The (lacanian?) Discourse of the Abjector (amidst my personal grooming regime)

S1 -->  a

__       __

S2   /    $

I do not have time to work this through thoroughly just now. But in the spirit of externalizing, of airing my dirty laundry in the tabloid of the Other's concern, I offer it anyway. Make me  make it  make sense  if you must.

So, while showering (in point of fact) I was thinking about homophobic or transphobic slurs, this led to racial slurs and the idea of hate speech (as problematic as that is for some as a way to denote this stuff) ... but my curiosity was about how those sorts of speech acts shook out as discourses in the lacanian sense of the term.

So then (during the rinse, and towel off) I pondered the available four lacanian discourses and discarded one after another. I also had to clarify that I'm thinking about hate speech in a specific context, where it addressed to the other it wishes to abject, where the abjection of this other is its intended effect. & thus not the casual racist comments and jokes between Klan members at the KKK BBQ, which, though hateful from many reasonable perspectives, are not directed at those who these people wish to abject and destroy (at least, not in the minute scenario that I am using here to help make this distinction, & on the fly as I said...)

So, I came up with the quadripode I present above. & here it is again, why not?

S1 -->  a

__       __

S2   /    $

(sorry that is not a nice clean and tight graphic, but if you know Lacan's discourses, you know what it supposed to look like - plus I drew it with a finger on my bathroom mirror while gooping up my hair)

S1 - master signifier

a    - objet petit a

S2 - knowledge

$    - the split subject

So, across the top - paralleling the action of a signifying chain, the agent has the words/significations - the agent is certain of them - speaks from the place of that grounded certainty ("I know what a woman is" or "isn't" etc) and abjects the other, marking them as an object (the waste object, anal object, etc - that which is beyond the pale, obviously deserving somehow of scorn, etc) - and assuming that this discourse functions, that it succeeds in interpellating the other to whatever degree, this naming, designating (Fag! Polack! etc) is also a mark of jouissance (hence, again, the a-object). 

Now the other who is hated, designated, abjected, etc. need not passively just 'take it' or have any specific response (the discourses are in an important sense "one way" in Lacan's theory) but to the extent that this other knows that this comment is directed at them, that they 'feel the call of its malice' there is some jouissance it would seem. Likewise, no matter how well grounded that person is, how comfortable in their body and with their identity, no matter how habituated to or even forgiving of others who are hateful, the product would still seem likely to be a reiteration of a certain split, a recognition - regardless of its critique or anger even its acceptance (in cases of internalized self-hatred) - all would seem productive of maintaining, even insisting on a split in this abjected subject (and denying the split in the agent, this repressed knowledge - S2 - which would undermine the agency of the abjecting agent).

The knowledge under the Hater's S1 though... what is that exactly? I pondered that, while getting dressed and splashing on a bit of scent)

Well, I was thinking about how we commonly attribute acts of homophobic violence and the irrational levels of anger and so forth that emerge for people because of the mere existence of gays and lesbians and, in a distinct but not at unrelated way, to transphobic speech and violence... That in every case what makes these such explosions of affect is the degree of threat which accepting these other ways of being and living and loving makes to the subjective consistency and stability of the hater. It need not be a threat as we might think about it, but for whatever reasons it is a threat for many. 

Is your bathroom breeding Bolsheviks?

It we think back to the developmental narrative that we can extract from Lacan, there is that moment when the infans becomes aware of its only personally produced product - POOP! - but that Look what I made moment that is so commonly shot down and devalued by the parent. No, disgusting, don't touch that! etc. Then think of the many ways in which abjecting parts of the subject's own being and own enjoyment is wrapped up in, & maybe even required (?) in consolidating the subject as this or that particular kind of subject. So, we have the by now common claim that the perpetrator of gay bashing is lashing out at their own un-acknowledgable desires which are seen as embodied by the other. The S2 then is the knowledge (repressed, hence below the bar) that what is hated, and marked as the abject object in the other, is then a part of the agent of the hate speech as well, a part which must stay hidden, repressed, denied, etc. A knowledge that the abject object is no less an object of fascination.

... ok, that's all I got right now... will try to think this through more carefully another time. Gotta get ready for poetry now. Put my face on, etc. 

My "Dissertation"? b/w How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States by Joanne Meyerowitz

In recent months I have been reading a lot books and articles and blogs and so on and so forth pertaining to trans(gender) broadly conceived. Meyerowitz's book had been given positive reviews in a few places and looked to be historically very rich with detail and so I got a copy and I'll say more about that below (though not much).

So, the scare quotes around "dissertation" (and that is what they are) what is that all about? could it be my inability to imagine such a thing in any but the most abstract of terms? maybe just the utter lack of a precise topic? yes, it could be that. it could very easily be that. 

I know of course that it'll have a fair amount of Sigmund and Jacques, and thus also undoubtedly a small boat load of lacanians and semi-sorta-lacanians that I find important. That much I know. Some degree of pull from all the reading in ideology (detailed on this blog last summer) and from Marx and certain marxists is also possible, but I am at the moment not really looking there (though I would be a delighted to find an ideological critique of the DSM generally or of the GID [gender identity disorder] diagnosis and other gender-connected diagnoses - someone direct me to that now please, thank you).

& I've been nibbling at a number of different scholarly zones pertaining, at their broadest, to the body… with an eye to what my sort of psychoanalytic thinking might find there or bring to those discussions or bring back from those discussions etc. So, neuro brain stuff (and the neuropsychoanalysis folks), and corporeal philosophy, a touch of phenomenology (don't tell on me), and much of the stuff about affect and emotion that got stirred up by the Laclau class back in 2010 and comes and goes as a specific site to focus on for me (affect is so hot topic right now! but i'm kinda meh on it myself, depending on the day)… body maybe also includes much of the stuff about voice that has been nagging at me as a place where maybe I have something to say. 

is voice a body thing or not?  either way, I have so many small notes and collected references to things about voice that surely voice could be a productive zone to work through. Aside from the interesting work on voice already from Dolar and that other Slovenian guy everybody reads (the one with all the nervous tics), I'd seen some abstract when I was taking classes in linguistics back in 2008 or so, it talked about subvocalizations taking place below the person's conscious awareness which were very very reduced versions of the same or initiating muscle motions involved in speaking aloud that which one was reading "silently". That got me to thinking about the automaton-like, machinic aspect of the unconscious in Lacan's understanding and as well to how here it seems that the Symbolic is actively reinscribing itself in the flesh (this subvocalization stuff I need to find out more about and also track down the article I saw again). Then there is a lot of stuff about gay voice that I researched back in that linguistics class. There are aspects of voice that seem interesting to think of wrt trans people as well in that voice is a somewhat unique 'behavioral set' (sorry, crappy term) to make alterations to, it being so heavily coded as the mark of authenticity, etc. It seems to me that the perilous fragility of the voice is not utterly unlike that of the subject per Lacan. There is in that last line a paper that could be written. 

& then most recently trans stuff has become interesting to me for a bunch of reasons, many of which have links back to the things discussed above. At the same time, articulating those linkages has largely not been done yet (by me that is), and I need to start making the links or at least trying to state where they might be.  

As with homosexuals, psychoanalysis, specifically the institutional psychoanalysis of North America and England (tied to psychiatry, medicine and state) has not got a very positive record in its interactions with trans people. The downside of this is predictable, Freud and Lacan and others who might have some useful things to say are all collected in the stink file with Charles Socarides and (judging from what scattered things I have read) Catherine Millot, possibly Saffouan as well. I'm likely to try and argue for the usefulness of lacanian thought to trans persons, of course to do that, I'll finally have to bite the bullet and try to get clear on what the fuck Lacan is really taking about when he refers to sexuation. That is, I confess that I have read much of this in a sort of surfacey way and tried to wrap my head around the distinctions being put forth. But all too often when I attempt this I feel like I am exerting more energy keeping sexual difference from slipping toward socio-cultural 'gender' or now and then (not as often) sliding back into a sort of bonehead anatomical marking, hm, looks like a penis, check the M box would you? and thus one is marked!  (though today I read something in Elliot's book [Debates in Transgender, Queer, and Feminist Theory: Contested Sites] which gave a lacanian developmental narrative in which the ascription of a sexed position relates to the oedipus and lacan's symbolic 'castration' etc and I need to think through her understanding because she certainly is saying that Lacan's concept is neither of those annoying options of the binary. & I sort of see what she is saying, but I wonder whether, if I understand her reading of Lacan correctly, that perhaps one is making a conceptual error even speaking of sexual difference and gender at all, maybe these concepts operate at angles to one another such that while they intersect, reigning those points of intersection into one or the other's discursive plane distorts what they are for the other beyond much use. But I digress.

One thing that I find fascinating in a very general way about all things trans is that it is as if the trans person, however they identify themselves, however they relate to the contesting ways that they are conceptualized in the social realm etc, simply by existing, (… damn, I am stretching for a metaphor… nothing coming …)… 

… If we use lacanian terms it seems that in a great many realms of the Symbolic (there is no single Symbolic after all, but a whole bunch of them interpenetrating and so forth) the crispy clean M/F binary is mapped very tightly with other pairs of traits and that many of these symbolic structures are immediately problematized by the very existence of the trans person. It seems that one can, in a very real sense, pick a disciplinary discourse and then 'add trans' and sudden rifts open up, questions so long settled as to be reflexes, to be naturalized ideologemes, appear suddenly inadequate and as if under a spotlight. That is to say, the trans body has the potential to act as the Real for some given symbolic. I do not easily say The Symbolic here because it is not total,  there are folks striving to find ways of letting trans people inhabit the language itself more easily - of course here too there are splits and rifts and suggesting new pronouns be adopted meets with a resistance that seems to me to be beyond any intellectual objection and to be of a piece with the affective investment that we have even in the way that pronouns contribute to the "gendered" structure of our worlds. But to the extent that there are trans and non-trans people speaking about trans persons and attempting more and more to do so in socially sensitive, non-pathologizing, non-eroticizing, and non-objectifying ways - one can see these practices as generating new signifiers for a Symbolic in obvious need of refurbishing. I'll call, with some misgivings but no better idea, what I have been talking about here the trans effect.

I do not wish to be read as posing the trans subject as inherently radical or disruptive or as otherwise "exceptional." My position here would be better stated as; trans people are people just like red headed people are people, or cat people are people. Rad, huh? But, that said, it also seems that the Symbolic of late (over the past century and very much so now) is in a bit of Imaginary turmoil because the trans person, however conceptualized (Symbolic) or pictured (Imaginary) is also Real in a way that "doesn't stop being written" to use Lacan's line from somewhere, but here we might hear that tiny quote as referring directly to the way that this Real requires, compels more and more writing, more and more attempts to reign it back into existing categories or to expand those categories or to abolish those categories. Thinking about the Real in this sense shows the way that, in spite of the typical tropes of negativity that are used to designate it, that the Real is actually the condition of possibility for the Symbolic and the Imaginary, that it inspires and compels the subject, via the resources of the other orders, to attempt to keep up with it. So, if there is something apparently exceptional about the trans subject at this moment in history, I think that this is an effect which will, at some point, be viewable as a history and that a time will come when the Symbolic and Imaginary, in a broader way, will have become more livable places for trans people and the effect I am writing about here will have ceased to be so filled with seeming paradoxes. 

Joanne Meyerowitz

So, in finding trans people and many ways that they might be seen to contest the extant Symbolic and Imaginary resources, interesting and potentially pertinent to my dissertation required of me that I start soaking up information. The book I that chose in hopes that it would give me a sense of the history was How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States by Joanne Meyerowitz, Now, if you would prefer a better review of that text, I suggest reading Dallas Denny on it here. I do not have the depth of knowledge that Denny has, but the two thumbs up response to the book is the same as my own. It is chock full of all manner of fascinating details and I found it very hard to put down. There were also too many things in it that I felt compelled to underline for me to even consider giving it a more careful write up just yet, though surely I should do that stuff (superego would agree).

Can We Invest in “Radical Investment”: Laclau’s Misuses of Psychoanalysis

Ernesto Laclau

This is a paper I completed last spring, and it marks a turning point of sorts for me. I went into it thinking that perhaps I would be energized by Laclau's thought and enthused by discourse, if not in his precise understanding of it, but at least enough that I might build upon that in my future work. What happened instead is that I came to conclude that Laclau's entire theoretical edifice was shot through with holes, his use of psychoanalytic ideas terribly skewed, his own theory largely untenable as given, and my interest in his thought a thing of the past.

So the paper is available as a PDF by clicking this sentence (which redirects you to ifile). It is 50 pages in total and I've just worked through it and cleaned up a few typos and such.

Recanting My Last Post

I've largely scrapped the text of my last post, drastically reducing some parts of it and writing out new examples that will hopefully serve my purposes somewhat better. Once I have that a little less drafty, I'll post it. 

A few quick thoughts though about the preceding version, which I will leave posted for shits & giggles.

1st, in that text I attempted to do something that Lacan does not do in Seminar XVII - integrate desire with discourse. I was reasonably happy with how I did this, and there may be some call to revisit this question at another time, but lest anyone think that I am sticking super-close to Lacan here, let me disabuse you of that wrt desire.

2nd, I also make use of a less that definitionally clear idea about affects which likely would not satisfy Lacan or informed readers of his work. This is not simply because affect is posed as unconscious in what I have written (and it seems in some readings that both Freud and Lacan disputed the idea that affects could be unconscious, though there is some ambiguity in that as well). But also simply that i deal with 'affect' in general and purport to discuss its workings in the discourses. Lacan never really talks about affects per se, only anxiety, because it is the only one that "doesn't lie." & he certainly doesn't talk even of anxiety in connection with the discourses.

The revision I have made to this opening hews closer to Lacan and eshews discussion of affect and desire. 

That said, I remain convinced that the body - as the site of jouissance - is crucial in lacanian thought. & that an informed and flexible theorization of affects (emotions, feelings) is something that would enrich lacanian thought. (Sadly, I have not been swayed by Green's attempt to do this in a loosely lacanian framework). Where exactly this will come from I do not know, though some of Massumi's thinking about affects strike me as compelling and perhaps there is a way to bring this into productive dialogue with lacanian thought - but there are also obstacles there as Massumi is soaked in Deleuze and Deleuze and Lacan seem to be at odds on certain crucial points.

more thoughts about Affect / Language

Back in February I was trying to work out some thoughts about the connections between language and affect and what I found troubling about the preeminence of Language in so many discussions of Affect. Well, now I have more thoughts to try and get out of myself in some quasi-coherent way and so, here we go…

Let's assume, for now at least, that so far as the account of Language derived from structuralism; langue/parole, signifying chain, the X/Y of the metaphorical and metonymical axes is adequate to its object of study. [I am not sure about that, but just for the moment, let us take it as given.] This model when plotting utterances of whatever sort does so in a way that we might reasonably think of as two-dimensional. Speech unfolds in one direction, forward in time. The other dimension is provided by the axis of substitution.

Many thinkers who are trying to cope with the question of how affect relates to signification are incorporating it directly into the signifying chain in some fashion. To give but two; Laclau ties it directly to signification arguing that "affect requires signification"; Johnston does this differently, arguing that "affects are signifiers." I will not replay here my critique of Laclau's position, but I do not think that affect can be shown to require signification and that the laugh of the infans is proof enough of that for this moment. Johnston's position is much better argued and I am not yet ready to try to engage it fully just yet. I will say that I agree with a great deal of what he says but still feel as if something is missing. What is missing I turn to now…

Let's say that three friends attend a dinner party making a total of 10 people. The three friends are dispersed around the table and talking to various others as the meal progresses. Many things are said, now and then everyone is listening to a single person but often enough things break into smaller side-conversations. There are any number of moments when the three friends are all aware of things that are said which are a bit problematic but none of them is in a great position to make a critique of these things without breaking the code of the dinner party. When it is over and the three are riding home together they begin to collectively process the evening and those moments when each was uncomfortable with the implications underpinning some other person's speech.

Now, let's assume the three are at home, continuing to recount things they heard or thought and one of the three reveals that they were very angry about something, and in telling this they release a great deal of negative affect. Here I want to tread lightly as I am unsure of the best choice of vocabulary. Does 'release' imply too much conscious intention? Would it be better to say that one 'gives off' affect? [We'll return to this below, just flow with me for now]. So one of the three is quite worked up and they state their criticism very strongly and then tired from the dinner and the discussion they go to bed. We are left with two now who remain in place. But now, things are very different. They are both left talking about their night still, but grappling as much with the content of the absent 3rd's criticisms, but also with the "affect bomb" that was set off at the same time.

It seems to me that while, yes, the 3rd did give an affect-laden chain of significations, that affect does not inhere only in those significations, rather that it colors the signifying chain. [Again, terminology alert - to be resumed below]. I, as one of the three friends (one of the two who remained behind when the 3rd left) was very conscious of change in 'mood' which was quite pervasive. I and the other spoke about the criticisms, about the night overall and about things unrelated to the night entirely, but it seemed very much to me that the tone (mood, vibe, coloration, etc) of the discharge of so much affect had colored all that came after, even the purely humorous discussion that was no longer about the evening at all.

This example, though it is what prompted my thoughts about this, is perhaps not the best one to make the point that I am making. But the thing I am pointing at is the way that someone's mood, their "affective charge" can and does impact others' affects. Now the thinker who favors language as model here will attribute this to signifiers. The person in the bad mood we must recognize as being in a bad mood and so there must be signs of this which we read to make this attribution. If it is countered that we may not always be aware of these signs, then perhaps the signifying chain where these details are registered is unconscious. Maybe. But I wonder still.

If the pre-linguistic child, the infans is productive of what seem very much like affects, smiles, laughter, fright, worry, etc. Then it would seem that affects precede language. I am sure that once the child becomes a speaking being that all of that is over-coded with signifiers. But I have a hard time believing that because of this an affect simply becomes just another signifier.

It seems that affects are at times much more nebulous, that we can not know what this 'weird mood' we are in means or what caused it. We may manage to satisfy ourselves about that by means of a statement at some point ("I guess I feel ______") but other times the mood simply changes and we never are able to really articulate what was happening affectively.

If we consider a sentence like "my father just died" we have pretty clear access to the basic signification, the meaning of this sentence. But as a written text without other detail or context we have no bearings on the affect involved, all that we can do is project an affect upon the statement. Affect can surely enter the signifying chain if someone says this to us and we reply by saying "you say that like you are happy about it," that is, if we explicitly enter the term "happy" into the signifying chain to name the affect which we felt in some way by virtue of the way that the sentence was uttered. In that case a signifier of an affect is present in the chain, but does this give any grounds for assuming that the affect is a signifier? In the famous 'the word is the murder of the thing' quote, is affect not the thing? Would "happy" not have to be utterly distinct from that to which it refers in order to be able to refer at all?

I know that there is much else to be done to shore up this general line of thinking about affects, but this at least gives my reasons for being dissatisfied with it being incorporated fully into the signifying chain. What remains is to ask what can be said about affect as distinct from signification and that will be difficult. My word choices for this are all tentative, but the one term which keeps reemerging as I try to think this all through is "colors." I think there is something valid in claiming that affects color the signifying chain. But this doesn't help all that much with trying to conceptualize this. I find I am also attracted to metaphors of charge and discharge, and certainly this has vernacular support, as when we say that an question is, for someone or other, very "affectively charged." In saying something like this we seem to be saying that the question is not one that people can seem to deal with in a non-affect-laden way, that emotions get in the way of reasons, etc. I do not know that I would be willing to accept any absolute distinction between reason and emotion, but neither would I assume that they are coextensive.

If the characterization of the structuralist view of language as two dimension has any merit, might we propose that affect is something like a third dimension? One that intersects in many ways with the two but that remains nonetheless of an other order. This is at least my intuition about this, though it is one that is sorely in need to a better conceptual grounding.

My unease about Language's preeminence

Something that has been troubling me under new names or new instances for some time now has to do with how language is used in lacanian theory.  The way the story goes is that the squalling little infans, the biologically human and pre-linguistic child is nearly another being entirely from what it will be once it accedes to language, to the No that grounds signification, after which it will always mean rather than be. Now, I am persuaded by so much of this argument and so comfortable in its basic parameters that I sometimes have difficulty formulating my unease with it.

But, due in part to last semester's intellectual escapades (Ernesto Laclau, William E. Connolly, also The Affect Studies Reader) I find myself feeling that something significant is lost in the psychoanalytic accounting of these matters... and that something either is or has something very much to do with affects.

My thoughts run as follows...

It seems that there is a lot of research and documentation about the infans' relation to others and in that research much indication that before using language at all, that those squishy little ones are more than able to signal with affect and receive affective signals. Then given the broad continuity of affect signals, whether one is a speaker of any language or not, it seems that while language may very well retroactively overcode those things, those affective signals or expressions... but that they retain their form in large part. As such it seems that to make the moment of learning to speak a language such a divisive cut is to ignore those factors and how they impact how we live, relate, love and hate, and most pertinently how we mean and interpret. On a particularly moody and glum day, a joke may not make me laugh, an idea may strike me as inert, a poem I have loved before may seem lifeless and dull.  On a particularly ebullient day, I may find large significance in small, everyday things, hear the poetry in the kids massing for the bus, etc. But if affective relations show this continuity from before we spoke to now, isn't it somewhat non-dialectical to assume that once language is uploaded that those factors are simply taken in, absorbed by language? Would it not seem more apt to assume that their continuity across that boundary of speech (the laugh of the infans and the laugh of the octogenarian being mutually recognized & recognizable) is an indication of their persistence either 1. alongside each other without significant mutual impact, or (as I think is the case) 2. in an evolving dialectic, perhaps (and only perhaps) in which learning how to manage their overlap involves finding each already at work in the other? Isn't the clinical process of the 'talking cure' in part about finding the words for the affects - and isn't that finding also a way of feeling the affect in question for what it actually is in its connections with one's life? If I am plagued by some floating and unshakable guilt whose justification I cannot name, and by whatever means I do manage to find its name, to comprehend what it is that I feel guilt about, do I not then have the chance to feel the guilt for what it really is, meaningfully connected to it object?

That this - what Freud means (or so I understand him) by the idea of 'working through' - linking of the affect with the words that name it adequately is not simply a furthering of my alienation in the realm of the signifier?

Anyway, such run my thoughts. & saying so, repeatedly (as this is not the first time I have tried this line of thought) as a process of working through has lessened the unease in some ways, in that at least I am inching toward a clearer notion of precisely where and with what I am uneasy. Not a very big step perhaps, but progress (or so I console myself).