susan Rankin's book The Lives of Transgendered People. This book is noteworthy for many reasons, though here I will only refer to a few details that connect - in my sketchy thinking - with the issues under discussion here. In the first chapter of the book, "Demographics of the Survey Participants" the authors decided to include within this a discussion of the terminology they chose to use, how they developed it, and, of interest to me here, how they derived their terms in response to the terms that trans persons chose to describe their own identities. I'll leave aside the classifications that Beemyn and Rankin derive therefrom because what most interested me are some terms that they chose not to provide here. What are these terms?

Here is a passage from that book,

The participants who described their gender identity as "transgender" and "other" were asked to elaborate, and they referred to themselves using a wide variety of terms. The 1.211 individuals who identified specifically as "transgender" provided 502 additional descriptors of their gender identities, of which 479 were unique responses. The other 23 responses, each of which was given by at least two participants, are shown in table 1.2. (my emphasis)

I want to know what the 502 or 479 unique responses are! This is where new signifiers are being put forth in an attempt to establish significations that, I suspect, are otherwise unavailable. (I am not suggesting that the authors ought to have provided all those other terms, they are being quite scrupulous with regard to the research methods here - I regret that they were not included simply as I want to read them, to think about them, etc.) So, while I get why - using the methods they are using and obviously working hard to condense such an amazing amount of material (they had close to 3,500 participants in their research) into a readable and not crazy expensive format - there just wasn't room for everything. I remain curious nonetheless. 

btw, this was an image search for "disequilibrium" as I recall
I still find something about it disturbing somehow.

Trying on new terms can fuck with your equilibrium.  

That can be a good thing as well. 

A necessary thing.