Positive Incomprehension (& the dissertating subject)

I can't make it cohere.  

~ Pound mournfully mutters to Ginsberg.
   (Good thing too, says me.)

Picking up where I left off yesterday with the slogan (peeps are hearing the Jameson echo there, right?) Always Free Associate!  But specifically in what I am posting below I am interested  in looking not so much at meaning as at knowledge. Where yesterday's post suggested a different model of what counts as meaning — it eschews the One Line Summary approach to that idea and advocates an incessant, generative, production through free association. & so, when working on the dream Freud associates endlessly on every detail that the dream presents (initially at least) not forcing these many scattered details to cohere. 

So this meaning, newly framed is not The Meaning, not definitive, not "The One True…", never final — but simply more, an excess of meaning, a potentially endless proliferation of signification (just what the anti-postmodernist version of the postmodernist is most resolutely against). & ignoring for the moment the "reasonable" or pragmatic question of how such a writing might be contained in a book or even an essay. 

Cixous is here talking about a number of things and I hesitate to either trim this down to "get at" the meaning that is so brightly lit up for me in what she says (as that would be a covert inversion of the approach to meaning that I am advocating). But it should perhaps be mentioned that here Cixous is not talking about "meaning" so much as comprehension (& much else). & with that shift many things realign for me too. Here I cannot escape the framework of Lacan's Discourse of the University, where the agent of the discourse speaks on behalf of S2, knowledge. There can be a variety of unpleasant (alienating) consequences of this discourse as well. Without getting into all of that here, what I like about Cixous' comments below is that — without her using this phrasing — she seems to be arguing for a different sort of knowing (comprehension), one that is not unknowing or "unknowledge" but… perhaps… produces a knowledge that is not equal to S2, or a knowledge that is situated in the beyond, or a knowledge in excess of S2. There is so much more to think about that idea. (& yeah, I can go to Bataille from here, but for now will not)

Here though is Cixous, talking about the shock of the other, and detailing two modes of incomprehension of the other, the negative and positive — the latter of which she aligns with love and "friendship-love". That said, much of this seems to spin more toward romantic love and while that is not uninteresting, my interest in this exceeds its locus in love or friendship-love, I want to extend it into the anti-hermeneutics that Dean (and Laplanche) are interested in (see yesterday's post). 

Cixous

"To return to the eventual shock with the other, the violence of the other: there is one that happens daily, that is up to us to manage. We are always in a relation with negative incomprehension; not even an incomprehension, but very often a non-comprehension. Simply put: there is no openness. And this spreads out infinitely, in all our relations. But there is also a positive incomprehension. It is perhaps what we discover in love; or in friendship-love: the fact that the other is so very much other. Is so very much not-me. The fact that we can say to each other all the time: here, I am not like you. And this always takes place in the exchange, in the system of reflection where it is the other we look at—we never see ourselves; we are always blind; we see of ourselves what comes back to us through (the difference of) the other. And this is not much. We see much more of the other. Or rather, on the one hand, we see an enormous amount of the other; and on the other hand, at a certain point we do not see. There is a point where the unknown begins. The secret other, the other secret, the other itself. The other that the other does not know. What is beautiful in the relation to the other, what moves us, what overwhelms us the most—that is love—is when we glimpse a part of what is secret to him or her, what is hidden, that the other does not see; as if there were a window by which we see a certain heart beating. And this secret that we take by surprise, we do not speak of it; we keep it. That is to say, we keep it: we do not touch it. We know, for example where the other’s vulnerable heart is situated; and we do not touch it; we leave it intact. This is love.
          But there is also a not seeing because we do not have the means to know any further. There are things that we do not understand because we could never reproduce them: behaviours, decisions that seem foreign to us. This also is love. It is to find one has arrived at the point where the immense foreign territory of the other will begin. We sense the immensity, the reach, the richness of it, this attracts us. This does not mean that we ever discover it. I can imagine that this infinite foreignness could be menacing; disturbing. It also can be quite the opposite: exalting, wonderful, and in the end, of the same species as God: we do not know what it is. It is the biggest; it is far off. At the end of the path of attention, of reception, which is not interrupted but which continues into what little by little becomes the opposite of comprehension. Loving not knowing. Loving: not knowing." (16-17)

To unravel or unpack (and leave a mess) here are some of my thoughts about this passage…

She claims that the shock, even the violence of the other is something that happens daily. & that it is up to us to manage this shock, this violence. What shock and violence does she mean? Her lowercase o-other makes me think of actual other persons rather than the Other of lacanian thought, but I am far from sure that Cixous is making such a distinction and I rather think not. 

But the shock, the violence? Does my recognition that there are others who are radically different, whose thoughts and feelings and beliefs are not simply opposed to mine or unlike mine but beyond what I am able to imagine constitute a shock that I feel daily and am forced to somehow manage or cope with? My answer would be no, that such a recognition — which I do have now and then, whether as a consequence of experience or arrived at intellectually — but I am not aware on a daily basis of this shock, at least not as such, though I may feel overwhelmed by the social, by the experience of others, and thus in need of retreat, of solitude. 

Cixous then implies that the management of this daily happening is managed, in the sense of being routinized and that there are two general modes of such management. There is negative incomprehension — a mode we are always in a relation with, which is perhaps not even "incomprehension" but simply non-comprehension. This non-comprehension, or perhaps better said, this refusal to attempt to comprehend, refusal of comprehension as a valid response to the other would seem painfully common. & her further gloss gets at this "Simply put: there is no openness. And this spreads out infinitely, in all our relations." We are not open to the other in its strangeness, in its particularity, we see it — much as Nietzsche's famous example of the leaf — not as a unique other but as mere type, whose needs and desires are distasteful, whose demands we seek to evade. 

Here I think of an unkindness that I am guilty of now and then when someone approaches to ask for money. I often give money to people but can be very impatient with the demand itself. I don't want to hear the reasons or the rationale, I want them to take the fiver and let me return to my monadic bubble (with earbuds). Surely this is negative incomprehension, in Cixous' terms. 

But there is another model for how we respond to the shock of the other, what she calls positive incomprehension. 

She gets at this way of responding to the other via love and friendship, and they make a natural fit I think. Difference being what stimulates friendship and love (though this stimulus may not always be unerringly a boon to either relation). Also, while it is not the aspect that I wish to bring into my writing practice, I am interested in the moment where, in looking at the other at a certain point we do not see, this being where the unknown begins. With her invocation of the "secret other, the other secret, the other itself. The other that the other does not know." That is, there is an insight in this passage which I at least feel. I've friends and even acquaintances who I think I know and then see in this way, and I have certainly learned that what I see is not something that should be simply given away, not even to the other in question. To do so is perilous. & so much as she writes I do not touch it; I leave it intact. Where I perhaps differ is that I do not always feel this as love, even as love may be a part of it. Compassion perhaps?

Cixous gets to the phrases that most excite me relative to my own projects of the moment in the second paragraph when she speaks of a not seeing because we do not have the means to know any further. Here then is a recasting of that passage as a means of prospecting for the sort of writing I am seeking…

To write in excess of Knowledge is to arrive at the point where the immense foreign territory of the other begins. The immensity, the reach, the richness of it, this attracts us — we then begin to create, produce, generate… (waste) meaning. This meaning one makes is not the discovery of the other, it remains undiscovered country. We do not know what the other is. The other is vast and far off. At the end of the lengthy path of our attention, of our reception, there is no 'end' but only a continuing into what gradually becomes the opposite of comprehension. Meaning not knowing. Meaning: not knowing.

______________Source

Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber

Rootprints: Memory and life writing

trans. Eric Prenowitz

Routledge 1997

Always Free Associate!

If Robert Frost is a poet, I don't want to be a poet.              ~David Antin

I've written now and then, here and elsewhere about my extant and emerging issues with scholarly writing. Sometimes I approach these issues through Lacan's discussion of the "discourse of the university," at other times in other modes of critique, or (in disregard of my New Years Resolution) complaint. Antin's quote above is but a piece of a longer statement where he also refuses poetry on the model of Robert Lowell, but opines that "If Socrates was a poet, I'll think about it." Involved in his rejection of Frost here is a poetic that wants more than to provide the moral commentary that one finds — everywhere — in Frost. & it is also not a poetic that aspires to platonism, but one that is engaged in the process of thinking, a thinking as talking, or as writing. A poetic that does not present its findings so much as its search — one where findings might be found, but who knows. Let this poetry-inflected opening color what follows, a collection of observations or quotes or thoughts which all seem to lead toward this other way of writing that I am seeking. 

Here is Mari Ruti talking about her sense of the conflict between the writing she aspires to and that which is demanded, a conflict between "professionalization and inspiration," which is bedeviled within the academy in that "we wish to advance knowledge, yet we simultaneously seek to ensure that this 'advancement' takes place according to relatively narrow rules and regulations that govern each discipline". This accounts in her view for the contrast, so often marked, between the American and French styles, where the former are characterized by "meticulous research, exegesis, criticism" and the latter by "confident and far-reaching theories, hypotheses, and lines of questioning" what she characterizes as a "propositional mode" (23). & Ruti is alive to the problem this clash of demands has, particularly on younger scholars — "One of the most frustrating dilemmas of academic work is that it seems commonly acknowledged that the most groundbreaking inquiries often challenge disciplinary boundaries, yet professionalization has made it more and more difficult to engage in such inquiries" (24). 

Rather than building up meaning, the analytic method breaks it down. ~ Tim Dean

To give a global interpretation, one which says this-is-what-it's-all-about, is what "building up" means above, the "analytic method" (i.e., free association) is what "breaks [meaning] down". These terms, up and down, are merely convenient. I could as easily claim that free association, by its productivity, builds up meaning and that the what-it's-all-about interpretation breaks it down, reducing it to a sound byte, to the moral of the story. Free association aligns with productivity, with the generation of more, and thus with excess… excess as a value. 

Dean's line appears as a gloss on Laplanche (who is turn writing about Freud) and the larger context is useful for me here, so;

"Laplanche shows how the original edition of [The Interpretation of Dreams] broke with hermeneutics by outlining a method that refused all syntheses of meaning. It was only in later editions (published after 1900), he suggests, that hermeneutical codes of symbolism and typicality were added to the text, in its burgeoning footnotes, addenda, and interpolations. Laplanche connects this eclipsing of Freud's original insights — by Freud himself" (38). The linchpin of this break with hermeneutics is free association… "the method of free association breaks things down, dispersing attention in multiple, often contradictory directions. The free associative method represents Freud's greatest discovery (…) because it is a method correlative to its object — the unconscious. Laplanche is fascinated by those passages (…) where for pages and pages Freud laboriously traces the associations of discrete components of a single brief dream (such as the famous dream of Irma's injection), without ever gathering together these associations into a final meaning or interpretation. It is Freud's reluctance to specify one-to-one - correspondences — his refusal to say: 'the dream means X' — that permits Laplanche to argue that the associative method represents a break with hermeneutics. Rather than building up meaning, the analytic method breaks it down" (38).

There is much in what Laplanche has to say about Freud that is interesting too and I'll need to go and read him more carefully, but what I am intrigued by here is simply this break with hermeneutics, with a method that "breaks things down, dispersing attention in multiple, often contradictory directions" and with excessive tracing of associations to any and every discrete component "without ever gathering together these associations into a final meaning or interpretation." & here again Ruti has something to add as in her book she seeks "to take the notion of narrativization in a different direction and to align it with psychoanalytic practices of free association and narrative self-constitution which, while granting meaning to the subject, do not aspire to any degree of self-mastery" (10). I am less concerned with narrativization as such than with the generation of meaning and the eschewal of mastery in so doing.

I've used the word excess a couple of times already and so let me also stress the emerging connection therein to Bataille whose notion of expenditure as waste in what he calls a "general economy" (opposed to the "restricted economy" of narrowly utilitarian ends) also appeals to me, even as I am so newly introduced to the idea that I am uncertain yet about how it might affect my desires as stated above. But Bataille's vision of so much of what we might otherwise think of as productivity, or the products thereof, he recodes as waste or excess. So where he writes of potlatch ceremonies and the willful destruction of goods I find myself thinking of the essay that I have been attempting to write about Nina Arsenault since I returned from seeing her OPHELIA/MACHINE show in December. The reason that association is so assertive for me is that the draft of this essay "about" Nina has been written, and deleted, written again and deleted again, something like a dozen times now. It was once over 40 pages in length only to be cut down to a few paragraphs. What is all that labor but sheer waste in Bataille's sense of the term? None of those lost drafts is any longer extant and none of them can be used, can serve any significant utilitarian end. 

Here, as if in illustration of my point, Nina is present but unclear
hidden behind string or lines (of description) and words on paper
which being somewhat clear are so, only by making her a blur.
Precisely the scenario I hope to avoid in the writing to be done.

In fact, Nina (by which I mean both her work and her person) is an exemplary case for the sort of writing that I aspire to do for the very reason that I cannot even pretend to explain her work to anyone. It's challenge and complexity make me painfully cognizant that any "building up" of meaning, or offering of a "global interpretation" of some work of hers will falsify it, reducing it to the limitations of my explanation. In a sense, though I was already struggling not to write of her show under the compulsion of hermeneutic interpretation, many of the blanket deletions that I made of such struggled-over writing was due to recognition that even at the scale of description, that the words we choose imply certain trajectories of meaning, and thus certain narratives and assumptions and again and again, I found these lacking, as not up to the challenge of writing about Nina in a way that does not reduce her.

It is thus in light of these varied ideas; of a prospective writing that is unafraid to offer far-reaching hypotheses; of a freely associative writing that that is not delivering an interpretation that wraps its object up in paper and bow, but one that loses itself in them, letting them send it wherever; a writing that embraces excess and the "breaking down"— which is to say the proliferation — of meanings rather than their reduction to the answer-to-all-questions. What then would such a writing be like? Where would it start, how would it progress, how would it (and could it) ever end? How might it be received in an academic space where the global interpretation, even if obviously inadequate, is given more props than a reading which stresses the inadequacy of such? How will it answer to the demands of utility (given that I wish it to be counted as a dissertation after all) and to the questions of readers, such as the pedestrian but unavoidable "What's it about?" 

Wait, is this an ironic comment or somehow illustrative?

My thought, in the last day or so is that I might model a mode of writing on Freud's repeated traces of associations and that just as in analysis, such chains of association are interrupted or link up suddenly with other clusters of ideas and so on… that I would allow this too. With such a model for how the writing would emerge, I would then simply keep writing, finding the links between all the areas that I wish to write about and when the link goes there, so do I. The link has the precise looseness that it has for my own unconscious or for Monty Pythons' Flying Circus. The link need not be judged as such, simply followed. Given this, might the dissertation unfold in whatever fashion so long as it links the many clusters of interest that I have in a way that is revealing of connections, allows for the making of arguments, and does much of the same work as a more predictable text but without the lock-step aspects and need to demolish all counter positions along the way? That is, I am attracted to the non-utility of Bataille's economy and yet, I am not averse to certain ends being reached.

Here then are some clusters of thought (I am leaving many aside for the moment) — sometimes discrete ideas, other times specific cases/arguments that I could flesh out in a pinch or perhaps just stuff I want to talk about. 

This lattice is not a very adequate map of the totality, and it even neglects some obvious connections
that should be made here, but one could read it as a map of a single attempt to talk my way through
the topics here and thus as something which could have been connected otherwise any other time
I made such an attempt.

__________Sources 

Dean, Tim
"Art as Symptom: Žižek and the Ethics of Psychoanalytic Criticism"
Diacritics (Nov 2002) 32:2 (21-41)

Ruti, Mari
Reinventing the Soul; Posthumanist Theory and Psychic Life
Other Press 2006

When you stare long enough at the text...

...the text stares back. — This is not yet n/a that will come later. Now it's just tease, no application, no answer.

I just found something, a gestation period and a parallel. & this is all put here because of a little bell ringing in the meat of my head. 

Salome, Ree & Nietzsche

As one of her admirers put it, 'Lou would form a passionate attachment to a man and nine months later the man gave birth to a book!' The first of these literary births was Nietzsche's; exactly nine months after meeting Lou Salomé, he produced part I of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.*

In mid-January of this year, I found something — someone fascinating — and an idea appeared, mine — an idea spawning many connected ideas in all directions —  and at a tangent, and to begin, they were liquid, barely yet approaching any solidity. Nine months later (14 Sept, 2012) I had this "vision" (not to be shared here) that rebounded upon that idea, since much grown and now kicking.

Pace Nietzsche's thoughts about artists as mothers, creativity as feminine, etc & this found passage's positing of Lou Andreas-Salomé as the father of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I'm taken with the thought that I've discovered the paternity of Rock Paper Scissor.

*Neitzsche on Gender: Beyond Man and Woman by Frances Nesbitt Oppel, p.121. 

Arnold I. Davidson's "How to Do the History of Psychoanalysis: A Reading of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" from _The Emergence of Sexuality; Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts_

Arnold I. Davidson

The Emergence of Sexuality; Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts

Harvard UP 2001

Chapter Three:

How to Do the History of Psychoanalysis: A Reading of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

Early on Davidson quotes Foucault saying that "'Truth' is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements" (qtd 67). If one has read my previous two posts about David's book, this shouldn't surprise. A bit further on, discussing the status of the rules and formal exclusions that typify a discourse he writes "These rules are, however, never formulated by the participants in the discursive practice; they are not available to their consciousness but constitute what Foucault once called the 'positive unconscious of knowledge'"(67).

Foucalt's "positive unconscious of knowledge" sounds a lot like Lacan's Symbolic order to me (just as, elsewhere, while Foucault famously abjured 'desire' as a concept, when he speaks about pleasure it sounds a lot less like the vernacular sense of the term and a lot more like jouissance, as such. Whether this suggests any way to bring Foucault and Lacan together in a useful way, I am not sure - I cannot be the first to have noted these things).

Davidson refers back to an earlier chapter (which I covered here) drawing out the ways that this earlier chapter adapts Foucault's archeological method to describe the psychiatric style of reasoning. "An epistemologically central constituent of a style of reasoning, as I interpret it, is a set of concepts linked together by specifiable rules that // determine what statements can and cannot be made with the concepts. (…) Thus I have urged that we need a conceptual history of sexuality, without which we cannot know what was being talked about when the domain of psychiatric discourse became fixated on sexuality" (68-9).

He acknowledges that some may find an approach such as his counter-intuitive for the study of psychoanalysis, "a thoroughgoing skepticism about its usefulness for writing the history of psychoanalysis might well persist. Since psychoanalysis is so completely intertwined withe the name of Sigmund Freud, it is natural to object that writing its history without his name would not be to write its history at all. (…) …no matter what one takes to be the last word in psychoanalysis, its first and second words are always the words of Freud"(69).

Davidson nonetheless wants to "operate at a level distinct from individual biography and psychology. In writing the history of psychoanalysis, I want to preserve this level, one whose articulation requires a history of a structurally related system of concepts, a conceptual space, that lies below, or behind, the work of any particular author, even great works of great authors"(70).

He sketches out a pair of "competing myths" that are common in discussions of Freud. "The first myth, that of official psychoanalysis, depicts Freud as a lonely genius, isolated and ostracized by his colleagues, fashioning psychoanalysis single-handedly and in perpetual struggle with the world at large" this is then "the story of Freud as triumphant revolutionary"(70). Davidson dispels this myth with "ex nihilo nihil fit" [nothing comes from nothing] (70). 

"The second, opposing myth pictures Freud as getting all of his ideas from someone else (…) This is the myth of the career discontents", one which issues in "the story of Freud as demagogue, usurper, and megalomaniac"(70). "When applied to the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, this myth proceeds by showing that, for example, Richard von Krafft-Ebing employed the idea of libido and Ellis the idea of autoeroticism, that Fleiss made central use of the notion of bisexuality, that Moll discovered infantile sexuality years before Freud, that Iwan Bloch talked about erotogenic zones, and so on, ad infinitum. Since Freud was fully aware of these writ-//ings, the story continues, how could he by anything other than a usurper, with a kingdom made of stolen materials?"(70-1).

Davidson finds this approach misguided, in that it depends "on an inappropriate invocation of his name"(71). Instead, what is needed per Davidson, is "a history of the concepts used in psychoanalysis, and account of their historical origins and transformations, their rules of combination, and their employment in a mode of reasoning. This task presumes, first, that we can isolate the distinctive concepts of nineteenth-century psychiatry, articulate their rules of combination, and thereby determine the limits of the possible. We must then undertake the very same enterprise for Freud's work, which, with sufficient detail, should enable us to see more clearly whether Freud's conceptual space continues or breaks with that of his predecessors"(71).

He notes that he is really only attending to the 1st essay (which is everyone's favorite, no?) and that "In order to do even that, I will have to start before Freud, with the prevailing concept of sexual perversion in the literature of nineteenth-century psychiatry"(72). Davidson replays here the discussion of the idea of the functional disease, and how for that notion to apply to sexuality that the notion of the sexual instinct is required (all discussed in "Closing Up The Corpses"). He points to the thoughts of Moreau, Krafft-Ebing and Charcot (who preferred the term "sens genital") and writes, "The genital sense is just the sexual instinct, masquerading in different words. Its characterization as a sixth sense was a useful analogy. Just as one could become blind, or have acute vision, or be able to discriminate only a part of the color spectrum, and just as one might go deaf, or have abnormally sensitive hearing, or be able to hear only certain pitches, so too this sixth sense might be diminished, augmented, or perverted"(73). Davidson also repeats the earliest use of "perversion" as found in the OED (1842). "The notions of perversion and function are inextricably connected. Once one offers a functional characterization of the sexual instinct, perversions become a natural class of diseases; without this characterization there is really no conceptual room for this kind of disease"(73).

Of this whole mode of thought Davidson remarks "one must first believe that there is a natural function of the sexual instinct and then believe that this function is quite determinate. We might think that questions as momentous as these would have received extensive discussion during the heyday of perversion in the nineteenth century. But, remarkably enough, no such discussion appears. There is virtually unargued unanimity both on the fact that this instinct does have a natural function and on what that function is"(74). [He then quotes Krafft-Ebing for a representative view (74) and shows how a superficially different account by Moll is at this level of analysis "quite literally interchangeable" (75).]

"Nineteenth-century psychiatry silently adopted this conception of the function of the sexual instinct. It was often taken as so natural as not to // need explicit statement since it was the only conception that made sense of psychiatric practice. It is not at all obvious why sadism, masochism, fetishism, and homosexuality should be treated as species of the same disease, for they appear to have no essential features in common"(76).

Moll goes so far as to state that "we ought to consider the absence of heterosexual desires morbid even when the possibility of practicing normal coition exists"(qtd 76). To which I can add only YIKES!

"Had anyone denied either that the sexual instinct has a natural function or that this function is procreation, diseases of perversion, as they were actually understood, would not have entered psychiatric nosology"(76).

With a picture of this milieu and its assumptions in place - assumptions shared by Krafft-Ebing and Magnus Hirschfeld (though he is not discussed at this moment) and common amongst the emerging movement for greater justice for homosexuals - Davidson then turns at last to the first of Freud's Three Essays, called "The Sexual Aberrations".  He quotes Freud's first two paragraphs;

The fact of the existence of sexual needs in human beings and animals is expressed in biology by the assumption of a "sexual instinct," on the analogy of the instinct of nutrition, that is of hunger. Everyday language possesses no counterpart to the word "hunger," but science makes use of the word "libido" for that purpose.

Popular opinion has quite definite ideas about the nature and characteristics of this sexual instinct. It is generally understood to be absent in childhood, to set in at the time of puberty in connection with the process of coming to maturity and to be revealed in the manifestations of an irresistible attraction exercised by one sex upon the other; while its aim is supposed to be sexual union, or at all events actions leading in that direction. We have every reason to believe, however, that these views give a // very false picture of the true situation. If we look into them more closely we shall find that they contain a number of errors, inaccuracies and hasty conclusions.(qtd. 76-7) 

Davidson: "If the argument of Freud's first essay is that these views 'give a very false picture of the true situation,' then we can expect Freud's conclusions to place him in opposition to both popular and, more important, medical opinion. The problem is how precisely to characterize this opposition"(77).

Davidson goes on to discuss Freud's positing of two terms, sexual object and sexual aim, the former being the sorts that one desires sexually and the latter term referring to the sorts of acts that one is hoping to get going with that desired other. Davidson notes that "these are precisely the two conceptually basic kinds of deviations we should expect of those writers who subscribed to the popular conception of the sexual instinct. Deviations with respect to sexual object are deviations from the natural attraction exercised by one sex upon the other; deviations with respect to sexual aim are deviations from the natural goal of sexual union"(77). & then, surprisingly to many superficial readers or those who come in thinking that they know already what Freud thought about everything (and that it must be wrong), Davidson continues, "The remainder of the first essay is structured around this distinction between sexual object and sexual aim, and the central role of this distinction is itself firmly dependent on the view of the sexual instinct that Freud will argue is false. I emphasize this point because one must recognize that Freud's opposition to the shared opinion concerning the sexual instinct is an opposition from within (…) Freud's opposition, let me say in anticipation, participates in the mentality that it criticizes"(77). Davidson characterizes Freud's procedure as "immanent criticism"(78).

We then look at the 1st sections where Freud, after a few other topics turns to inversion/homosexuality - Davidson, "the deviation to which nineteenth-century psychiatrists had themselves devoted the most attention"(78) - dropping in… "Freud argues that inversion should not be regarded as an innate indication of nervous degeneracy - an assessment which was widespread, even if not universal, in the nineteenth century. (…) Freud insisted that choice between claiming inversion to be innate and claiming it to be acquired is a false one, since neither explanation by itself gives an adequate explanation of the nature of inversion"(78) 

Davidson sums on Freud RE bisexuality "his remarks in this section become more and more puzzling the more carefully they are studied"(78). [I'll be getting to that soon enough - though not in this post.]

But we're back to the action when Freud turns to "the characteristics of the sexual object and sexual aims of inverts" and comes to a conclusion that Davidson sees as "more innovative, even revolutionary, than I suspect he was able to recognize"(78).

Freud ~ "It has been brought to our notice that we have been in the habit of regarding the connection between the sexual instinct and the sexual object as more intimate than it in fact is. Experience of the cases that are considered abnormal has shown us that in them the sexual instinct and the sexual object are merely soldered together—a fact which we have been in danger of overlooking in consequence of the uniformity of the normal picture, where the object appears to form part and parcel of the instinct. We are thus warned to loosen the bond that exists in our thought be//tween instinct and object. It seems probable that the sexual instinct is in the first instance independent of its object; nor is its object likely to be due to its objects attractions." (78-9)

Davidson writes, "By claiming, in effect, that there is no natural object of the sexual instinct, that the sexual object and sexual instinct are merely soldered together, Freud dealt a conceptually devastating blow to the entire structure of nineteenth-century theories of sexual psychopathy. (…) If the object in not internal to the instinct, then there can be no intrinsic clinico-pathological meaning to the fact that the instinct can become attached to an inverted object. The distinction between normal and inverted object will not then coincide with the division between the natural and the unnatural, itself a devision between the normal and the pathological. Since the nature of the instinct, according to Freud, has no special bond with any particular kind of object, we seemed forced to conclude that the supposed deviation of inversion is no more than a mere difference. (…) cases of inversion can no longer be considered pathologically abnormal"(79).

Now I want to work over that passage from Freud a bit more…

"It has been brought to our notice that we have been in the habit of regarding the connection between the sexual instinct and the sexual object as more intimate than it in fact is." 

There are hints already of his position—the suddenness of 'brought to our notice' suggestive of an error or mistake realized—the evocation of 'habit' and thus a non-reflective or routinized relation to the issue—I'm uncertain how much to make of "intimate" here—should consult the German.

"Experience of the cases that are considered abnormal has shown us that in them the sexual instinct and the sexual object are merely soldered together—a fact which we have been in danger of overlooking in consequence of the uniformity of the normal picture, where the object appears to form part and parcel of the instinct."

& again, I'm curious about the German ("soldered together" is what auf Deutsch?)—but the basic thrust is that aim and object are contingently connected regardless of what sort of object does the trick (I choose this phrase in hopes of avoiding the word "choice" as it seems to reflect so poorly how many people feel what is also called sexual "orientation", and to simultaneously avoid making the person in question powerless in the face of their desire, while recognizing that some people do choose and others feel powerless—what does the trick is intended to try to refer, open-endedly, across the board, but of course it fails with asexuality immediately, oops). Davidson will place stress on the "considered abnormal"(79) in this sentence to show that Freud is disputing the common assumption—true enough, and he might also have stressed "where the object appears to form part and parcel of the instinct" so as to balance the qualifications. Not only is the object chosen by the 'invert' merely 'soldered' to their sexual aim, but the relation of aim to object for the 'normal picture' (i.e., that of heterosexuals as tritely & reproductively conceived) is no less contingent. & because of these lazy habits and assumptions…

"We are thus warned to loosen the bond that exists in our thought between instinct and object."

One might ask we are asked to loosen and not simply to break any such 'bond' found in our thought? Perhaps this is because Freud feels that those with a sexual aim will also direct this toward an object, so that it is not the assumption that there will be an object that is problematic, what is problematic is assuming that this object is somehow 'hardwired' to the aim and predictable in advance. Freud continues

"(i) It seems probable that the sexual instinct is in the first instance independent of its object; (ii) nor is its object likely to be due to its object's attractions."

In the i. section of this, we have the clearest expression of what is most radical about Freud's thinking here - and what distinguishes him from all of those that he surveys in Three Essays (and who Davidson has been talking about in this article)… that the sexual instinct (or, let us upgrade to a lacanian reading of the terms perhaps?)… that the drive toward jouissance, while it has a conceptual object (objet a), that any object actually found will be a semblance of that one, a thoroughly contingent object that comes to seem to embody the a-object. So then, in ii. where Freud cautions us against thinking that it is something inherent in the object chosen by some sexual being which determines their desire for it, though he does not spell out where from - if not from the object - though it would have to fall on the side of the subject / the desiring person with a sexual aim. This final clause sort of bugs me tho and I tend more to think that whatever will do the trick for a subject, whatever will be able to occupy the place of the a-object, will have been formed through interaction with the desire of the Other, and thus it becomes difficult to say either that what objects do the trick for this subject is determined by their own intrinsic qualities OR that they derive from something about the subject's drive as such, the distinction itself doesn't seem to hold (after "desire is the desire of the Other")—though, Lacan never suggests that 'drive is the drive of the Other' and the drive does embody something of what might be called the subjects singularity, that aspect of the real which marks them.

From the foregoing discussion Davidson concludes that though many point to Freud's use of trieb and not instinkt and the sloppy translation of Strachey and co., Davidson notes that Krafft-Ebing also used the word 'trieb' and as such this alone is rather insignificant, what is extremely significant is that Freud's notion of the "Sexualtrieb" is fundamentally unlike the notions of sexual instinct found in Moll, Krafft-Ebing, Ellis, Hirschfeld, etc. All of those thinkers, even the homosexuals among them, accepted the link between aim and object on the heterosexual model and sought to argue for the inverts not being degenerates or in need of prosecution etc in spite of their deviation from the 'natural' object of the instinct. Freud agreed with the political aspirations of this movement (as is well-documented by Robert May and discussed here) but he refused to mark off homosexuals off as a separate type of human being unlike the rest of the population.

Davidson discusses Iwan Bloch - who Freud also mentions - as providing an instance of a certain attitude that Freud would adopt and further. Bloch had written about sexuality from an "anthropologic-ethnologic" point of view (qtd 81). Basically, Bloch saw the charge of pathology as misplaced and recognized a great deal of variability in sexual activity and was loath to designate this or that practice as a perversion (80-2). Davidson discusses a milder way that Freud might have grafted Bloch's attitude to a less challenging (more socially palatable) position but notes that "rather than drawing this limited, though significant, conclusion, Freud when to the core of the matter and decisively replaced the concept of sexual instinct with that of sexual drive 'in the first instance independent of its object'"(82).

& here we begin to see one of Davidson's strokes of brilliance - and one that Tim Dean will pick up and capitalize on (applying it to Lacan). That is, Davidson is alert to the ways that Freud himself is unable to fully integrate the radical consequences of his idea in a thorough-going way. Davidson discusses his use of 'perversion' later in the text when, as a concept, it had already been undermined earlier (82-3). He also draws attention to Freud's notion (also in Three Essays) of the 'component [drive(s)]' - basically the idea that the sexual drive is not a unitary and singular thing but that it has component parts, contingently soldered together. As Freud puts it "the sexual [drive] itself must be something put together from various factors, and that in the perversions it falls apart, into its components" (qtd 84). [I'm bringing the 'drive' substitution from here on out]. Davidson dos not remark upon this assumption of Freud's that the perversions show the component drives as disaggregated, or more negatively as 'fallen apart'—it would seem to me that this description again poses perversions as outcomes that are somehow F'd up.

"Freud's argument, his structure of concepts, leads to the claim that neither the erotogenic zone of the genitals nor the aim of copulation bears any privileged connection to the sexual [drive]. The 'normal' aim of the sexual instinct [as discussed before Freud, etc], is not part of the content of the [drive]…"(85)

"We ought to conclude from what Freud says here that there are no true perversions. The conceptual space within which the concept if perversion functions and has a stable role has been thoroughly displaced—and displaced in a way that requires a new set of concepts for understanding sexuality and a new mode of reasoning about it"(85).

As Freud does mention both disgust and shame in connection with the perversions, Davidson recognizes that some might be inclined to use those affects as indexes of perversion, but he points out that Freud clearly was not saying this. Rather Freud says such responses as "often purely conventional" and compares them to the disgust one might feel at "the idea of using someone else's toothbrush" (qtd 86). 

Davidson then writes that "Even if Freud's conclusions in effect overturn the conceptual apparatus of perversion, it is well known that he did not embrace these conclusions unambiguously or unhesitatingly. The language of Freud's discussion sometimes reads as if he is unaware of the conceptual innovations he has wrought, as if nineteenth-century theories of sexual psychopathology can remain secure in their conceptual underpinnings"(86).

He highlights a contradictory moment in Freud's writings where, later in Three Essays, Freud suggests that something is deemed pathological when a perverse object takes the place of all others and the subject is fixated wholly upon it. But of course, in the so-called 'normal picture' of heterosexual psychosexuality that Freud has effectively undermined, this fixation (of men on women with the goal of penis-in-vagina sex) would be just such a fixation, and thus, perverse (87).

Davidson also underscores the way that more frequently early on but less so as the book progresses, Freud places words like normal, pathological and perversion in scare quotes, distancing himself from the common and medical understandings of them.

"But once Freud recon//ceived the sexual instinct as having no natural operation, once any specific aim and object of the drive were thought to be merely soldered to it, the genital zone lost the conceptual primacy that was a precondition of its principled identification with the instinct itself"(88-9). 

… or Goodbye "Sexual Instinct" and Hello Drive(s)

"Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality provided the resources to overturn this conceptual space [that is nineteenth-century psychiatry] by fundamentally altering the rules of combination for concepts such as sexual instinct, sexual object, sexual aim—with the consequence that these shared concepts, among others, were destroyed. The conclusion forced upon us is that perversion is no longer a legitimate concept, that the conceptual preconditions for its employment no longer exist in Freud's text. So that if Freud, despite himself, said that such and such phenomena were perversions, he could not have meant what Krafft-Ebing, or Moll, or Charcot had meant. We will not be able to arrive at this conclusion if we focus simply on whom Freud read, on who before him used what words in which contexts"(90). …I have a few uncertainties here. Given that Davidson shows that Freud himself, a victim of his own mentality, was unable to completely wipe the older way of thinking out of his own work—even just in Three Essays—what sense does it make to say that the older concepts and all their problematic baggage "were destroyed"? & while I agree that, when Freud persists in using the term 'perversion' that he cannot by that term mean to revert to what Moll or Krafft-Ebing had meant by the term, it is also not quite clear what he does mean either. Are we to assume that somewhere in any use he puts these words to there is an aspect of this revolutionary idea of the drives and their contingent objects, and echo of this demotion of the "normal picture" and all the rest? That might be useful, in terms of furthering Freud's project (by which I mean one's own) but it would seem that every instance would have to be examined in detail.

Bringing up Bloch's attitude once again, Davidson writes, "This notion of attitude (…) is one component of the concept of mentalité, a concept that has been put to extraor//dinarily fertile use by recent historians, especially in France. A mentality includes, among other constituents, a set of mental habits or automatisms that characterize the collective understandings and representations of a population. (…) But this displacement [of the old by the new] could only be partial, and one was always in danger of falling back into the old mentality, precisely because there was no conceptual backing for this change of attitude"(91).

Then comes the long passage that Dean is fond of and which I'll undoubtedly be using in my dissertation somehow;

"Freud's genius consisted not simply in appropriating this attitude but in seizing and exploiting it. He provided a conceptual foundation for the newly emerging mentality that made it possible, once and for all, for us to change decisively our old mental habits. So why, one wonders, did Freud himself not so change his own mental habits, why did he exhibit an attitude no less ambiguous and unstable than Bloch's. Any answer to this question is bound to be complicated, so in lieu of an answer let me provide the structure for what I take this answer to consist in. Automatisms of attitude have a durability, a slow temporality, which does not match the sometimes rapid change of conceptual mutation. Mental habits have a tendency to inertia, and these habits resist change that, in retrospect, seems conceptually required. Such resistance can take place not only in a scientific community but even in the individual who is most responsible for the conceptual innovation. Freud was a product of the old mentality that regarded perversions as pathological, a mentality whose first real signs of disintegration can be found at the beginning of the twentieth century. Freud's Three Essays ought to have stabilized the new mentality, speeding up its entrenchment by providing it with a conceptual authorization. But given the divergent temporality of the emergence of new concepts and the formation of new mentalities, it is no surprise that Freud's mental habits never quite caught up with his conceptual articulations. The attitudes that comprise a mentality are sufficiently impervious to recognition, so much like natural dispositions, that many decades may intervene before habit and concept are aligned. However, without some appropriate conceptual backdrop, it is very unlikely that a new scientific mentality can genuinely // displace an old one, since concepts, especially in science, are on fundamentally habit-forming force, one force which, even if over a long span of time, makes possible a stable set of firm mental habits. Although social. cultural, institutional, and psychological factors may all delay the definitive formation of these new habits, it is conceptual innovation of the kind Freud produced that marks one place of genius. But we must remember that genius too has its habits, its inert tendencies, that create a form of friction between what could be said and what is said, so that genius is always ahead of itself"(91-2).