Friday, April 8, 2011
On Delany's The Jewel Hinged Jaw, Initial Thoughts
I came across this recently, and thought I would put it up. My initial reaction to Delany's first collection of science fiction literary criticism.
Samuel Delany’s collection of essays The Jewel Hinged Jaw shows a lot of similar pressures as other science fiction criticism at the time. There is still a clear sense that the genre was not respected either in the academy nor in many mainstream literary arenas. At the same time, it is also clear that science fiction is becoming an important commodity. One can see the shifts that occur within the book itself. The initial essay discusses the commercial uptake of the genre. At that point, it was impossible to sell books labeled science fiction on the market because the distributors would just ignore them, but by the time “Shadows” comes out as an essay, that description had become outdated. This only represents one facet of what Delaney is trying to respond to. He is also involved in a complex conversation with the science fiction writing community about literary style and experimentation, a conversation about the problems with literary critics about the problems with structuralism, and with both authors and publishes about audience expectation in genre theory. In effect, he tries to juggle a lot of tasks, and it can be questioned whether he keeps all the balls up throughout.
Probably the most significant of the essays is the one entitled “Shadows”. It opens with a statement from Joanna Russ, which appears to be its purpose, an experiment in what science fiction criticism would look like. Russ argues that in order to produce science fiction criticism, the critic would have to engage a radically different set of tools in its production. This set of tools would emphasize the unusual and would bring in a whole set of interests traditionally read as extra-literary into the process. She states this in these provocative terms. “For example, allusions to the death of God will be trivial jokes, while metaphors involving the differences between telephone switchboards and radio stations will be poignantly tragic. Stories ostensibly about persons will really be about topology.” (Delany 38) Russ is, of course, referencing the modes of estrangement that operate in science fiction. She puts this estrangement in terms that would have be extremely familiar to the formalists that initially produced the concept of estrangement, which is in a manifesto form that takes on the forms of extremity and grotesqueness found in futurism.
Let’s return to Delany. He takes up these provocations and runs with them. Along with a discussion of science fiction, he introduces long conversations about structuralism and its relationship to literary criticism and anthropology, formal logic, and a series of anecdotes about Delany’s everyday life and his literary production. There are moments that it is difficult to grasp why these various fragments are put together, especially the moments of formal logic, but there seem to be a couple projects that can be drawn from the work. The first concerns the role of criticism. Delany argues against the structuralist imagination that posits their work reveals some sort of essential skeleton from the literary work. He instead argues that critical work can only allow for a partial, distanced look at the work. This response is always personal, although the best work will be methodologically rigorous. This isn’t a dismissal of criticism, and Delany makes the point of recognizing that criticism can allow for a more productive reading of the text, but it is an attack on the notion of the discipline as an objective science.[1] A second point swirls around issues of political domination. He argues that domination operates within a form of unconscious, rather than as conscious decision. He marks this in the remarks of a SF author, structuralist criticism, and later on in Ursula Leguin’s novel, The Dispossessed. The implicit argument seems to be that we can only begin to recognize these unconscious structures because the modes of resistance have put them into crisis. This has been because of the conscious decisions to reject those modes by the NSM’s. The final point might be that science fiction operates in a manner analogous to the future, by “casting a shadow over coherent areas of imaginative space that would otherwise be largely inaccessible.” (Delany 117-118)
What is to be made of this? The common point that might be drawn from these goals is that approaches to producing knowledge must remain contingent, multiple, and open to recognizing their own partiality and incompleteness. The brief even tossed of reference to the various new social movements might be an important clue to this in that they have challenged forms of knowledge production, even in older counter-systemic movements. Delany attempts to not only prove this, but perform it in his work. This leads to the modes of reflexivity that appear throughout the book as well as the various references to the tidbits of his personal life. To a certain extent, one could read Delany as a mediator between the late work of Michel Foucault and the various social movements that he is trying to understand.[2] The science fiction he examines is both a marker of these times and something that critically engages in these times.
[1] While I agree with Delany that criticism is always partial, subjective, etc, I think its important to remember that genre still acts as a disciplining an normalizing structure on what is recognized as literature (and criticism). A critic might be able to point to those forces within the work of art, which are not a ‘skeleton’ so to speak, but do mark its structural conjuncture.
[2] Foucault is, of course, not attempting to produce a history of these movements. Instead, they act as studies of the conditions that brought rise to these movements.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
More on Literary Criticism and Science Fiction Genre Criticism
This continues from the material I set up in my passage on Theodor Adorno, which can be found here.
However, as Adorno notes, aesthetic production is linked to the reworking of ideological material, linking his conception of the aesthetic to the concept of literary production of developed in the 1920’s by a small circle of literary critics surrounding Mikhail Bakhtin. The circle attempted to reject both the solipsistic interpretation of art by the formalists and the crude economic of their Marxist contemporaries. This attempt is most obvious in the critical reading of Formalism provided by Bakhtin and Medvedev, shifting the emphasis of formal analysis away from technique and formal estrangement. They note, “The literary structure, like every ideological structure, refracts the generating socioeconomic reality, and does so in its own way. But, at the same time, in its “content,” literature reflects and refracts the reflections and refractions of other ideological spheres (ethics, epistemology, political doctrines, etc.). That is, in its “content” literature reflects the whole of the ideological horizon which it is itself a part.”[1] The production of literature then is tied to both the reworking of the ideological codes of the literature that came before and within that process. It also draws on material of other ideological spheres, transforming them in the process. The engagement in this process puts literature at the ‘ideological horizon’ of its world, allowing it to engage with both the potentialities and contradictions of the transforming ideological terrain.[2]
These concepts are further developed in the structuralist influenced criticisms of the 1960’s and 1970’s, which critically draw from the concepts of language developed by Saussure, as well as the arguments presented by Formalism. However, these critics abandon the belief in an isolated concept of art that is promoted by the formalists under the guise of autonomy. These theorists emphasize the transitory nature of genre production, emphasizing the manner in which a formation of genre coagulates to communicate to a specific audience, comes into form as a dominant form, and loses its efficacy as literary form to be replaced by other forms. Genre then takes on a normative function, a way of mapping the formation of literary norms in response to conventional and historical expectations. Form then becomes a way of exploring social formation, although in a mediated form. The author is de-centered as the first reader, and is linked into a community of readers who shape genre through social expectations.
There are a number of limitations to this formulation that have been explored by Marxist critics in this field, which point to the ways that these readings tend to homogenize those social formations. Jameson in particular focused on this problem in his reading of structuralism and is precedents in Formalism and Saussure's semiotics in The Prison-House of Language. Jameson noted that these modes of criticism contained a common element, the tendency to emphasize the synchronic over the diachronic. These models don’t deny the diachronic per se, but they emphasize the interpretation of systems as synchronic totalities. This very quality leads to an inability to understand why things change. The conceptualization loses the ways that diachronic transformations can only be understood through the recognition that totality is constantly in motion, in constant flux. No moment can be understood as a complete totality in and of itself. To return this question to genre, the structuralist influence on genre theory leads to a tendency to ignore the contradictions, gap, lacunae and failures that are constitutive of literary works.[3] This problem becomes particularly sharp when confronting science fiction, which confronts the question of transformation over time.
At this point, the question of science fiction as a particular genre becomes central. One of the first systematic attempts to define the genre was made by Darko Suvin in his book, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. He defines the genre with the term “cognitive estrangement,” borrowing from the term from the critical work of the formalist Viktor Shklovsky and Bertolt Brecht. The genre is defined by the Novum, or an element of novelty that is taken as a pivot for the possible transformations of the society as a whole. Suvin distinguishes science fiction from the fantastic through the legitimization of the Novum through the scientific knowledge of the period, therefore linking up the Novum the need to read it through a ‘socio-historical lens.’ For instance, the narratives to be discussed in the prospectus are haunted by catastrophe, notably the threat of nuclear war, but also the threat of biological warfare, and civil war. Suvin notably refuses the mythic reading of these narratives, focusing on their historic peculiarity, rather than reading them in the deeply structured manner as invited by critics such as Northrop Frye.[4]
Suvin’s concept of the genre has been explored and developed by a group of sympathetic colleagues, particularly in the pages of Science Fiction Studies, and in the work of such theorists as Federic Jameson, Carl Freedman, Peter Fitting, and Tom Moylan. That work has managed to challenge some of the basic assumptions that Suvin makes about the genre, particularly the distinctions he made between the genres of science fiction and the fantastic.[5] However the most famous of that work, the work of Jameson, spends no substantial effort in exploring the feminist works that this thesis discusses, nor do the questions of social reproduction. The work of Fitting and Moylan on the other hand deal with these works in their engagement with the concept of critical utopias and dystopias from the end of the Second World War into the end of the century. Moylan’s concept of the critical utopia is particularly significant for this work. He argues that the new utopian tradition rejects the earlier tendency within the tradition to present the good, new society as a static, fully formed blueprint. Instead, these works focus on the conflict between the old dominant order, and an order to come. He also emphasizes the importance that critically rethinking gender plays in this new utopian tradition, as well as the explicitly feminist interventions in the genre.
[1] Mikhail Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985)
[2] They note, “This is the reason that literature so often anticipates developments in philosophy and ethics (ideologemes), admittedly in an undeveloped, unsupported, intuitive form. Literature is capable of penetrating into the social laboratory where these ideologemes are shaped and formed. The artist has a keen sense for ideological problems in the process of birth and generation.” Bakhtin, Mikhail et.al. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985
[3] See Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production.
[4] For more, read Suvin’s argument in SF and the Genological Jungle in Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 16-36 16-36.
[5] See Jameson book. Also, Brian Attebery shows the influence of the gothic on science fiction, particularly its concepts of gender in Decoding Gender in Science Fiction.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
The Use of Analogy Amongst Activists (Some Thoughts)
It's been a little while since I last posted anything because of some important academic work that I needed to get done, but I'm hoping to have more time to write for the next few weeks or so. A recent retreat with the Students for Justice in Palestine made me return to a question that has been on my mind for the past few years, that is, the use of analogies within activist circles. This topic has been often been a source of a great deal of controversy, particularly in relationship to struggles based on identity, but the question has also been brought up in relationship to anti-imperialist struggles. Those conflicts have often been quite heated, and have lead to internal splits in groups as well as the break up of coalitions. I plan on arguing that the theoretical problem with these conflicts can be found in the implicit agreement amongst the interlocutors in the dispute, rather than their disagreement.
To understand that problem, I will work through each of the positions. The pro analogy position is fairly simple, and is best understood as a set of unthought assumptions, rather than a consciously developed approach to the use of analogy. The analogies that are used within this formation are really best understood as homologies. Structurally, the operate under the logic of X=Y. For instance, the feminist movement commonly compared the experience of women with the experience of African-Americans under segregation. This analogy had a habit of slipping into a logic that might be expressed in the following terms: the experience of African-American [men]=the experience of [white] women. This structure of analogy is frequently used to justify a particular cause by linking it to an older struggle, drawing an aura of legitimacy through the connection.
I think it should be clear at this point that I don't think this is a particularly appealing form of political reasoning. The opponents of the use of analogy have come to the same conclusion, arguing that this form of reasoning becomes a form of appropriation. Organizations that use this sort of logic put themselves into a parasitical relationship with other struggles, feeding off their energy, rather than acting in solidarity with those movements. And it needs to be recognized that this form of organizing produces legitimate resentments from the struggles that have been used in such a manner. For instance, the white gay establishment has done a great deal of harm through the indiscriminate use of analogies to the civil rights movement. As a whole, this position is a far more thought through position, focusing on the differences of struggles, and demanding an ethical accountability to the actions of activists and organizers. Folks within this position by in large argue against the use of analogy, critiquing its use in the vast majority of situations.
So, one may wonder at this point why I have claimed that I am producing a critique of both sides of the debate. After all, I clearly see that one side's position is more clearly thought through and ethical than the other. But, the problem is that both views operate under a common misunderstanding of the role of analogy in argument. Both positions operate on the assumption that analogy is homology, that is that a similarity based on a common origin. This is a form of analogy, but it isn't the only approach. It also can be a productive epistemological device, allowing for a better understanding of a situation through an act of comparison. It allows for the thinker to break out of old patterns of thinking to produce a different way of looking at a situation. As Ta-Nehisi notes,
To understand that problem, I will work through each of the positions. The pro analogy position is fairly simple, and is best understood as a set of unthought assumptions, rather than a consciously developed approach to the use of analogy. The analogies that are used within this formation are really best understood as homologies. Structurally, the operate under the logic of X=Y. For instance, the feminist movement commonly compared the experience of women with the experience of African-Americans under segregation. This analogy had a habit of slipping into a logic that might be expressed in the following terms: the experience of African-American [men]=the experience of [white] women. This structure of analogy is frequently used to justify a particular cause by linking it to an older struggle, drawing an aura of legitimacy through the connection.
I think it should be clear at this point that I don't think this is a particularly appealing form of political reasoning. The opponents of the use of analogy have come to the same conclusion, arguing that this form of reasoning becomes a form of appropriation. Organizations that use this sort of logic put themselves into a parasitical relationship with other struggles, feeding off their energy, rather than acting in solidarity with those movements. And it needs to be recognized that this form of organizing produces legitimate resentments from the struggles that have been used in such a manner. For instance, the white gay establishment has done a great deal of harm through the indiscriminate use of analogies to the civil rights movement. As a whole, this position is a far more thought through position, focusing on the differences of struggles, and demanding an ethical accountability to the actions of activists and organizers. Folks within this position by in large argue against the use of analogy, critiquing its use in the vast majority of situations.
So, one may wonder at this point why I have claimed that I am producing a critique of both sides of the debate. After all, I clearly see that one side's position is more clearly thought through and ethical than the other. But, the problem is that both views operate under a common misunderstanding of the role of analogy in argument. Both positions operate on the assumption that analogy is homology, that is that a similarity based on a common origin. This is a form of analogy, but it isn't the only approach. It also can be a productive epistemological device, allowing for a better understanding of a situation through an act of comparison. It allows for the thinker to break out of old patterns of thinking to produce a different way of looking at a situation. As Ta-Nehisi notes,
Thursday, March 24, 2011
A Short Analysis of a Fragment of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory
As I try to transform my prospectus into a cohesive 10-12 page response from its original format of 32 overwhelming pages, I find myself having to cut some interesting material. For instance, I wound up having to cut the passage that I have included below, which uses Adorno to think through the relationship between artistic form and social formations. Rather than abandoning it completely, I thought I would include it here. Consider it a precursor to some of the material that I have produced over the past few months on the relationship between aesthetic form and politics.
The linkage between form and politics is most directly developed by Theodor Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory. Adorno’s analysis of the aesthetic utilizes Leibniz’s concept of the monad to capture the dialectical tension of literature ‘as both autonomous and fait social.’ For Leibniz, the concept of the monad links to his general concept of the harmony of nature, each element of the whole containing the key to understanding the whole. This concept of the monad then becomes the key for understanding the literary work, operating both within its autonomous sphere and containing the key to understanding a whole realm of social relations that exist outside of it. However, Adorno abandons Leibniz’s organic and harmonious whole for a concept of antagonistic totality. Adorno states this in the following terms.
“That artworks as windowless monads “represent” what they themselves are not can scarcely be understood except in that their immanent historicity as a dialectic of nature and its domination, not only is of the same essence as the dialectic external to them but resembles it without imitating it. The aesthetic force of production is the same as that of productive labor and has the same teleology; and what may be called aesthetic relations of production—all that in which the productive force is embedded and in which it is active—are sedimentations or imprintings of social relations of production. Art’s double character as both as both autonomous and fait social is incessantly reproduced on the level of its autonomy. It is by virtue of this relationship to the empirical that artworks recuperate, neutralized, what once was literally and directly experienced in life and what was expulsed by spirit…. The basic levels of experience that motivate art are related to those of the objective world from which they recoil. The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form. This, not the insertion of objective elements, defines the relation of art to society. The complex of tensions in artworks crystallizes undisturbed in these problems of form and through emancipation from the external world’s factual façade converges with the real essence.”[1]
The relationship between the ‘artwork’ and its outside is understood through a structure of homology between the ‘aesthetic force of production’ and that of ‘productive labor.’ Both are ‘embedded’ in the social relations of production, that is, both are products of the structures of the social logic of capitalist domination, and simultaneously tied into the same social struggles that make up its teleology. The artist (as subject and as subject position) is both produced within the violence of the structures of social domination and resistance that constitute capitalist social relations and use as her or his raw material the ideology of those struggles, or, as Adorno states it, the ‘neutralized’ contents of what is ‘directly experienced in life’ and is ‘expulsed by spirit.’ Therefore the ‘artwork’ is both autonomous, in that it must be understood as a unique assemblage of ideological and material elements, and that it directly emerges from the social forces that shape the society as a whole. Thus, Adorno refuses simultaneously, a set of formal demands made by Marxist critics such as Georg Lukacs who demand a sort of mimetic ‘representation’ of its outside in the form of a sort of historical realism[2] that he finds in the works of Walter Scott among others. At the same time, it refuses the fantasy contained in the concept of an art for its own sake, which Adorno amongst others would link to the specific artistic alienation produced by the transforming social relations of the production of art. Instead, the artwork must be understood within the forces of production that created it, and specifically the multitude of social discourses that both are produced and reproduce the social. While this relationship may seem initially to point to a simplicity and clarity in the relationship, it is important to remember that this gestures to the fact that the artwork itself is as complex and overdetermined as the society is as a totality.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
A short comment on Mary Shelley's The Last Man
As I continue to work on academic work, here is an earlier set of notes about Mary Shelley's The Last Man. I hope that it captures some the genuine strangeness of the book.
At an initial glance, The Last Man looks like it should be categorized within the genre of science fiction. Most obviously, the text opens in the year 2073 and moves to the year 2093, which marks the end of humanity. This eschatological element also ties in with many of the dystopian themes found in science fiction. The text even imagines the collapse of the monarchy. However, on close inspection, the text doesn’t fit many of the norms around the genre. To begin, the narrative does not draw on the genre of travel literature, nor does it replicate similar anthropological tropes of fieldwork. There is little thought given to either the technological developments of the society or its broader sociological transformation. The focus remains resolutely character based, and there is little sense of the world being pushed to the foreground.
If anything, the text operates in the allegorical register that Fredric Jameson is so focused on in his work on science fiction. For instance, the war on Greece described in the text is a thin allegory for the war of independence that took Lord Byron’s life. There has also been ample research linking each of the characters with Shelley’s inner circle. Lord Raymond stands in for Lord Byron, Adrian stands in for Percy Shelley, etc. With the exception of the resignation of the king, the world we are looking at is of Europe of Mary Shelley’s time. I would argue that this text and its dependency on thin allegory show some of the weaknesses to Jameson’s theory. It is precisely the allegorical elements that make this text not operate as science fiction. Instead, it operates within the norms of romanticism, while challenging some of its English practitioner’s optimism in the possibility of progress.
So what does the text do? Perhaps, we should start off with a brief overview of the plot. The novel begins with the narrator Verney meeting with Adrian for the first time. Verney portrays himself as a wild youth, without training. Jane Blumberg argues that this portrayal acts as a parody of Wordsworth’s emphasis on the ideal of the solitary wanderer.[1] This meeting brings Verney both into an intellectual life and the society of Adrian among others. This leads to fairly elaborate intrigue with Adrian’s mother, who both disapproved of Verney and his father before him (who was a friend of Adrian’s father, the former king.)[2] His mother desires that Adrian take up the throne that had been abandoned by his father, but Adrian has responded to his mother’s ambitions by becoming a republican. His mother responds to this by both putting Adrian into an asylum and trying to tie her fortunes to another character, Lord Raymond, who just came back from a victory in Greece.
To make a long series of complex intrigues short, Adrian’s mother eventually fails and Raymond marries Adrian’s sister. Raymond marries Verney’s sister Perdita, and Adrian is rescued from his isolation. This marks one of the many temporary points of happiness in the text. However, this moment of bliss ends as Raymond returns to politics in order to run for the position of Protector of England. At the same time that he is involved in the campaign, he begins an affair with another woman. Eventually, this revelation leads him to resign his position and to escape his domestic situation to fight another war in Greece. His eventual plan is to be able to claim the privilege of conquering Constantinople. The narrative both emphasizes the useless destruction of the war and holds onto a heroic view of Raymond.
But at the same time, the eventual capture of Constantinople leads to the outbreak of the plague. The city is found empty, and the plague spreads among the soldiers. Raymond dies during the entrance of the city, but from a random wall falling down. The remaining characters return to England, and wait for the plague to come.
With the coming of the plague, Adrian eventually takes the position of the Protector of England. The narrative emphasizes his skill in dealing with the city in a time of plague, but his actions are primarily futile. Eventually, humanity is reduced to a few thousand people. It looks as if some sort of egalitarian society can be formed at this point. As the narrator points out, “poor and rich now were equal, or rather the poor were the superior, since they entered on such tasks with alacrity and experience…” Eventually, the living travel to the desolate city of Paris, where they fall into combat with a religious sect. This combat is dovetailed by the return of the plague. The plot ends with Verney standing alone, Adrian and Clara having fallen into the sea and drowned. Verney writes this tail for noone and wonders the empty streets of Europe.
My inclination is not to follow the symptomatic readings of the text that are touched on in both Blumberg and Kari Lokke’s text. They are not irresponsible readings, and the text bears them out, but I’m not that interested. Instead, my interest is the way the text operates as an allegory for the aftermath of the French Revolution and the terror produced by it and by Napoleon’s wars of conquest. This narrative is a familiar one for the English romantics. There is an early attraction to the possibilities of the revolution, then an eventual revulsion, and either a turning away from politics or a turning to conservatism.
This text certainly follows this to an extent. The ideal of the republic cannot save England from the plague, but despite its quotations of Edmund Burke, the grandeur and tradition of England is equally incapable of saving the country. The text stands in an interesting situation. There is no possibility of progress available, and at the same time, the old forms as represented by Burke’s concept of tradition have been destroyed. Shelley seems to be gesturing towards a void between the dead forms of the old and the stillborn forms of the new.
[1] She read his sister in the same manner. “Exclusive communion with nature has retarded her and it is the effects of civilization… which redeem her.” On Verney, “I had lived in what is generally called the world of reality, and it was awakening to a new country to find that there was a deeper meaning in all I saw….” (Blumberg 127-128)
[2] The possibilities to read this as a veiled allusion to Shelley’s life are not a stretch to say the least.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Suvin, H.G. Wells, "The Time Machine, Science Fiction and the Fantastic
In his essay on “The Time Machine”, Darko Suvin argues that the novelette is “at least one of the basic historical models for science-fiction structuring.” (Suvin 91) It presents interpretations of the future society of the Eloi that cover the basic forms of imagining the future in sociological science fiction, ranging from the utopian to the dystopian. He then looks at the influence that Huxley’s theories on evolution had on the structure of the novel. While he notes that Wells also drew influence from what Suvin refers to as a commonsense ‘folk biology’, “the principle of a Wellsian structure of science fiction is mutation of scientific into aesthetic cognition.” (Suvin 101) This material all ties in with the basic thesis that Suvin presents in his fundamental argument about the structure of science fiction as a genre in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction.
In that piece, Suvin argues that Science fiction can be understood as a separate genre through the concept of cognitive estrangement. This separates the genre from ‘naturalism’ because of its engagement with estrangement. It no longer operates within the ideological ‘zero world” of its author. The naturalized constraints of the world of the author, whether social or technological, are seen as contingent and the author imagines a world that operates within different social rules. At the same time, science fiction distinguishes itself from the realm of the fantastic, by trying to limit its speculations to what science has deemed to be possible. Rather than delving into the impossible, science fiction tries to open up possibilities in what is possible. This allows the reader to break through the ideological barriers of the contemporary society to an extent.
Suvin’s reading is compelling, and is extraordinarily useful, but I am more convinced by the first part of the argument than I am by the second part of the argument. Without a doubt, Wells’s narrative and aesthetic are influenced by the science of his times, as are his discussions of the nature of time, but how does the narrative get to the point of being able to explore the realm of time? This element of the story seems to put a bit of a dent in Suvin’s belief in a strong separation of the genres. The question that may need to be posed is how much do the realms of wonder (magic, the marvelous and the fantastic) begin to mix with science, and how much do they overdetermine each other?
In order to begin this discussion, it might be productive to look at the initial description of the model of the time machine.
The thing the Time Traveler held in his hand was a glittering metallic framework, scarcely larger than a small clock, and very delicately made. There was ivory in it, and some transparent crystalline substance. And now I must be explicit, for this that follows—unless his explanation is to be accepted—is an absolutely unaccountable thing. (Wells 11)
The opening description of the device falls out of the scientific narrative that Suvin stake so much importance on. Instead, we are offered a narrative of an object that is, in essence, fantastic. This is not only apparent in the lack of explanation of the device, but in its construction, which both emphasize delicacy and a construction that emphasizes its beauty. Instead of a description of the clockwork of the machine, we are told of its crystalline and ivory construction. Further into the narrative, the Time Traveler notes that, “You will notice that it looks askew, and that there is an odd twinkling appearance about this bar, as though it was in some way unreal.” (Wells 12) This unreality, along with mystical properties imbued in its construction, points to something that escapes the realm of the cognitive.
The plot’s construction itself borrows heavily from elements that Todorov would consider essential to the fantastic. The tension in the narrative structure comes from the question whether the Time Traveler is a reliable or an unreliable narrator. We are told from the beginning that this is a man that is not widely trusted. “The fact is, the Time Traveler was one of those men who are too clever to be believed; you never felt that you saw all round him; you always suspected some subtle reserve, some ingenuity in ambush behind his lucid frankness.” (Wells 15) It had already been established that this distrust had some merit. The Time Traveler had already played tricks on the group of friends, mechanically creating the effects of a ghost. Thus, the Time Traveler looks far more like a conjurer than a scientist. The question we are posed with is whether that ability comes from smoke and mirrors or it comes from something genuine. The narrative seems to indicate the latter, although it only does that through the negative, the disappearance of the Time Traveler in what could best described as a poof of smoke.
If we take the basic gist of the critics of fantasy seriously, that the fantastic allows us to engage with material that is unsymbolizable in the present, then it isn’t surprising that these techniques would be crucial in presenting social orders and scientific discoveries that are as of yet unimaginable. The curious thing is that the critics of the fantastic are as eager to banish science fiction to the realm of the marvelous as Suvin is eager to banish it from the realm of the cognitive, but “The Time Machine” operates easily within the dictates of Todorov’s demand of suspension, as well as it does within Suvin’s demands for cognitive estrangement. It’s not that these concepts should be collapsed, but there seems to be some limit in reading the genres in isolation.
In that piece, Suvin argues that Science fiction can be understood as a separate genre through the concept of cognitive estrangement. This separates the genre from ‘naturalism’ because of its engagement with estrangement. It no longer operates within the ideological ‘zero world” of its author. The naturalized constraints of the world of the author, whether social or technological, are seen as contingent and the author imagines a world that operates within different social rules. At the same time, science fiction distinguishes itself from the realm of the fantastic, by trying to limit its speculations to what science has deemed to be possible. Rather than delving into the impossible, science fiction tries to open up possibilities in what is possible. This allows the reader to break through the ideological barriers of the contemporary society to an extent.
Suvin’s reading is compelling, and is extraordinarily useful, but I am more convinced by the first part of the argument than I am by the second part of the argument. Without a doubt, Wells’s narrative and aesthetic are influenced by the science of his times, as are his discussions of the nature of time, but how does the narrative get to the point of being able to explore the realm of time? This element of the story seems to put a bit of a dent in Suvin’s belief in a strong separation of the genres. The question that may need to be posed is how much do the realms of wonder (magic, the marvelous and the fantastic) begin to mix with science, and how much do they overdetermine each other?
In order to begin this discussion, it might be productive to look at the initial description of the model of the time machine.
The thing the Time Traveler held in his hand was a glittering metallic framework, scarcely larger than a small clock, and very delicately made. There was ivory in it, and some transparent crystalline substance. And now I must be explicit, for this that follows—unless his explanation is to be accepted—is an absolutely unaccountable thing. (Wells 11)
The opening description of the device falls out of the scientific narrative that Suvin stake so much importance on. Instead, we are offered a narrative of an object that is, in essence, fantastic. This is not only apparent in the lack of explanation of the device, but in its construction, which both emphasize delicacy and a construction that emphasizes its beauty. Instead of a description of the clockwork of the machine, we are told of its crystalline and ivory construction. Further into the narrative, the Time Traveler notes that, “You will notice that it looks askew, and that there is an odd twinkling appearance about this bar, as though it was in some way unreal.” (Wells 12) This unreality, along with mystical properties imbued in its construction, points to something that escapes the realm of the cognitive.
The plot’s construction itself borrows heavily from elements that Todorov would consider essential to the fantastic. The tension in the narrative structure comes from the question whether the Time Traveler is a reliable or an unreliable narrator. We are told from the beginning that this is a man that is not widely trusted. “The fact is, the Time Traveler was one of those men who are too clever to be believed; you never felt that you saw all round him; you always suspected some subtle reserve, some ingenuity in ambush behind his lucid frankness.” (Wells 15) It had already been established that this distrust had some merit. The Time Traveler had already played tricks on the group of friends, mechanically creating the effects of a ghost. Thus, the Time Traveler looks far more like a conjurer than a scientist. The question we are posed with is whether that ability comes from smoke and mirrors or it comes from something genuine. The narrative seems to indicate the latter, although it only does that through the negative, the disappearance of the Time Traveler in what could best described as a poof of smoke.
If we take the basic gist of the critics of fantasy seriously, that the fantastic allows us to engage with material that is unsymbolizable in the present, then it isn’t surprising that these techniques would be crucial in presenting social orders and scientific discoveries that are as of yet unimaginable. The curious thing is that the critics of the fantastic are as eager to banish science fiction to the realm of the marvelous as Suvin is eager to banish it from the realm of the cognitive, but “The Time Machine” operates easily within the dictates of Todorov’s demand of suspension, as well as it does within Suvin’s demands for cognitive estrangement. It’s not that these concepts should be collapsed, but there seems to be some limit in reading the genres in isolation.
Some Basic Concepts of Jean Laplanche
In a continuation of printing older material as I work on my academic work, here is a slightly revised essay on the basic concepts of the psychoanalyst, Jean Laplanche. Laplanche is an interesting figure. Originally involved in the radical organization, Socialism or Barbarism, Laplanche went onto work with Jacques Lacan. He was unsatisfied with the approach of Lacan, and went back to the work of Sigmund Freud to establish a new foundation for psychoanalysis. Unlike the Hegelian idealism at the heart of Lacan's project, Laplanche's work is much more in line with a materialist analysis of the unconscious, and is probably the most relevant psychoanalytical thinker for a radical and materialist analysis. Despite the revision to the essay, there are still a number of elements in the analysis that need to be developed and thought through. But here are, in essence, my first thoughts on the question.
What is interesting about Jean Laplanche’s thought, is despite the fact that it comes across fairly clearly in his work, ultimately Laplanche is a concise thinker who is concerned with communicating with an audience, is that it isn’t necessarily easy to reproduce. I think that this comes from the fact that his models and thought processes resist the sort of taxidermic models that structure so much of academic thought. His concepts are so overdetermined and overlapping, that in order to discuss one of them, one inevitably brings up a number of the others. Nonetheless this is the modus operandi of this essay. I will begin with some comments about the relation of Laplanche’s relationship with the overall world of psychoanalytic thought. From there, I will move into the concepts in a more formal, if terse, manner, discussing seduction, translation, and the drive.
Despite the critiques the critiques that Jean Laplanche makes of the concept of the “infant Robinson,” the infant and the genesis of the unconscious is an ideal place to begin a discussion of Laplanche’s engagement with psychoanalysis. His book New Foundations of Psychoanalysis introduces this argument in its most direct form. What we find occurring is the rejection of a whole structure of terms and concepts as the basis of psychoanalysis. The oedipal structure and crisis and the mother’s breast become historically contingent, cultural phenomena. Instead the trans-historical basis for the unconscious can be found within the interaction between the infant and the adult who cares for it. We can see this as both a very radical re-theorization of psychoanalysis and at the same time a movement that can be described as very conservative, defending the trans-historical nature of the unconscious against the assault of post-structuralism and feminism.
This maneuver pushes the trans-historical elements of the unconscious into a very small corner. But this maneuver doesn’t transform Laplanche into an Albert Hourani type figure arguing for a limited space for a primarily obsolete psychoanalysis. Instead, he make an argument for a psychoanalysis that isn’t afraid of ‘culturalism,’ that sees an interdisciplinary engagement as a necessity for its development. He looks to some of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s observations as guide in this. “A philosopher interested in clinical observation, in very concrete experiments involving children, and in the observations of an anthropologist! He could teach a lesson to more than one psychoanalyst. We can learn the same lesson from Freud, who was never afraid to refer to observation, and to anthropological observation in particular…”[1] Laplanche looks to Merleau-Ponty as a useful methodological example, precisely though his willingness to engage in interdisciplinary scholarship. It’s notable that Merleau-Ponty’s engagements, examining the work of clinical observation, philosophy, and anthropology are engagements both taken up by Jacques Lacan, and more significantly, Sigmund Freud himself. At a more level, the study of the unconscious has to be placed into the study of social relations, both at the level of the interpersonal and at the level of social structures.
Laplanche returns to examine Freud’s theory of seduction, which the dominant strains of psychoanalysis argue, was abandoned, and that this abandonment constitutes the genesis of psychoanalysis. This fascination with seduction runs against the current found within Jeffrey Masson’s work. His interest is in the theoretical ramifications of seduction rather than its empirical dimensions. As a matter of fact, he suggests that Freud spent too much time on the actual incidents of abuse, rather than too little. In effect, Masson doesn’t recognize that Freud doesn’t abandon the seduction theory when he begins to beyond a model that poses a one to one relationship between fantasy and reality. Instead, Freud is developing a broader theory of the genesis of sexuality.
Instead he draws up a general theory of seduction, one that can be linked to any number of contingent relationships between an adult and a child.
“I am using, then, using the term primal seduction to describe a fundamental situation in which an adult proffers to a child verbal, non-verbal and even behavioral signifiers which are pregnant with unconscious sexual significations. We do not have to look far to find concrete examples of what I call enigmatic signifiers. Can analytic theory afford to go on ignoring the extent to which women unconsciously and sexually cathect the breast, which appears to be a natural organ for lactation? It is inconceivable that the infant does not notice this sexual cathexis, which might be said to be perverse in the sense that term is defined in the Three Essays. It is impossible to imagine that the infant does not suspect that the cathexis is the source of the nagging question: what does the breast want from me, apart from wanting to suckle me, and, come to that why does it want to suckle me?”[2]
Rather than continually looking for the traumatic origin of sexuality in some form of abuse, Laplanche argues that the introduction of sexuality needs to be understood within the daily activities between infant and mother, more specifically, the act of breast feeding. The act of feeding is then linked to the fact that women conventionally “unconsciously and sexually cathect the breast.” Laplanche then argues that the child undoubtedly picks up on this ‘sexual cathexis,’ which is then offered to the child as an incomprehensible signifiers. In addition to the economy of need that the milk fulfills, there is an additional economy of pleasure, one that exists in relation to the enigmatic signifiers sent by the mother. These signifiers are then engaged with by the child, who, at some level, poses the question, what is does this set of signifiers mean, and what does it have to do with me?
Laplanche uses the breast within this example, but it should be understood that the breast doesn’t take the place of the penis in a re-centered oedipal structure. We are in fact reminded earlier in the book that increasingly children are not being breast fed, and that it may be that in the future most children will not in fact be breast fed. The reason why he make reference to the breast, and Freud makes reference to the care of the mother is that they are still the most common forms of care of the child, but that doesn’t mean that they are essential to the operation. This doesn’t change the enigmatic messages sent through the adult. This can take any number of forms, touching, speech, the gaze of the child, etc.
The enigmatic signifier isn’t simple or untroubled. On asked of its nature, Laplanche responded, “it is conflict-full, conflictual, because it is enigmatic, unknown, hidden, it involves the repressed. It is like the example of parapraxes, slips of the tongues and so on… our conscious messages are infiltrated by unconscious ones which remain unconscious because there is conflict.”[3] The gift that is proffered, perhaps unknowingly, the introduction into human society, is one that is complex and riddled with contradictions and aporias.
The unconscious is in fact produced through the work of translation. Translation is the work of interpreting the message. “The unconscious grows from different types of messages. But metapsychologically, I don’t say that the unconscious is made up of enigmatic signifiers, as such, which would mean that the unconscious of the child is the unconscious of the mother. Instead there is an active part played by the infant which is repression; that is, the infant doesn’t take the whole of the message, but tries to understand it and the parts he understands do not become unconscious. The unconscious grows and grows, not in an organized manner, but side by side with those different types of relationships with the cares are interrelations of self-preservation, but which from the point of view of sexuality are only one-way relations (from the adult to the infant).”[4]
This is a significant point. It shifts away from a concept of the unconscious that can in any sense be linked to a primordial past of any sort. Nor can it be linked to the level of structure. Laplanche insists, “I am not denying the existence of essential stages such as the Oedipus and castration, even though I would claim that they, as opposed to primal seduction, are secondary stages.”[5] The unconscious is defined in terms of repression. Repression operates as a productive structuration, producing both the “I” of the ego and the force of the unconscious. The unconscious instead of being a sort of primordial structure becomes a discontinuous series of thing-like signifiers. It becomes “a un-metabolized trace.” He goes on to say, “It’s not a representation. It’s something that remains from the process. It’s a by-product of the process, a by-product which is continually reactivated.”[6]
This moves us in to the more troubled territory of “propping.” Laplanche retranslates Freud’s term, “Anlehnung” from James Strachey’s translation of the term as “anaclisis.” This literalization of the term serves to redefine and problematize this concept. “Strachey’s use of ‘anaclisis’ as the translation for this has nothing to with the Anlehnung of Freud. The idea of ‘leaning on’ is the idea that sexuality emerges on the basis of self-preservation, it ‘leans on’ that basis, but it’s not just an internal movement.”[7]
Laplanche expands this to connect with the idea of seduction, which had been abandoned in its original formulations. “We have here something resembling an onion with one layer of its skin peeled off or a flower which has lost a petal. And to make the point succinctly, onions do not peel themselves. Seduction peels what might be termed a sexual layer away from the self-preservation. Seduction peels the onion of self-preservation; self-preservation does not split as a result of some indefinable endogenous movement.”[8]
Jean Laplanche links the problem of the drive with a number of fairly significant structural problems. ”Yes with regard to the English-speaking world, this is the main issue, because the English speaking world has been invaded by the mistranslation of Trieb as ‘instinct’. The object relations school, the ego psychology, the Kleinian school – all these schools fail to make a basic distinction between drive and instinct. As a consequence they still have the idea of a biological basis to infantile sexuality, a predetermined basis, expressed in the evolution of sexuality through certain human stages. This is correlated with the concept of in instinct – an instinct that develops through certain stages. Human sexuality is completely reduced to an old biological model. The whole of Freud’s discovery is forgotten. Freud sometimes forgets it too, in fact.”[9]
We can see in here the deconstructive element of Jean Laplanche, the side that finds a certain alliance with Sigmund Freud’s Three Essays on Sexuality. We can see the same modes of deconstruction contained within Freud’s thought there, an attempt to deconstruct the structures of normative sexuality, by showing that they are precisely that, normative cultural structures. Laplanche looks at the way that confusion of the concepts of “Instinkt” and “Trieb” which gets put in the service of a certain type of normative sexuality that places under a concept of a biological one. He also links this to problems with Freud’s thought itself, which often rebels against the implications of his most radical concepts.
The drive also becomes one of the most constructive places for Laplanche’s rethinking of the project of psychoanalysis. “We don’t have meaning, we have the signifier. The signifier, which can have a meaning, but which becomes a force. It is the force of the ‘thing-signifier’. The message forces me to translate. There is a force to translate, a Trieb-a-drive-to translate, which is inside the message itself.”[10] Laplanche frequently refers to this drive, the only real drive it would seem, and as one that ‘perverts’ the limited structures of self-preservation within the young human subject. This perversion is linked to certain unevenness, an “unevenness inside the message.” This unevenness is a clear reference to the uneven capacities between the adult and the child. He then moves on to say. “I would say the message itself contains the enigma.” There seems to be a linkage between the concept of the enigma and the unevenness of force contained within the message.
The concept of Nachtraglichkeit, or ‘afterwardsness’ becomes crucial to understand the relationship of trauma to the structure of the drive and the nature of the enigmatic message. The trauma takes place in the process of ‘afterwardsness.’ The enigmatic message taken in at an earlier place but was placed in the state of unconsciousness. The trauma is only activated in an incident, which allows for the enigmatic signifier to link itself to another incident. This is why Freud links trauma and neurosis with overdetermination, because the ‘thing-like’ signifiers of the unconscious must always link themselves to other signifiers to reach the state of representation.
This single drive can be divided into to two aspects, “the life and death drives.” He points to the work of Klein as good place to define these concepts. “The so-called ‘life’ sexual drive corresponds to a whole and totalizing object; it is bound (in Freud’s sense of continuing to exist in more or less coherent manner, of not being fragmented) because it relates to a totalizing object or to an object than can be totalized.” Laplanche links this with the concept of metaphor. “The death drive, on the other hand, corresponds to a part object which is scarcely an object, as it is, even in Klein’s description, unstable, shapeless and fragmented; it is, therefore, closer to metonymy than metaphor.”[11]
While he schematizes these two drives, he emphasizes their heterogeneous relation to the primary and secondary processes of the drive, “we cannot establish a complete equation between the two, or say that the entire primary process is dominated by the death drive whilst the entire secondary process is dominated by the life drives. We have a complimentary series rather than a real opposition… The absolute primary process and the absolute secondary process are linked by a series which distributes varying degrees of metaphor and metonymy, but there is no point at which we can speak of pure metonymy and pure metaphor.”[12] This once again seems to be linked to a critique of a biologizing concept of the drive. A concept that Klein seems to accept in schematizing the ‘life’ and ‘death drives’ in the manner she does.
Although this brief summary hardly does justice to the thoroughness of Laplanche’s ideas, it does show a thread of continuity. Laplanche as I said before is involved a process that works to both radically transform psychoanalysis and conserve it as an important site of knowledge. What is transformed are the moments that psychoanalysis is used as a device to reinforce and naturalize the contingent structures of culture. But Laplanche doesn’t do this in the more radical form of ‘anti-psychiatry’ or the manner of, say, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen. Instead, he finds that they can already be found within Freud’s work itself. Freud’s work, while guilty of the charges above also reads those formations symptomatically and culturally. Laplanche’s work recognizes both within the work, and works to produce something else within them.
[1] Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. David Macy (New York: Blackwell, 1989), 92
[2] Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. David Macy (New York: Blackwell, 1989), 126
[3] Jean Laplanche, “The Kent Seminar”, in Jean Laplanche:Seduction Translation, Drives, Ed. John Fletcher and Martin Stanton (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1992), 23.
[4] Jean Laplanche, “The Kent Seminar”, in Jean Laplanche:Seduction Translation, Drives, Ed. John Fletcher and Martin Stanton (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1992), 25.
[5] Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. David Macy (New York: Blackwell, 1989), 149
[6] Jean Laplanche, “The other within: Rethinking psychoanalysis”
[7] ibid.
[8] Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. David Macy (New York: Blackwell, 1989), 145
[9]Jean Laplanche, “The other within: Rethinking psychoanalysis” in Radical Philosophy 102 (2000)
[10] Jean Laplanche, “The other within: Rethinking psychoanalysis” in Radical Philosophy 102 (2000)
[11] Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. David Macy (New York: Blackwell, 1989), 146-147.
[12] Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. David Macy (New York: Blackwell, 1989),147.
What is interesting about Jean Laplanche’s thought, is despite the fact that it comes across fairly clearly in his work, ultimately Laplanche is a concise thinker who is concerned with communicating with an audience, is that it isn’t necessarily easy to reproduce. I think that this comes from the fact that his models and thought processes resist the sort of taxidermic models that structure so much of academic thought. His concepts are so overdetermined and overlapping, that in order to discuss one of them, one inevitably brings up a number of the others. Nonetheless this is the modus operandi of this essay. I will begin with some comments about the relation of Laplanche’s relationship with the overall world of psychoanalytic thought. From there, I will move into the concepts in a more formal, if terse, manner, discussing seduction, translation, and the drive.
Despite the critiques the critiques that Jean Laplanche makes of the concept of the “infant Robinson,” the infant and the genesis of the unconscious is an ideal place to begin a discussion of Laplanche’s engagement with psychoanalysis. His book New Foundations of Psychoanalysis introduces this argument in its most direct form. What we find occurring is the rejection of a whole structure of terms and concepts as the basis of psychoanalysis. The oedipal structure and crisis and the mother’s breast become historically contingent, cultural phenomena. Instead the trans-historical basis for the unconscious can be found within the interaction between the infant and the adult who cares for it. We can see this as both a very radical re-theorization of psychoanalysis and at the same time a movement that can be described as very conservative, defending the trans-historical nature of the unconscious against the assault of post-structuralism and feminism.
This maneuver pushes the trans-historical elements of the unconscious into a very small corner. But this maneuver doesn’t transform Laplanche into an Albert Hourani type figure arguing for a limited space for a primarily obsolete psychoanalysis. Instead, he make an argument for a psychoanalysis that isn’t afraid of ‘culturalism,’ that sees an interdisciplinary engagement as a necessity for its development. He looks to some of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s observations as guide in this. “A philosopher interested in clinical observation, in very concrete experiments involving children, and in the observations of an anthropologist! He could teach a lesson to more than one psychoanalyst. We can learn the same lesson from Freud, who was never afraid to refer to observation, and to anthropological observation in particular…”[1] Laplanche looks to Merleau-Ponty as a useful methodological example, precisely though his willingness to engage in interdisciplinary scholarship. It’s notable that Merleau-Ponty’s engagements, examining the work of clinical observation, philosophy, and anthropology are engagements both taken up by Jacques Lacan, and more significantly, Sigmund Freud himself. At a more level, the study of the unconscious has to be placed into the study of social relations, both at the level of the interpersonal and at the level of social structures.
Laplanche returns to examine Freud’s theory of seduction, which the dominant strains of psychoanalysis argue, was abandoned, and that this abandonment constitutes the genesis of psychoanalysis. This fascination with seduction runs against the current found within Jeffrey Masson’s work. His interest is in the theoretical ramifications of seduction rather than its empirical dimensions. As a matter of fact, he suggests that Freud spent too much time on the actual incidents of abuse, rather than too little. In effect, Masson doesn’t recognize that Freud doesn’t abandon the seduction theory when he begins to beyond a model that poses a one to one relationship between fantasy and reality. Instead, Freud is developing a broader theory of the genesis of sexuality.
Instead he draws up a general theory of seduction, one that can be linked to any number of contingent relationships between an adult and a child.
“I am using, then, using the term primal seduction to describe a fundamental situation in which an adult proffers to a child verbal, non-verbal and even behavioral signifiers which are pregnant with unconscious sexual significations. We do not have to look far to find concrete examples of what I call enigmatic signifiers. Can analytic theory afford to go on ignoring the extent to which women unconsciously and sexually cathect the breast, which appears to be a natural organ for lactation? It is inconceivable that the infant does not notice this sexual cathexis, which might be said to be perverse in the sense that term is defined in the Three Essays. It is impossible to imagine that the infant does not suspect that the cathexis is the source of the nagging question: what does the breast want from me, apart from wanting to suckle me, and, come to that why does it want to suckle me?”[2]
Rather than continually looking for the traumatic origin of sexuality in some form of abuse, Laplanche argues that the introduction of sexuality needs to be understood within the daily activities between infant and mother, more specifically, the act of breast feeding. The act of feeding is then linked to the fact that women conventionally “unconsciously and sexually cathect the breast.” Laplanche then argues that the child undoubtedly picks up on this ‘sexual cathexis,’ which is then offered to the child as an incomprehensible signifiers. In addition to the economy of need that the milk fulfills, there is an additional economy of pleasure, one that exists in relation to the enigmatic signifiers sent by the mother. These signifiers are then engaged with by the child, who, at some level, poses the question, what is does this set of signifiers mean, and what does it have to do with me?
Laplanche uses the breast within this example, but it should be understood that the breast doesn’t take the place of the penis in a re-centered oedipal structure. We are in fact reminded earlier in the book that increasingly children are not being breast fed, and that it may be that in the future most children will not in fact be breast fed. The reason why he make reference to the breast, and Freud makes reference to the care of the mother is that they are still the most common forms of care of the child, but that doesn’t mean that they are essential to the operation. This doesn’t change the enigmatic messages sent through the adult. This can take any number of forms, touching, speech, the gaze of the child, etc.
The enigmatic signifier isn’t simple or untroubled. On asked of its nature, Laplanche responded, “it is conflict-full, conflictual, because it is enigmatic, unknown, hidden, it involves the repressed. It is like the example of parapraxes, slips of the tongues and so on… our conscious messages are infiltrated by unconscious ones which remain unconscious because there is conflict.”[3] The gift that is proffered, perhaps unknowingly, the introduction into human society, is one that is complex and riddled with contradictions and aporias.
The unconscious is in fact produced through the work of translation. Translation is the work of interpreting the message. “The unconscious grows from different types of messages. But metapsychologically, I don’t say that the unconscious is made up of enigmatic signifiers, as such, which would mean that the unconscious of the child is the unconscious of the mother. Instead there is an active part played by the infant which is repression; that is, the infant doesn’t take the whole of the message, but tries to understand it and the parts he understands do not become unconscious. The unconscious grows and grows, not in an organized manner, but side by side with those different types of relationships with the cares are interrelations of self-preservation, but which from the point of view of sexuality are only one-way relations (from the adult to the infant).”[4]
This is a significant point. It shifts away from a concept of the unconscious that can in any sense be linked to a primordial past of any sort. Nor can it be linked to the level of structure. Laplanche insists, “I am not denying the existence of essential stages such as the Oedipus and castration, even though I would claim that they, as opposed to primal seduction, are secondary stages.”[5] The unconscious is defined in terms of repression. Repression operates as a productive structuration, producing both the “I” of the ego and the force of the unconscious. The unconscious instead of being a sort of primordial structure becomes a discontinuous series of thing-like signifiers. It becomes “a un-metabolized trace.” He goes on to say, “It’s not a representation. It’s something that remains from the process. It’s a by-product of the process, a by-product which is continually reactivated.”[6]
This moves us in to the more troubled territory of “propping.” Laplanche retranslates Freud’s term, “Anlehnung” from James Strachey’s translation of the term as “anaclisis.” This literalization of the term serves to redefine and problematize this concept. “Strachey’s use of ‘anaclisis’ as the translation for this has nothing to with the Anlehnung of Freud. The idea of ‘leaning on’ is the idea that sexuality emerges on the basis of self-preservation, it ‘leans on’ that basis, but it’s not just an internal movement.”[7]
Laplanche expands this to connect with the idea of seduction, which had been abandoned in its original formulations. “We have here something resembling an onion with one layer of its skin peeled off or a flower which has lost a petal. And to make the point succinctly, onions do not peel themselves. Seduction peels what might be termed a sexual layer away from the self-preservation. Seduction peels the onion of self-preservation; self-preservation does not split as a result of some indefinable endogenous movement.”[8]
Jean Laplanche links the problem of the drive with a number of fairly significant structural problems. ”Yes with regard to the English-speaking world, this is the main issue, because the English speaking world has been invaded by the mistranslation of Trieb as ‘instinct’. The object relations school, the ego psychology, the Kleinian school – all these schools fail to make a basic distinction between drive and instinct. As a consequence they still have the idea of a biological basis to infantile sexuality, a predetermined basis, expressed in the evolution of sexuality through certain human stages. This is correlated with the concept of in instinct – an instinct that develops through certain stages. Human sexuality is completely reduced to an old biological model. The whole of Freud’s discovery is forgotten. Freud sometimes forgets it too, in fact.”[9]
We can see in here the deconstructive element of Jean Laplanche, the side that finds a certain alliance with Sigmund Freud’s Three Essays on Sexuality. We can see the same modes of deconstruction contained within Freud’s thought there, an attempt to deconstruct the structures of normative sexuality, by showing that they are precisely that, normative cultural structures. Laplanche looks at the way that confusion of the concepts of “Instinkt” and “Trieb” which gets put in the service of a certain type of normative sexuality that places under a concept of a biological one. He also links this to problems with Freud’s thought itself, which often rebels against the implications of his most radical concepts.
The drive also becomes one of the most constructive places for Laplanche’s rethinking of the project of psychoanalysis. “We don’t have meaning, we have the signifier. The signifier, which can have a meaning, but which becomes a force. It is the force of the ‘thing-signifier’. The message forces me to translate. There is a force to translate, a Trieb-a-drive-to translate, which is inside the message itself.”[10] Laplanche frequently refers to this drive, the only real drive it would seem, and as one that ‘perverts’ the limited structures of self-preservation within the young human subject. This perversion is linked to certain unevenness, an “unevenness inside the message.” This unevenness is a clear reference to the uneven capacities between the adult and the child. He then moves on to say. “I would say the message itself contains the enigma.” There seems to be a linkage between the concept of the enigma and the unevenness of force contained within the message.
The concept of Nachtraglichkeit, or ‘afterwardsness’ becomes crucial to understand the relationship of trauma to the structure of the drive and the nature of the enigmatic message. The trauma takes place in the process of ‘afterwardsness.’ The enigmatic message taken in at an earlier place but was placed in the state of unconsciousness. The trauma is only activated in an incident, which allows for the enigmatic signifier to link itself to another incident. This is why Freud links trauma and neurosis with overdetermination, because the ‘thing-like’ signifiers of the unconscious must always link themselves to other signifiers to reach the state of representation.
This single drive can be divided into to two aspects, “the life and death drives.” He points to the work of Klein as good place to define these concepts. “The so-called ‘life’ sexual drive corresponds to a whole and totalizing object; it is bound (in Freud’s sense of continuing to exist in more or less coherent manner, of not being fragmented) because it relates to a totalizing object or to an object than can be totalized.” Laplanche links this with the concept of metaphor. “The death drive, on the other hand, corresponds to a part object which is scarcely an object, as it is, even in Klein’s description, unstable, shapeless and fragmented; it is, therefore, closer to metonymy than metaphor.”[11]
While he schematizes these two drives, he emphasizes their heterogeneous relation to the primary and secondary processes of the drive, “we cannot establish a complete equation between the two, or say that the entire primary process is dominated by the death drive whilst the entire secondary process is dominated by the life drives. We have a complimentary series rather than a real opposition… The absolute primary process and the absolute secondary process are linked by a series which distributes varying degrees of metaphor and metonymy, but there is no point at which we can speak of pure metonymy and pure metaphor.”[12] This once again seems to be linked to a critique of a biologizing concept of the drive. A concept that Klein seems to accept in schematizing the ‘life’ and ‘death drives’ in the manner she does.
Although this brief summary hardly does justice to the thoroughness of Laplanche’s ideas, it does show a thread of continuity. Laplanche as I said before is involved a process that works to both radically transform psychoanalysis and conserve it as an important site of knowledge. What is transformed are the moments that psychoanalysis is used as a device to reinforce and naturalize the contingent structures of culture. But Laplanche doesn’t do this in the more radical form of ‘anti-psychiatry’ or the manner of, say, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen. Instead, he finds that they can already be found within Freud’s work itself. Freud’s work, while guilty of the charges above also reads those formations symptomatically and culturally. Laplanche’s work recognizes both within the work, and works to produce something else within them.
[1] Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. David Macy (New York: Blackwell, 1989), 92
[2] Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. David Macy (New York: Blackwell, 1989), 126
[3] Jean Laplanche, “The Kent Seminar”, in Jean Laplanche:Seduction Translation, Drives, Ed. John Fletcher and Martin Stanton (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1992), 23.
[4] Jean Laplanche, “The Kent Seminar”, in Jean Laplanche:Seduction Translation, Drives, Ed. John Fletcher and Martin Stanton (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1992), 25.
[5] Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. David Macy (New York: Blackwell, 1989), 149
[6] Jean Laplanche, “The other within: Rethinking psychoanalysis”
[7] ibid.
[8] Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. David Macy (New York: Blackwell, 1989), 145
[9]Jean Laplanche, “The other within: Rethinking psychoanalysis” in Radical Philosophy 102 (2000)
[10] Jean Laplanche, “The other within: Rethinking psychoanalysis” in Radical Philosophy 102 (2000)
[11] Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. David Macy (New York: Blackwell, 1989), 146-147.
[12] Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. David Macy (New York: Blackwell, 1989),147.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)