The Price of Fixity is Unintelligibility

The Extra-Clinical Potential of Lacan’s Discourse of the Analyst?

2014-08-27T17:14:00.000-04:00

As Lacan’s ‘discourse theory’ has become more well known since the English publication of Seminar XVII in 2007, it has not been uncommon to see the analyst’s discourse touted as having great potential for deployment outside the clinic. It is easy enough to understand why such hopes would be expressed, though it seems to me that certain claims being made about it exceed the support that it can offer. Some say it is a revolutionary discourse, others that it is a discourse which “excludes domination” (that phrase is Jacques-Alain Miller’s). Here is Žižek glossing this perspective (note I do not say that he is espousing it),

(...) the analyst's discourse stands for the emergence of revolutionary-emancipatory subjectivity that resolves the split of university and hysteria. In it, the revolutionary agent - a - addresses the subject from the position of knowledge that occupies the place of truth (i.e., which intervenes at the "symptomal torsion" of the subject's constellation), and the goal is to isolate, get rid of, the master signifier that structured the subject's (ideologico-political) unconscious.

The snag, or hang-up that emerges for anyone wanting to take this aspiration further (if it is recognized as a snag at all, and often it is not) concerns how to actualize the discourse of the analyst outside the clinic.

Inside the clinical relation, the analyst’s discourse makes possible many things, crucially it aids in establishing the transference, it makes of the analyst a cipher or void or sorts onto which the analysand’s various repetitive ways of responding to the Other might, over time, be made recognizable to them. And with that recognition of what is symptomatic and repetitive in the analysand’s stance vis-a-vis the Other, comes the potential to change (obviously much more could be said about this). I have no qualm with any of this because in that very special setting (that of a psychoanalysis) it seems to me that the analyst’s discourse does facilitate these very things. Note that I wrote facilitate, and no other verb which might imply that it offers any assurance of such an outcome. The analyst’s discourse makes possible, that is all.

[Here too, and in spite of my conviction, I am moved to note that there may be something about the discourse of analyst which is specific to the clinical work with neurotic analysands, as I have seen suggesting that if working with a psychotic analysand, that the elusive and enigmatic approach is very much not what is clinically called for — if that is true, then does the analyst in the clinic of the psychotic, still operate in the analyst’s discourse? I leave that question aside here as it exceeds the bounds of my topic.]

But again the question of how one can speak from the place of object a (which is to speak from the place of jouissance), that is, how can one be the agent of the analyst’s discourse outside of the clinic in order to advocate for the (revolutionary, emancipatory) desires that others (those who hear) have, but have not or cannot avow as their own? (This being part and parcel of aiding the analysand in grasping their symptom qua symptom, through recognition of their stance toward the Other.) Then, if one can do this effectively outside the clinic in the broader social realm, then per the discourse, the hoped for product would be new S1s, new master signifiers that productively name the addressed subject’s desire— allowing them to own it, to act upon it.

What those who either make these claims or hope for them seem to be eliding is the radical specificity of the clinical setting and it’s marked difference from nearly any other discursive context one might name. That setting insists upon the fundamental rule of free association. Already here, at the fundamental rule, we are faced with an injunction that is very unique. And while it is not as if we do not, in our many and varied discursive activities, engage with free association — only that nowhere else is it a rule, much less a fundamental one. In the clinic, the analysand (certainly to the extent that he or she has sought out a Lacanian analyst) is unlikely to be consciously expecting answers to their every question, advice or instruction relevant to their life’s problems, even as what they very probably do expect unconsciously might very well be these things. While this setting may be compared with other clinical settings or to what takes place in other sorts of psychotherapy, it is quite difficult to imagine any less formalized, less structured “social setting” being able to maintain even the fundamental rule of free association.

Let us be comedic for a moment and suppose that you wish to operate only in the analyst’s discourse throughout the course of a day and through one’s various activities (making an appointment to take the cat to the vet, ordering lunch, talking with coworkers around the break room table, sitting in a conference call with other co-workers, unwinding with a friend or spouse after work, etc). How does one speak from the place of jouissance so as to help the other one is addressing to recognize and avow their own desire when ordering lunch? What happens on that conference call if, now and then when you hear an odd stress or slip of the tongue you echo it in the manner of the analyst? How much ‘unwinding’ is possible with friends if you only ever repeat their slips, or highlight the polyvalence and ambiguity of what they say?

The trouble it seem in each of these scenarios is that they do not conform to the specific agency involved in the clinical use of the analyst’s discourse. Agency in everyday discourse situations requires offering statements, questions, information and much else a great portion of which is expected to be accurately self-referential in nature. The waitron’s question is not “what do I desire for lunch while being unable to avow it to myself” it pertains to you and your demands at the conscious level. We might then think of the analyst’s discourse as one in which the agent involved agency is directed toward enabling the unconscious of the other to be heard. And while, between good friends, where one has a trouble and wants to talk about it, the other may very well be trying to hear in their friend’s many thoughts about whatever they are suffering from, what it is that they desire but cannot put into words, I would argue that even here, where a very similar impulse might be seen, that enough significant differences persist that such a conversation between friends is still not a clear cut example of the analyst’s discourse.

Having thought about this off and on for a couple of years at this point, I remain at a loss to find any other social setting where the specific constraints that structure the clinical relation are in effect.

Here are three passages from Lacan which underscore some of the issues already raised;

For a good analysis to be possible there needs to be an agreement, an understanding between the analyst and the subject analysing himself.

The routes by which this act of speech proceeds demand a great deal of practice and infinite patience. Psychoanalysis’s tools are patience and moderation. The technique consists of moderating the degree of help that you give to the subject analysing himself.

Psychoanalysis is a serious matter that concerns, I repeat, a strictly personal relation between two individuals, the subject and the analyst. There is no collective psychoanalysis, just as there are no mass anxieties or neuroses.

(Lacan in 1974” — emphases are mine)

Now for more comedy, but not a thought experiment. During my analysis, I became, as I am sure many do, quite attuned to slips of the tongue, both my own and those of others. Once one begins to hear how amazingly frequent these are, it can be hard not to try doing some of what one’s analyst does — or at least this was the case for me. I did this to people all the time! The responses were quite striking. Here are a few in brief;

I’d asked where the men’s shoes were in a department store, the employee said something like “Shoe-shits are over there.” The first word “shoe-shits” was less clear and less distinct than it appears in writing. But that is what I heard, so I blurted out, in my best neither-question nor-assertion tone of analytic ambiguity “shoe shits” with a pause to bring out both words. The employee looked shocked for a split second then started cackling with laughter. This is the only pleasant anecdote about this I have.

The most unpleasant is somewhat complicated and even now I shy away from giving some of the details, but a very short version. I heard a poet reading. He had intended a particular word and said something else, something very neologistic but quite clear (and later I listened bakc to this on an audio recording and it again seemed clear to myself and other I asked that the neologism I heard is what other heard as well). After the reading I mentioned this slip of the tnogue to the poet and he first denied (quite vehemently) that this is what he had said. I didn’t dispute with him only saying that this is what it sounded like to me. The word in question (I am intentionally not giving it for reasons that will be made clear below) included the word “porn” as one of two syllables in the neologism. The poet in question became more angry and said “So you’re saying that I watch porn and there’s something wrong with that?!” I said I had nothing against pornography, and had no insight into the meaning of the slip, and that I thought the word I heard was poetically interesting. He seemed unable to hear any of this and continued in the same vein, getting progressively angrier. I tried to change the subject but he kept circling back. Finally, arriving at his hotel, I said, “What would be so bad about having said that. We all make slips of the tongue all the time.” He replied with “Fuck you” and slammed the car door. Had this been all there was too it, it would be less of a story but the action doesn’t end there. About a week later I was alerted by a friend that several lengthy posts at a blog were violently attacking me by criticizing a piece I had written about a poet (already long deceased at that time). My friend sent me the link and I notice only once I had click on it that the blog it took me to had a one word neologistic title — precisely the same neologism I had heard in this poet’s slip of the tongue. I read through three lengthy pieces of this guys writing which were all intent on demolishing every claim I has made in that piece about the dead poet, and along the way to impugning my poetics, my intelligence, my grasp of logic, my abilities as a reader of literature, and even my grammar! Over the next month or more, additional posts appeared with scathing reviews of my poems as found here and there online and even point by point attacks on posts I had made to a poetry-related listserv more than 5 years earlier. This blog still exists (I just checked), though its author has long since ceased to devote himself to telling the world how terrible everything I think say or write is (and from checking the archives, it seems that he deleted the posts about me at some point in the intervening years — this having happened in 2004).

Those two anecdotes mark the poles, but the most common response to experiment in listening for the unconscious along these lines was “that’s not what I said” but I’ll still note that often it was prefaced by a “fuck you” and that, it often resulted in a fair amount of negative affect being directed at me. Sometimes people simply looked confused momentarily and ignored what I’d repeated from their discourse. Other times someone would turn what I had said into a question for me. Still, overall, the most common affective response to my many experiments with this seemed to be anger, annoyance, confusion or a demand for clarification. These seem to be what emerges when you try to use the analyst’s discourse in social settings which are not structured in such a way as to allow it to do the work that it does in the clinic.

Toward the end of the time when I was doing this I also tried telling people that I was practicing hearing slips of the tongue and that they should feel free to free associate to anything I repeated. This never went anywhere. Either demands were issued for me to explain why I would do this, arguments were made that slips of the tongue mean nothing, or my repetitions were met with a raised eyebrow and ignored. Often people would ask that I stop doing as soon as I said anything.

I conclude form these admittedly anecdotal and personal/subjective experiences that, Freud was right — It speaks! But (he was right about this too) very few people want to hear what it says or think about what it says and mostly they’re just gonna be pissed off.

Psychoanalysis, as Lacan says above, “is a strictly personal relation between two individuals” and if, as he also claims, there “is no collective psychoanalysis, just as there are no mass anxieties or neuroses” might the reason for this be that no speaker, no agent of any discourse in the extra-clinical social world, where there are more listeners and speakers involved than we see in an analysis, is able to impose and thereby rely upon the rules which psychoanalysis requires in order for the analyst’s discourse to work as it is does in the clinic. And while I do assert that it does work in its radically particular setting, saying so is not meant to imply that it always works, or that it works astonishingly well, or anything of the sort. Most of the time it doesn’t work, right? Doesn’t that have to be the case, as even in the clinic the analysand often enough squirms away from many interpretations because they touch upon what is most anxiety-producing about the unconscious, what we in effect do not want to know that we know about ourselves. This is why Lacan stresses above that psychoanalysis requires “infinite patience” and “moderation.” If the analyst’s discourse always worked, little patience would be required. The analyst’s discourse works, but only now and then… hopefully more often as an analysis proceeds within that very specific setting or “social bound” that we call a psychoanalysis.

Having said all of this, I do not mean to suggest that one cannot operate as Agent of something structurally equivalent to the analyst’s discourse in a social space not founded upon free association and all the rest. I claim that it can and does get used in the day to day world. But that outside of the rules which found the clinical relation it operates somewhat differently, is harder to sustain for long periods (by contrast with the other three discourses in each of which one can blather on for hours at a time seemingly). Also, in non-clinical social space, the fact that the upper level of the graph of the analyst’s discourse is very similar to the matheme of the perverse phantasy [a <> $] is not without significance, because in its extra-clinical functioning it may well be that the best name for it is the discourse of the pervert.

Faulkner

So, how does this discourse, whether we call it the analyst’s or the pervert’s work? The position of the agent, as discussed above, is one which speaks on behalf of jouissance from the position of the object and it addresses an other in their very character as split, addressing itself to this split that all of their defenses and ego and self-understanding is premised upon denying. It does this with S2 (knowledge) in the position of truth, as such this agent has knowledge of jouissance and it is this which it seeks to locate in the split in the other. And, the product of this discourse is an S1, a new master signifier. To provide an illustration of this pervert’s discourse, I’ll now turn to one of the novels in Faulkner’s Snopes Trilogy, The Hamlet.

Some stage setting will be required here. The Hamlet referred to in this novel is the teensy tiny Frenchman’s Bend, part of Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha county where the majority of his famous works take place. A new family or clan has taken up residence there, these are the Snopes and they are generally thought of as pretty bad news for a variety of reasons. The important Snopes for this discussion are the patriarch Ab and his son Flem. But Frenchman’s Bend, small though it is, is perhaps not a terrible place when they arrive and rent a nearby farm. The town is run by Will Varner who is the richest man in town, owns the town’s one store, and is the landlord for the majority of the farmland surrounding it. Ab Snopes rented the farm he’s working from Varner’s son Jody who, as head clerk, runs the store for his father. Ab and Flem Snopes, and Jody Varner are the principle characters discussed here, but there is one other who is somewhat important, Ratliff. Ratliff is a travel salesman who passes through Frenchman’s Bend and many other small towns throughout his territory, not only selling his wares, but also acting as new service of sorts. Ratliff knows everyone and seemingly remembers everything as well. So, let’s dive in to the specifics now.

Ab Snopes, father of Flem, comes into Varner’s store and encounters Jody. Ab, like his son Flem, evinces certain traits which might be read via the discourse of the pervert (analyst), namely his vague and somewhat ambiguous answers and his refusal of the normative flow of conversation and reinforcing eye contact (Faulkner 8). But overall this exchange unfolds as two Masters facing off with one another in the full Hegelian-Kojèvean resonance of that as a “fight to the death for pure prestige” (Kojève 7). But outside of this founding Hegelian myth, in a social world wherein such dominance is not usually obtained through direct violence, determining who 'wins' in such a face off is less clear. Jody does not evince any fear for the security of his own dominant position, he is, after all, the son of Will Varner, the richest and most powerful man in Frenchman's Bend as well as the proprietor of the store which everyone thereabouts depends upon — he has power and knows it, is used to exercising it and to be deferred to on its account. But he does recognize the strangeness of the interaction and the obdurant mastery that Ab presents (Faulkner 9). Moments after Ab Snopes leaves the store, a hanger-on at the Varner store named Tull, tells Jody that Ab is thought to be responsible for burning a barn on a property he’d rented previously (Faulkner 9).

The narrative shifts next to a discussion between Jody and his father Will that evening in the Varner home. Here Jody tells his father of a plan he has conceived to increase the Varner profits from the Snopes rental. He suggest that they let Ab work the farm until the season is almost over, and only when the crop is ready to harvest, to reveal that they know about the barn burning incident, using this as a means to intimidate and run the Ab and the family off the property. This scheme would net additional profit, from both the rent paid by Ab until that time and then from the entire value of the abandoned crop (Faulkner 13-8) which the Varners could then have harvested and sell.

The next day, on the road to the Snopes farm to meet Ab and see how things are progressing with the crop, Jody encounters Ratliff and their conversation initiates a shift in Jody’s thinking which is crucial to understanding what follows with Ab to a degree and with Flem most of all. Ratliff tells Jody the story of the bad blood which led up to the barn burning that Ab (with the likely aid of his son Flem) is said to have perpetrated as an act of revenge the landlord whose barn it was. In this scene we see how this barn burning narrative suddenly takes on another function relative to Jody’s plan. No longer a handy and obvious ace-in-the-hole, Jody begins to see the barn burning as far more threatening than he had previously imagined, as his repeated Hell fires, blurted out during the Ratliff’s tale, comically portray (Faulkner 16, 18). Jody's assumption had been that the mere rumor of wrong-doing would undermine Ab's pretensions mastery and insure Jody's dominance of the relationship. In the terms of the graph of the Master’s discourse, Jody’s initial plan to abscond with the literal product (the crops) that Ab as other (as S2, knowledge, in this case specifically knowledge of how to farm and the knowledge of the barn burning incident) conforms nicely to the graph’s dynamics. This aim is precisely mirrored in Lacan's discussion of the how it is that, in his account, the philosopher managed to interest a Master in something more than merely setting slaves to work; reaping the benefits of the knowledge they have, yet cannot or do not articulate (2007, 30). But the effect of Ratliff's narrative is to portray an Ab Snopes who is not in the least troubled by social censure or opinion, an Ab Snopes who is a master that doesn’t limit his strategies are to the socially acceptable. There are more examples of this in Ratliff’s gossip about the Snopes than simply the barn burning and which paint Ab as someone with a prickly refusal of being dominated by others (Faulkner 18).

Having set out on this road in a complacent sense of his own Mastery, by the time Jody reaches the farm and notices that the gate has not been repaired, something he would normally have used against the tenant, his Mastery has been undermined decisively and he remarks “I don’t even dare to mention it” (Faulkner 18-9). Nothing that he had hoped to accomplish in visiting Ab comes to pass at all, and in his mounting anxiety he finds himself instead offering favors quite out of character (Faulkner, 20-1).

In the discourse of the Analyst as practiced in the clinical setting, one of the expected and indeed necessary effects is that the analysand is hystericized. They generally begin by speaking of their problems as Master’s would, or perhaps from a distance characteristic of the University discourse. But analysis begins to bear fruit only when the analysand’s presumption that the analyst knows the meaning of their symptom or their suffering results in their beginning to shift to an hysterical response, trying with all their might to force the analyst out of the Analyst’s discourse and into that of the Master so as to pronounce the truth of their symptom as an S1. For analysis to proceed the analyst must refuse this, must instead remain ambiguous, noncommittal, must not obey conversational conventions such as offering reinforcing gestures or eye contact – analytic behavior proceeds in this fashion so as to embody the elusive object a for the analysand – that object which they wish to contain, naturalize, and delimit so that the frightful and overwhelming jouisance it manifests can be tamed.

Jody Varner already had installed this idea of barn burning in the chain of his own desire to manipulate and swindle Ab, but after talking to Ratliff and seeing exactly how much he had underestimated the potential consequences of fire as a means of expressing antagonism, it, the signifier "burning" or "fire," has behaved as signifiers generally do, sliding into other relations with other signifiers and signifieds. In "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud" Lacan characterizes the signifying chain as composed of "links by which a necklace firmly hooks onto a link of another necklace made of links" (2006, 41). Both Jody's initial plan and the change in his attitude after talking to Ratliff can be illustrated by this suspended links example. Jody begins by assuming that by revealing his knowledge of the barn burning and threatening Ab with it, that Ab will immediately grasp the many associative vertical substitutions that this allows, marking Ab as criminal, untrustworthy, social outcast, etc. Jody is himself criminal as his plot to run Ab off the farm clearly shows, but Jody's social power and prestige is a consequence of his father, and thus, for he himself to be revealed as untrustworthy, a criminal, etc would be disastrous for what mastery and prestige he has. His mistake is assuming that his own mastery, second order as it is and dependent upon social prestige, is the equal of Ab’s mastery, which is not dependent on the social consensus. After talking to Ratliff, whose story undermines the assumption Jody was depending on, we see how it is that other substitutions equally available to the signifying chain manifest that threat. Having burned on barn, Ab might well burn another. Or, a store, a home or many other piece of property might be into the position of the object to be burned and thus collectively embody a substitutive chain of signifiers hanging suspended from the signifier "barn." The threat is that should such things go up in smoke, Jody’s own needs, demands and desires would be curtailed in a fundamental way as the store above all is the emblem of Jody’s own power.

On his way home from his dispiriting encounter with Ab, Jody runs into Ab’s son Flem on the road and, perhaps imagining that Flem will be easier to deal with engages him in conversation. If we consider the pages on which this interaction takes place we can see that Jody, like a good analysand, talks a lot. He seeks to extract reassurance, to tame and domesticate his anxiety. But Flem does not provide any assurance, even when asked if his name is Flem he replies with the ever-so analyst-like question “[t]hat so?” instead of with simple agreement (Faulkner 22).

Unnerved by both Ab's and Flem's persistently perverse ambiguity, Jody tries initially in his conversation with Flem to speak from the discourse of the University, positioning Flem as his object a (what he wishes to control, to domesticate) and attempting to institute a split in him. How does this happen? Jody attempts to sketch a narrative which will make the unspoken signifier “barn burning” its occluded subject and to warn of the dangers facing those who resort to such things, namely that they will run out of places to run away from their own ill repute. This information is delivered not as the commanding nomination of a master who by saying asserts it as truth but as something commonly and socially known, dependent upon obvious knowledge (S2) on whose behalf Jody, as agent, speaks so as to educate Flem. Clearly Jody is hoping to get an assent of some kind from Flem, a recognition that there really are only so many places that a person can run if they do things again and again to make themselves unwelcome and unable to stay where they are. Such an admission on Flem's part would, firstly, link the coordinates of Jody's and Flem's utterances to a common S1 in the position of truth (perhaps nameable as 'social approval' or even 'common sense'). Had Flem agreed to this, and if we assume he did have something to do with the barn burning incident, such an assent to Jody’s claim would have effectively split him between his past criminal actions and his present recognition of the dangers of such actions.

Flem's response avoids this discursive trap entirely. He replies instead that “[t]here’s a right smart of country” (Faulkner 22). Flem’s manifest meaning here is that there is a lot of country and thus that he doesn’t worry about running out of places to go, and Faulkner chooses this particular idiomatic expression for that thought. The obvious, if submerged threat is clearly there for Jody as we know he is already afraid and now his cautionary narrative has just blown up in his face (i.e., the “truth” or S1 that he was depending upon — ‘social approval’ was not so much refused as simply ignored). And Flem response, in analytic fashion, makes use of signifiers provided by Jody, but in order to produce a signification at odds with the meaning that Jody wanted to be taken.

And the utterance is ambiguous, is Flem's response directed at the whole of Jody's narrative or only its final comment? What does Flem know? What are Flem’s desires? Jody cannot tell from what is said. He cannot be sure that Flem is even paying very much attention as his “face was as blank as a pan of uncooked dough” and during Jody’s speech he “chewed steadily” (Faulkner 22).

But what about the specific choice of the word “smart”, a word that did not emerge in Jody’s discourse, but from Flem? The psychoanalyst is not, or so we hope, out to manipulate the analysand, and it is in the service of clinical goals when the analyst offers interpretations or comments to the analysand. I think one can read this word, “smart,” as an interpretation, that is, as a response to the unconscious, latent import of Jody’s prior discussion and not to its manifest content. Were Jody an analysand and asked to free associate on that word in the context of this narrative, might he come in time to consider that he had headed out to see Ab intending to outsmart him (and failed) and that he had just (by means of his little narrative to Flem) hoped to show him a smarter course of action, and thereby outsmart him otherwise, and could the fear that he is now himself being outsmarted already have arisen in his mind? Switching to Flem’s side of this exchange, the analyst is asked to be open to his own unconscious during the clinical encounter, and when sudden signifiers emerge in his own thoughts, to allow them into the discourse. How much of a stretch is it to think that Flem intuits that Jody thinks he is being very smart here and therefore attempting to manipulate him? Flem's use of "smart" accords with Lacan's comment about analytic interpretations, that they are "not designed to be understood [but] to make waves" (qtd. in Fink 81).

Jody's first self-serving little narrative having failed, he tries another tack, again in conformity with the discourse of the University, stressing that open communication between them is important in order to stave off any untoward problems (i.e., the unspoken signifiers “burning” or "fire") and that to do so would yield a benefit. Flem’s minimal response, the question “[w]hat benefit?” (Faulkner 23), once again fails in to address or in any way acknowledge the occulted significations of the narrative in which Jody is trying to ensnare him. What Flem says can be read to signify a simple request for clarification, as tacit agreement to the implicit deal being offered, or as doubt that any benefit offered would be enough, among other possibilities.

Flem's responses throughout this dialogue mirror another comment by Lacan about analytic interpretation, that "[i]t is only through equivocation that an interpretation operates. There must be something in the signifier that resonates" (qtd. in Fink 92). Here "equivocation" and "resonance" denote a polyvalence and ambiguity in what the analyst says that attempts to maximize the potential significations of any utterance. When Jody answers that the benefit is “a good farm to work” (Faulkner 23) Flem immediately shoots him down, thus undermining the second of Jody’s attempts to contain, control, split and outsmart him. Jody tries again to gain the advantage by suggesting that in some other line of work, Flem would need the “good will” of others to succeed (the structure of the University discourse is again evident). Flem ignores this, changing the focus, and tightening it upon Jody himself by asking “[y]ou run a store, don’t you?” (Faulkner 23). This question has many effects here. First of all, in light of the manifest content of the last few lines, it says in so many words I don’t want a farm, I want what you’ve got. Additionally, it links the occluded signifier that has been driving this discussion, “burning” to the social emblem of Varner wealth. And finally, somewhat speculatively, Flem asks about the store twice, each iteration includes the words "you" and "run" (the latter term introduced earlier, as we saw, by Jody) and while one might observe that Jody may well wish he could simply run away from this encounter, that the Varner store cannot run, and neither Ab nor Flem seems about to be run off. Flem has repositioned this signifier in the chain of desires contesting here and, as with “smart” above, it has reverberations and "makes waves." As one knows from reading the novel, Flem will indeed come run the store (and the town) in time.

Two more of Flem’s few comments remain to be mentioned. Jody offers him a cigar, and Flem refuses it saying, “I aint never lit a match to one yet” (Faulkner 23). Here again the previously occluded “burning” is once more reactivated and more explicitly than at any previous moment in their conversation. Jody registers this instantly, saying, as the text specifies, “quietly,” and presumably outside of Flem’s hearing, “[a]nd I just hope to God you and nobody you know ever will" (Faulkner 23). In light of the anxiety that Jody feels about things which might be burned, the offer of a cigar reads as an almost comical attempt to link Flem to both "burning" and something which, if burned, would not be cause for alarm; an attempt to bring closure to the anxiety of "burning" by innocuously punctuating its open-ended threat. Flem's response features both a double negative “aint never” which logically, if not in the vernacular, suggests its inverse and the destablizing word "yet" at the end, making the possibility that he will at some future point "[light] a match to one" explicit. Also, Flem by deploying the shifter "one" in this statement potentially opens up that term's reference beyond one cigar to one barn or one store among other possible “ones.” Jody's sotto voce comment quoted above makes this explicit.

While Flem makes no request for a job in the store, Jody nonetheless makes an offer of such work to begin “[n]ext fall” and when this results in no response from Flem, he says “[n]ext week then” and once again he tries to rein in this giving away of favors to and to tame the anxiety that the unspoken “burning” provokes by asking for a “guarantee” from Flem. The offers, of cigar and of job, show us Jody in the discourse of the hysteric. If a master is not really a master then this is demonstrated by showing that they need things outside of themselves to be complete in their mastery. Jody as split subject offers a cigar and gets a refusal and an increase in his anxiety, then he offers a job next fall, to no reply, and finally he offers a job next week again without any response, and finally he makes a demand for a guarantee. This demand is essentially that Flem be a master, who can lay down the law with his word, and who can thus be potentially challenged and undermined by further hysterical demands for failing to be equal to that word. Flem, acting as the proper pervert (analyst), addresses Jody not as object a, refusing to grant or even acknowledge what Jody (as analysand) will not make explicit at the level of his speech, the signifier “burning”, by asking Jody in return “[g]uarantee what?” (Faulkner 23).

It is unclear from this scene what S1 might have been produced in Jody, but we can speculate. Jody had begun his day in comfortable assumption of his own social dominance and convinced that he could use it to swindle the Snopes. Through a series of incidents that turn his trump card into the signifier of great threat to himself and everything that sustains his own prestige. Might the signifier “guarantee” itself be the new S1 produced? Heretofore, Jody had not felt any need for a guarantee, he’d grown up without any challenge to his power, and without any need to struggle to attain it— that labor had been accomplished by his father. Offering Flem the job in the store might also be seen as a “guarantee” from Jody’s perspective as it is a position of power, prestige and influence in Frenchman’s Bend — and surely from Jody’s perspective, no one would want to burn the source of their own power, or the supports of their own narcissistic ego. But now Jody appears to recognize that he himself desires a guarantee of his own continuing relevance while before he’d never needed it, and while such a guarantee is hard to imagine as positive outcome for an analysis, as here it’s merely a prop for the ego— Flem’s having subjected Jody to the workings of the discourse of the pervert has brought about a change in Jody’s relation to his own desire, and to his stance vis-a-vis the Other.

The Discourse of the Pervert

To conclude, as is obvious from what has been said above, my contention is that there is nothing inherent to the discourse of the analyst/pervert which necessitates that it have revolutionary or emancipatory effects on its others. And further, that the positive effects that it has in the clinic are made possible by a carefully regulated setting, with stated rules and expectations which are much more formalized than the majority discursive situations we find ourselves in day to day. Now having said this, I am not ruling out the possibility that operating as the agent in the discourse of the pervert is of necessity manipulative or “bad.” I also believe that this needs to be understood with reference to the other discourse as well. Each discourse can have negative and positive effects, sometimes we need the sort of agency deployed by the master, or the university, the hysteric, or the pervert (analyst) and each of these can be directed at us in ways that intensely problematic. We have to see the discourses as structures without any necessary ethical stakes as those stakes can only be made explicit when we carefully consider what takes the places of S1, S2, the object, and the split subject in a particular case. It will be remembered that Lacan hopes that, in the wake of a successful analysis, and thus “perhaps it’s from the analyst’s discourse that there can emerge another style of master signifier” (2007, 176) and that while of another style than previously, this new S1 would once again circulate within four discourses, that of the master, the university, the hysteric, the pervert… and, conditions permitting, the analyst.

Works Cited

Faulkner, William. The Hamlet. London: Chatto & Windus, 1964.

Fink, Bruce. Fundamentals of PsychoanalyticTechnique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners. New York: Norton, 2007.

Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Ed. Allan Bloom. Trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. Ithaca, NY: Cornell U.P., 1969.

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2006.

–––. “‘This so-called crisis. It does not exist.’ — Jacques Lacan on psychoanalysis 1974.”

–––. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII; The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Russell Grigg. New York: Norton, 2007.

Žižek, Slavoj. “Jacques Lacan’s Four Discourses”

Positive Incomprehension (& the dissertating subject)

2013-03-26T16:02:00.000-04:00

I can't make it cohere.

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

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

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

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

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

Cixous

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

______________Source

Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber

Rootprints: Memory and life writing

trans. Eric Prenowitz

Routledge 1997

Always Free Associate!

2013-03-25T19:40:00.001-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wait, is this an ironic comment or somehow illustrative?

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

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

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

__________Sources

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

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

When you stare long enough at the text...

2012-11-04T15:40:00.005-05:00

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

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

Salome, Ree & Nietzsche

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

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

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

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

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

2012-10-13T14:35:00.000-04:00

Arnold I. Davidson

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

Harvard UP 2001

Chapter Three:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arnold I. Davidson's "Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality" from _The Emergence of Sexuality; Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts_

2012-10-12T13:09:00.000-04:00

Arnold I. Davidson

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

Harvard UP 2001

Chapter Two: Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality

[n.b. this chapter is not on my comps list, but there is some useful information nonetheless and so I'll briefly poach from it here. It's a fascinating chapter, but I'll perforce, deal only with a few pieces of it.]

Davidson sees deep congruence between Krafft-Ebing's terms and those of our contemporary the DSM's discussion of "gender identity disorders" (36)

_____re "sex-change" and it's impossibility BEFORE

"So-called sex-change operations were not only technologically impossible in earlier centuries; they were conceptually impossible as well. Before the second half of the nineteenth century persons of a determinate anatomical sex could not be thought to be really, that is, psychologically, of the opposite sex. Anatomical sex exhausted one's sexual identity…" (36) "Our current medical concept of sex reassignment would have been unintelligible or incoherent since it could not cohere with the style of reasoning about sexual identity."(36)

On one level this makes sense, right? If there was not yet a notion of the 'psychological self' current in the culture, then how could one be thinking of it, much less feeling that it was at odds with the body one has? But at the same time, I have to question whether it makes sense to assume that, until a term is defined, that what it refers to is impossible for thought. For example, Freud gives us the notion of The Uncanny, and part of the success of this idea - or so it seems to me - is that we have felt this, we have encountered this uncanny thing and now that Freud has described it so carefully, the word has taken off as a designation of this. Immediately below, Davidson will invoke 'dynamic nominalism' as a problematic of sorts, but if there is anything problematic about it, it would seem to be the suggestion that these 'types' of people exist only because of the effect of the nomination. But is that true of The Uncanny or is it not? Can we be sure?

So to bring this back to those who might feel mis-aligned when considering how they understand themselves and the body that they have. Whether or not the conceptual scaffolding was present to make sense of this in the way that Davidson is discussing, or not, can we truly feel that it is certain that no one felt this disjunction before such time as this particular way of speaking about it was coined?

Gratuitous, but whatever - sue me.

___________the idea of "dynamic nominalism"

"This shift from the emergence of a concept ("perversion") to the emergence of a kind of person (the pervert), to return to an issue I have already mentioned, is underwritten by the doctrine that Ian Hacking has called 'dynamic nominalism.' Hacking argues that in many domains of the human sciences, 'categories of people come into existence at the same time as kinds of people come into being to fit those categories, and there is a two-way interactions between these processes.' Dynamic nominalism shows how 'history plays an essential role in the constitution of the objects, where the objects are the people and the ways in which they behave,' sine the human sciences 'bring into being new categories which, in part, bring into being new kinds of people.'" (57)

"Connected with this new focus is the face that nineteenth-century psychiatry often took sexuality to be the way in which the mind is best represented. To know a person's sexuality is to know the person. Sexuality is the externalization of the hidden, inner essence of personalty. And to know sexuality, to the know the person, we must know its anomalies." (63)

"Sexuality individualizes, turns one into a specific kind of being - a sadist, // masochist, homosexual, fetishist. This link between sexuality and individuality explains some of the passion with which psychiatry constituted the pervert. The more details we have about the anomalies of perversion, the better we are able to penetrate the covert individuality of the self. Only a psychiatrist, after meticulous examination, could recognize a real pervert. Or, to be more accurate, it was also thought that there was one other kind of person who could recognize a true pervert, even without meticulous examination: as if by some kind of hypersensitive perception, a pervert could recognize one of his own kind." (63-4)

"It's not that medicine simply took over the study of what has once been a part of morality; moral deviation did not merely transform itself into disease. Instead, the moral phenomenon of the perversity of the will furnished a point of reference that both opened the way for and provided an obstacle to the medical constitution of perversion."(64)

still from a Lucio Fulci film
One on Top of the Other [1969]
Google Image -> "Perversion"

Arnold I. Davidson's "Closing Up The Corpses" from _The Emergence of Sexuality; Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts_

2012-10-12T12:21:00.000-04:00

Davidson

Arnold I. Davidson

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

Harvard UP 2001

Chapter One:

Closing Up The Corpses

Davidson begins with Foucault (and he'll be with us till the end) observing that in THE BIRTH OF THE CLINIC that Foucault had traced the "conjunction of pathological anatomy and clinical medicine" and "emphasize[d] the significance of pathological anatomy as a foundation for the description and classification of diseases"(1). After a bit of clarification he cites Foucault's conclusion about these matters, that "the great break in the history of Western medicine dates precisely from the moment clinical experience became the anatomo-clinical gaze"(2).

But Davidson will be concerned not with Medicine per se, but with psychiatry.

"One of the great breaks in the history of Western psychiatry comes precisely during the time when the anatomo-clinical gaze is in steady decline. The story of psychiatry's emergence, in the nineteenth century, as an autonomous medical discipline, and specifically its autonomy from neurology and cerebral pathology, is, in part, the history of this decline. Pathological anatomy could not serve psychiatry either as an explanatory theory for so-called mental diseases or disorders or as the foundation for the classification and description of these diseases. But the gradual and virtually anonymous disappearance of pathological anatomy in psychiatry is not merely the history of decline. For with this decline came the proliferation of whole new kinds of diseases and disease categories, a revitalization and reworking of nosologies the consequences of which stamp us even today. Foremost among these new disease categories was the class of functional diseases, of which sexual perversion and hysteria were the two most prominent examples. Although the hope that these functional diseases would yield to pathological anatomy was held out long after there was any evidence for this hope, in clinical practice, and later in theory as well, these diseases were fully describable simply as functional deviations of some kind; in the case of sexual perversion, for instance, one was faced with a functional deviation or abnormality of the sexual instinct. Admitting pure functional deviations as diseases was to create entire new species of diseased individuals, and to radically alter our conceptions of ourselves"(2).

Davidson gives us a three stage model of the emergence of "sexual perversion". First "sexual perversion was thought to be a disease of the reproductive or genital organs (…) whose basis was some anatomical abnormality of these organs"(3). The second stage comes when, failing to find anything "wrong" with the organs in cases of "sexual perversion" it is asserted that the answer is to be found in "the neurophysiology and neuroanatomy of the brain"(3). So the first two are both still engaged with the "anatomo-clinical gaze" but directly their gaze differently. "The third stage took perversions to be pure functional deviations of the sexual instinct, not reducible to cerebral pathology" instead "Perversions were to be viewed and treated at the level of psychology, not at the grander level of pathological anatomy. The psychiatric style of reasoning emerged clearly and definitely at this third stage"(3).

"In the years between 1870 and 1905 psychiatry was caught between two conceptual grids; in one of which it was aligned with neurology, in the other with psychology"(3).

"During this span of time, no one really knew what it would mean to conceive of diseases like perversion in purely functional terms. It would be like admitting functions without organs, which, as Bouillard reminds us, was a palpable absurdity"(4).

"The real break, the new style of reasoning, is to be located at that point when the sexual instinct and its functional diseases were introduced together. Functional diseases were diseases of something - not an organ, but an instinct"(4).

Davidson is discussing the work of one Dr. Michea (late 1800s) and his ruminations on the causes of deviations of the sexual instinct (i.e., perversion, or homosexuality more accurately still) and a certain anatomical cause within the male body which explains these.

"Nothing could be more natural than to expect these feminine tendencies to have some anatomical basis; and nothing could constitute a more appropriate anatomical basis than a masculine uterus. The uterus, that almost always diseased female organ, was responsible for masculine deviations as well!"

"Since it was natural to suppose that all behavioral disorders had an organic basis, and since the behavioral manifestations in question were diseases of sexuality, it seemed inevitable that the sexual organs themselves must be the seat of the perversions"(6).

"…to the consternation of the pathological anatomists, the conclusion is virtually always the same - genital organs, normal; no physical malformations of the reproductive organs"(7). Anatomy had proven in this case to be "a useless explanatory space"(7).

. . . "But if pathological anatomy was to survive this startling claim [that perversions were not correlated with deviations in sexual anatomy], it had to retreat. And it quickly found its site of retreat in the brain"(7).

"At this time in the history of psychiatry only certain kinds of statements about disease processes could count as either true or false; not every such statement was a possible candidate for the status of truth or falsehood. Specifically, explanations of disease states had to be referred to organs; any explanation not of this type was not so much false as not even in the domain of the true and false. An explanation that did not at least attempt to anatomically localize the disease was more a part of theology than of science. Since it was believed that there were distinct diseases of sexuality, and since these diseases could not be explained by defects of the reproductive organs, the only plausible organ that remained to provide an explanation was the brain. (…) Indeed for these early psychiatrists it does not seem as if anything could have counted as evidence against the proposition that sexual perversions are ultimately traceable to brain disease. Postmortem examinations that demonstrated no pathological lesions, and should have constituted such evidence, were always explained away; the necessary changes in brain structure were undoubtedly 'so fine that with ordinary instruments they are not demonstrable postmortem'. (…) To affirm explicitly that sexual perversions or other mental diseases were functionally autonomous from the brain would have been to pass from basic truth to palpable absurdity, something beyond falsity"(10).

"The epistemological stranglehold of pathological anatomy on psychiatry is perhaps best illustrated by Moriz Benedikt's Anatomical Studies upon Brains of Criminals" … this series of studies was hoping to lay the "foundations stones of a Natural History of Crime" (Benedikt qtd 10)… and here is Bnedikt's (shouted?) conclusion;

THE BRAINS OF CRIMINALS EXHIBIT A DEVIATION FROM THE NORMAL TYPE, AND CRIMINALS ARE TO BE VIEWED AS AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL VARIETY OF THEIR SPECIES, AT LEAST AMONG THE CULTURED RACES. (Benedikt qtd 11)

"The appropriate way to understand the sexual instinct is in functional terms, not anatomical ones"(13).

"By acknowledging the subservience of the genital organs to the function of the sexual instinct, Legrain makes overt what by 1896 nobody should have doubted. And by claiming that the seat of the sexual instinct was everywhere and nowhere, he told us to look for diseases everywhere and nowhere. This 'everywhere and nowhere' sometimes had a more common name in psychiatric discussion - it went under the name of personality"(13).

The first modern usage of "perversion" per the OED "occurred in 1842 in Robley Dunglison's Medical Lexicon"(14).

OED: " 'Perversion,' one of four modifications of function in disease; the three others being augmentation, diminution, and abolition"(14).

"Once one offers a functional characterization of the sexual instinct, perversions become a natural class of diseases; and without this characterization there is really no conceptual room for this kind of disease"(14).

Krafft-Ebing saw the sexual instinct in functional terms (14-5).

"In order to be able to determine precisely what phenomena are functional disturbances or diseases of the sexual instinct, one must also, of course, specify what the normal or natural function of this instinct consists in. Without knowing what the normal function of the instinct is, everything and nothing could count as a functional disturbance. There would be no principled criterion to include or exclude any behavior from the disease category of perversion. So one must first believe that there is a natural function of the sexual instinct and then believe that this function is quite determinate. One might have thought that questions as momentous as these would have received extensive discussion during the nineteenth-century heyday of perversion. But, remarkably enough, no such discussion appears. There is virtually unargued unanimity both on the fact that this instinct does have a natural function and on what that function is"(15).

"Krafft-Ebing further divides the perversions into sadism, masochism, fetishism, and contrary sexual instinct"(15).

"It is not at all obvious why sadism, masochism, fetishism, and homosexuality should be treated as species of the same disease, for they appear to have no essential features in common. Yet if one takes the natural function of the sexual instinct to be propagation, it becomes possible to see why they were all classified together as perversions"(15).

"Had anyone denied wither that the sexual instinct has a natural function or that this function is procreation, diseases of perversion, as we understand them, would not have entered psychiatric nosology"(16).

"We can conveniently place the origin of contrary sexual instinct, as a medicopsychological diagnostic category, in 1870, with the publication of Carl Westphal's 'Die conträre Sexualempfindung'"(16).

"He believed that contrary sexual instinct was a congenital perversion of the sexual instinct, and that in this perversion 'a woman is physically a woman and psychologically a man and, on the other hand, a man is physically a man and psychologically a woman.' I have called this the firth modern definition because it presents a purely psychological characterization of homosexuality, and detached from Westphal's meager explanatory speculations, it provides us with the clinical conception of this perversion operative in almost all of the subsequent medical literature"(16).

"Westphal's psychological characterization of homosexuality is, in effect, the psychiatric transformation of a previous, although nonmedical, understanding of this disorder"(17). ---> links this to Ulrichs and the "urnings" of his thinking

"…throughout the 1870s and 1880s there were the obligatory anatomical claims that these desires were the result of 'the brain of a woman in the body of a man and the brain of a man in the body of a woman'. These three ideas of same-sex behavior represent three central places where the phenomenon was thought to reside - the soul, the brain, and the psyche or personality. And, although not always in this historical sequence, theology, pathological anatomy, and psychiatry each took its own opportunity to lay claim to a complete explanation of perverse desires"(17).

"None of the writers I am familiar with ever suggest that these so-called functional diseases are not true diseases, are not part of the legitimate domain of medical science. Yet, at the same time, where was no already clearly formulated concept of disease under which they could readily fall. Clinical practice came first; explanatory theory lagged far behind. No doubt the circumstances are complicated by the fact that all of the early writers expressed allegiance to pathological anatomy. But even after pathological anatomy became an obvious explanatory failure, psychiatry did not regroup and address itself to the question to whether these perversions were really diseases. One unequivocal path to take would have been to claim that because no anatomical changes underlay the perversions, they could not be considered diseases, and physicians must leave there regulation to others more qualified. But clinical practice had already constituted the perversions as diseases, and by // the time the hold of pathological anatomy was loosened, they were already a recognized part of psychiatric nosology. This precedence of clinical practice to theory is officially endorsed by the American Psychiatric Association, whose Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is meant to be theoretically neutral. But such theoretical neutrality is as unprincipled as it is expansive; indeed, its expansiveness is partially a function of its lack of principle. On a straightforward interpretation, it sanctions the view that whatever psychiatrists do in fact treat as diseases are diseases"(19-20).

"To count something as a disease is to make a theoretical classification. The hope of reading diseases straight off of nature, independent of theory, is as philosophically naive as it is historically suspect"(20).

Theories of functional disease were proposed, but what Davidson sees as crucial is that they come along after the classificatory work has already been done. "These new diseases appeared almost full-blown in clinical practice, and silently, anonymously, became part of psychiatric nomenclature"(21).

Krafft-Ebing "These anomalies are very important elementary disturbances, since upon the nature of sexual sensibility the mental individuality in greater part depends"(21).

"Sexuality individualizes, turns one into a specific kind of human being - a sadist, masochist, homosexual, fetishist. This link between sexuality and // individuality explains some of the passion with which psychiatry investigated perversions"(22).

"One will not be able to understand the importance of these new diseases of sexuality if one conflates them with sodomy. Sodomy was a legal category, defined in terms of certain specifiable behavior; the sodomite was a judicial subject of the law. Homosexuality was a psychic disease of the instinct, of one's sensibility, not to be reduced to merely behavioral terms"(22).

"Homosexuality was a disease, a 'perversion' strictly speaking, whereas sodomy was a vice, a problem for morality and law, about which medicine has no special knowledge"(23).

"Every psychiatrist writing during this period acknowledged the difference between perversions and perversity, even if they also quickly admitted that it often proved difficult to distinguish the two. Only minutely detailed examination could help to determine that a given patient was a genuine pervert, and not merely evil or wicked"(23).

"The reassignment in regulating the perversions, from law/morality to medicine, was not simply a new institutional division of labor; it was to signal a fundamental transformation, and the inauguration of whole new ways of conceptualizing ourselves.

Perversion was not a disease that lurked about in nature, waiting for a psychiatrist with especially acute powers of observation to discover it hiding almost everywhere. It was a disease created by a new (functional) understanding of disease, a conceptual shift, a shift in reasoning, that made it possible to interpret various types of activity in medicopsychiatric terms. There was no natural morbid entity to be discovered until clinical psychiatric practice invented one. Perversion was not a disease candidate until it became possible to attribute diseases to the sexual instinct, and there were no possible diseases of the sexual instinct before the nineteenth century; when the notion of diseases of this instinct loses its last remaining grasp upon us, we will rid the world of all of its perverts."(24)

"The theory of degeneracy was used as a pseudoexplanatory framework for practically every serious psychopathological state dealt with by nineteen-century psychiatry."(25)

Nature and nurture make plenty of appearances too - notably when the issue of treatment appears. Kraeplin thought these things were congenital, ergo there could not be eradicated. But this position would undermine any treatment and there was a lot of push behind the idea of treatment. Kraeplin; "There can be no thought of treatment of an anomaly like this, which has developed with the development of the personality and has its origin deep within it" (qtd 26)

"Schrenck-Notzing was perhaps the first to argue in detail that extraneous influences and education were actually the most significant etiological factors in the genesis of perversions"(26).

Morton Prince tackled the problem somewhat differently, but restating the conflicts between nature and nuture. Davidson writes "If it was not congenital, then therapeutic intervention would be required. This is exactly where Prince relied on his theory of habit neuroses and true functional diseases. He believed that in order to maintain that perversion, although acquired, was nevertheless a disease, one had to demonstrate that intensely cultivated habits could eventually become automatic, independent of volitional control. The pervert was then subject to 'real imperative sensations and ideas.'

[...embedding Prince] "analogy with what takes place in other fields of the nervous system would make it intelligible that sexual feelings and actions may by constant repetition (cultivation) become associated together and developed into the sort of quasi-independent neural activities, which may then become practically independent of the will - or, in other words, a psychosis." [back to Davidson...]

Google Image > "19th Century
Psychiatry"

Prince could then argue that, given this theory, it us up to 'counter-education to replace the morbid processes by healthy ones'. Under counter-education one could include almost anything one pleased, and so psychiatry was on its way to an unlimited disciplinary regulation of the sexual life. This theory of perversion as an acquired disease induced one to leave completely the domain of pathological anatomy and embed oneself firmly in psychology. Morton Prince, after all, founded both the Journal of Abnormal Psychology (1906) and the American Psychological Association (1910). The sexual personality was created so much the better to control the body"(27).

"The categories and conceptualizations of the self determine not only how others view us, but also how each person conceives of him- or herself. And conceptions of ourselves greatly influence how we actually behave"(28).

"The concept of perversion, once exclusively a part of specialized nineteenth-century discussion, became, in the twentieth century, a dominant way of organizing our thought about own sexuality. People diagnosed as perverts came to think of themselves as diseased, morbid, an experience that was not possible before the heyday of the pervert that I have described"(28).

"Being classified as a pervert could alter everything from one's self-conception to one's behavior to one's social circumstances. And even those of us who are not full-fledged perverts have had to reconceive of ourselves; every little deviation may be a sign of our impending perversion. We are all possible perverts. It is perversion as a possible way of being, a possible category of self, that is the legacy of nineteenth-century psychiatry"(28).

"Moreover, we cannot think away the concept of perversion, even if we no longer claim to believe that there is any natural function of the sexual instinct. We are prisoners of the historical space of nineteenth-century // psychiatry"(28-9).

Without having an argument against this last observation, I do wonder at its stability. Admittedly the term has taken off, been taken up, and means variously to many people even now. But I wonder first whether as a term it might have been detourned one too many times to really function any longer - without qualification - as the bars of our 19th C psychiatric cage. Secondly, it seems to me that, often, when on encounters the word used spontaneously these days, that it isn't really employed in an othering or pathologizing way. Perhaps that is symptomatic of the people I talk to/read etc (?) but it often seems to be used as self-description or when applied to another's interests, used to denote the suspicion of a sexual motivation or of some manner of jouissance involved, but in a way that is nascently complimentary, as if, under it all, the comment also says "good on you for figuring out how to get off on that stuff!"

Hartwood Hospital, a 19th Century psychiatric Hospital
Cheery, ain't it?

Henry Abelove's "Freud, Male Homosexuality, and the Americans" - qbq

2012-10-06T14:51:00.000-04:00

Henry Abelove

"Freud, Male Homosexuality, and the Americans"

in Deep Gossip Minneapolis MN: U of MN Press, 2003. (1-20)

Abelove begins with some discussion about and the entire text of Freud's 1935 "Letter to an American Mother" which reads as follows;

I gather from your letter that your son is a homosexual. I am most impressed by the fact that you do not mention this term yourself in your information about him. May I question you, why you avoid it? Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty too. If you do not believe me, read the books of Havelock Ellis.

By asking me if I can help, you mean, I suppose, if I can abolish homosexuality and make normal heterosexuality take its place. The answer is, in a general way, we cannot promise to achieve it. In a certain number of cases we succeed in developing the blighted germs of heterosexual tendencies which are present in every homosexual, in the majority of cases it is no more possible. It is a question of the quality and the age of the individual. The result of treatment cannot be predicted.

What analysis can do for your son runs in a different line. If he is unhappy, neurotic, torn by conflicts, inhibited in his social life, analysis may bring him harmony, peace of mind, full efficiency whether he remains a homosexual or gets changed. If you make up your mind he should have analysis with me—I don't expect you will—he has to come over to Vienna.

Sincerely yours with kind wishes,

Freud

…and while this short letter is frequently cited and quite familiar to many already, Abelove brings out interesting details and situates it within a context which underlines much that a decontextualized reading cannot provide.

Noting that Ernst Jones had called the letter a "kindness", Abelove generally agrees with him, noting that "Freud had no previous acquaintance with the woman, yet he took the time to write to her when he was himself deathly ill" (2). But he goes on to write,

But the letter was more than just a "kindness". It was also the considered expression of a viewpoint that Freud had long deeply felt and tenaciously held. Everything about homosexuality that he says in the letter had been an article of conviction with him for more // than thirty years. Summarized: Homosexuality is no advantage; it is also no illness; it should be neither prosecuted as a crime nor regarded as a disgrace; no homosexual need be treated psychoanalytically unless he had also, and quite incidentally, happened to be neurotic. (2-3)

In 1903, Freud had been asked by a Vienna newspaper to comment on a then current scandal—"a prominent professional man was on trial, charged with homosexual practices" (3). This is what Freud is quoted as saying,

I advocate the standpoint that the homosexual does not belong before a tribunal of a court of law. I am even of the firm conviction that homosexuals must not be treated as sick people,for a perverse orientation is far from being a sickness. Wouldn't that oblige us to characterize as sick many great thinkers and scholars whom we admire because of their mental health? (…) Homosexual persons are not sick, but they also do not belong in a court of law! (3)

Freud co-signs a statement with Schnitzler, Werfel and Schlick in an attempt to influence an "Austro-German legal commission" which was deadlocked over the question of repealing laws that criminalized homosexual relations. This statement claimed that homosexuality had "been present throughout history and among all peoples" and that criminalizing it would be an "extreme violation of human rights" that refused them "their very sexuality" (qtd 3). That was in 1930.

Earlier, in 1920 Freud had clashed with his psychoanalytic colleagues about this very issue

(…) the Dutch Psychoanalytic Association had an application for membership from a doctor known to be "manifestly homosexual." Uncertain how to respond, they turned for advice to a member of Freud's inner circle, Ernst Jones (…) Jones kept Freud informed by letter. "I advised against it," he said, "and now I hear . . . that the man has been detected and committed to prison." He then asked whether of not Freud thought that always to refuse homosexual applicants would be "a safe general maxim to act on." (4)

Freud and another close collaborator, Otto Rank, responded to Jones jointly,

Your query, dear Ernst, concerning prospective membership of homosexuals has been considered by us and we disagree with you. In effect we cannot exclude such persons without other sufficient reasons, as we cannot agree with their legal prosecution. We feel that a decision in such cases should depend upon a thorough examination of the other qualities of the candidate. (qtd 4)

…news of this exchange and of Freud's views spread and the Berlin Psychoanalytic Association's members were "alarmed" and wrote Freud in criticism of his position. [n.b., this is the same Berlin group which—to Freud's dismay also excluded Magnus Hirschfeld which I wrote briefly about already here] The upshot of the Berlin response was simply that they were inclined to see homosexuality as a mark against, regardless of what Freud thought, that it was in effect "a neutral factor" (5), and they may have been more definitive about this had he not been so clear about his refusal to stigmatize or pathlogize.

Abelove also reveals that in his practice, Freud refused to treat homosexuality as something to be cured and regularly refused referrals from others who assumed that he would do so. Because he did not seek to pathologize homosexuality he also did not keep notes about patients sent to him for the wrong reasons, but Abelove has unearthed a piece of writing by someone who saw Freud only once and might have been homosexual. This man's name was Goetz, who had one session with Freud, and spoke of his fantasies about sailors and his desires to kiss them and about his disinterest in marriage.

Freud said (as Goetz reports), "'And the matter with the sailors has never upset you?'" Goetz answered, ""'Never … I was very much in love. And when you are in love,, everything is fine. Right?'" Freud replied, "For you certainly…' and laughed." (6)

Freud kept no notes of this single session and upon sending Goetz from his office, gave him an envelop with enough money to get a good meal as Freud could see that he was not wealthy or well taken care of.

Freud's views about homosexuality seem to have been quite consistent across the span of his professional life, but "His viewpoint was not wholeheartedly shared by most of his fellow analysts, though no analyst so far as I know directly and avowedly rejected it during Freud's lifetime. But his colleagues did show some hesitation about it, some edginess." (7)

Abelove gives some evidence of Jung's homophobia, but as that is well established I'll move along…

As a contrast to Jung and the other homophobes amongst the early psychoanalytic associations, he are given a quote from a colleague of Victor Tausk who had commented on his analysis with a neurotic homosexual, saying that "his therapeutic goal for the patient was to rid him of feelings of guilt about his homosexuality so that he could be free to satisfy his homosexual needs" (8).

With the above portrait of the conflicts between Freud and what feels like the majority of the psychoanalytic movement in Europe, we then turn to the other significant subject focus of the article - American Psychoanalysis.

It was in America, however, that Freud's viewpoint on homosexuality was least accepted or maybe most resisted. (…) from the very beginnings of the transplanting of psychoanalysis onto these shores, American analysts have tended to view homosexuality with disapproval and have actually wanted to get rid of it altogether. As early as 1916, when Freud was still very active, Smith Ely Jeliffe, a prominent New York analyst and a founder of the Psychoanalytic Review, declared that "individual training" and "education" should control the "homogenic" tendency and "direct it" to a "normal, well-adjusted sexual life" so that there need be no homosexuality.

Jeliffe's declaration is perhaps distinctly American; it reflects the outlook that historians usually call moralistic and that has always dominated psychoanalytic thinking in this country. It is an outlook that Freud knew, despised, and opposed, but never succeeded in overcoming or even mitigating. (8)

Then Abelove turns to the correspondence between Freud and James Jackson Putnam for an in depth look at how Freud responds to the ever-present moralizing that Putnam seems to assume is what psychoanalysis is all about. Putnam argued in a variety of ways across their correspondence that "the psychoanalytic method needs to be supplanted by methods which seek to hold up before the patent some goal toward which he may strive" (qtd. 9) to which Freud says, in essence, absolutely not.

What would you have us do when a woman complains about her thwarted life, when, with youth gone, she notices that she has been deprived of the joy of loving for merely conventional reasons? She is quite right, and we stand helpless before her, for we cannot make her young again. But the recognition of our therapeutic limitations reinforces our determination to change other social factors so that men and women shall no longer be forced into hopeless situations. (qtd. 9)

This made no impression on Putnam seemingly as he wrote back not long after saying "As I study patients and try to relieve them of their symptoms, I find that I must also try to improve their moral characters and temperments" (qtd 10). Freud was not swayed to his position and later, poking some fun at Putnam's all-but-Christian moralism he wrote,

You make psychoanalysis seem so much nobler and more beautiful: in her Sunday clothes I scarcely recognize the servant who performs my household tasks. (10)

As their correspondence went on Freud turned somewhat bitter writing to Putnam,

a chemistry-themed tie, titled
"Sublimation is my specialty"

"As soon," he wrote, as analysts take on "the task of leading the patient toward sublimation, they hasten away from the arduous tasks of psychoanalysis so that they can take up the much more comfortable … duties of the // teacher and paragon of virtue." (10-11)

Then in one of his last letters to Putnam, Freud writes,

Sexual morality as society—and at its most extreme, American society—defines it, seems very despicable to me. I stand for a much freer sexual life. (qtd 11)

In Abelove's gloss "That, too, made no apparent impact on Putnam, and in his next letter he ignored altogether Freud's remark about America" (11).

So analysts in the States operated very much at odds with Freud's position. Louville Emerson published a critique of Freud arguing that "he was wrong to try to exclude 'ethics' from psychoanalysis" and that, in Abelove's summation, "All analysts must try to tell which social relations were, and which were not, 'righteous'" (14). The general view of American analysts was that their task was to "control homosexual feeling and reshape it into 'normal, well-adjusted' sexuality" (14).

To return to Freud's letter to the American mother. His motive in writing it was by no means just "kindness," nor was it just a determination to restate a position he had long held. He wanted also to hit back at us Americans, at out moralism and our misuses of psychoanalysis. He knew perfectly well that the letter would be noticed. It was a deliberate provocation, and perhaps the heart of it was the passage where he ended: "If you make up your mind he should have analysis with me—I don't expect you will—he has to come over to Vienna." Freud had no need of more patients, and the woman was a stranger. His object was to tell her, and everybody else, too, that her son could not be properly treated in America. (15)

Abelove then reviews Freud's disagreements with the early homosexual emancipation movement, these hinge primarily on Hirschfeld and Ulrichs insistence that homosexuals comprised a specific type, distinct from others. Freud firmly rejected such "third sex" arguments, though he "willingly endorsed the movement's law reform objectives" (15). In disputing the notion of homosexuals as a separate type of human from the rest, Freud, says Abelove, countered to the effect that "everybody's sexuality was homosexual in large part" (17).

In parliamentary culture, as the Germany of Freud's day in some measure was, or as modern-day America is, group-organizational strength can often translate directly into political influence. Freud understood all of this, and he cannot have been surprised when the homosexual emancipation movement ignored him. But he took his stand against their line anyway, just as he had taken his stand against American moralism, and for the same reason: both line and moralism were, as he saw the matter, in effect repressions. (17)

Freud dies in 1939. "Almost as soon as he was cremated, a host of revisionist essas started rolling off the psychoanalytic presses, especially in America. One of the subjects most eagerly canvassed was homosexuality" (17). Abelove turns next to look at the work of a number of American analysts, and here I will try to be schematic…

Sandor Rado - circa the 1940s - "argued that male-female pairing was healthy, that it was moreover the 'standard pattern,' that homosexuality was an illness based on a fear of women, and that it could often be cured in psychoanalysis" (18).

Irving Beiber claims that (apparently "all") "psychoanalytic theories," (…) "assume that homosexuality is psychopathologic" and he pushes for the now infamous mother-blaming account of its origin "a domineering mother, a cold father" and as Abelove notes "He too was relatively optimistic about achieving cures" (18).

Charles Socarides' position was that "homosexuality was in fact a severe illness, accompanied often by such psychotic manifestations as schizophrenia or manic-depressive mood swings." [And that, in contrast to heterosexual pairings] "homosexual pairings could bring only 'destruction, mutual defeat, exploitation of the partner and the self, oral sadistic incorporation, aggressive onslaughts, attempts to alleviate anxiety, and a pseudo-solution to the aggressive and libidinal urges which dominate and torment the individual'. Socarides also said that cures were possible." (18)

See here for a bit more about Charles Socarides.

Abelove notes that "Influenced perhaps especially by Rado, the American Psychiatric Association (APA in 1952 formally classified homosexuality as an illness" (18). This classification was rescinded under much pressure in 1973 (and soon after many other gender-related "disorders" began to populate the DSM, acting, or so it seems, to continue to allow gender "deviance" to be pathologizable). Abelove notes that when it was declassified as illness that the then president of the APA hoped that this woudl be a good thing for "the homosexual minority". "What the president assumed was that homosexuals were indeed a minority, a group with a special character. He assumed as much both because the gay liberation movement was predictably saying so and because their psychoanalytic allies were loudly agreeing" (19).

He then introduces those "allies" … Judd Marmor and Robert Stoller, both of whom he presents as at odds with Beiber and Socarides and analysts of their opinion about these matters. "Both, denying that homosexuality was an illness, described it instead as the sexual orientation of a minority. In so describing it, they of course rejected the view that Freud had thought theoretically crucial—the view that everybody's sexuality was in large part homosexual" (19). Marmor claims that Freud's view is "non-operational" and, that it must be set aside (19). Stoller was troubled that with Freud's view it would be difficult to tell who was and who was not a homosexual. "So Marmor and Stoller both saw homosexuality as belonging to homosexuals alone, who were therefor different from everybody else, and thus a minority" (19). Abelove adds that "the corollary of the humane ascription of minority status was this: people outside the minority need no longer think of themselves as in some important way homosexual, too" (19).

Abelove's conclusion gathers the threads of the discussion thus far very nicely…

At the APA meetings that had led up to the eventual decision to rescind the classification of homosexuality as an illness, all of the // major protagonists has been analysts. On the one side, Bieber and Socarides; on the other, Marmor and Stoller. A strange spectacle" two sets of moralistic analysts, each opposing the other, each claiming to stand in the tradition of Freud, and each espousing a position that Freud had himself rejected as wrong and repressive. In America, Freudianism continues as it began. (20)

Though I much enjoy Abelove's style throughout and this article is peppered with many great sources which I'd not seen cited elsewhere. I am somewhat dismayed that here at the end—in this battle of analysts at the APA meeting—that he provides no citation at all. I'd very much like to see much more information about this meeting, a transcript in fact would be handy. Likewise I'd be interested to see what documentation there is of the initial classification of homosexualty as illness too, if only to see how many and precisely which analysts were involved in this decision, the degree to which they offered a "psychoanalytic" justification, etc.

"Re-Reading Freud on Homosexuality" by Robert May (qbq)

2012-09-30T13:55:00.002-04:00

May, Robert. "Re-Reading Freud on Homosexuality." In Domenici & Lesser, Eds. Disorienting Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Reappraisals of Sexual Identities. Routledge: New York, 1995. 153-65.

May begins be asking why it is that gays and lesbians, queers more generally, are so prone to distrust psychoanalysis. He discusses "two books representative of mainstream American Psychoanalysis's view of homosexuality from the late '50s through the early 70s" these being Irving Beiber Ed. Homosexuality (1962) and Charles Socarides The Overt Homosexual. (1968). & gives some quotes from each that show just how pathologizing each text is.

May, though is trying to clarify Freud's radical unlikeness to the thought of these American analysts.

"The Freud who interests me, and whom I think is the redeeming Freud, is the Freud who is constantly doubling back to undercut distinctions, distinctions to which he himself has allegiance, or even has himself constructed. This self-destructing Freud is in tune with our contemporary sense of the instability of meaning, the limitations of binary positions, and the importance of noticing what's outside the frame" (157).

& restated somewhat

"The Freud who I believe remains most persistently interesting and valuable is the Freud who could never be content with a given formulation and was constantly revising and undercutting" (157).

Writing of the American psychoanalytic establishment;

"To be established, respected, socially empowered to judge others—this was the triumph of orthodox psychoanalysis in the 1950s. It became, then, an irresistible target for the righteous anger of the unwillingly diagnosed and of those who had good reason to feel excluded and demeaned: women, gays, even psychologists and social workers wanting admission to mainstream psychoanalytic institutes. The rise of biological psychiatry, the radical decline in society's willingness to pay for long-term psychotherapy, and ideological shifts in the culture all have combined to destroy the foundation of psychoanalysis' social power. It will be interesting to see if the anger against psychoanalysis decreases in turn" (158).

…this book was published in 1995, but in the 17 years since then, while surely less people know less overall about Freud, it seems to me that much of what has been retained is the bullshit. Certainly the unthought rejection of Freud is still extremely common, even amongst those who have not heard of 'The Oedipus Complex.'

May notes that while perversion, and pervert sound "harsh and assaultive to many" that "it's important to notice that the vocabulary Freud is trying to free himself from centers around the label 'degeneracy,' a pseudo-neurological term used in his day to categorize (and stigmatize) homosexuality" (159). & indeed this is a good point, though one that dogs all discussion of perversion (and in a different way, psychosis). Still, it bears repeating that Freud was fighting against a large group of medical and sexological and psychological folks who were all positive that homosexuality was the result of some as yet to be found degeneracy of the body itself, against which to classify variation of the sexual instinct as inversions or perversions or whatever was a more (though clearly not totally) value neutral approach.

May writes of Freud's subverting of the definition of 'perversion' that he had himself given. "Here is the enlivening paradox: a binary distinction is bridged, and therefore subverted, by contact between any any two adjacent links in the chain. There must then be a place where the distinction breaks down and we can't tell the difference" (160). As May plays out in more detail that I've reproduced here, Freud sets up the distinction of perverse to "normal" sexuality then almost immediately begins to problematize "perverse" such that much of what we all take for granted as very common 'things to do' with one another, sexually, might be thought of as perverse as well.

May discusses the insistently "Knowing" attitude (162 & elsewhere) taken by Freud in the work, an all-too-questionable posture it seems from our current perspective. But he is at pains to show how Freud is continually oscillating between statements that seems to be erecting hierarchies and classificatory schemes only to undermine their stability with his next utterance. Likewise, we might grant Freud a bit of leeway as well in that I think we would be hard pressed to find anyone publishing papers in his time who adopts a rhetoric of uncertainty or who insists on ambiguity or undecidability when discussing sexual matters - my hunch is that the were we to look at the discursive situation his works were joining in to we would find a discursive norm everywhere present such that authors presume in advance that classifications are possible, that researchers will be definitive in their claims. This was Freud's academic culture in large part, that he so frequently operates within its rhetorical demands and nonetheless undermines the stability of so many of his and other's classificatory schemes is quite radical in many ways.

That article is all that I am going to mention, but here is a link to the book if anyone is curious about the other articles. Below are several pictures of people turned up by a "Robert May" google image search. I doubt that any of these is the author.

Is that a real theory, or did you make that up?

2012-06-23T17:41:00.003-04:00

I like reading Lacan.

Not always mind you.

Not with some desperate impulse barking at my neck, some super-Ego stand-in demanding that I finish a paper or rebut a critique or otherwise pronounce authoritatively upon (& cite of course!) to demonstrate my worth for the big(bloated)Other in some fashion.

But I find just how freakily bizarre Lacan can be, rather… awe-inspiring.

That so much of his work is spoken opens a particular door to it that I often stand in, looking, and wondering (through the haze of multiple English renderings with my non-French eyes) from the improvising poets' room (my room) into Lacan's (as I imagine it) and feeling as if I know something about how things must just have just started to come out - like a tap being turned on, the pipes creak, then you're talking - and it is not as if one is not thinking all the while (in fact it is challenging to think on one's feet, in one's mouth), but to say that one is magisterially directing with knowledge aforethought each utterance in accordance with some grander argument is perhaps even more absurd (noodle in a pincushion) than to suggest that no thought is being exercised in this process.

O'Hara

Much more like Frank O'Hara than anyone will probably credit, Jacques is going on his nerve.

Or so it seems to me.

But Lacanians, or such has been my experience, are not comfortable focusing overmuch on his seminars or writings as embodying a poetics - as if to find in the language something not importantly content-relevant and connectable to one's real or imagined internal map of Lacanian thought consigns whatever it is to frivolity.

I see no necessary contradiction with desiring to both make use of the generative charge of Lacan's poetics - a position which would start with him but go wherever, and another which thinks that attempting to tune him in as best as one is able (an endless and recursive process) is important regardless of whether one ultimately 'agrees' and this attempt is an aid to the very generativity of the poetics.

In correspondence recently with my sis, where I was thinking through some of this same stuff somewhat otherwise, I wrote this;

[Lacan's] poetics i do not talk about but simply use, a poetics that is generative (for me at least) and about which i do not have much of anything to say, though there is endlessly something more one can do with it - "doings" which could never have been predicted entirely from knowledge of Lacan, hence the 'generative'

were the generative poetics not present, then the "specific rigor" [of my approach to Lacan's work, her description] would never have taken hold, nor would giving 2 shits about Lacan in all likelihood

in a very similar way (abstracted from the specific contents);

i hold you to a higher standard - because i love you

None of which should suggest that my reading and thinking and experience of Lacan is not conflicted and ambivalent in many ways.

That is, in spite of having found ways to enjoy, I am not immune to the suggestion that something crucial is being said, that he is on the verge of giving us the key to grasping it all - and thus of the need (it could strike at any moment!) to be able to bring the lights up, stand, face the group and say "What Lacan means is…"

And this is surely required if one is to accord with the general demands of the University discourse,.. that flash of mastery "What Lacan means…" - as fleeting as a grimace - is quickly diffused with more and more knowledge, tied to the master's words with citation and exegesis, propped up further by pointing at other names who read him in a similar way.

But saying "What Lacan means…" is a rather secondary if not tertiary posture of mastery already, one that any 'Agent S2' in an actual university setting sneaks up on rather than blurting out in most cases, laying all the bricks of justification and citation before daring to pronounce.

Obviously - in the tone if not the substance - there is something about this which is displeasing to me, constraining.

There is a poetics in that too I guess, but it isn't one that presses my buttons and - as JL himself argues in Seminar XVII apropos the University discourse.

"…the difficulty endemic to translating me into academic language will also blight anyone who, for whatever reason, tries their hand at it…"

"Blight" is an interesting choice - and of course that is Grigg, the translator's choice and I do not have the French original to ponder.

Rather we are to be agents of the S2, knowledge purveying a unique packaging (dare I say brand) of some concatenation of 'a stupid' of signifiers, made to appear to have a meaning and should the they be truly classic, the might simply seem to be their meaning (two echoes there might be worth thinking about sometime, not now).

This unique packaging should be reflected on the c.v.,.. naturally.

Brand Lowther (includes the award-wishing Lowther Method ®™)

Google > Image "brand lowther" gave me this pic and this caption;
"As you might expect, Lowther-based loudspeakers were much in evidence at the show. A pair of vintage Lowthers was spotted in the Lowther America room." Now I want a vintage Lowther loudspeaker!

Superego says: [sigh]

So, I like the idea of having a specific rigor, it sounds so butch but maybe we could spin it nicely if the license that the poetic provides is available as a consequence.

There is an ethics there and one not totally unlike that involved in staging a Return to… the text of someone or other.

Which is not to even pretend that the poetics that I find generative would have found favor with Lacan or that he'd even agree that it is there in his work, just that I feel pieces of it there.

"Poetics" here having less to do with words-language-discourse as such as with the ways of working with them, actual practices but also the stances towards the materials would seem to be important.

Since I am already risking an opposition between the poetic and the academic 'Lacans' let me also not forget the clinical one - arguably the one most crucial for Lacan himself from the beginning to the end of his career.

My hope to tune Jacques in as best as I can as well as to find the points where more thinking is needed, extensions proposed, modification seems necessary, etc - This is where it shades over into the poetics (theory is then improvised and maybe not scrapped after) (this is very like poetry for me, a poem is written or spoken and later one decides… Not all of them can work. Plus if you aren't failing often then you can't be trying very hard. Sometimes they come in bunches, interrelated but distinct and they keep coming for as long as they keep coming and no longer.) to do perhaps with the way the concepts interact, how they fit together and don't, how they unsettle one another or create tensions, the sorts of narratives that emerge from them, a sense (ultimately my own, and not exactly anything I could argue for) of the propulsion or internal dynamics of this as poetics that makes it available for use.

But, just to make matters more impossible(?), it seems to me that whether some modification to the theory is to be justified as "psychoanalytic" in a meaningful sense of that term, then it would also need, at the bare minimum, to not be armful or contraindicated or somesuch thing in the clinic.

No analysands were harmed in the making of this post (so far).

But yes, that is a tough one as I am not an analyst and never even completed my own analysis - though I do admit that I often wonder about becoming an analyst, being an analyst, ( I hear your slips of the tongue, I do, but have learned mostly to pretend I didn't) etc.

So those are the three styles or modes that I try to keep in mind, the poetic, the 'specific rigor' (scholarship) & the clinic - the first I feel but have some difficulties explaining and do not really desire to try to explain very much - the second I am always trying to adapt to the specifics of university protocols and whatnot but which my allegiance to scholarly pursuits is not framed by those things (MLA format, disciplinary boundaries, peer review) but by the specific texts that I am excited by - and thirdly by my hallucination of the subject as analysand or analyst, my memories of my analysis and others I read about, my never-ending snooping around in my own associations, slips, dreams.

The weak link is the third one.

Which is not to say that the others are über-robust or anything.

Creeley, natch.

My subject line is a riff on the line that poet Robert Creeley so often repeated.

Creeley was reading somewhere - the midwest I think - and after his reading a man came up and asked him, in all seriousness "Is that a real poem or did you make that up?"

If we put theory in for "poem"…?

The whole problematic of the university discourse as discussed above is evoked once more.

Other jokes are possible.

But speaking as a poet I just want to say,

That's a real theory

because

I made it up.

You talkin' to me?

The Transsexual in Badiou's SAINT PAUL

2012-05-30T18:13:00.000-04:00

Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul; The Foundation of Universalism. Ray Brassier trans. Stanford CA: Stanford UP, 2003.

The cover design they didn't choose.

I was surprised to come upon this here. I was searching in all my ARG-poached files for any reference to trans* and Badiou's book on Paul popped up. Go figure. In the text, Badiou is giving a snarky sort of litany of hyperbolic identitarian positions and asks who will "eulogize the cultural marginal-homeopathic-media-friendly transsexual?" and the collision of these varied terms is an index of the general scorn that Badiou has for what he calls identitarian or minoritarian logics. Below is reasonable chunk (I hope) of Badiou in which the reference to the transsexual appears, to help provide a sense of why the transsexual appears at all and what Badiou's point may be, and to what degree we can assume it to have any bearing on trans* persons as such.

For those not versed in or perhaps even familiar with Badiou this might be steep reading. Keep in mind that for Badiou universalism is not a bad thing and truth and 'truth procedures' are crucial. I'm not the best expositor of this stuff because I am not sure I follow once things get articulated as set theory. Still, in one example (that I might sort of get), that of "politics" being replaced by "management" (see below), part of the point is that politics maintains antagonism as politically constitutive (a point Badiou had made in the 70s but which is independently arrived at by Laclau and Mouffe later in a formulation that is more well known) whereas management elides antagonism, presenting it as something that can administered out of existence by better management. There is a similar elision at work when the terms sexuality, technology and culture replace those of love, science and art in Badiou's analysis. & Badiou's thoughts about love and its truths are related to Lacan's (lack of sexual relationship) if by no means equivalent. (Big topic, not going there.)

Also important to Badiou's philosophy are events and truths and subjects that they create. Being super schematic about all of that… An event is what can not be predicted based on how the situation or status quo is at any given moment (an event is then not a consequence of what there is, it is an interruption in that field). An event happens and it manifests or embodies a truth in one of the four 'conditions' [art, science, politics, love] and this truth creates subjects, in that subjects hold to the truth, live so as to sustain that truth, in the sense of remaining faithful to that truth - this is what Badiou calls fidelity to truth. To reneg on that, to lose faith in the truth found in some event is evil. (Yeah, no shit, he goes to that word! …which gives you another glimpse of what is so unusual about Badiou.) Anyway, here is the passage from Saint Paul; The Foundation of Universalism…

The contemporary world is thus doubly hostile to truth procedures. This hostility betrays itself though nominal occlusions: where the name of a truth procedure should obtain, another, which represses it, holds sway. The name "culture" comes to obliterate that of "art." The word "technology" obliterates the word "science." The word "management" obliterates the word "politics." The word "sexuality" obliterates "love." The "culture-technology-management-sexuality" system, which has the immense merit of being homogeneous to the market, and all of whose terms designate a category of commercial presentation, constitutes the modern nominal occlusion of the "art-science-politics-Iove" system, which identifies truth procedures typologically.

Now, far from returning toward an appropriation of this typology, identitarian or minoritarian logic merely proposes a variant on its nominal occlusion by capital. It inveighs against every generic concept of art, putting the concept of culture in its place, conceived as culture of the group, as the subjective or representative glue for the group's existence, a culture that addresses only itself and remains potentially nonuniversalizable. Moreover, it does not hesitate to posit that this culture's constitutive elements are only fully comprehensible on the condition that one belong to the subset in question. Whence catastrophic pronouncements of the sort: only a homosexual can "understand" what a homosexual is, only an Arab can understand what an Arab is, and so forth. If, as we believe, only truths (thought) allow man to be distinguished from the human animal that underlies him, it is no exaggeration to say that such minoritarian pronouncements are genuinely barbaric. In the case of science, culturalism promotes the technical particularity of subsets to the equivalent of scientific thought, so that antibiotics, Shamanism, the laying on of hands, or emollient herbal teas all become of equal worth. In the case of politics, the consideration of identitarian traits provides the basis for determination, be it the state's or the protestor's, and finally it is a matter of stipulating, through law or brute force, an authoritarian management of // these traits (national, religious, sexual, and so on) considered as dominant political operators. Lastly, in the case of love, there will be the complementary demands, either for the genetic right to have such and such a form of specialized sexual behavior recognized as a minoritarian identity; or for the return, pure and simple, to archaic, culturally established conceptions, such as that of strict conjugality, the confinement of women, and so forth. It is perfectly possible to combine the two, as becomes apparent when homosexual protest concerns the right to be reincluded in the grand traditionalism of marriage and the family, or to take responsibility for the defrocking of a priest with the Pope's blessing.

The two components of the articulated whole (abstract homogeneity of capital and identitarian protest) are in a relation of reciprocal maintenance and mirroring. Who will maintain the self-evident superiority of the competent-cultivated-sexually liberated manager? But who will defend the corrupt-religious-polygamist terrorist? Or eulogize the cultural marginal-homeopathic-media-friendly transsexual? Each figure gains its rotating legitimacy from the other's discredit. Yet at the same time, each draws on the resources of the other, since the transformation of the most typical, most recent communitarian identities into advertising selling points and salable images has for its counterpart the ever more refined competence that the most insular or most violent groups display when it comes to speculating on the financial markets or maintaining a large-scale arms commerce.

Breaking with all this (neither monetary homogeneity nor identitarian protest; neither the abstract universality of capital nor the particularity of interests proper to a subset), our question can be clearly formulated: What are the conditions for a universal singularity?

(Badiou, Saint Paul, 12-13)

These days, I restrict myself
to lacy underthings - Alain Badiou

I feel a certain use value in the critique of the "culture-technology-management-sexuality" system launched from the POV of "art-science-politics-Iove" but I am unsure precisely where Badiou stands on some of these. What I guess I am responsive to is in part to the aesthetics of the critique itself, the way that, by ref. to an event the universality of truth creates subjects to that truth (in one of those four areas, art - science, love, politics) a subjection that requires fidelity. So, while I respond to that critique, it also makes me a bit nervous in that "Honor" and "Duty" and all manner of other suspect master signifiers seem to lurk in the wings, waiting for the old narratives to take off running with this purportedly new rationale. After all, I respond to tear-jerkers just like the next moron, but so what?

Another point of ambivalence for me concerns Badiou's thoughts on love. Apparently there is a new book on love out now by Badiou (In Praise of Love), though I've not seen it or read anything about it so far. Again to shoot from the hip; Badiou's language seems to shut things down to the terms of the extant sex/gender regime in what I have read, and he does not seem to be thinking about those who do not fit within it - and yet, the arguments that he makes about love as an event that creates of two people - the lovers - subjects of this shared event, does not seem to be predicated upon sexuality as such and thus, perhaps not to be limited to any M/F predictability. So these various terms like fidelity and truth, and the narrative that is implied in his discussion chimes uncomfortably close to the find your soulmate and never let go dicta that underpins so much of the popular ideology of love. But what if I think sexuality is important too? Can there be no truth of sexuality? Seemingly not for Badiou, events just don't come from there. Yet another wrinkle is added when one tries to factor in that the vast majority of the times when two people both get all gooey for one another and declare that they are in love, that this is probably not "love" as Badiou conceives it.

Here though is a passage from Žižek's book Violence,

Alain Badiou develops the notion of “atonal” worlds - monde atone - which lack the intervention of a Master-Signifier to impose meaningful order onto the confused multiplicity of reality. // A basic feature of our postmodern world is that it tries to dispense with this agency of the ordering Master-Signifier: the complexity of the world needs to be asserted unconditionally. Every Master-Signifier meant to impose some order on it must be deconstructed, dispersed: “the modern apology for the ‘complexity’ of the world…is really nothing but a generalized desire for atony.” Badiou’s excellent example of such an “atonal” world is the politically correct vision of sexuality as promoted by gender studies with its obsessive rejection of binary logic: the world is a nuanced world of multiple sexual practices which tolerates no decision, no instance of the Two, no evaluation, in the strong Nietzschean sense of the term.(34-35)

I'd be curious to read Badiou on Gender Studies, not sure where that is to be found though - the quote that Žižek embeds is from the French version what in English is Logics of Worlds, so perhaps it is found there. What strikes me as a bit weird in this account of atony is that Slavoj tells us that the effort is to get rid of S1s - master signifiers - and yet he writes "the complexity of the world needs to be asserted unconditionally" which, to my mind, nominates COMPLEXITY to the status of S1 - even a more aggressive S1 in that - like the Borg perhaps - it attacks and assimilates all other rivals to itself. But might we not also observe that the assertion of complexity might be understood as pushing the Symbolic in relation to the Imaginary? A strategy that might be thought of as contributing to the loosening of Imaginary fixations.

None of which is to say that I also do not see a point to his criticism, just that it has these contrary associations as well. I am thus asserting the complexity of the potential meanings of complexity to Žižek (who is surely still reading).

I bet Žižek likes this notion of atony as well as it echoes his analysis of the rhetoric around wars - where they have profit incentive they are insistently make-or-break, into the breach, combattings of the "obvious" evil etc, but where no profit motive, complexity rules and it is impossible to ascribe clear blame to anyone, the conflict is intractable, time to step back, queue the sociologist-historian, etc. Thus complexity acts as an apology for inaction - there is something to that, and I largely buy his earlier analysis… just not sure that I can sign off yet on atony as discussed here (though it further contextualizes Badiou I guess).

Žižek's evocation of the binary is also a bit off-putting, but is anyone seriously reading him for gender politics? The question I can't answer is whether Badiou's thinking about such matters is any different or an sort of "improvement".

To the extent that Badiou's rephrased critique of the "it's a black thing, you wouldn't understand" idea is generalized to all similar identitarian claims, I am intrigued by the charge of barbarism (and how he seems to liken this to essentialism via the brute animality of humans). But, I am uncertain how Badiou gets from there to being in a position, it seems, to blame this logic for the proliferation of all manner of things which it appears he dislikes, things like "Shamanism, the laying on of hands, or emollient herbal teas" (recall that the transsexual above is 'media friendly' and 'homeopathic', the latter term surely fitting in to a sequence with emollient herbal teas for Badiou). So, given that I think that homeopathy is ridiculous (I do actually) am I to see the transexual, who is media-friendly (really?) and culturally marginal, as also being ridiculous (guilt by association?). Or to cut to the quick, is identifying oneself as a "transsexual" (or a "manager" or "straight") in and of itself enough to sustain the charge of barbarism that he formulates?

& can we really let that "media-friendly" pass without further question? With the terms manager and terrorist (with which transsexual would seem to be substitutable) what would being media-friendly mean? Certainly the media has been thriving on terrorism and transsexuality and in a vastly different way on managers/management - but even with those terms - it seems to me that they are, what they are, in ways that exceed what the media is "friendly" towards and about. Is the media-friendly transsexual the one parodied on Jerry Springer and the one troped as psychotic killer and the one marked prostitute and etc… If so, then it seems ludicrous to name this construct a product of an indentitarian or minoritarian logic as there seems to be nothing behind this "identity" or "minority" at all but refusal, a various phrased but quite insistent "That's not me".

& throughout, are we implicitly limiting to trans women in this discussion? I ask as the discussion of the media invisibility of trans men is not uncommon and I am having trouble thinking any similar set of delimited connotations for trans man (has there ever been a trans man prostitute story for example?). For terrorist and for manager we have a bewildering variety of associations, the difference being that for terrorist the "positive" connotations are few and far between and the term acts as a flashpoint for negative affective connotations. By contrast manager is rather neutral, or simply open to positive and negative connotations. Transsexual has by contrast has been heavily overdetermined by the few possible articulations (stereotypes might be a better term) above and few others as all (already well-critiqued by folks like Julia Serrano), with actual trans people being pushed or pulled or crammed into one or another of these few narratives.

Anyway, all of this to gesture at how fraught it is to conjoin "media-friendly" with "transexual" as Badiou does.

Maybe something can be extracted from the passages on politics to help think about this…

"In the case of politics, the consideration of identitarian traits provides the basis for determination, be it the state's or the protestor's, and finally it is a matter of stipulating, through law or brute force, an authoritarian management of these traits (national, religious, sexual, and so on) considered as dominant political operators."

…which echoes a statement that will come later

"The two components of the articulated whole (abstract homogeneity of capital and identitarian protest) are in a relation of reciprocal maintenance and mirroring."

…this feels to me like the real teeth of this critique. That is, if we had good reason to doubt or dispute that "identitarian protest" was in a relationship of "reciprocal maintenance and mirroring" with the "abstract homogeneity of capital" then this critique would have no bite to it. But do we doubt this? Do I, I suppose I ought to ask.

I recall a discussion a decade or more ago with this poet who was insistent that every artistic form had already been politically neutralized. I asked about graffiti. He acted like I was an idiot and told me exasperatedly that there had been graffiti shows in NYC galleries since the 80s at least, ergo, graffiti had absolutely no status outside of the commodity. The "one drop rule" just flitted through my head, but that's a pretty fraught analogy to work from, even if it works. I'm uneasy with the idea that the potential for politics to emerge from within any group thought to have an "identity," if that identity has, at any time, anywhere, been positioned as a social category to be administered by the economy in some fashion, is thereby liquidated. Certainly I am not trying to uphold barbarism in the form of an "it's a My Identity®™ sort of knowledge (so I just have it) and you are not of my identity (so you never can know it)" but I worry that assuming that because there is a socially mediated niche seemingly already present and something appears to fit there, that whoever that "something" is has become tainted through and through. Does the existence of one "uncle Tom" politically neutralize all African Americans? I don't see how that can be right.

Another Badiou wrinkle to keep floating nearby is that for him, until one has been subjected to a truth, one is not a subject at all. Badiou is unconcerned with "identities" as generally conceived and does not extend subjecthood on the basis of membership in a group such as women or african americans, dead white guys or male lesbians, etc.

For him, it appears that the sequence of "the transformation of the most typical, most recent communitarian identities into advertising selling points and salable images" could probably be re-articulated endlessly, he gives us "the competent-cultivated-sexually liberated manager (…) the corrupt-religious-polygamist terrorist (and) the cultural marginal-homeopathic-media-friendly transsexual" which would seem to allow extensions, such as the vegan-hacker-genderqueer or the bipolar-leather bear-derivatives investor which would have to entail the same scorn from Badiou for making use of the same "identitarian or minoritarian logic." But at this hyperbolic and parodic level are we perhaps failing to address what it Badiou is implying here? That is, the conjoining of all of these terms and insistent S1s in someone's life is not so monovalent as this is it? Does Badiou thereby elide the differences and ambivalences in investment even in the terms most insisted upon? Does he flatten the relational aspect of these things?

That is, there are probably some who identify strongly with being a manager - but does that have anything like the same range of effects and consequences that being identified as man or woman, straight or queer, muslim or buddhist, etc has for a person? Context is crucial here, no? I frankly find it hard to imagine a symbolic economy wherein the designation transsexual gains or loses in currency or legitimacy in a reciprocal relation with a term like manager - the two seem to operate in radically different zones of social meaning. Admittedly Badiou is probably using these somewhat synecdochally to refer to any and every such term one could produce and thus - by implication the system of differentially constructed identity terms. (This would connect to his claim that in the situation as such, all we have are bodies and languages - until a truth appears that is. See here for more).

Recall though that after his list of compound identities he writes "Each figure gains its rotating legitimacy from the other's discredit. Yet at the same time, each draws on the resources of the other, since the transformation of the most typical, most recent communitarian identities into advertising selling points and salable images has for its counterpart the ever more refined competence that the most insular or most violent groups display when it comes to speculating on the financial markets or maintaining a large-scale arms commerce."

There is a bunch of stuff in this that needs unpacking. Let's start with his recognition that there is/are something called "communitarian identities", temporally marked as "recent" and also as "typical" (though what register that term relates to I am not sure) (are "atypical communitarian identities" not subject to Badiou's critique?). So he seems to acknowledge that communities do confer, in some cases, "identities" upon their members. Is that already a problem? That is, is the identitarian or minortarian logic already at work here in Badiou's POV? I'm not sure really, though surely this is an important question. It seems that these problematic logics are operant at least by the point at which such "identities" have been converted into "advertising selling points and salable images".

Hi, I'm a spokes corpse!

Here we might think about the way that The Gap used images of Kerouac to sell khaki pants or chinos or whatever they're called. Beatnik as spokes-corpse. Surely the beats have long since been turned into "advertising selling points and salable images" and I am not likely to argue for their relevance to the poetic or literary moment (though I hear that Sha-Na-Na are doing a reunion tour) but I'd also dispute that because something called beat has entered into economic circulation that who the beats were and what their work might persist in provoking in new readers is somehow foreclosed by that fact.

Is the economic dimension of this the top level of description? That is, when one of these figures "draws on the resources of the other" do we mean that they others are all literally "speculating on the financial markets" and this, their participation in the market, is what taints each and sets up the "relation of reciprocal maintenance and mirroring"? What about groups that don't speculate on the market? Or for whom such interaction with the market is not shared by all - surely even amongst managers there are many who do not invest in the market. Or, from a different direction we might ask if it makes any sense descriptively to discuss "transsexual market investors" as a group?

I have no published position
on Homeopathy

What does it mean that "communitarian identities" have been used as "advertising selling points and salable images" and that "the most insular or most violent groups" are good at "speculating on the financial markets or maintaining a large-scale arms commerce" - how is the latter a "counterpart" to the former? The answer would have to be for Badiou that they are exhibiting these suspect logics that he's been complaining about. But do they? Let's say that I am a terrorist and I am also great at speculating on the derivatives market and I have a great business plan where I draw my resources from gun running, drug and sex trafficking and this all funnels into and is exponentialized by my market speculation and thus do I plan and fund terror worldwide. How does that sit next to, as the demonstration of the same "logic" the situation of a transsexual, who is media-friendly, culturally marginal and "into" homeopathy? Ok, let's pretend that Chaz Bono is way into homeopathy. Let's also call him culturally marginal just to keep the game going. If we could maintain this thought experiment without it collapsing into stupidity would we see this purportedly identical logic at work in both cases? What sort of perspective would I have to occupy to see the investment savvy capitalist-terrorist and Chaz as equivalent operators or a cultural logic? What makes Chaz media-friendly is his parents and his transition, child of celebs + sex change is like a tabloid wet dream and 'media-friendly' surely encompasses such dreams regardless of whether they aid or victimize their subjects. So, while I would not wish to deny any agency to Chaz Bono and submit him entirely to the enjoyment of the media apparatus - the balance seems to be with the demand of that media apparatus. But in the terrorist example the terrorist as agent is all slickly capitalistic and knows how to work the system, but it does not appear that the terrorist is worked by that system in anything like the same fashion. If these are counterparts, how much weight do we put on counter, do we read "counterpart" as denoting an inversion or reversal? That seems possible if I use my close-reading glasses (which make it impossible to see as far as my toes) but really? Does it really seem that the same logic is in effect in these two scenarios? To me, it does not.

Badiou's discourse here about these identitarian or minoritarian logics doesn't feel to me like it has that solid a grasp upon the ways that identities are adopted, imposed, implied, revoked and many other such "identity processes" of the social take place. I'm unconvinced that such processes can be adequately conceptualized as all exhibiting an identical logic. The terms in question also seem to operate at different levels, mobilizing different potentials of investment and investment that is coded at times, coded along the lines of earlier identifications - as male or female, by race, etc - even as these things may work to inhibit or facilitate certain outcomes. How much more likely circa 1950 in the USA was it for a man than for a woman to attain to the position of "manager" in a business? More perhaps than ended up in that year becoming "firemen" probably, but being identified as woman for the social realm surely impacted what professions one might attain in that time, arguably making this imposed identity more fundamentally determinative than others like 'manager' or 'patriot' or 'vegetarian'.

Perhaps if one drastically limited the terms to - for example - the designations available on any given US census, then we could begin with the pretense that these categories, all imposed by the same authority, operating on the same plane of reference, might be susceptible to reciprocal mirroring that Badiou discusses. But I am not sure that even in a setting where such is facilitated, like this one, that it can be unproblematically understood that way (which is not to exclude any understanding deriving from such a move, just to add a bracket for further consideration, a step back from the dogmatism of Badiou's presentations).

The idea that, should any term of identification enter into circulation within the economy, that the "identity" so referred to by the term is now reduced to a commodity-cog of said economy without remainder, strikes me as false. Which is not to argue that when a term of identification enters the economy that there are not many effects - surely there are, only that they cannot be adequately thought along the lines of a 'one drop rule'.

So, while I continue to find Badiou intriguing and provocative, here at least, little of what he is saying convinces me. My answer to my opening questions about the transsexual in Badiou's text is that - in principle - nearly any other identity term might have been chosen by him. So his use of "transsexual" feels largely spontaneous to me and given my thoughts above, largely irrelevant to whether anyone does or does not find transsexual a useful, necessary, problematic or irrelevant term for self-identification.

Works Cited

Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul; The Foundation of Universalism. Ray Brassier trans. Stanford CA: Stanford UP, 2003.

Žižek, Slavoj. Violence; Six Sideways Reflections. New York: Picador, 2008.

"Psychoanalysis needs a sex change" by Patricia Gherovici

2012-05-13T15:02:00.003-04:00

Gherovici, Patricia. "Psychoanalysis needs a sex change." Gay & Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review, 7:1. 2011 (3-18).

Patricia Gherovici

This article's got a seriously ass-kicking title I tremble and not having dreamt up myself… Psychoanalysis needs a sex change. Awesomeness. But, Patricia Gherovici is also the author of Please Select Your Gender; From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (Routledge, 2010), a book that I read back in January but never wrote anything about. Essentially I recognized that I had many points of agreement and that I also had a ton of uncertainties and whether due to my having only just begun to think about trans issues and thus being somewhat inhibited in fully engaging Gherovici's book or if the text's central arguments might lack a bit of incisive force,.. whatever the case, I didn't feel up to writing through it as a whole at that time. That said, I am going to go back to it soon and give it the patient reading that it deserves. What I do recall about it is that it is all over territory that I want to know much better, has copious sources that I'll want to look into and references many things I have already read, and that in broad stroke it appears to be the only sustained lacanian work on the topic of trans that doesn't assume in advance of trans people that pathology is unquestionably present.

Bolds are my emphases throughout, otherwise QBQ--quoteblatherquote.

⚧

Gherovici's abstract promises that the "paper discusses the crucial part played by psychoanalysis in the history of transsexualism and assesses the controversial yet central role of sex-change theory for psychoanalysis" and that it "argues for the depathologisation of transgenderism." and that "Lacan's theory of the sinthome offers an innovative framework for rethinking sexual difference. With the help of this theory, one can challenge the pathological approach too often adopted by psychoanalysis. This calls for a more fruitful dialogue between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the clinic of transsexualism."(3)

The point about depathologization is crucial and I've made the argument here in a variety of ways already. But to say it once again, I see no justification analytically speaking for assuming that non-normative gender expression, cross-gender identification, or any of the behaviors that one associates with transgender most broadly conceived can signify, in advance, that the (trans)subject in question is of any particular structure of desire. To assume such a thing would seem to be strictly comparable to assuming that dreaming of walking up stairs always relates to coitus - & yes, I picked one of Freud's weaker, more problematic and arguably Jungian moments (gasp!) to make the point that Freud (and Lacan and everyone) is quite prone to failing to live up to the radical consequences of her own insights (or his) and here is a moment when Freud fails, slipping into a sort of 'dream dictionary' mode that elsewhere he warns against. As Fink's Clinical Introduction book is at pains to show, subjects can have psychotic or neurotic or perverse traits without having that as their fundamental structure of desire. While I would argue just as staunchly against understanding manifestations of trans identification as psychotic or obsessive traits just as much as I do against assuming that a trans person's desire is structured in any particular way because they are a trans person (and for the same reasons), the notion of traits that bear the mark of a structure's mode of desire is perhaps worth thinking about in connection with my idea about specific jouissances discussed here.

Would Gherovici agree with me that transgender cannot be equated with any one structure? I am not certain. It seems that she primarily associates it with hysteria and, at the same time, or so I am understanding her, with the sinthome and thus, perhaps, with psychosis to a degree as well. This is complicated though and I'll try to attend more carefully to this question below. Also, to the extent that she writes of "the clinic of transsexualism" I m moved to wonder how she is understanding the specificity involved - is being trans akin to being hysteric, or obsessional - is it a structure in that sense and thus another 'clinic' to comprehend? Or is she writing more loosely here, such that the clinic of transsexualism is simply a reference to any and all clinical interactions with trans persons? My insistent and motivated (mis)understanding of these issues and my argument against pathologization is found at the ding (hear it like an oven timer and imagine cookies are coming!).

⚧

Gherovici's Introduction starts with a bang,

"Psychoanalysis has a sex problem in more than one sense. Transgender activists and scholars have been wary of psychoanalysis, with good reasons. In both subtle and brutal ways, psychoanalysis has a history of coercive hetero-normatization and pathologization of non-normative sexualities and genders. Such a homophobic and transphobic history, however, is based on a selective reinterpretation of the Freudian texts."(3)

To underpin the selective, if not coercive nature of this use of Freud, we turn next to struggle against popular misunderstandings of Freud which all who care to understand him better must struggle with (far more than seems just at times). Gherovici approaches this task, not surprisingly, through homosexuality,

"Freud never condemned homosexuality and has a very tolerant attitude facing it. Furthermore, (…) the founder of psychoanalysis never considered same sex desire pathological. Freud was not voicing liberal tolerance but rather making a radical move, because for [him] homosexuality was a sexual orientation as any other, and as contingent as heterosexuality. (…) For Freud, human sexuality was essentially polymorphous and perverse because the erotic drive does not follow any 'natural' course" (…) "Freud 'perverted' sexuality when he separated the drive from any instinctual function and described its object as 'indifferent', that is, not determined by gender."(3)

…but, as Dean and others have argued, this is Freud being very queer about sexuality. Something that unsettled his contemporaries and which many of his followers denied, disavowed or foreclosed…

‎"What irritated people most in Freud’s early sexual theories was not the scandalous claim that children were sexual beings, but rather his non-essentialism in the definition of sexuality. Freud’s later notion of the drive is also non-gender specific; this was the real scandal that would clash with Victorian sensibility and it was thereafter repressed by post-Freudians."(3-4)

It is this collapse of analysts post-Freud back into heteronormative-ideological understandings of the psyche that troubles so many of us that are committed (queerly or not) to analytic thought. Gherovici asks,

"How then could psychoanalysts after Freud talk about 'normal' sexuality assuming it means heterosexual genital function when Freud acknowledged that the mutual interest of men and women is 'a problem that needs elucidating and is not a self-evident fact'."(4) [Her quote is from Three Essays, though not the SE version.]

Sadly it is not that hard to imagine how this was done. Take some heavily cathected beliefs and watch them find themselves projected anywhere they search long enough.

"As Dean & Lane (2001) note, one of the greatest paradoxes of the history of psychoanalysis is that its institutions have developed normalizing moralistic and discriminatory practices that are antithetical to psychoanalytic concepts."(4)

Anyone who has read me much here on this blog can probably guess at my thoughts about some of this. On the one hand, I am profoundly suspicious of the Ego Psychology version of "psychoanalytic" thought that held sway in North America for so long, and am inclined to see lacanian thought as a corrective to this. At the same time (the other hand) I am wary as well of lacanians' tendency to orthodoxies. This perhaps colors me as a psychoanalytic "utopian" for some of you, in that I want a psychoanalysis that is not connected to the State, irrelevant to the institutionalization of people or any cure derived from or constituted through the State's demand, I want a psychoanalysis that is radically non-normative and anti-pathologizing. I do not think that this is of necessity utopian, but your mileage may vary.

It occurs to me that Gherovici, though she cites many folks in the U.S. does not address herself to the 'doctrinal' adherences of the players involved (are they 'object relations' thinkers? 'ego psychologists'? would they best be described as relational or perhaps humanistic, or - who knows, Adlerian? — any and all of which might be classed as "psychoanalytic" depending on who is speaking). That might well be a huge task, but it would seem to be a potentially useful one to a degree and it is not as if Lacan doesn't have things to say about psychoanalysis American style. Though, perhaps as a practicioner in the States, this might feel impolitic for the rhetorical situation as Gherovici feels it, that is, as an analyst assuming she will be read by other therapists and analysts?

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Gherovici then surveys some terminological history relevant to the topic which she is pursuing to highlight certain connections to psychoanalytic thought, a job that is sort of does, though I think that on whole, a bit less history and more discussion of her cases studies and more explication of her use and understanding of the sinthome would have suited me better.

Magnus & friends (that's MH in the lower right, seated,
wearing glasses, behind the masked person)

"Transvestite" was Magnus Hirschfeld's coinage from back in 1910, himself an occasional cross-dresser, Hirschfeld propounded a theory of sexual 'intermediaries' (basically a continuum idea). Gherovici, observing that the title of Hirschfeld's book Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress relies on the analytic notion of the drive, nonetheless she cautions against equating Hirschfeld's use with Freud's(5). She also notes that Hirschfeld was convinced of a biological basis for these behaviors(5).

& there is some other interesting stuff about Freud's and Hirschfeld's connection…

Freud published in Hirschfeld's journal devoted to sexology, his "Hysterical Fantasies and Their Relation to Bisexuality" appeared in its inaugural issue. & that journal published other folks from Freud's circle in its subsequent issues.(4)

& then comes some dirt on Jung (who, it seems to me, routinely has his dirt denied or swept under a rug)…

"But Sigmund, we can't have analysts sucking cock!"

"Hirschfeld co-founded with Karl Abraham the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society in August, 1908 (Gay, 1998). In 1911, at the third international Weimar congress of psychoanalysts, Freud greeted Hirschfeld as an honored guest and a 'Berlin authority on homosexuality' (Bullough, 1994, p.64). Yet even with this recognition, Hirschfeld left the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society shortly after the Weimar meeting, despite Abraham's 'attempts at persuasion' to stay (Falzeder, 2002, p.139). Hirschfeld's departure had been precipitated by 'an external cause' (p.139) also described by Abraham as 'a question of resistances' (p.140). It seemed that Jung had objected to his homosexuality (p.141). Unlike Jung, Freud did not seem to mind Hirschfeld's advocacy of homosexual rights as a positive development and from the beginning he had encouraged Abraham to work with him (Gay, 1998, p.181)."(5)

Magnus Hirschfeld

The workings of politics in the early psychoanalytic circle is some tangled and bizarre stuff. Undoubtedly here Freud's somewhat embattled mentality rather than his more daring theoretical self was ascendent and that is not a great outcome. When he writes Group Psychology later, how much do we suppose he was addressing himself to problems of groups that he knew very intimately? All this just to say that there still seems something a bit tepid in this accounting of Freud's stance when Hirshfeld withdrew - why is Abraham the behind the scenes man? Why could Freud not have made a definitive and inclusive statement about homosexuality to all psychoanalytic societies?

But since we're dishing, how about another helping of Jung?

"But those women who can achieve something important for the love of a thing are most exceptional, because this does not really agree with their nature. Love for a thing is a man's prerogative. But since masculine and feminine elements are united in our human nature, a man can live in the feminine part of himself, and a woman in her masculine part. None the less the feminine element in man is only something in the background, as is the masculine element in woman. If one lives out the opposite sex in oneself one is living in one's own background, and one's real individuality suffers. A man should live as a man and a woman as a woman." ("Women in Europe" from 1927, collected here)

With the echo of John Cage in my head I wonder about the should here and the claims of nature and the overt biologism peeking out from every turn in this thinker who is, it seems to me, unjustly praised for positing anima and animus as if this implied a more open-ended sense of gender identifications (and it is often mentioned as somehow a corrective to the presumed rigidity of Freud of Lacan vis-a-vis sexual difference) when it masks a rigidity of end points and a quite harsh endorsement of what hindsight would allow us to call cissexualism (though there is surely some homo- and trans-phobia in there too I'd reckon). & as certain meanings of the phallus will come up for discussion below I'll risk noting that in Jung's text above that to "achieve something important for the love of a thing" is rare for women but is "a man's prerogative" seems to require not simply a phallic attitude with respect to the fixing of meaning in an Imaginary stasis, but slips so easily into being phallic in the sense of masculinist-misogynist. Phallus schmallus. This will recur below with more nuance (I hope).

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There is little about Stekel or Gutheil's work on fetishism or transvestism that seems to rise above a rigidified and imaginarized version of whatever aspects of Freud might serve the desire to go on a safari amongst the more exotic of sexual pathologies and Gherovici doesn't add much to the mix, sufficing to point to the conceptual differences between these rather conventional thinkers and Freud.

Next she talks about David Cauldwell, a rather bizarre figure, who I again will mostly ignore save to note that in Gherovici's view he "just added the biological component to the old psychoanalytic formula of childhood trauma: when a generic predisposition was combined with a dysfunctional childhood, the result was the immaturity that produced a 'pathologic-morbid desire to be a full member of the opposite sex'"(6).

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Harry Benjamin looking friendly

Gherovici has some interesting details about Harry Benjamin. She notes his use of the term "neurosis" with respect to trans, but remarks that "Despite the use of the term neurosis, Benjamin (1954) discouraged any psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic intervention, seeing these as 'a waste of time' (p.228). Benjamin argued that psychoanalysis did not lessen the wish to change sex but rather forced patients to hide this desire and therefore live miserable lives. As his close collaborator Hamburger (1953) put it. 'it is impossible to make a genuine transvestite [transsexual] wish to have his mentality altered by means of psychotherapy'"(p.392-393)(7)

"For transsexuals, Benjamin (1954) reiterated that therapy was of no use. He was also not naive, admitting that for a male-to-female transsexual surgery 'may not always solve [the transsexual's] problem'. His feminization craving may never end' (p.228-229). He also warned against performing sex reassignment on patients with psychosis or who were in danger of suicide or self-mutilation."(7)

Gherovici points to the curious contradictions in the conclusion to Benjamin's paper wherein he wrote "Transsexualism is inaccessible by any curative methods at present at our disposal. Nevertheless the condition requires psychiatric help, reinforced by hormone treatment and, in some cases, by surgery. In this way a reasonably contented existence may be worked out for these patients"(qtd 7)

She also observes that "Benjamin maintained a very negative bias against psychotherapy and psychoanalysis but created a protocol for sex change therapy in which psychiatrists were given the power to determine who the potential candidates for surgery were; psychiatrists had the final word on the treatment decision but no say on the diagnosis."(7)

There are a couple of threads in this that I find instructive. First of all, Benjamin's impressions of what psychoanalysis is offering or insisting upon is that non-normative gender expression be cured, in the sense of being eradicated, those who had suffered from 'it' would then presumably comport themselves and desire and desire to be desired as men or women as understood by society, and thus ultimately via anatomical-genital reference? & of course it doesn't take much looking around in the writings of people like Socarides, Stoller, etc to begin to see something called "psychoanalysis" being used, as Gherovici put it earlier "In both subtle and brutal ways" to effect the "coercive hetero-normatization and pathologization of non-normative sexualities and genders" and so, I'm inclined to grant Benjamin's refusal a critical insight into the problems with American psychoanalysis and what I've called elsewhere the Psychiatric-I.S.A. Hetero-normatization and pathologization of the non-normative would be exhibit one in my critique of the american Psy-ISA.

& with that in mind it seems that Benjamin and Hamburger are both being better analysts than those who take the term analysts upon themselves as both Hamburger and Benjamin speak about the desire of these people and are not seeking to deny them their desires, Gherovici's gloss on Benjamin is that in his perspective, the intentions of the Psy-ISA (for him simply "psychoanalysis") "did not lessen the wish to change sex but rather forced patients to hide this desire and therefore live miserable lives." Certainly no lacanian would seem to be able to reasonably sustain such a goal, of requiring the analysand to hide, deny or repress their desire (which is not to suggest that some lacanians might not effectively do so nonetheless). & the same recognition is present it seems in Hamburger's own words "it is impossible to make a genuine transvestite [transsexual] wish to have his mentality altered by means of psychotherapy". Both of these men seem to have taken the desires of their patients to be central, meaningful and not amenable to the imposition of norms, both seem to find in the desire of their patients the grounds of an ethical relation to them. Notably, Benjamin's comment that surgery "may not always solve [the transsexual's] problem" also seems to demonstrate a nuanced understanding of desire as something which desires to keep on desiring - a recognition that does not stop him from being the advocate of his patient's desires.

But there is still a but, and a curious one as well. While we are given to understand Benjamin as against psychoanalysis he nonetheless relies on certain psychoanalytic notions at key moments, as when he cautions against granting the desire for surgery to any patient that is psychotic. & more importantly in that his protocols give the decision about who is granted surgery and who not, to psychiatrists! What is not clear to me is how much of this is Benjamin's recognition that these are the powers that be and thus this is the audience he must address himself to, and how much this can be understood as his faith in these arbiters. I am inclined to read this as real politik more than deep-seated ideological confusion.

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Gherovici then turns to the work of Robert Stoller. I'll quote at length,

"Stoller further refined the notion of a separation of sex and gender with the idea of 'core gender identity', which corresponded to the internalised idea of the individual's belonging to a particular sex. Stoller initially supported the idea of a biological force, a drive determining gender. 'Gender identity' stressed more the subjective experience of gender and separated gender from sexuality. Based on the conviction of a distinct identity and the importance of the penis, Stoller systematised a distinction between the transsexual, the transvestite (cross-dresser), and the effeminate homosexual. He noted that in contrast with transsexuals, transvestites and male homosexuals identify as men; transexuals abhor the penis, which for transvestites and homosexuals is an insignia of maleness and a source of pleasure"(8).

I can't find a picture of Stoller, but
here is one of his books.

"By 1968, Stoller, always a believer in bisexuality, had completely moved away from a biological model to a psychological one and emphasised the psychological forces that resulted in transsexualism. Stoller was mainly interested in male transsexualism, which he considered a 'natural experiment' (Stoller, 1975, p.281) to measure variables in the development of masculinity and femininity, but also a pathology of psychosexual development caused in early childhood by 'excess merging with the mother' (p.296). He recommended ''sex change' surgery' for patients properly diagnosed as transsexual, requesting from his colleagues that 'everything should be done to assist them in passing' (p.279) and was quite humble about the goals of his treatment. Stoller opposed any attempt as 'converting' male transsexuals into masculine, heterosexual or even less feminine people, because 'the treatment of the adult transsexual is palliative; we must bear this and not, in our frustration, impatience, or commitment to theoretical positions, fail even to provide that much comfort to our patients' (p.280)."(8)

"Yet despite his efforts at contributing to psychoanalytic theories of sexuality, and perhaps because of the fact that he believed that transsexualism was a petri-dish for human sexuality - a 'key test, in fact the paradigm for Freud's theories of sexual development in both males and females' (Stoller, 1975, p.297) - Stoller developed a simplistic explanation with psychological overtones that he summed up in the formula: 'dominant mother, father pushed to one side, infant cuddly and lovable, mother-son too close' (p.193). In cases of male-to-female transsexualism, the key was the essential femininity passed from mother to son: 'What his mother feels is femininity; what he feels is femininity' (p.204). The model was one of mimetic imitation: The son copied the mother; the mother's excessive closeness to the son was considered to be a negative influence. Stoller also talked about a bisexual mother, who might have has a period of extreme tomboyishness, and of a distant // father. These factors contributing to the creation of transsexuality, especially male to female. For female-to-male transsexuals, Stoller's speculations can be rendered as 'too much father and too little mother masculinizes girls' (p.223-244). Importantly, Stoller stated explicitly that female transsexualism is not the same condition as male transsexualism, stressing that female and male transsexualism are clinically, dynamically, and etiologically different(p.223-244)".(8-9)

& then, in the wake of Stoller's work…

"…many psychoanalytic theories of gender identity development blamed gender trouble on identifications with the 'wrong' parent'"(9)

"And most psychoanalysts proceeded to view transgender expressions as an indicator or underlying pathology - be it a precursor of transvestism or homosexuality (Limentani, 1979), borderline disorders (Green, 1986), narcisistic disorders (Oppenheimer, 1991, Chiland, 2003) or psychosis (Socarides, 1970, 1978-79). Understandably, feeling relegated to the realm of pathology and abjection, transpeople rejected psychoanalysis."(9)

Obviously I'm going to need to read Stoller. Lacan mentions him in Seminar XVIII, so I at least need to figure out which text he is obliquely referring to. & simply given his centrality in American psychoanalysis and his influence on the thinking about these issues, witnessed, if by nothing else, by the ubiquity of his coinage of the phrase "core gender identity." But, that said - all the mother blaming and father blaming and just this immediate reduction of all issues to a highly routinized notion of the family romance read through a similarly rigid conception of developmental stages and the obsessive foregrounding of the penis all looks to me to be indefensible if named as psychoanalysis (assuming you share my S1s and not Stoller's I suppose). But here again it seems that Stoller's thought has to be read with and against the history of psychiatry's POV on homosexuality in the States. I discuss this to a degree here. & it is not as if Stoller is without empathy even if it is framed by pathologizing which makes him a complex character in this history.

⚧

The discussion of Millot via Sheperdson and with Kate Bornstein's dubbing of Millot as a Gender Terrorist is interesting but ends too quickly for my taste. That is, it repeats something that Gherovici is wont to do in this text and in her book - she will often pose a question that I, as reader, very much want to see her then answer in some relatively clear fashion,… and then, she does not answer it to my satisfaction. For instance, with regard to Bornstein's critique of Millot, Gherovici asks "Is Bornstein's accusation of gender terrorism justified?"(10) The next sentence is not an obvious answer "Millot's interpretation of transsexuality is classic…"(10) unless we understand "classic" status as an answer (hopefully not). Gherovici's subsequent gloss on Millot may be accurate, but does not present itself as an answer to the question she posed. A bit later when she agrees with Pat Califia's critique of Millot (11) and then after a somewhat odd detour through the film Transamerica (which Gherovici seems to read positively, where to me it seems like mild trans-exploitation wrapped up in a 'feel-good' road movie) which then leads to some reflections on the phallus before returning to Millot, she writes,

"To return to Millot, then, it is in the inevitability yet variety of symptoms that I mainly disagree with Millot's generalised assumption that most transsexuals are psychotic…"(12).

So am I a gender terrorist or what?
[Catherine Millot]

This one-liner does not really open onto the question of whether Bornstein's criticism is justified, a query I would be curious to hear Gherovici's thoughts on. & this single line also falls short of charging Millot with pathologizing as Gherovici "mainly disagrees" which seems to leave open the possibility that she minorly agrees(?) that "most transsexuals are psychotic" - a reader may think I am being persnickety here about the language, but I am reading Gherovici to the letter, something one would assume she would expect (and to "mainly disagree" is a bit less than to disagree, is it not?). But then perhaps she means that the majority of her disagreement hinges on this issue but that the remainder of disagreement is due to other unnamed reasons with no agreement being implied at all… I am unsure.

I guess what I would have appreciated in this text is some way to distinguish between pathologizing and psychodiagnostics.

In spite of this qualm of mine with regard to her stance on Millot, Gherovici does have some things to say which distinguish her rather radically from Millot and the pathologizing analysts' club, such as this;

"I argue for a depathologisation of transgenderism and thus differ from the position taken by nearly all analysts. What I propose is an alternative to the usual psychoanalytic treatment of transgenderism. That is to say, transgenderism should not be systematically defined as pathology. If transgenderism is not pathological, then a sex change should not be considered either a treatment or a cure. My perspective follows Lacan's later theory of the sinthome to rethink sexual difference. This theory is a departure from the classical Freudian theory of the Oedipus complex and even from Lacan's first formulations that insisted on the symbolic and the father. It departs as well from a second period on Lacan's work when he would put the emphasis on the theory of fantasy and the object cause of desire. Lacan modified his whole position a last time in the mid-1970s when he elaborated a new conception of sexuality, just before discussing Joyce's writings.(12)

Of the Sinthome she writes,

"Lacan gave a new twist to Freud's Oedipus complex when he reformulated it as evincing the domination of the Name-of-the-Father. Later, Lacan (2005) went beyond the Oedipus complex and finally proposed the sinthome as a way of reknotting in the psychic structure what had been left unknotted because of the father's failure. (…) Since the sinthome is not a complement but a supplement, it is a vehicle for creative unbalance, capable of disrupting the symmetry. The sinthome is what helps one tolerate the absence of the sexual relation/proportion (Lacan, 1975, p.45). Instead of grief and reproaches for broken promises addressed to the Other as demands, the sinthome employs the Name-of-the-Father as a way of naming, as a path in the invention of new signifiers (Lacan, 1977). Lacan's notions of the sinthome thus connected fantasy, demand, the system of the symbolic, and the place of the real with the infinite possibilities that it allows for jouissance."(12)

This passage chimes suddenly with a book blurb I spotted on amazon today: Self-Organizing Men: Conscious Masculinities in Time and Space, Jay Sennett Ed. - the blurb for which includes the following; "…Noble, who discusses female-to-male transition as a racialized experience with very different ramifications of power and status for transmen of color, offers a new theoretical paradigm, which encapsulates the strengths of Self-Organizing Men: trans in-coherence, a positive, productive disharmony, a collective state of paradox and flux."

. . . can one not hear in this an echo of Gherovici's gloss on the sinthome above as "a vehicle for creative unbalance, capable of disrupting the symmetry." Perhaps the echoes are incidental, but surely it warrants consideration.

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Gherovici next turns to the phallus and I so wish that she was a bit more explicit about the distinctions within that word between the imaginary phallus and the symbolic phallus, as it is there that so much trouble starts. Here though is what she writes,

"It is true that the phallus, often confused with the limp little prick, is not much more than a signified of jouissance that sexual discourse transforms into a signifier. Lacan's dictum that 'there is no sexual relation' is another way of saying that for the unconscious there is no representation of the female sex, that the unconscious is monosexual or homosexual; there is only one signifier for both sexes, the phallus. The phallus refers only to phallic jouissance; other forms of nonphallic jouissance exist and can be experienced, although they remain outside signification."(13)

She continues this line of thought…

"Sexual positioning is predicated on an 'error' that consists of taking the real organ for a signifier of sexual difference. The error is to take the phallus as a signifier of sexual difference."(13)

The phrasing here has a bit more punch!

Quoting Morel, who is either quoting trans analysands of hers or paraphrasing, Gherovici writes; "This common error can be what the rectification proposed by some transsexuals is all about" 'If you think that because I have a penis I am a man, that is an error; I can be a woman who has a penis.' Or conversely. 'If you think that not having a penis makes me a woman, this is an error because I am a man without a penis (Morel 2000, 186). And, they are absolutely right, because for the unconscious somebody with a penis can be a woman or // someone without a penis can be a man. Sexual positioning is not based on organ attribution. The transgender phenomenon proves that there is nothing natural that would direct us to the opposite sex. Sexual identity is a secondary nature. Since the unconscious has no representation of masculinity or femininity, we cannot speak with certainty in terms of sexual identity of being a man or a woman, but only of an assurance, a happy uncertainty."(13-14)

It is in reference to this 'common error' that Gherovici's slight twist on Dean's now well know quote makes sense. Dean had written of the phallus as "red herring", on which Gherovici puns,

"I would like to suggest that the phallus is less a red herring than a 'read' herring - in fact, like gender, it is subject to interpretation, and it will always be read like a text"(14).

"the flying phallus"

There is a lot here to talk about. But let me highlight what might be a contradiction first. We are told that "Sexual positioning is predicated on an 'error' that consists of taking the real organ for a signifier of sexual difference." …and soon thereafter we are also told that "Sexual positioning is not based on organ attribution." It is hard not feel that she is demanding that "sexual positioning" (which is what exactly? Sexuation? Gender? Sex?) both is a consequence of the "common error" of equating penis with (imaginary) phallus (seeing it as the unambiguous mark of sexual differentiation) and at the same time asserting that it is not "based on organ attribution." Or let's not be shy - she is saying this, though I don't think that this is quite what she means to say. It would certainly help matters if "sexual positioning" were clarified, but I am not sure that is possible here.

Where things become muddled (it seems to me) is that when she writes that "Sexual positioning is predicated on an 'error' that consists of taking the real organ for a signifier of sexual difference" we are able to see this as beginning at birth (if not before) when a delivering doctor might announce "It's a boy" or "It's a girl" - and in this instance it is hard to credit this as a common error (which makes it sound sort of bland and easily avoidable) so much as an instituted protocol of misrecognition fully backed by a naturalized ideology which makes its avoidance structurally difficult. This error is not one that the infans has made, it is imposed on the body of the infans. But, when she writes that "Sexual positioning is not based on organ attribution. The transgender phenomenon proves that there is nothing natural that would direct us to the opposite sex. Sexual identity is a secondary nature. Since the unconscious has no representation of masculinity or femininity, we cannot speak with certainty in terms of sexual identity of being a man or a woman, but only of an assurance, a happy uncertainty"…here it seems that she does have something like sexuation in mind, a model of sexed being which allows for identification as the ground of positionality which trumps anatomy. This instability in the text as to what "sexual positioning" is, is vexing. Consider me vexed. In the first instance she seems to mean by it "assigned sex" and in the second instance to mean something not radically unlike what Stoller means by "core gender identity" even if, as a good Lacanian, she recognizes that "Sexual identity is a secondary nature" she surely understands how primarily it is experienced by subjects, as something which simply is, rather than it being a choice the subject makes.

& then, while it is accepted almost as dogma that there is no signifier of sexual difference in the unconscious, I think that this statement runs some risks as well. To begin, it cannot be understood to suggest that signifiers like clitoris, or vagina, or less clinical and more slangy sexual ones are somehow barred from the unconscious. So if it does not mean that signifiers of the genitals are unknown in the unconscious, what does it mean that there is no signifier of sexual difference in the unconscious? That is, if we are all subjected to the common error at birth, that of being marked as male or female due to the presence or absence of the penis, such that the penis as bit of flesh and signifier signifies male to us in large part and if vagina as flesh and as signifier signifies female to a significant degree, then on what grounds can we argue that no signifiers of sexual difference are found in the unconscious? The predictable lacanian answer begins by pointing out that the penis is not the phallus - but if the penis is used, and it is, to ascribe sex to the new born - that is, if the penis is able to sustain that signifying function at the moment of childbirth and if that ascription "It's a boy" then serves as ground of the social identity that a child is raised to occupy - then it would seem difficult to maintain a straight face while arguing that the phallus is radically distinct from the penis. Certainly the doctor who delivers the baby is not relying on a lacanian understanding of the phallus in that moment, even if she or he might be treating the penis (or the vagina) as Imaginary phallus (if I am allowed to read their actions as a lacanian).

Also what can it mean to say that "there is only one signifier for both sexes, the phallus. The phallus refers only to phallic jouissance; other forms of nonphallic jouissance exist and can be experienced, although they remain outside signification." That is, there is a slippage it seems between the penis understood as Imaginary phallus and phallus said to refer "only to phallic jouissance" (and, we might add, to phallus as Symbolic, that is, as master signifier or S1 - a relation that is involved with phallus as signifier of jouissance but not equivalent to it, or so it seems to me).

Does it seem like I am clarifying anything to anyone? I feel like I am just making more murk in any already murky scene.

In the back of my mind here is again Dean's idea of supplanting the phallus where possible with objet petit a, a suggestion I find very interesting and which I want to explore further, but which surely does not always work. To help further undermine the reach of this term (which, denotes quite a few distinct and non-equivalent concepts) I've been advocating for the use of S1s, master signifiers or quilting points as terms when and where possible to supplant those uses of the phallus where it acts to ground meaning. & explicit in this is my feeling that the varied overdeterminations of the term are too suasive and operate at too many levels to make hanging on to "phallus" more generative or useful than less. What I cannot say is whether it is possible, as Dany Nobus suggested at a seminar I was at some years ago, to articulate the whole of Lacan's theory without using the term phallus. But it's not a bad project now is it?

So to return again to fail again to make clear why there can be no signifier of sexual difference in the unconscious… It would seem to hinge on both jouissance and the requirements of signification itself and thus desire and… lots of stuff. Starting with desire, we might argue as Dean does that desire, as it has no fixed object and as there is no natural relationality of sexes, that unconscious desire has no signifier of the other sex in the sense that it is not constituted by any such relation and precedes whatever objects it takes up (even where its object is what is denoted by such a signifier). Or perhaps, we might observe that as the unconscious is symbolic, is structured like a language, etc, that it cannot ever adequately signify jouissance, not for the subject and even less for the Other or any other positioned as such. & finally, if the securing of an S1 is in a sense a "phallic" relation to meaning then the sexual difference that cannot be signified, cannot be signified because it operates differently, if it could be designated as a meaning then it would not be other to meaning as exemplified/established by master signifiers generally (i.e., it could be called "phallic"). It is this that Gherovici seems to be getting at when she writes "other forms of nonphallic jouissance exist and can be experienced, although they remain outside signification."

But, before I move on, this part again calls out for applause: "This common error can be what the rectification proposed by some transsexuals is all about 'If you think that because I have a penis I am a man, that is an error; I can be a woman who has a penis.' Or conversely. 'If you think that not having a penis makes me a woman, this is an error because I am a man without a penis. And, they are absolutely right, because for the unconscious somebody with a penis can be a woman or someone without a penis can be a man."

Maybe one thing that I wish was more present in Gherovici's discourse was the recognition that the trans person is there in the audience listening, if not perhaps that the big Other is a big transOther (whether existent or not) but simply that while trans people may be a small group numerically, that signifiers like transsexual and transgender and many others are already at work in the symbolic, already heavily cathected in diverse ways and operant in their lives. That meaning is something we battle over is indicative of its status as Imaginary. We need new symbolizations, and not more imaginarizations. We need greater attention to language which is renewed, re-distanced, stepped-away-again from its mediated habits. The attention to language is somewhat impoverished in this paper, regardless of where one stands on trans issues, or the use of new pronouns or words to designate people or refuse their designation with older words, the signifiers are there now - are extant - they cannot readily be foreclosed from signification. But the literal words are quite pristine in Gherovici's use (man, woman etc), their ramification is symbolic even as her lack of space-making for any third or queered sexual position implies (to me at least) that her discourse cannot escape fully the gravitational pull of the Imaginary of the sex/gender regime as is. Is that a general problem with Lacan too? Maybe. Though I suspect I owe you all more about this for it to be granted as a problem at all.

⚧

She then turns to briefly sketching what would be involved in understanding transitioning as a sinthomatic writing. I am very interested in this, even with the qualifications and so forth, but wish that here Gherovici had spent more time to explicate. She writes,

"Certainly in some cases, writing about one's transexual transformation is of the order of the sinthome; there are many cases where the transformation is reported as achieving a reknotting of the three registers of the real, symbolic and imaginary. Then the sinthome shapes the singularity of an 'art,' a techne that reknots a workable consistency for the subject; this movement can best be evoked by saying that it moves the subject from a certain contingency to absolute necessity."(14) …she then looks to Jan Morris' book to clarify what this might mean for a subject who is trans, writing that "One can see why her sinthome was necessary: It was necessity itself. In Morris' case the sinthome has produced less a 'woman' than a 'woman of letters'. Sex may have its reasons but they remain unknown since sexual difference obstinately resists symbolization. This impossibility can produce a sinthome. The sinthome is something that cannot be rectified or cured. The sinthome is a purified symptom, it remains beyond symbolic representation and exists outside the unconscious structured as language. In this sense, the sinthome is closer to the real. Lacan reached the final conclusion that there is no subject without a sinthome. Lacan's contention that there is no sexual relation, and therefore that the relationship between partners is a sinthomatic one."(14).

If the sinthome is a purified symptom, what has been flushed out that it's purity might shine? The answer would seem to have to be anything we might signify of it, those semblants are still ghosts in the symbolic machine (I'm scatting here people) and the sinthome would be outside. One would then have to begin with a symptom and by isolating the Imaginary fixations which sustain it, resymbolize them so as to open them up to new connections and bring them back into symbolic circulation, until such time as what remains is no longer symptom but sinthome. What then is a sinthome? Is it the set of relations as cathected minus the determinate points at which a symptom had grasped? Obviously I need to spend more time in the seminars XX through XXIII.

She notes on page 14 that Lacan was the 1st analyst in France to work with transsexuals. There is a bit of discussion of this in her book, and I recall not being thrilled by it.

Returning to Freud Gherovici draws attention to the moment in Three Essays when Freud writes "It is experimentally possible (E.Steinach) to transform a male into a female and conversely a male into a female"(14)(yes, it says the same thing twice here in Gherovici's text - but presumably that is a typo and Freud's second clause reversed things along the lines of an "& vice versa"). She also points to Freud's interest in sex hormones as dating back to 1896 and discussed in letters to Fleiss.

In her conclusion Gherovici writes,

"What makes a man a man and a woman a woman is a question that has come to psychoanalysis from hysteric patients. The position on bisexuality held by Steinach and Benjamin seems closer to a queer notion of sexuality in which genders are placed in a continuum beyond a strict binary. Paradoxically, the liberal discourses of gender identity support a sort of essentialism about gender identification. A collaboration between psychoanalysis and transgender discourse would thus open the way for an alternative."(15)

I've written elsewhere about my issues with a continuum model, so when Gherovici invokes an alternative to this, I'm on board immediately if standing near the life rafts. What does not come through for me in this article is a vantage from which I then might take a breath and say, ok, given this where now? Instead I am simply reeling amongst questions or my inability to use what is offered in such a way as to open things up more (where 'more' is obviously relative to wherever I might be said to 'be' and thus perhaps a measure of the 'dullardity' of my misunderstanding).

Superego says: Bingo!

A trans friend of mine found this
cover offensive. You?

Whatever the case, Gherovici is going to be central to my dissertation.

& there is still so much in this paper that I didn't talk about at all!

I'm too lazy to type out the sources cited in the text of Gherovici's paper. You'll have to get it or ask me if you need that stuff.

Ego Psychology -vs- Homosexuality in 'One Nation Under God' ~b/w~ What's Lacan got to do with it?

2012-04-29T05:18:00.002-04:00

The other night I watched Teodoro Maniaci & Francine Rzeznik's 1993 documentary One Nation Under God which is about the "ex-gay" movement, a rather bizarre conjunction of the religious right's sexuality panic and some really pathologizing psychobabble soundbites and even nastier meat-fisted behavioristic aversion therapies. "Psychoanalytic" soundbites though, and to be precise distinctly American formulations of analytic thought which derive it seems largely from what is called Ego Psychology. And one of the things that anyone who reads much Lacan will figure out is that he loves to heap scorn upon Ego Psychology and does so for many years, tackling along the way many of its basic ideas and generally (this is a huge reduction of his issues) faulting it for being stuck in the Imaginary in various ways, this perhaps being a consequence of its focus on the ego. Basically the way the story told by Ego Psychologists ('psychoanalysts'?) played heavily on a developmental sequence that had become somewhat rigidly monumental since Freud's initial observations of it (perhaps as codified by his daughter Anna to a large degree - Lacan being quite wary of "Anne Freudianism" too) and so the idea was that symptoms, thought explicitly as pathological in a way that (again) connects more to American cultural values I think than to Freud's own practice, were a product of the child not going through the stages in just the right way. As if there were a just right way to become a desiring subject. Even here we see how unlike Lacan's thinking this is, that we are split subjects is because there is no just right way, no guaranteed or homeostatic relationality as such - not simply with others - but with ourselves - relationality always fails. Language and body are always at odds. Etc. So the Ego guys proposed that the analyst would act as a sort of surrogate parent, a strong ego, with which the suffering person should identify with so as to embody similar qualities, strength of ego being the grand accomplishment aimed at in much of what I've seen. Beneath his amazingly snarky and devastating critiques of Ego Psychology, I can't help but feel Lacan's horror at a clinical practice whose ethos might be stated as "Be like me, and be well." As if we all desire in the same ways or could. And how could this hope to stand up to even a gesture at its normativizing assumptions? When one adds in all the talk of defenses (a cold war metaphor? a way of discounting all disagreement?), mother blaming (are you a CBI mom? "close-binding intimate mother" - careful your boys'll all turn out fags!) lesser father blaming (distant, remote, unproductive relationship, etc) and recognizes that in the States, this form of "psychoanalysis" was tied right into the APA and hence falls under the Psychiatric ISA and is thus intimately involved in decisions about people's institutionalization in looney bins, the Arkham Asylum, etc. …

the gates at Arkham Asylum

It is very hard

to see

Ego Psychology

positively

it seems

to me.

So, back to the documentary… Martin Duberman gets a good amount of screen time and has some interesting things to say. Here is my (hopefully) accurate transcription of some of his dialogue (not presented in the same order necessarily);

"I did spend ten years of my life in psychoanalysis trying to cure myself of my homosexuality."

"There was nothing else available in the culture in those years. (…) I was a thorough believer, I was very much imprisoned by the going psychoanalytic model and that model told me that, I was, the mild word was a 'character disorder' but often I was simply described as 'diseased', my 'condition' and it was always called a 'condition', was pathological."

"The good news according to the psychoanalytic model was that my disease could be cured, that is, if I presented myself for psychotherapeutic treatment and if my determination to change was strong enough to overcome this faulty family configuration that I happened to have been born into it didn't work for anybody that I knew personally, and I don't think it works for anybody who I don't know either."

"In terms of the therapeutic process and how I was supposed to be cured, what Carl, who was the man I was in therapy with (…) What Carl would say, first of all, was that my innate heterosexuality had been blocked through unfortunate childhood experiences, and so what I had to do was, unblock them and sort of re-do my childhood, central to that would be forming a good relationship with Carl so that he could become a substitute father, the good father that I had never had when actually growing up in my own family."

"The assumption of therapy in general in those years was that everybody is innately heterosexual. The only time there is a homosexual outcome is when there is some disturbance in the family configuration."

Duberman is just the right age to have seen what all of this was like during the period of Ego Psychology's hegemony, though we also see in the accounts of various aversion therapies that the Behaviorist paradigm was sharing or taking power as well in psy-I.S.A.. But showing people gay porn and then poking them with a cattle prod somehow fell out of favor over time. (But thank God for the religious right or we wouldn't even be able to beat our kids!)

These comments also further contrast Lacan's position to Ego Psychology as the latter asserts an innate heterosexuality, and clearly seems to be depending on a "natural" correlation of anatomy, gender presentation and sexual behaviors none of which would Lacan support in my view. & how is it that we get from "Come to Daddy" to "Be like me and be well"? Oh, I guess that is obvious. My bad.

"Jacques just refused to call me Daddy"
~ Rudy Loewenstein

A scan of the wikipedia article on Ego Psychology is sort of amusing and when one reads through its primary tenants and aims one can so easily imagine how Lacan might have responded to each point, and it's never good. Ego Psychology reads like normativity as therapy, or "straighten up and act right" as an ethic. But beware the final paragraph about Lacan's criticisms, it is poorly written and not that accurate. But, curious factoid (for those who don't know); Lacan's own analyst, whom he disliked, Rudolph Loewenstein, is one of the main egos in Ego Psychology.

So, one thing which this documentary provides evidence of is how this conception of "treatment" is entirely pathologizing through and through, functioning as a way for the "analyst" as arm-of-the-law to punish perceived deviance of whatever sort. Charles Socarides is shown in the film saying "Homosexuality is in fact a mental illness, which has reached epidemiological proportions." Bad Analyst Behavior (it could have been a reality show back then). Anyway, all of this ties back to that post about structures and diagnosis.

It's on Netflix if that helps.

Enjoyment, rather, JOUISSANCE… How many flavors?

2012-04-25T16:53:00.000-04:00

HEADNOTES

i. There is no lit review or anything even sketched out here. I know what Žižek and others mean by "perverse enjoyment" and so am just running with that for now just to see what shakes out when I try (though obviously the lit review would have to happen sometime)

ii. This is all very tentative still and will undoubtedly need reformulation and clarification

iii. I am throughout depending on my reader already having a grasp of Lacan's notion of psychic structures. If you lack that, you probably need to read this post first to see how I symptomatically misunderstand these things.

Perverse enjoyment is participatory but passive, right?

The neighbor who leaves trash in my yard and wakes everyone up with his music and who I find to be an aggressively unpleasant neighbor, if given a citation by the police for something - some other neighbor perhaps called this in - and I see it all, see it escalate, see the neighbor take a drunken swing at the cop and get flattened and handcuffed and hauled off to jail… Do I not enjoy this? Is there not a smile on my face as I turn to enter my house. This would be perverse enjoyment, enjoying the spectacle of an other being subjected to the law, or 'getting what they deserve.' The concept of perverse enjoyment has a lot of reach and many have explored it since Žižek put the idea forth (at least, I believe it was him).

What interests me and what I'll come back to below in hopes of extending it otherwise is the latitude marked here between structure and jouissance. That is, the perverse subject is said to have a structure of desire which is perverse in itself and is centered around the disvowal of lack and a specific relation to the law, that of situating oneself as the instrument of its application. But this perverse enjoyment, which is passive and participatory, appears to be available to subjects without regard for any congruence with the structure of their desire (maybe, see my dithering below). Also, unlike the psychic structure of any given subject - it seems that we can identify perverse enjoyment when and where it is offered up to us by media of all sorts (witness American Idol or any of a boatload of reality shows, such as… COPS).

But if one can stand outside of the directly perverse interaction, and enjoy the cop slamming the neighbor to the ground and handcuffing him, without even having seen it happen, but simply by relishing the neighborhood gossip… and if this enjoyment is as accessible to the pervert as the hysteric, the psychotic or the obsessional. Isn't the next question that seems to beg for an answer that of whether there are other participatory and passive (or 2nd hand) types of jouissance which these psychodiagnostic categories might allow us to discern, and which might well be already operant in the social world? Is there a psychotic jouissance in this sense of the term? That it is not the specific suffering of the psychotic - the subject who has foreclosed any S1 and either has stabilized this in some sinthomatic fashion or has not. Rather, it would have to be a jouissance which figures the jouissance of psychosis such that other subjects can participate in it. Hypothetically and very tentatively here; If the 'ordinary psychotic' has managed, sinthomatically, to stabilize the registers R.S.I. through investment in something else, in placing some other S1 (master signifier) in a position of central importance and using it as the 'anchor' which stabilizes one's psyche, allowing a livable relation to the Other… then might we postulate an '(ordinary?) psychotic enjoyment' as one in which a subject sustains themselves against the Other's many demands through being all in, that is fully invested, in(as?) their sinthome? Do we not often think of artists in this way? As those who are so committed to their 'vision' that it is the center of their lives, the point of their unfailing devotion regardless of the praise or denigration of the Other. When artists of whatever sort are presented in this way, do we not take a bit of passive and yet participatory enjoyment of this stubborn willfulness which they exhibit? And I mean the whole range of jouissance here, so not merely positive responses to the artist as figure but violent rejections (con man, scam artist, my kid could pant that, etc). More than that, do we not often see this as a sign of "the artist" - that they provoke these responses?

& what of the phobic, wherever one places phobia as structure or as shared symptomal formation of more than one structure, it would seem that there are many claimants already for phobic enjoyments; homophobia, transphobia, islamophobia, etc. Though we would have to begin with skepticism about whether these are in fact truly phobic at all - which is by no means to discount that phobia, in the more clinical sense of the word, is likely present in all of these to some degree, nor is it to take the screamingly obvious jouissance out of bigotry, only to suggest that it needs a more complex analysis. & it would seem that phobic enjoyment, along the lines of perverse enjoyment, is not hard to conceptualize. In Riki Anne Wilchins' Read My Lips there is an anecdote which might help to show what might be at stake in 'phobic enjoyment'.

Wilchins writes about a sex demo of sorts, or at least a body demonstration, where she invites women, after listening to an informal lecture about sexual reassignment surgery, to don latex gloves and have a feel of what her "transcunt" (her word folks, not mine) feels and looks like. She, naturally, is quite used to her body but for others "it's a different matter."

"Several interesting things occur, the least of which is that people fall apart. For many women, this is a gut-wrenching experience. It's one thing to talk about sex-change surgery, argue about whether I am a real woman and all that jazz. It's another entirely to find your hand buried to the knuckles inside the warm, breathing body of another person…"(116)

So that is the context for the anecdote that I want to consider.

"[One] participant discovered her friends from home were so grossed out that she had touched a transexual cunt (…) that they stopped speaking to her. She related all of this to me through tears, because these were people she had come to the festival with and had known since childhood. She was astonished to discover how transphobic they were toward me, and correspondingly quick to turn on her, as if I were contagious. What was even stranger was that her outraged friends were so deliciously and completely butch, they made me feel like I was an extra in petticoats straight out of Gone with the Wind." (117)

What is going on here that we could think of as phobic enjoyment? More than meets the eye I think. That is, the butches who diss their childhood friend as is she had been contaminated, as if Wilchins' body were a contagion as firstly enjoying (in the specific sense of jouissance) their own repudiation of Wilchins and of their friend. Had the friend initially thought that she wished to have this experience and then at the last moments said "No way, gross.." etc and run from the tent then she could, presumably have been able to find her butches and share the phobic enjoyment with them… "I almost did, but I just couldn't." etc. & the friends could have teased her for even considering it, but then all have rested in the enjoyment of marking Wilchins as phobic object and their common repugnance and who knows, more long term humiliation of the friend just for kicks? But as it is, they still got their phobic enjoyment (times two even!) both with regard to Wilchins and their "friend."

Or I think about a story that I recall circulating in High School about some guy having 'made out' with some girl - the 'scandal' of this was that the girl in question was - for reasons that made zero sense to me - marked in the High School's caste system as somehow 'untouchable' (read: skanky, low-class, ugly, etc). So when people told the story of catching the football player making out with her it was met with peels of "ewwwww, gross" from other girls and faces of disgust from guys (some guys laughed too). The football dude was made to suffer for it and lost social standing. The poor abjected girl was still just as abjected, but now was actively offered up in school gossip for specifically phobic enjoyment. I even recall one clear statement made by another girl about the football guy which bears this out, she said something like "I can't believe he put his tongue in that mouth" with a shudder which the other girls listening all shared in.

And is there then a distinctly neurotic enjoyment, more specifically are their jouissances specific to hysteria and obsession which again offer this passive and yet participatory option of enjoying?

If we understand hysteric jouissance through the Discourse of the Hysteric from Seminar XVII then it would seem sort of easy to picture. Any time that we see an hysteric demand directed at a master act to undermine that master's mastery, to reveal their secret investments and enjoyments of their claim to be master… this then would be 'hysteric enjoyment' of the passive and participatory sort. But, as immediately as this suggests itself to me as a way to think about the hysteric's jouissance, I also wonder if it might be too easy. That is, what is marked a 'hysteric' here is the working of a discourse and not that of a structure. My understanding of the discourses is that none of them is wedded to the structure of any subject's desire and thus that any subject might speak as Master or Hysteric or whatever.

Perhaps what is specific to neurosis which might help us to think this issue more clearly is doubt, the doubt of the neurotic. The hysteric doubts the words and meanings that are given to account for her body her experience etc (I'll go the traditional route here and make the hysteric her and the obsessional him - though often I reverse this). The obsessional might be said to be doing the same thing… backwards… that is, trying again and again to capture being in meaning and then doubting that it is enough, that this "capture" (in language) is really his at all - after all, likely it is just a reiteration of what some dead master already said and thus not authentic to this subject and thus further evidence that meanings must be doubted requiring more meanings more knowing. As I write this, I'm reminded of the Discourse of the University and I wonder if it might not have some links to the obsessional structure. Both the agent in the discourse and the obsessional seem to wish to be taken as masters of a sort but both are haunted by the master that they must repress, for both it seems that the production or more and more knowledge, more S2s, is a continual need and that it serves to keep the master repressed and out of sight.

In Good Will Hunting, there is a scene where some guy in a bar is belittling Ben Afflect's character (sounds fun doesn't it) in this hyper-intellectualized fashion and Matt Damon's character in turn attacks the attacker. He does this through undermining the guy's criticism by showing that it is not that guy's at all, but one found in a book which Damon can cite and, if memory serves, also disputing the guy's understanding of the very criticism that he had made. This looks rather like what we have been discussing as obsession getting its comeuppance. The initial belittling comments, had they fully succeeded would perhaps have been one instance of obsessional enjoyment, but then Damon's rebuttal would restage the same sort of scenario in that Damon asserts a greater mastery than the guy he is debating with while also presenting himself as above or outside the material at hand and able not only to see where some scholar's work has been used, but used incorrectly. Then, to the extent that we viewers of this scene enjoy seeing Affleck made to appear dumb, and then the guy who made Affleck appear dumb to be made to look worse. Would this be obsessional enjoyment? The very reiteration of it perhaps suggestive of the word obsession, an endless re-staging?

But what about hysterical jouissance? Can we rest with the dynamics that the Discourse of the Hysteric provides or does that risk losing sight of the crucial disjunction between language and body? That is, if I challenge a professor's mastery and reveal it to be a sham by virtue of addressing them in the hysteric's discourse - it would seem that the specific content of my discourse might not be concerned with the language/body issue at all, but simply about the posture of mastery that they are performing. Here I am reminded of the course I took with a professor at Uni Mainz, one Müller-Wood, who it seems to me often spoke with this pretension of great knowledge that, it was implied, would prove the truth of the many bald assertions (quite essentialist in character at times) but which she never actually would produce when questioned - tending instead to show some affect (of the 'how dare you question me' sort) and to evade the question or the request for her implied knowledge or sources. My questions to her were at times constructed with the Discourse of the Hysteric in mind, and often enough they seemed to work as that discourse is said to work. But again, this does not seem to be about my contesting the ability of her language (concepts, theories, etc) to capture my body (experiences, etc) and yet it is still working the way the hysteric's discourse works it seems to me. (This point is perhaps extraneous to my endeavor here to delineate other modes of 2nd hand enjoyment, but might be important for those using the discourse of the hysteric or trying to connect it to specific feminine subjects or feminine discourse - if such a thing can be shown to exist - I am not saying it cannot, only that I have yet to be completely convinced).

If we instead try to maintain the body/language disjunction as crucial to hysterical enjoyment, can we retain the framing provided by the Discourse of the Hysteric in addition? That is, to mark hysterical jouissance that can be enjoyed 2nd hand as that which presents a hysteric challenging a master's ability to enchain her in his language as if without remainder. So when I read Susan Stryker's introduction to The Transgender Studies Reader and she speaks of an event...

"As I stood in line, trying to marshal my thoughts and feelings into what I hoped would come across as an articulate and eloquent critique of gay historiography rather than a petulant complaint that nobody had asked me to be on that panel, a middle-aged white man on the other side of the auditorium reached the front of the other queue for the other microphone and began to speak. He had a serious issue he wanted to raise with the panelists, about a disturbing new trend he was beginning to observe. Transsexuals, he said, had started claiming that they were part of this new queer politics, which had to be stopped, of course, because everybody knew that transsexuals were profoundly psychopathological individuals who mutilated their bodies and believed in oppressive gender stereotypes and held reactionary political views, and they had been trying for years to infiltrate the gay and lesbian movement to destroy it and this was only the latest sick plot to. . . .

It was an all-too-familiar diatribe—a line of thinking about transsexuality that passed at that time for a progressive point of view among many on the cultural left. At some point, in a fog of righteous anger, I leaned into the microphone on my side of the room and, interrupting, said, “I’m not sick.” The man across the auditorium stopped talking, and looked at me. I said, “I’m transsexual, and I’m not // sick. And I’m not going to listen to you say that about me, or people like me, any more.” We locked eyes with each other for a few seconds, from opposite sides of the auditorium filled with a couple of hundred gay and lesbian scholars and activists (and a handful of trans people), until the man suddenly turned and huffed out of the room." (1-2)

I enjoy this. YMMV. Imagining this scene and the dynamics involved and so on and so forth, there is undoubtedly jouissance in my response to Stryker's words, “I’m transsexual, and I’m not sick. And I’m not going to listen to you say that about me, or people like me, any more.” [Snap!] And in this instance it seems to me that Stryker is objecting to this 'master' who is very clearly proposing to delimit and constrain the meaning of her embodied life, and that she challenges him precisely on that point - the inadequacy of his meanings. My enjoyment here is hysterical I think - in that "2nd hand", passive and participatory way that has been the concern of this post to tease out. [n.b. this is not to say anything at all about Susan Stryker's experience and whether the jouissance she surely experiences in this moment of confrontation is of any particular 'kind.']

Two things have been held in abeyance throughout my discussion. One of them might wreck the apple cart or perhaps only shake it really good. The 2nd of them links this with my earlier post about the structures of desire and the criticisms I offered there of psychodiagnosis used as a tool of pathologization. Let's begin with the potential monkey wrench.

It is commonly said that, neurotics fantasize about what perverts do. Ok, why is that an issue? My concern is that … I might be over-stating the case when I assume above that perverse enjoyment is open to subjects of any structure. Maybe, in the same way that what is usually thought of analytic technique is really the technique of the clinic of neurosis, perverse enjoyment is an option for neurotics but not necessarily for perverse or psychotic subjects. Certainly I do not think that perverts fantasize about what either psychotics or neurotics do. & I have no clue what psychotics might fantasize about or how fantasy even operates for them.

Now perhaps this problem is not as significant as it might seem in that it is said that the vast majority of human subjects are neurotic with perverse or psychotic subjects being relatively rare. If so, perhaps this mapping of different modalities of jouissance might still have some theoretical purchase and thus use. But it makes me uneasy to a degree, as if one loses sight of that fact (the possible neurotic specificity of '2nd hand' enjoyment) then do we not run a risk quite similar to assuming all people are straight (because gays and lesbians and such are but a small percentage) or assuming everyone is cisgendered (again due to the small sample size of those who are not)?

But, without dodging the challenges that the last two paragraphs pose to this theorization of mine, I think that there are very good reasons for considering these modes of jouissance that I have been trying to elaborate here. Very simply put, these are as follows;

1. Given that psychodiagnostics is a tool for analysts to use in the clinical relation and one that is, even there, entirely suppositional and only to be judged adequate if the treatment works to lessen the suffering of the analysand… Perhaps it ought to be largely retired from lacanian scholarship in the cultural sphere where none of the subjects discussed is being analyzed at all (in the clinical sense of that term) and so to claim, as I have seen and read before, things like Joan of Arc was hysteric, or John Wayne is an obsessional, etc would be invalidated on the grounds that one cannot make that ascription with any certainty outside of a robust clinical experience with Joan or John. But, it would seem to me that while others' enjoyments are no more obviously measurable, that in a clear enough context there are moments when the enjoyment that is presented can be discussed in one of these ways - and that this would be possible without making unjustifiable assumptions about the psychic structure of people (pathologizing) or filmic or literary characters (silly, but also common).

2. Formulations like "phobic enjoyment" offer similar extensions and applications to "perverse enjoyment' and thus allow one to specify this 2nd hand enjoyment and the ways that it can act to sustain cultural biases and so forth (recall the Wilchins' example above, where the phobic response of the butches to their 'friend' serves to abject Wilchins and the friend who touched her). [In fact, might phobic enjoyment often go hand in hand with what I wrote about as the Discourse of the Abjector?] We might also imagine the range of these brought into play when discussing the points of identification that viewers or readers of films or texts experience.

Works cited___

Stryker, Susan. "(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies." In Stryker and Whittle eds. The Transgender Studies Reader. Routledge, 2006. (1-17)

Wilchins, Riki Anne. Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender. Firebrand Books, 1997.

Rebecca L. Stotzer, "Violence against transgender people: A review of United States data."

2012-04-11T18:04:00.003-04:00

"Violence against transgender people: A review of United States data." ~ Rebecca L. Stotzer, in Aggression and Violent Behavior 14 (2009) 170–179

What a lovely name for a journal, Aggression and Violent Behavior.

Not saying we don't need such a journal...

just sayin'

This is almost all quote poaching as I have no skills to critique the methods here and am more interested in the implications of the diverse findings. & by interested I mean disgusted. Also outraged. Also, unsurprised (at the Human, all too Human). Bold is extra disgust/outrage/etc. If you are curious about the sources that are embedded in these quotes or the article itself, it is available here.

"Numerous studies have demonstrated that transgender people experience high levels of violence from strangers and known others alike, and that they often face a lifetime of repeated victimization."(171)

"The number of gender non-conforming people in the United States is unknown"(171)

"One qualitative study paints a picture of what life is life for transgender people. Wyss (2004) interviewed seven transgender high school students and asked about their experiences at school. This study discusses the 'full-contact hallways' that seven gender non-conforming youth encounter in high school. Their descriptions of the physical violence are particularly informative considering the details that the youths describe. Many report that not just other students harassed them, but that people they even considered friends would either help or join with assailants during physical attacks. Two of the students were set on fire in school, one after shop class. There were also constant threats of sexual assault, or coercive sex, or physical assault, both verbal threats and notes left in lockers. The hallways were also the place to be grabbed or fondled by anyone in the school."(171)

"Not only is sexual violence occurring with a high level of frequency, but this violence starts at an early age. One study found that first rapes often occurred in the early teens, with a median of 14 years old for FTMs and 15 years old for MTFs (Xavier et al., 2007)."( 172)

"The FORGE (2005) report found that young gender-nonconforming persons were particularly vulnerable to sexual violence, with the majority of incidents occurring before the age of 12, and that number steadily declining with age. This claim about younger transgender people being more at risk was also found in Wyss' (2004) study on high school-aged transgendered youth. Wyss, through a mix of surveying and interviewing, found that 86% of respondents had experienced some type of sexual violence, often perpetrated by other students, because of their gender identity."(172)

"Perhaps one of the most disappointing findings from self-report surveys are the findings that the largest percent of perpetrators of sexual violence are people who are known to the victim, including partners and family members. "(172)

"Additional details about the perpetrators of these crimes comes from Xavier et al. (2007), who found that acquaintances were the most common perpetrators of sexual violence (48%), followed by complete strangers (26%), father or stepfather (16%), a former spouse or partner (14%), current spouse or partner (12%), and a brother or sister (12%)."(172-173)

"Within the transgender community it is common knowledge that interacting with authorities invites a certain level of possible victimization, or revictimization for transgendered people. (…) However, an interesting finding that might elucidate the lack of reporting to authorities was the fact that victims reported that 4.9% of incidences of sexual violence were perpetrated by police, and in 5.9% of cases the perpetrators was a social service or health care provider."(173)

"Reback et al. (2001) also found that 37% of the perpetrators of verbal abuse were police."(175)

"...the average number of crimes over the last decade from just these 20 NCAVP chapters alone suggests that there are an average 213 hate crimes with anti-transgender motivation reported to Anti-Violence programs per year in the United States."(175)

"Organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report collect information based on news accounts, police reports and other sources. Their report claimed that there were 27 murders of transgender people in 2002 and the first nine months of 2003 alone (Moser, 2007). In addition, this report suggests that at the time it was written, of those 27 cases, arrests had been made for only seven cases."(175)

"Another source of information about murders of transgender people is a report titled '50 Under 30' from the Gender Public Advocacy Coalition (GPAC). The report related stories of 51 transgender and gender non-conforming individuals under the age of 30 who were murdered in the United States between 1995 and 2005. In collecting // information about these murder victims, they also attempted to gather some basic demographic information as well. They found that most victims were people of color (91%), most victims were poor and lived in major cities, most were biologically male but had some variant of a feminine presentation (92%), few murders received media coverage, all the assailants were male and used extreme levels of violence, and most of the murders were not investigated as hate crimes (71%), and most assailants go free."(175-176)

"I got raped at 18 because they wanted to set me straight. I went to the police and the police said to me, ‘he who lays with dogs should expect to get fleas,’ that's what I got. So from that moment on I knew the police were never gonna help me.” (Interviewee in Moran & Sharpe, 2002 p. 279)"(176)

"There are indications that prosecutors are not alone in being unable to effectively do their jobs in regard to transgender people, and government attempts to consolidate a system of measurement to help clarify and standardize this process have failed. After being dropped from initial hate crime laws and early workplace anti-discrimination laws in the 1990s, in 2007 both the House and Senate passed versions of a hate crime law, called the Matthew Shepard Act, that would have mandated the FBI to count transgender hate crimes in the United States as they counted those based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, and disability. The bill would have also provided federal resources to jurisdictions that needed help investigating and prosecuting any hate crimes that they felt they were unprepared for, including those based on gender identity. However, because this bill was attached to Defense spending in the Senate version, later at-tempts to reconcile the language of the House and Senate versions proved unsuccessful, and this bill has effectively died. This means that currently there is no federal system for collecting statistics measuring the violence against transgender people, or laws that clarify the relationship between gender identity and violence. Thus, discrepancies in how transgender people are categorized, how data are tracked and stored, and how it is presented will continue."(177)

"Stotzer (2008) re-analyzed data from five years worth of reports of hate crimes against trans- gender people made to the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations, and found suggestions in the crime details that the reasons for hate crimes against transgender people are far more complex than just possessing non-normative gender-identities. There was evidence of intersections of gender identity, race, class, and education as causes for the crimes of violence against transgender people. "(177)

"When combining all three forms of violence reporting it becomes clear that among transgender people, known others are physically and sexually assaulting transgender people at high rates, and strangers are physically and sexually assaulting transgender people, but also harassing them and causing other types of violence and abuse. These acts of violence are not single incidents, but happen across a lifetime, and often a single individual experiences multiple acts of violence or intolerance on a daily basis."(177)

"Self-reports have offered the highest level of // details about the prevalence of hate crimes, suggesting that the majority of transgender people will experience violence in their lifetimes, and that risk for violence starts at an early age. "(177-178)

"Policy is often based on 'official' sources such as law enforcement crime statistics; however, transgender victims of violence are almost absent from the law enforcement view of crime. Yet, without adequate statistics on the victimization of transgender people, it is unlikely that these issues of violence will move onto law enforcement's agenda."(178)

"What is beginning to emerge from these multiple sources of data are the increased risks of variety of types of violence, though in particular sexual violence, faced by transgender people. This risk starts early in life and continues throughout the lifetime. Transgender people appear to be victimized by strangers and people they know, including their families and loved ones, with equal frequency. In addition, it appears that this violence occurs at home, at work, and in public places. Although transgender people face these heightened risks and horrific instances of violence, the transgender movement is still growing and flourishing. However, in order for effective laws and policies to be enacted, and for effective social service organizations to be implemented, research that addresses the serious methodological failings of these three data sources must be addressed."(178)

Nong Tum, portrayed in the film Beautiful Boxer
(Uekrongtham 2004) is both kick-ass
(in the most literal sense of that term)
and a Kathoey from Thailand. She aint got
much to do with the violence in the USA
that this report talks about, but
her ass-kicking skills seem
worthy of evoking nonetheless.

Foreword by Stephen Whittle, from The Transgender Studies Reader (quotes interspersed with my babble)

2012-04-11T16:00:00.002-04:00

The Transgender Studies Reader

Edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle

Routledge, 2006.

This began as quote poaching, then I started rearranging the quotes and seeing interesting things in the new juxtapositions, and that led to some dictation and some thinking and wandering and much else.

Also note - and cut & paste that nifty trans symbol, ⚧

"Increasingly we presume that language, as another predeterminant of humanity, overrides the determinant of biological sex: that is, a person is the gender they claim to be, regardless of sex status. But the language of sex and gender is inherently limited. As trans people challenge their exclusion from language, and therefore from basic human rights, sex itself is increasingly becoming an unsafe foundation for the legal foundation of the order of human life."(xiii)

"Having a sex is apparently a prior determinant of being human, but as such it begs the meaning of what 'human' is."(xiii)

Does sex need laws?

I'm not sure what that question is about. I heard it. So I wrote it. (dictation)

One can object to the question in so many ways and sidestep imagining any answer.

One can tarry over the terms and the options of relating them. So many inflections, contexts, would have beens…

The safest course is to understand it as you like and/or walk away.

To say what sex "means" so as to consider the question as such ties one back into laws of various orders, yet we know it is not a free-for-all - as much as that fantasy is available in the culture - that is to say, whether one is born into a body that accords with their desire, or not, does not seem an issue of choice in the usual sense of that term.

At a tangent from that - but again (dictation) - I just heard it,

…Neither is who you want to fuck.

Perhaps we need more space simply for not knowing?

Is it just the largely contingent emergence of law-like behaviors that have outgrown their utility but which sprang from out of greater potentialities at some point in the past and those potentials are now needed once again?

Too utopian? all that foggy ancient wisdom potential once the b-movies move on it?

Sorry, I am not terribly in control of the throughput just now. After the above, I slept reading this sleeping this and now this, here.

Kinda the beginning of Swann's Way, but less dreamy perhaps - doesn't everyone have that? that thing where you are so deep into the text that your sleep is an extension, your thought perhaps clopping along at the characteristic pace of what you'd been reading?

Where could I stand to pronounce on what is or is not legitimately of the human? I laugh at me for thinking it.

As to the limitations to our language for sex and gender, and he could have added orientation and expression etc etc (both terms seem to provoke endless internal descriptions and exponential external ramifications)… yes, of course.

But how to be alert to and differently responsive to the places where it breaks down so frequently with negative consequences for bodies, lives, etc.? That is the question that needs answering.

⚧

"For the trans person’s understanding of the self, the question becomes whether gender, at the heart of self-understanding, can be theoretically recuperated. It is all very well having no theoretical place within the current gendered world, but that is not the daily lived experience. Real life affords trans people constant stigma and oppression based on the apparently unreal concept of gender." (xii)

"This new politicization forged a determination to change the world, by every means possible, for the next generation of trans youth. Significant changes have indeed taken place. At the very least, where once there was pure ignorance and prejudice of trans issues, we now see informed prejudice and discrimination, which is more easily addressed through the courts and legislature."(xii)

One is placed regardless of how they would place themselves. If that accords, so easy not to even recognize it happening. Indeed, would it not simply seem to be how things are if what you thought was what everyone else asserted? Ought I to have said 'how things were'? it is what I first typed (is that dictation?) (yes, it's dictation)

The first of these quotes seems to argue that, viable or not, recuperable or not, unreal of not, gender remains a social mandate.

Gender (and sex) would then be one of the things that those subjects supposed to believe, believe in. & as difficult as it is to combat the beliefs which are supposed by subjects, themselves merely suppositional - I'd argue that this is a better situation than one where we had compelling evidence that all but a few of 'us' do in fact believe. It's better as what supposes subjects are supposed to believe is largely a fantasmatic construction based upon the this or that person's grasp of the cultural dialogue about whatever (sex & gender, in my example)… & thus a construct that is only as strong as the individual who supposes such other believing subjects own need for this belief.

Is that clear?

Probably not.

Ok, the idea is an development of Lacan's concept of the subject supposed to know, i.e., the analyst. Analysands, of necessity impute knowledge to their analysts (at least neurotics do, not sure this applies to every structure). The end of analysis, if it goes well, requires the fall of the analyst, the moment when the analysand recognizes that it is they, the analysand who has done all the work, all the analysis, and is the only one who can declare that things are over, that the symptom has been interpreted, etc. None of that supposed knowledge was the analyst's at all, it all belongs to the analysand. So far so lacanian…

Žižek is the one who develops this into the subject supposed to believe. My example will be yard mowing, I think I took this specific example from Levi R. Bryant who used it years ago on the Lacan listserv, but I like it so much because of certain personal experiences with 'yard nazis' in the Chamblee part of the greater ATL. Anyway, let's say you live in a housing development sort of neighborhood and you really do not like mowing the yard, in fact you find it a waste of time, after all the grass hurts no one when allowed to grow, so what's the big deal? But you nonetheless believe that the neighbors are all deeply invested in lawn lengths as falling between certain parameters which your own grass has woefully exceeded. You note that your grass is the longest of any yard's on the block and you conclude that all those other subjects (everyone else in your hood) believe there is a length for grass which is simply too long. Grumbling you mow your yard under the imagined pressure of the neighborhood, though in theory every single local resident might feel exactly as you do.

Great theory. Likewise, it can be very useful in explaining why people do certain things - say with regard to the stock market.

But… when I lived in Chamblee, though my ex supposed the subject of the hood to have certain feelings about the yard, I didn't give it much thought at all and in time the landlord was given a letter of complaint by one of our neighbors about the height of our grass.

That fact is maybe funny at this point though, right?

But that, as that quote I keep tossing around goes: "Over the last decade, more than one person per month has died due to transgender-based hate or prejudice, regardless of any other factors in their lives. This trend shows no sign of abating" (Gwendolyn Ann Smith, p90 - in Beemyn & Rankin, The Lives of Transgender People) …or as Whittle puts it above "life affords trans people constant stigma and oppression" - the only strategy that makes any immediate sense against this is education, or dare I say consciousness raising.

Yes, I too am squirming at that.

So, while I am in no way suggest that an strategy of educating people should be in any way diminished, just as I don't think that symptoms of unconscious desire can be explained away as irrational or counterproductive or whatever (as this addresses only the conscious ego), so too, educating - perhaps especially when it's motivations are to 'raise consciousness' seem very likely to produce in some of the 'astudied' formations of desire that are reactive, built upon the Imaginary and expressed through aggressivity.

The Discourse of the University

Calling those who are to be 'educated' the "astudied" is also a Lacan quote, or pun, neologism… which emerges in Seminar XVII when he is discussing the Discourse of the University. Across the top line of the discourse we see S2, knowledge in the position of the agent, the operator of the discourse. The agent as knowledge addresses an other who is the object cause of desire. In one scenario, consider the teacher (filled with "positive" intentions) speaking on behalf of all that they know (that people are just people no matter where you go, that being gay or straight of bisexual or asexual, intersexed or transgendered or transsexual or genderqueer or of any height or weight or race or ethnicity or by approximation to ideals of beauty - that none of this should matter) and aiming to convince the student, or students, thus the (objet petit a)-students, those who the teacher wishes to usher into hir own libidinal attachment to this set of beliefs. The lower level of the graph shows us something else…

Below the agent is S1, the master signifier - that thing you reach when you keep asking yourself why you believe ____ to every given answer… You reach that which you believe because you just do (damn it!). (& I suspect that when it comes to things like transphobia or homophobia, misogyny, racism, etc… that while some of these have visible 'superstructures' of Imaginary and Symbolic contents - that what makes them so often expressed through violence is the very same thing that makes them difficult to change simply by presenting arguments - these would of course be unconscious investments). But here, in the University Discourse, though the agent will stage, launch and purport to defend the content of their speech with logic and stats and reasoning and examples, the motive will ultimately be otherwise. There will be a belief that is believed simply because it is believed, a belief which can't be uttered and owned as the agent's own without it invalidating the working of the discourse itself. & then, on the right hand side, regardless of how the other responds to the discourse, to the extent that they do respond, the excess, the waste product of having been interpellated by the discourse here produces a deepening of the split within the subject ($).

Things start getting relatively hairy at this point. That is, in my use and my understanding (undoubtedly both open to critique) none of these discourse models is transparent within a given sample of speech or text. Lacan is careful to distinguish discourse from speech at the beginning of the seminar. But just a statement can mean differently in differing contexts, so too the same utterance could function within multiple discourses. And just as, for Freud - unlike the grocery store line 'dream handbook' with its many X means Y claims about 'symbols' and so forth - an element of the dream text has no determinate meaning in advance of its interpretation in the context of the dreamer's own associations… what precise S1 is repressed in this or that Teacher's discourse when they are speaking as the agents of knowledge is going to have to vary from person to person. Just the same, the product of the Uni Discourse, the deepening or furthering of the split within the subject ($) might be experienced as alienating and painful - furthering one's sense of being unable to put one's suffering into words - or it might come as a relief, as when - after countless doctors and no answer to what ails you, a diagnosis is finally given. A 'diagnosis' of one sort could serve to anchor a claim that your suffering is absolutely and utterly not your fault, thus freeing you from guilt or stigma, but how many of us notice that this also denies us any agency? That these new signifiers which are the meaning of our suffering are not open to our agency, they require our submission.

All of this makes me wonder again at the "new style" of Master signifier that Lacan speaks of in Seminar XVII.

&, at the same time, whether there might be a way to saturate the culture with images and narratives and concepts which would not be prone to being experienced as a University Discourse at all. & looking at Whittle's thoughts above, where he writes "where once there was pure ignorance and prejudice of trans issues, we now see informed prejudice and discrimination" I find myself asking whether - given the understanding that is afforded by the subject supposed to believe, whether there might be a way to target that?

Bear with me, I am struggling to make this make sense for myself as well.

That is, rather than a Uni Discourse scenario, where I would be trying to make you invest in the beliefs and positions which underpin the many things I am concerned about (already a rather suspect aim, no? even if I am promoting peace and love…) that instead, I ask myself what is it that contributes to certain beliefs (the people phobias and isms mentioned above) being believed - supposed (imputed to) - some them ('everyone', 'most people' 'right wingers' 'vegans' etc) and how that impression might be altered. Essentially - to stick with the trans context (but it could be applied to any I suppose) How to make it appear that regardless of what phobia or fear or rage or whatever you may feel in your black little heart, that everybody knows that is totally wrong because everybody knows that trans people are people just like every other kind of people are people.

Or who knows, maybe that's just a shoddy containment strategy, after all, what white person doesn't know to not use the N-word and does that in itself prove that there is less racism?

Nope.

But, perhaps it does equate to "informed prejudice and discrimination" and thus to not sucking quite so thoroughly?

⚧

"I am part of the cultural crisis of the new millennium."(xiv)

"It is now possible, simply by 'telling' or theorizing my own life and the lives of other trans people, for me to build an academic career based on the fascination of the 'Other' with people like me. It is their obsession that has given us the opportunity to use the power of the media to tell our stories, to theorize our lives, and to seek equality and justice."(xii)

Irony here too in lots of ways, too many to compass. But the central one being that the academic activism against Othering is to some degree facilitated by that very Othering.

Does that mean they might be able to cancel out eventually?

That was probably a dumb question.

On the grumpy side, if - as seems so amazing obvious - one's sex/gender/whatever - is so tightly wrapped up in one's subjectivity that relatively minor infractions of the ordering principles assumed to depend upon it leads all too often to explosions of dangerous affects - rage, violence, etc.. in light of this, it seems unlikely that it will be, in any sense of the word, easy, to make large scale alterations to.

But then it is also pretty easy to point to significant changes and developments and so forth as well.

& this seems to lend itself to various narratives which, at the extreme, are utopic in character. & that troubles me as I'm just too much of a curmudgeon to invest in a time share in Utopia without a lot of skepticism being work through first. Though I suppose that I needn't take that narrative seriously in order to recognize that positive social changes have occurred.

I may be doing Whittle a small disservice here in that he sets up the one line above, "I am part of the cultural crisis of the new millennium" with some care, and does not deliver this line with the sort of I am trans hear me roar, vibe that it has when floating alone and out of that context.

But, I wanted it to resonate like that.

I wanted, dear (largely hypothetical) reader, for you to feel some crisis. If, that is, you were not already.

⚧

"Frequently, many non-trans theorists have used trans identities to support constructivist arguments. But increasingly, trans people are questioning whether the deeply held self-understandings they have can be entirely due to nurture and environment." (xiii)

"...the formal psycho-medical theories are falling rapidly by the wayside, and nothing has appeared in their place except some very limited evidence of biological differentiation that is so problematic that it cannot yet be said to have any proof value." (xiii)

Not sure where to step. There is a tension between these two quotes that I can sketch in big dumb strokes but it feels like it needs a definitive question to cut through it somehow. Both concern the body, or almost the bodies of the body - the empirical body of science, the imaginary body of ego identification, the erotic body of drives and merger, the raced, sexed, aged, coded bodies that are all ours, each of us, specifically, particularly, to the culture, etc.

I've aired my concerns about biological explanations for transgender phenomenon, how they might have some benefits and aid in some efforts for recognition but that they also open the door to scary places - places where something would be fixed or prevented or 'hygienically' cleaned-up and corrected.

But, to spend much time concerned over such things now is also foolish. The "limited evidence" at the moment "is so problematic that it cannot yet be said to have any proof value." If such evidence were to arise… then one can start asking how much the trans persons' agency has been taken away by the scientific account of cause.

More interesting to me, though still not the intervention between these two quotes I was hoping for, if one has a "deeply held self-understanding" going back to the moment when one was operating in language but hardly only just… does this in itself argue for a nature, rather than nuture argument? I'm not trying to adjudicate the answer based on whether this is or is not a valid supporting claim, just wondering about the somewhat catch-all character of "deeply-held understandings."

I guess as so many of my deeply-held understandings have been proven limited, if not wrong, through the years.

Also here is the recognition that the default assumption of mental illness of one kind or another is on the outs - though it seems to me that many trans people still have to reckon with it's lingering effects.

Then there is the business about the 'non-trans theorists' which, if I deserve the mantle theorist, I'll surely also rate non-trans or cis-gendered. Though whether I'll be caught making a constructivist arguments (not usually my thing) is less obvious. I get that trans people can quite legitimately feel like objects of convenience for theorists of all sorts, but I'm holding out for the possibility that I, as a non-trans person, might eventually have something meaningful to say (this issue deserves a post of its own, and to refer to a number of other writers about this question). But I will note that I am somewhat nervous about that issue - given that Patricia Elliot writes of the many criticisms she has be treated to - and I read her book thinking about what a great job she did of not being potentially offensive.

⚧

"In recent years, embracing the trans community and its culture has led us to an exciting position at the cusp of one of the most significant social and political changes in the postmodern world. The struggles of trans people could have significant impact on all of our freedoms, depending upon who wins the war of ideologies surrounding the meaning of gender and sex."(xiv)

"But the questioning that trans people present to others’ identities is a growing challenge to all who place their confidence in the binary rules of sexed lives: man/woman, male/female, masculine/feminine, straight/gay."(xiii)

Doesn't the mere existence of trans people suggest that there is so much about being human that most humans do not have even any ideas about?

Likewise, in other areas of thought, when an idea (the ether wind) for example finds it's experimental invalidation (the Michaelson-Morely experiment - though it was intended to measure the ether wind's direction and speed, not to find that it was not there at all) there might be some squawks about it, but it tends to get dropped (witness: the theory of the humors, phrenology, neuroscience… ok, joking about that last one, sort of…) and yet copious counter evidence to the conceptual adequacy of our conceptions of sex and gender, male and female, masculine and feminine are all over the place and yet… The terms are no sensed by most as discredited and untrustworthy.

Why not?

⚧

"The work of trans academics and theorists is increasingly moving trans people away from the discredited status of being mentally disordered, towards having expert knowledge of those who struggle to maintain the current strict gender regime, referred to by Kate Bornstein (1997) as 'gender defenders'."(xiii)

"The empirical and sociological analyses undertaken have shown that it is only by understanding and accepting that linguistic barriers still exclude the vast diversities of trans and non-trans identities, that we can possibly begin to accept that gender, like race, simply does not exist other than as an idea that has gained immeasurable power within the economies of social discourse."(xiv)

. . . so like money? that is, Whittle mentions "the economies of social discourse" and characterizes gender as something that does "not exist other than as an idea that has gained immeasurable power"… How different is that to the money form itself?

Here is much of a paragraph from a piece I wrote on Žižek's "How did Marx invent the Symptom" which is the last chapter of Mapping Ideology (Žižek ed. - and to which my page references refer) and also included in The Sublime Object of Ideology. & here is that entire text from back in July 2011 (while I was basking in the lovely heat of New Orleans), it's gonna be rather thick with missing context (sorry):

Users of money understand that currency is simply paper (and coins, metal), that it gets old, wears down, etc. Yet “in the social effectivity of the market we none the less treat coins as if they consist of an immutable substance” (303). Žižek evokes the notion of disavowal and stages it for this case as “I know that money is a material object like others, but still... [it is as if it were made of a special substance over which time had no power]” (303). Žižek opines that Marx never solved this problem, that of the “sublime material” or the “immutable body” of money (303). “This immaterial corporeality of the ‘body within the body’ gives us a precise definition of the sublime object” though Žižek insists that we must recognize how the “postulated existence of the sublime body depends upon the symbolic order” that its very immutable nature is “sustained by the guarantee” of the symbolic (303).

(…)

But the same blindness is present in every act of exchange in which we “misrecognize the socio-synthetic function of exchange: that is the level of the ‘real abstraction’ as the form of socialization of private production through the medium of the market” (304). Given this “the social effectivity of the exchange process is a kind of reality which is possible only on condition that the individuals partaking in it are not aware of its proper logic” (305). Žižek dubs this “the fundamental dimension of ‘ideology’” (305). As such “a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence” is what we must see as ideological (305). This in a sense, turns the conception of false consciousness ‘on its head’. “'Ideological’ is not the ‘false consciousness’ of a (social) being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by ‘false consciousness’” (305). At last the symptom enters the discussion here as Žižek offers a “possible definition” of it as “a formation whose very consistency implies a certain non-knowledge on the part of the subject” as when, by virtue of analysis and interpretation the subject brings this knowledge to consciousness, the symptom dissolves (305).

…OK, I know that might have come from out of left field, but let's play substitution games for a bit and see what happens.

Users of the ideas sex and gender understand that these things are not simple binary terms, that there are intersexed bodies, that gender attributes are culturally specific and mutable, they understand that these concepts are increasingly out of sync with the bodies and subjects around us and that they're wearing out. Yet, in the social effectivity of symbolic exchange we none the less treat assigned sex or gender as if they were the unmediated and inescapable evidence of those concepts as bodily substance. So then yes, this is a disavowal, "I know very well that feminine is a culturally specific set of beliefs about what characterizes the female, and that this concatenation of ideas is largely contingent, but still… [it is as if, when I read a body as female, I know it through and through, I know it as "feminine".] This would make of "sex" or "gender" something quite like a "sublime material" or an "immutable body" beyond the anatomical. This immaterial corporeality "Gender" (or is it "Sex"?) of the ‘body within the body’ gives us a precise definition of the sublime object (read: objet petit a) though the postulated existence of the sublime body depends upon the symbolic order, such that its very immutable nature is sustained by the guarantee of the symbolic. (…)

[To be clear, the Symbolic is not immutable at all - and Žižek knows this very well - he is referring to the way in which subjects treat the Symbolic, how it works within a discursive situation for example, or in fantasy - as the big Other. It is this Imaginarization of the Symbolic which leads us to credit it so thoroughly, as an Other without lack, a Symbolic where every answer could in principle be found, a fantasy world where "the truth (really is) is out there". Object a's place as sublime within fantasy or social discourse is sustained by that, but they (the object and the Symbolic) are not of the same stuff, the object is not Symbolic but Real.]

(…)

But the same blindness [that philosophy has to the unconscious] is present in every act of gendering in which we systematically misrecognize the socio-synthetic function of gendering: that is the level of the ‘real abstraction’ as the form of socialization of bodies through the medium of the categories language has as yet allowed for. Given this the social effectivity of the gendering process is a kind of reality which is possible only on condition that the individuals partaking in it are not aware of its proper logic. Gender then, pace Žižek, would display the fundamental dimension of ‘ideology’. As a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence. None of truly know what the hell sexual or gendered 'identity' is truly all about, but we can master the linguistic terms well enough to use them and navigate social discourses and even to find lovers, so to the extent it continues to "work" (at all) we treat it as a guide to essence as, all to often, we believe there is one and thus wish to speak of it. It is this that we must see as ideological. This in a sense, turns the conception of false consciousness ‘on its head’. A gender identity (of any sort) is not the ‘false consciousness’ of a social being but this being itself in so far as it is supported and socially-constituted by the ‘false consciousness’ that the historical moment and current state of the Symbolic and Imaginary allow when attempting to think Sex or Gender. Gender then appears as symptom, a possible definition of which might be, a formation whose very consistency ("I am a man") implies a certain non-knowledge (of what being a "man" or "woman" or whatever would truly entail) on the part of the subject, as when, by virtue of an analysis yet-to-come and its interpretation the subject might bring this knowledge to consciousness and dissolve gender as symptom so as to assert it (or something like 'it') as sinthome, as the support needed for subject in order to be able to live, love, work, play without unnecessary suffering.

⚧

Stephen Whittle

I'll let Stephen Whittle's text have the last word as I have been rambling so much above. There are a few things in the passage below that catch my eye. The 1st of these is the injunction to claim "the transsexualism of the self"… and my curiosity is as to whether this might be something that the non-trans person might also have a share in. I rather hope so. Of course there is also a bit of the manifesto here as well, and I do love manifestos when they're well done… even as I shy away from many utopian futures foretold.

Anyway, this Foreward is a great read and raising many interesting questions that I didn't even allude to. Also, if you are curious about who this Stephen Whittle is, here are two links to find out [one and two]

"The public articulation of a trans voice and trans consciousness has not only influenced sex and gender studies, but it also impacted on trans people themselves, and has provided a collection of materials that coherently explain their own experiences as genuine. Amongst other things, it has created new ways in which to be an activist, as well as new ways of being trans. It is now possible:

• to acknowledge and fight the injustice of transphobia, and to be trans publicly in order to truly represent transphobia’s victims;

• to be in charge of what we do to our own trans bodies, and to take risks in the art of our bodies;

• to become queer, by refusing gender ascription and by claiming the transsexualism of the self;

• to turn away, ultimately, from the relative safety of queerness and go beyond that to claim a unique position of suffering; and finally,

• to welcome the rage afforded by that experience of suffering, a suffering that is part and parcel of being trans.

Teaching transgender theory is itself an activist process as well as an explorative process. The field is expanding exponentially along with the cultural changes that accompany it. It also poses a daunting problem—in order to hear the voices of trans people, as justice demands, one has to acknowledge the limits of sex and gender and move into a new world in which any identity can be imagined, performed, and named."(xv)

Quadripodal Musings

2012-04-11T01:47:00.001-04:00

Displacer Beast!

I am still hoping to find some kind of generative poetic that will let me work with theory differently than I have largely had to up until now. I know that the dissertation will have to explain things and exemplify things - but I'm maybe reacting to the imposed telos of it all. Is there no way to demonstrate knowledge other than the University Discourse? What would any of these be like as the upper line of a quadripode of Lacan's discourse theory.

Yes, I said quadripode.

Aloud, while I was typing it.

Here is the graph of the positions…

So then, here are the two other upper lines I alluded to before we stumbled over quadripode (quadripode oh quadripode…) I would like to nominate for consideration (meaning someone out there explain them to me!)…

a → S1

a → S2

In each the agent is object petit a. Discourse issues from the cause or object of desire in each case. The first addresses an other as Master and the second addresses an other as Knowledge.

object a as agent seems to me to always be the tough one to think on par with the others. It is easy as pie to imagine individual statements of arguments as being delivered in the discourses of the Hysteric, Master, University. But the Analysts does really say that much to begin with, and it is always as if what they say is coming back at you from things you've already said. anyway.

That is to say, I can imagine - in a somewhat Marx Brothers fashion, ordering a meal in a restaurant in the mode of those other three discourses. ...But how would the analyst order anything if we understand their discourse as situated in the analytic session?

Waiter: Do you want to start with drinks?

Star..? (the waiter had dropped the 't' at the end of "start", though it could have been a accent thing, after all, they've just met)

Waiter: I can take the food order then if you're ready.

…

Waiter: I'll give you a few minutes. (muttering 'nutcase' as he heads for the kitchen)

Whether any meal could in fact ever be ordered is unclear, perhaps the hopefulness of the waiter who is under pressure to sell tonight's special might leak out somehow, get repeated and appear to satisfy the wish i.e., be heard an order. Though the difficulty would repeat with the side dish and salad dressing.

But, it would seem to me (and I argued this with a literary example elsewhere) that what is different in the analyst's use of the discourse of the "analyst" discourse is a very restrained, even refused relationship to the sort of 'agency' that is exerted by the S1, S2 and $ in their respective turns in the agent's position. To point to one very easy difference…

If one attempts to intervene in discussions or to interpret, in the analytic sense of that term - echoes slips of the tongue and mis-speech of any sort, refusing to gratify questions with answers or attention, interrupting now and then with utterances that are annoyingly neither clearly questions or answers, etc etc what, in my experience happens is, people get angry or annoyed, or they just treat you like you're maybe on meds or something and give glassy smiles back your way. Now one could complain that I am grossly underestimating what analytic technique is all about etc - fair enough. I'd still argue that no counter argument is really allowed - analysis is purported to work whether I as analysand know doodley squat about the theory - ergo, first impressions are not something that could be shrugged off, rather they would be aspects of the interaction for the analyst to interpret. Just saying that if the above first impressions may be overly negative, there is enough there I think to nonetheless mark the trends in the analysts discourse that work at odds to most social styles of discussion and interaction that we are involved within.

What none of the other discourses seem to have is an ethic. As such, if we think of the discourse formerly called the Analyst's as being without any ethic, then what might it better be called…? Maybe the Discourse of the Pervert? (I'm not the first to have noted that the top line of the discourse also resembles the formula for perversion a <> $ ).

There is much more to say but I'm just staring at these and spinning lines ...

a → S1

a → S2

[4/4] The Lives of Transgender People by Genny Beemyn & Susan Rankin (Chapter 5, Appendixes & a few closing thoughts)

2012-04-10T22:15:00.000-04:00

The Lives of Transgender People

Genny Beemyn & Susan Rankin

Columbia University Press, 2011

Chapter 5 "Transgender Youth and Implications for Higher Education"

I poached a bit of quoteage already in an earlier chapter about college and university issues. But this chapter is sort of about two things at once. One section is on 'identity formation among transgender youth' and includes this;

"Because they had known about and met others like themselves from an early age, most of the younger people we interviewed reported that they began to identify as transgender while still teenagers. (…) Yet few of the older participants indicated that they had acknowledged being transgender during adolescence, which suggests that these results reflect a shift in transgender identity formation and no merely survey bias"(161).

On the university theme, the authors note that "more than 90 percent of two- and four-year institutions in the United States have not taken any of these steps and remain completely inaccessible and inhospitable to transgender students"(163). The 'steps' they refer to are any of those things one imagines would be required to make transgender students welcome.

This chapter ends with this;

"By identifying themselves in multigendered ways, transgender and other gender-nonconforming youth are radically changing the definition of gender and how gender identity will be viewed in the future. Long gone are the days when gender could be limited to the categories of men and women. But so, too, is the time when transgender can be considered a catchall third option, creating a gender 'trinary.' We live in a world where gender is more complex and more fluid. It is not enough to dispense with the notion of a gender binary; we must embrace and celebrate the idea that gender is bound only by the limits of people's spirits."(166)

& ya know, I do respond to the hint of utopia at the end of that passage, I really do. I wish that we had the volunteeristic control of our gender which this might be read as implying. But I guess I've soaked up too much psychoanalysis or something, but it seems to me that while so much of that last paragraph is spot on, that if Beemyn & Rankin are implying that we can devise the gender that we desire to inhabit (which they may well not being saying at all), then I'd have to be skeptical.

Any "identity" would be a montage of Symbolic and Imaginary components, would be better denoted (from my POV) not as an identity at all, but as an identification. Perhaps the primary identification or at the very least one of the most primary identifications, but still, nonetheless, an identification, not a guarantee of language having captured being.

The Appendixes, of which there are 3, which give us the survey itself, the interview protocols and a review of the stats. I got nothing much to say about any of that stuff.

For a book with only 230 pages, this packs quite a punch. I was quite sparing above in my use of the stories and voices of the respondents, in part to make me focus a bit more on the stats and so that I don't give too many spoilers. You should read it - this is my claim.

I lack the experience to respond to the Milestones model but I'd be most interested to see any reviews of the book by trans people. There are probably a bunch of them out there already, but I've yet to search.

There have been many in recent months to either express an unparticularized curiosity about my interest in trans issues, or a blunt question along the lines of "what's with all this trans stuff you're writing about?" I find myself listening to these questions and now and then trying, a bit at least, to answer. But, I cannot help but to suspect that there are other questions unspoken. That is, I am more than willing usually to try and speak to how thinking about trans issues is meaningfully linkable to my interests in psychoanalysis, queer theory, the body, voice, and much else. & if much that I am reading is not expressly theoretical, this is because I am leery about theorizing in this area without knowing a lot more than I know at present.

But having answered as above, I notice in many instances that there is a hint of my having failed to answer something. I do not know that anyone might be wondering if I am about to transition to woman, but the answer there is Yes, absolutely - I started hormones last month! The preceding claims are not true. I was hoping that you might have thought so for a second. Nor am I, by focusing on this literature, attempting to stake any sort of new or modified identity claim with regard to myself - though I suspect that realignments of my identifications are surely possible, and may in fact be on-going though at a snail's pace much of the time. Beyond that, I think I will remain silent, though acknowledging that the old chestnut from psychology programs does hold true here; "research is me-search" … though it remains to say exactly how that is the case for me.

[3/4] The Lives of Transgender People by Genny Beemyn & Susan Rankin (Chapters 3 & 4 & various digressions)

2012-04-10T21:01:00.000-04:00

The Lives of Transgender People

Genny Beemyn & Susan Rankin

Columbia University Press, 2011

Chapter 3 "The Climate for Transgender People"

"Over the last decade, more than one person per month has died due to transgender-based hate or prejudice, regardless of any other factors in their lives. This trend shows no sign of abating." ~ Gwendolyn Ann Smith (quoted at 90)

That quote doesn't appear until later in the chapter, but seems to deserve foregrounding. I've read that a dozen times now but it continues to disturb me, perhaps more rather than less as I think more about it. How about this one: Over the last decade, more than one person per month has died due to C.E.O.-based hate or prejudice, regardless of any other factors in their lives. Were this case it doesn't seem far-fetched to imagine martial law and curfews here in the U. S. of A.

Turning to the book…

I think most folks have an immediate idea of what is meant the "climate" here. Beemyn & Rankin of course have had to parse that and quantify and so forth. They've also both been interested in how these issues play out on college and university campuses, which suits me too. Quotes mostly…

"Among the 1,669 self-identified LGBT students, faculty, and administrators surveyed nationwide, 36 percent of the undergraduates and 29 percent of all respondents had experienced harassment over the past year. Ninety-two percent (68) of the transgender respondents reported that they were the targets of harassment because of their gender identity" (85).

Unsurprisingly campuses that care and think about these issues, drafting guidelines and so forth, do better (as research dutifully demonstrates, though it would seem a no-brainer at another level).

"Despite the beneficial outcomes of having LGBT-inclusive policies and programs, relatively few institutions have implemented these changes. Currently, 595 colleges and universities offer protection against discrimination on the basis of sexual identity, with 392 of these school enjoining discrimination also on the basis of gender identity. More than 400 institutions provide health care benefits to the same-sex partners of employees. These numbers seem large, but the LGBT-inclusive campuses account for only a small percentage of accredited colleges and universities in the United States. As a result, many LGBT students, staff, and faculty continue to experience the campus climate as hostile and isolating and frequently victims of discrimination and harassment. In fact, physical and verbal harassment of LGBT individuals has been reported on every campus where research has been conducted" (86).

"Students are coming out as transgender on college campuses across the country. Although these students have unique needs related to programming, housing, bathrooms and locker rooms, physical and mental health care, and records and documents, most colleges and universities offer little or no support for this growing population" (87).

Beemyn & Rankin adopt the terms Genderism (which was mentioned earlier), Transphobia and Gender bashing defining them as follows;

GENDERISM "is the ideology that there as, and should be, only two genders and that all or most aspects of one's gender are inevitably tied to the gender assigned at birth. Genderism reinforces negative attitudes toward gender nonconformity, or the incongruence between assigned gender and gender identity/expression. Much like heterosexism, genderism is a source of both social oppression and psychological shame; in can be imposed on a person, and a person may internalize that ideology" (89).

TRANSPHOBIA "or gender prejudice is the irrational fear, hatred, and/or discriminatory treatment of people whose actual or perceived gender identity/expression does not conform to society's expectations" (89).

GENDER BASHING "refers to the assault and/or harassment of individuals who are transgender" and this it is "the violent manifestation" of Transphobia / Genderism" (89).

"Genderism and gender prejudice may also present transgender victims of hate crimes with special psychological challenges, such as intensified self-hatred, higher levels of depression and anxiety, a loss of confidence, and a heightened sense of vulnerability" (89).

"From verbal harassment to threats of violence, from acts of discrimination to the destruction of property, from assaults to even murder - people who are (or are perceived as) transgender often face a hostile social climate. Violent behavior and hostility is an estimated four times higher for transgender individuals when compared with the national average. Transgender people are more likely to experience hostile or aggressive familial interaction, more likely to be kicked out of their homes by parents, more likely to become homeless or live below the poverty line, and less likely to be employed" (90).

"Only twelve states and the District of Columbia currently include crimes based on gender identity/expression in hate crime laws, and only fifteen states and the District of Columbia have laws to protect people from discrimination based on their gender identity/expression" (90).

There is clear evidence that if a crime is classes as a hate crime that it is more likely to be solved, so the finding that "Almost three-quarters of the attacks against transgender individuals were not classified as hate crimes, often despite clear evidence to the contrary" (92) one is forced to wonder what it would take to make law enforcement feel this discrepancy. Of course with one person dying a month already, perhaps it would have to involve terrorists?

The authors consider claims that such hate crimes can be explained as reactions to the breaking of gender rules, and the common "explanatory" scenarios that are offered in accounts of violence against transgender people, where perpetrators are predatory mad dog types and the victims, like rape victims generally, were 'asking for it' somehow ("what was she wearing?") - and they conclude that these explanations are inadequate and "simply extensions of the traditional discourse" (they are quoting others here, 93). Further considerations convince the authors that many factors are involved in anti-trans hate crimes, but they note specifically that "the intersection of racism and genderism may increase bias crimes against transgender people of color" is particularly marked & that is not surprising as "almost all of the transgender participants of color had been physically assaulted" (99).

The rest of this chapter looks the respondent's responses to the climate they find themselves in and how they experience this, sometimes hiding themselves, other times being fearful. It also considers the negative impacts that being trans has on these people's work lives, being passed over for promotion, losing their jobs, being harassed at work, etc. The authors look at these sorts of factors with other factors like age, race, and 'outness.' All in all it makes it sort of embarrassing to be human when you really think about it… "more than one person per month has died due to transgender-based hate."

Chapter 4 "Developmental Milestones of Different Transgender Groups"

This is the longest chapter of the book and may be the most interesting. Beemyn & Rankin begin the chapter with a quick review of earlier developmental models, those proposed by Anne Bolin, Frank Lewins and Henry Rubin assessing the strong points and weakness of each (110-114). Next the authors begin to explain their 'Milestone Schema";

"Unlike many theories of transgender identity development, our milestone schema is not a stage or step model - even though there // is a seemingly 'natural' progression through the milestones from confusion, guilt, and shame to self-acceptance and a sense of wholeness. Moreover, not all milestones are relevant to all individuals within a transgender group, and even people who experience the same milestone will likely do so in different ways" (114-115). Some of these 'milestones' will be skipped by some respondents, they are not experienced in any one rigid sequence, and these 'milestones' are themselves derived from the survey responses.

They also note differences in life trajectories between those who grew up without access to information about transgender versus those who did, with the former group tending to pass through a number of 'identities' along the way before finding the one that suited them best and younger respondents have less conflict and less time devoted to finding the identity term which helped them to live as they wished to live.

In many ways this is the richest chapter in this book, but that richness also poses challenges for my task here. The authors provide a chart on page 116 "Table 4.1 Milestones for each gender group" that would be very handy right now as it condenses the 'milestones' for the four groups described (FTM, MTF, CD & GQ) into a single page, sadly though when I search for it by name, I get only the googlebooks page for this book and that crucial page 116 is "not a part of this preview."

As such, I decided to use a randomizing method of sorts to select which of the four groups' milestones I would talk about here. [Insert chunk chunk sound of an old IBM here to stand in for the randomizing procedure, then it makes a BING noise, and ta-da!]

Female to Male Transsexual Milestones

Feeling and often expressing a male gender identity from a young age

[Rickey] "I would deny it [that he was a girl] until I couldn't breathe, but it never made any difference to anyone else."

[Robert] "I alternated doubting my sanity or their honesty or whether something weird happened (…) The world was this gigantic fraud and everyone in it, even the most loving people around me in childhood, didn't love me - they loved something they made up." (117)

…I had reread this section of the book yesterday and then last night was having dinner with my dear sister and her family and noting to myself the steep increase in recent weeks of their child Shithead (Not his real name, I am protecting his identity) refusing things. Breeders and child cultists will be unable to hear much of what I am about to write given that in their heads they are all instructing me on how I should think abut this stuff, but if that is not you,. then perhaps you will hear me. What I am seeing Shithead doing a great deal lately happens like this. Someone says dinner is ready. He asks what it is. Someone tells him. He picks out the name of some ingredient or component of the meal (regardless of whether he knows what it is) and objects strenuously to any meal containing the offending substance (currants, and mango in recent exemplary moments of this dynamic). & it occurred to me that parents, already struggling to keep on keeping on in spite of the diminished cognitive capacities that their life choices have imposed upon them (sis gave me the finger at this point, though I note that she was laughing), are probably now and then in a pretty tough spot. The resolute rejection of currants and hence of one's dinner can at least be dealt with by going to bed hungry or some other method for those parents who have ceded control to the child (i.e., cake and ice cream). But while this is very trivial example, how would a parent be able to tell whether a refusal of some seemingly obvious trait (like being male or female in the eyes of most parents who are not grad students tuned in to gender issues and whatnot) is part of a general strategy of refusal that is taking place (in which foods, weather, that is it is a school day, etc can all be refused with great gusto) and when it relates to something more significant. I got no solution for this, just appreciating the challenge this must be for the parents of a child who feels mis-sorted into the M or F box. So, big props to those parents who somehow figure it out and still love and support their kids.

[& note to self: think of but do not actually send a Thank You card to that asshole doctor that gave me the vasectomy… during the procedure he and I got into an argument prompted by my reading de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life - weird, huh?]

Repressing or hiding one's male gender identity in the face of hostility and/or isolation

…elsewhere in my notes and poachings from this book I made mention of a difference that young girls, but not young boys, who are gender-nonconforming can at times access as a means of 'being themselves' - that is, the role of tomboy. The survey brings out the stat that only about 1/3rd of FtM transsexuals found this option available (117) and even where given, it seems to have an expiration date - puberty (118). What caught my eye here is the 1/3rd - I'd have expected that it was somewhat higher than that. Stupid me.

Thinking of oneself as lesbian, but realizing over time it was not a good fit

"Some of the transsexual men whom we surveyed initially felt that a lesbian identity was the best way to characterize their lives. Not only did it explain their interest in women, but it also gave them the freedom to present in more traditionally masculine ways." (119)

This strategy, while affording some relief also highlighted why 'lesbian' was not an adequate identification as well. As one respondent, Nathan states it, he was unable to "pass as a woman emotionally." (119)

Realizing that there are FTM individuals and that transitioning is possible

[Kyle] "it never occurred to me that I could actually live as a guy."(121)

Learning about and meeting other transsexual men

"Two-thirds of the FTM interviewees discussed the importance of other transsexual men in their identity process, and nearly 60 percent indicated that the Internet, books, and/or the news media played a critical role. These findings are in line with other studies."(121)

Overcoming denial and internalized genderism to accept oneself as male

[Rej] "to admit to myself I was [a transsexual] was a long and difficult stage."(122)

Taking hormones and having top surgery to look more like self-image

The survey reveals that top surgery is very common and much desired by trans men… 62% had it already, 19% planning to, and 5% saying that they didn't need to bc of small breasts, the remaining 9% including some of are not sure yet, have only begun to transition or are not interested in top surgery(123).

"In contrast, genital or bottom surgery was not important to most of the transsexual male respondents."(123)

Only a few of the survey respondents had had a metoidioplasty and only one a phalloplasty.(124)

"Most had rejected bottom surgery because of the inauthenticity and unattactiveness of the results, the risks and complications, and the lack of phallic functionality. Given that many transsexual men do not have genital surgery, Rachlin concludes that 'restricting the definition of an FTM to someone who requests a risky, costly, [and] often technologically inadequate surgery is unrealistic'."(124)

Whether and when to tell others, and developing new relationships after disclosure

"After transitioning, most of the transsexual men surveyed were readily seen by others as men and could choose whether or not to tell new friends and acquaintances about their female-assigned pasts. Some of the respondents were open about their transsexual histories, considering it a part of their identity and often wanting to educate cisgender people about transgender issues. Others sought // to leave their previous lives behind them. Now that they could finally be themselves and be recognized as men, they did not want to provide an opportunity for people to think of them as less than other men."(124-125)

Having a sense of wholeness as a different kind of man

"…respondents developed a sense of themselves as a different kind of man - a man who had been born and raised female and who still had elements of a 'female' body. They did not feel that these distinctions made them 'incomplete' or less 'real' than other men."(125)

The authors are underscore the psychic & emotional relief that transitioning brings to so many of these people(126). That factor strikes me as one of the most important ones to make as well as to keep in the forefront of one's mind when trying to understand, or more modestly, to appreciate transgender experiences.

This chapter of course gave a great deal more information about FTM folks that I have poached or glossed here and it does so for MTFs, CDs and Genderqueer folks too. I underlined and annotated a great deal throughout this chapter could I suppose extend my survey of this chapter my many thousands of words, but I'll leave that aside for now in hopes that anyone who has read this much of what I have posted will perhaps just buy the book themselves.

One thing about all of this which makes me quite happy is this: Information is a threat after all! That's right Jerry Falwell and co. & all the "Gender Defenders" too - one aspect of your otherwise paranoid, creepy and evil Weltanschauung, the fear that if people learn about X, Y or Z that they might want to do it or be it or become it… is true! Information is not neutral! Regardless of how ineffectual one might feel as a GTA with social and political beliefs, somewhere, maybe even right next door, people are fundamentally changing their lives because of stuff they learn. Of course there are many teachers teaching some variety of utter bullshit, so there is no need to do the group hug just yet, but still.

[to be continued]

[2/4] The Lives of Transgender People, by Genny Beemyn & Susan Rankin (Chapter 2 and a bunch of my wandering thoughts)

2012-04-10T19:05:00.000-04:00

The Lives of Transgender People

Genny Beemyn & Susan Rankin

Columbia University Press, 2011

Chapter 2 "Experiences of Transgender Identity"

…though both the introduction and chapter one were sprinkled with capsule details about various peoples' lives as a means of illustrating this or that point derived from the details, both also read a whole bunch of data being given as a narrative of sorts. While that dynamic characterizes much of this text, in the 2nd chapter and after, I at least began to find the reading more engrossing and the quotes and short narratives of people became more interesting as well. This chapter begins with a quote from one of the respondents Jeri, who writes;

"Since I was a child, I realized I could not express my feelings, and forced myself to present myself as a man. It is one of the loneliest decisions a child could ever make. No one can know you." (39, my emphasis).

…[Autobiographical Alert] this quote threw me back into memories, not memories of making this precise lonely decision, but after getting in trouble a couple of times, once ending in a huge blow-up of rage from my father because I was both "talking like" and "acting like" a fag - he said, and worse yet - I did this in front of his tennis buddies. The first of the two times that this behavior took place (which I honestly do not recall as such, only remembering the attitude that it provoked and that I was playing backgammon with my a neighbor while my dad waited to play the winner) I must admit that I didn't quite know what it was I had done though it had to do with my speech and that sitting quietly through a grueling period of looking contrite was probably in order (look at all that internalization! I was a master at that age already.). But the second time, I do recall the scenario a bit more. I was in a good mood, I'd been inside the house of the guy who owned the tennis court and I'd spoken with his wife who I thought was as beautiful as a movie star and thus I always felt very quiet and still when I saw her and probably I stared a lot, but she was always very kind to me and actually asked me questions and then heard my answers. I'd been talking with her in the kitchen I think and I went outside feeling a bit giddy and happy somehow - I'd made her laugh a lot, and I liked making people laugh - and I recall racing from the house to the tennis courts where the game had ended or a break was being taken or something and the four men who had been playing doubles, all sat drinking in lawn chairs under a big umbrella. One asked me what I had been doing and I launched into an account of whatever I had been talking about inside with one of them's wife. I do not recall what I said, but that I had a sense that I was performing and that all were watching me and that maybe I was being funny again, who knows, maybe I was on a role. I was asked something and I answered and everyone laughed but my father who stood up a moment later and grabbing his stuff and my arm, dragged me out of there. In the car he started shouting at me. It is probably true that I was not a very self-reflective child at times, certainly I learned a strategy with my volatile father, of always just assuming guilt when in trouble and acting contrite and just oh so damned sorry until his anger and then his post-angry lecturing phase was over. & I remember many times when in that space, seated silently while he lecture ranted at me, that I often was not at all sure what I had done or if I knew, often why it was bad was a mystery to me. & so while none of this compares that well to the quote I typed in above, I did make a lonely decision of my own which had to do with how I'd comport myself when addressing adults, especially men, and particularly if my father was present. As I do not think I fully understood why whatever I had said was faggy or embarrassing to my father, I sort of thought of the problem as my showing too much cheer or playfulness and sure enough, when I spoke to adults and listened and answered them in a very serious and considered manner (minus large hand gestures and such), this led to positive attributions being made about me to my father, which usually was a good thing for the vibe between he and I.

. . . returning to the text now, this chapter considers the responses to questions like When did you first begin to sense that there was something different about yourself? and then How did you experience and understand this difference? through to questions about uncertainty and confusion, various strategies used to respond to these feelings, such as being a tomboy, a relatively common social ascription for behaviors that allowed many female assigned-at-birth subjects a good deal more wiggle room during childhood and adolescence that male assigned-at-birth children didn't have as an option (is there a way to understand this other than as simply supporting the gender norm's presumption that being more masculine is understandable - go patriarchy, go team! - and so not pathological? I can't think of any other.) Of course even for those to some degree comfortable through these years, as tomboys with non-evil parental units let's say, puberty can come still as an unpleasant shock and is also a time when tomboyishness is expected to dim and traditional feminine modes to come to the fore. Here is a detail that I found interesting;

"For the most part, the cross-dressing (CD) individuals we surveyed did not want to change their bodies permanently to look more female; however, a few of the CD interviewees still experienced a profound sense of loss when their bodies began to virilize" (49, my emphasis).

Vin Diesel vs The Rock
...it took me a long time not to just
want to be something else entirely...

…the CD respondents to this survey tended to be older, just as those identifying outside the gender binary, as genderqueer, etc, tended to be younger. That creates some odd results here and there if one does not keep the age difference in mind, as the authors are careful to point out each time such a finding appears. Cross-dressing is perhaps phasing out somewhat as an identity term as well, given that it is said to be rare amongst younger trans people (maybe, if this survey is a gauge of that, seems like there are still a lot of cross-dressers around). What I found interesting above though is that "a few" cross-dressers recalled a sense of loss at puberty, when their pre-adolescent bodies began to change in ways that hurt. Presumably by not evolving toward womanly characteristics. But the word chosen is loss. My immediate thought is that the preadolescent body felt more able to embody those characteristics in play and so forth and acted more stably as an anchor for those identifications. But thinking of the dynamics of mirroring, Imaginary identification with the external image, taken as gestalt, etc… Just as, with Lacan's mirror stage, there does not have to be a mirror per se for the sudden psychic (cognitive?) step that this concept refers to to take place - the child can identify with the image of the sibling or an adult, etc. and still accomplish the same task: initiating the first fix of one's body Imaginary in that ah-ha gestalt-like "moment" (I scare quote moment because, as I have discussed somewhere else I think, that I think we risk deforming the structural significance of the mirror stage of we see the truth of it as a chronological moment & yeah, that may be at odds with what Lacan has to say in that text - but his thinking changes over time too). But leaving that hazy and somewhat 'logical' rather that 'chronological' moment for the many subsequent moments in one's identificatory history. Don't kids identify with all manner of Imaginarized "identities" or even just images, all the time? I did, but I also recall feeling at times like roles in play that I'd liked in some ways to have played simply didn't fit - didn't accord with me somehow, with "what I had to work with" (to quote Hedwig). I'm not speaking so much of female parts in childhood game scenarios as certain male roles which were too much for me somehow - I'm having a hard time thinking back to what those were exactly - but to give a contemporary reference, if kids did and still do 'play Star Wars' and so forth, well, think of any Vin Diesel movie, Pitch Black or whatever. There was a period in my preadolescence when imagining myself into the starring role in such a form of play would have somehow just not worked for me, but then as elementary school progressed and I was then associating much more with other boys than with girls, and whatever and there was my father to contend with, etc. so of course I learned how to invest in the hypermasculine as fantasy space.

But again… where was the thread here?

I feel like I'm on the trail of something and having a hard time getting a hold of it.

excrete excrete excrete qwerty expulsion sequence activated!

Maybe I could say this,

If to a degree (note the qualification), the available terms for the designating of one's identity act to delimit the possibilities for understanding and living it (certainly Meyerowitz's How Sex Changed gives the impression again and again that for trans people, learning about others and about the terms and designations was crucial for many in coming to some self-understanding) - and

If (bear with me) the body, especially the Real of the body (the body of the drives, of jouissance, etc), is always going to frustrate perfect or non-discrepant capture by the Imaginary or Symbolic - and

If post "mirror stage" all subsequent identifications would seem - even such things as "knowing what one looks like" or "knowing one's position on [some issue]" to always potentially be in some degree of flux (think of the quote above about the changes in sexual orientation over a lifetime) even as they are being 're-tied' again and again (many button-ties, quilting points, points de capiton - pick your term) by being performed, imposed/imputed, articulated, cathected, differently than before to some degree - and

If the failure of relations between language and body inherent to being a sexed being at all is constitutive of any and every symbolic identity available or constructible for an embodied being, rather than the effect of poorly chosen terms or that there is not enough knowledge or whatever - and

If, without contradicting the preceding point, we can also observe that there are better and worse 'fits' at the level of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, and by better I mean that they accord with other identifications that may be in large part unconscious and with the drives and desires of that subject, and which are important in allowing the subject to feel that this or that set of identifications (read: "identity") is adequate and livable (and how different is this ultimately from the observation that different explanations are available for any sequence of events and that we navigate multiple explanatory 'fields' often when considering a problem before settling on one which seems best to fit) - then...

If all of that stuff,

Perhaps the sense of loss that the CDs above refer to is the palpable loss of all those identifications and thus the problematizing of remaining identifications which had been variously cathected with these which are now 'lost' (for those with no comparable cross gender identifications to ponder here, think of the impact that other sorts of loss have upon people - the death of a child, the end of a love, revoking of one's medical or legal credentials, betrayals, etc)

Then, if this was palpable and saddening for these young cross-dressers, how much harder would it be if virtually all of one's most persistent and undeniable identifications were as the other sex? - and

If, as is so common to read, trans people who are denied HRT and surgeries and put through one embarrassment after another, thwarted in their every attempt to live differently, are at high risk for suicide… why would that be surprising? If all one's most profound subjective identifications are denied or refused by one's social surround, if the body is used as evidence against the feelings of the person whose body it is such that identifications are continually challenged or undermined or redescribed as mental illness? If relatively stable sets of relating and reinforcing identifications are what allow any person to be who they are for themselves and to position who they are for themselves within a social world in a way that is meaningfully connected to social and cultural values and practices - then denying all that or explaining it away at every turn would look like the plan were one actually attempting to provoke suicide in someone.

So, when the next chapter includes this statistic; "The proportion of transgender youth who attempted suicide in 2006 was 20 percent higher than LGB youth and almost five times higher than the U.S. average for all youth" (90)… might we be justified in observing that the lack of social space for identifications is dangerous?

Maybe, and very "maybe" too, if it is the case that the number of people who are identifying as trans in some way is increasing, due to the availability of better terms and a greater variety of instantiations of what it might be to live this or that set of identifications, we could read those instances when cross-dressers (an older population in the survey) refer to a sense of loss attendant upon puberty, these feelings could be read as tremors in the Symbolic, foreshadowings of the quakes to come [Even if it were true that in terms of percentages of the world population, trans people comprise a relatively consistent number, the option not to hide or deny those identifications has emerged and become generative for so many people is all that is needed to account for the perception that the number is rising… I do not know the number and have no clue, just speculating - plus without stats for the past, how could one compare?]

hm.

but this is sort of about that book still right? The Lives of Transgender People by Genny Beemyn & Susan Rankin. That was the plan at least. So, a few more quotes from this chapter that caught my eye & I'll close.

Some of the other commonalities that the authors discovered in trans life histories included strategies of denial that there was anything wrong or different, for instance diving into hypermasculine activities to establish or ground oneself as male (which probably had the effect of causing others to read these people as men doing men stuff, but seemingly never acted very compellingly to anchor identifications of oneself as sexed being) (50-51). …Or having trouble settling on an identity that would proven sustainable "many of the respondents, especially those who grew up in the 1940s through 1980s, initially did not understand their experiences or have the appropriate language to describe them, leading many to remain confused or to mischaracterize their identities" (51).

From here the text looks at the moment of acceptance of a transgender identity, the importance of support groups and the internet, of socializing with other trans people, as well as coming out to family, friends and acquaintances, at work, etc.

[to be continued]

[1/4] The Lives of Transgender People, by Genny Beemyn & Susan Rankin (Introduction & Chapter 1)

2012-04-10T17:23:00.000-04:00

The Lives of Transgender People

Genny Beemyn & Susan Rankin

Columbia University Press, 2011

This small and densely packed book is the result of a relatively massive nationwide survey with something like 3,500 participants, all of whom went through an online survey, a smaller but still significant group are then interviewed in person or by phone. Then come the stats. At which my eyes always water after a time. Beemyn & Rankin's original survey, amongst all its Likert scales solicits the respondents to say more, telling them that "Quotes will also be used throughout the report to give 'voice' to the quantitative data" (168), which is what makes this a much more readable report than it would have been otherwise. This is now a very theoretical review of this book, I am mostly just pulling quotes, glossing the chapters, going on rare tangents through autobiography or a bit of Lacan… but what I got from this book was a lot of data and a greater appreciation for the complexity that I knew already was complex but wow, really, this stuff is complex. Not, the book or the concepts and definitions in play so much - but the realities of the people who are the living breathing subjects of this study. I am trying as well to be more attentive to definitional issues in this text - not because I am arguing that these are the terms to use or the best tools or whatever (how would I know) but because they do seem flexible and feel to me at least to be derived from analysis of concrete situations rather than being looked for and therefore found. Flexible terms which do not erase the specificity of any of those designated and are useful in furthering the discussion and understanding of the lives of these people is surely in need.

In her forward to the book, Shannon Minter, draws attention to a number of things, other than the size, which distinguish this study from others; the flexible and somewhat novel classificatory schema; that survey respondents are given many opportunities to elaborate and are enjoined to share their own preferred terms and concepts of identity, pronoun preferences and the like.

"Past studies of transgender people have generally failed to include people with nonbinary identities, perhaps in part because the task of definition is so daunting. [The authors] recognized that attempting to define who counts as transgender would hinder, rather than advance, their ability to study a community in which new identities are rapidly emerging" (viii).

The text is laid out with an introduction, then five chapters, then a few appendixes. What these are up to is something like this;

The Introduction

… talks about the development of transgender studies, noting how early work in this area did not solicit terms of self-description from those being studied (i.e., it imposed its terms) and with notable exceptions was written by non-trans people. There is discussion of transvestite clubs and associations and the degree to which some explicitly excluded anyone male who wanted to be a woman, as well as any self-professed homosexuals or bisexuals, accepting only heterosexual men who desired to appear as women while retaining a heterosexual orientation (2-3). But the period of the cross-dresser seems to be on the wane and the research will show that most of those who identify as such are significantly older and that younger folks opt for different terms, including those outside the M/F duo.

… it turns then to questions of definition and description, observing that "For much of the twentieth century, the literature on cross-dressers, transsexual people, and other gender-diverse individuals was reductive and pathologizing" [psychoanalysis alert: "psychoanalysts such as William Steckel (1930) subsequently characterized 'transvestities' as men who were 'latent homosexuals' or in denial about their homosexuality] (5). But after touring quickly through the DSM's terms and also dispensing with the idea of "primary" and "secondary" transsexuals forwarded by someone as hierarchical "unnecessarily judgmental and of little value" the authors write;

"Our approach in undertaking this research was that cross-dressing, transsexuality, and other transgender identities are no less 'natural' or 'legitimate' than the dominant gender categories of women and men" (5-6).

"Our research also differs from many previous studies in that we did not seek to define who qualified to be counted as transgender. All people living in the United States who currently identify as transgender or gender nonconforming in some way or who have identified as transgender in the past (i.e., FTM and MTF individuals who have transitioned and no longer consider themselves transgender) were encouraged to participate. (…) we will be using the word 'transgender' as a general term for all individuals whose gender histories cannot be described as simply female or male, even if they now identify and express themselves as strictly female or male" (6).

… then there is a bunch of stuff about methodology, and if you want that, buy the book. Theoretically pertinent too though is that the authors have constructed a model of trans identity formation (to be mentioned below someplace) from the research findings.

Chapter 1

…continues the definitional labor to orient readers to the framing assumptions of the survey and as well to clarify the terms used within the survey itself. I'll quote poach for a bit.

Writing of the sexing of the newborn, "If the infant has a penis, then it is a boy; if the infant does not, then it is a girl. Gender assignment is thus medicalized, phallocentric, and dichotomous" (15) that would be phallic reasoning, but not because the penis is the phallus. Though I wonder if the authors would agree.

Next they consider the powerful effects of language, of the very terms chosen to describe anyone and observe that "There are no neutral terms related to transgender people and there are no neutral systems of classification, treatment, or strategies of empowerment. The basic point of contention pits biology against social construction; as a practical reality for transgender individuals, this means a choice between having surgery or finding acceptance and empowerment without surgery" (16-17).

"Our language's emphasis on polarity (good-bad, wrong-right, male-female) also makes it difficult to think of sex, gender, gender identity, and gender expression as existing within a more dynamic framework that is inclusive of transgender people" (17).

…so then, SEX

"Sex or biological gender is typically defined as one's biophysiological makeup. Although often reduced to genitalia, sex is established through the complex interplay between genetic, hormonal, gonadal, biochemical, and anatomical determinants that affect the physiology of the body and sexual differentiation in the brain. Approximately 1.7 percent of the world's population does not fit the biological categories - once presumed to be immutable - of female and male" and though they don't fit, "they are made to fit into a gender binary" (18).

[1.7% of the world pop & btw, 1.7% of 6,840,507,003 = 116,288,619… that's people. More people than there are in Mexico, almost as many as Japan. According to wikipedia (the friendly superego!) the pop of the Atlanta metro area is 5,268,860… so 22 times as many folks as we got here in the greater ATL]

"…the prevalence of individuals with disorders of sex development (DSD) and their negative responses to unnecessary surgical interventions challenge the fundamental assumption that physical characteristics unequivocally define male and female" …recognize through here that gigantic number above is about DSD cases so called, and isn't an estimate about the number transgender people world wide (in the sense of the term they are using) though I'd be curious to see such an estimate (it would probably be a very fuzzy estimate).

…next up, GENDER

"Similar to biological sex, gender has traditionally been considered a dichotomous social construction: one is either a man or a woman" (…) quoting Gayle Rubin, gender is the "socially imposed division of the sexes that transforms males and females into 'men' and 'women'" (…) …then referring to many other authors they gloss a general position about gender which "suggests that physical differences between women and men are used to rationalize distinctions in expectations and opportunities based on gender and changing notions about what is considered to be gender-appropriate behavior, a binary model or women and men - of femaleness and maleness - remains intact (…) identities that do not align are pathologized as undesirable but treatable mental disorders" (19).

"Society does not offer an social or biological territory for individuals who exist between sexes and genders" (20).

…but gender is not just the term boy or girl given at birth (gender or sex assignment) but a bunch of other sociocultural stuff. Here is how Beemyn & Rankin parse this stuff, beginning with GENDER ATTRIBUTION

"how others perceive one's gender"

…which can have to do with GENDER ROLES

"the behaviors that are culturally coded as masculine or feminine"

…whereas GENDER IDENTITY

"refers to an individual's sense of hir own gender, which may be different from one's birth gender or how others perceive one's gender. The centering of gender on an individual's self-concept, instead of on the person's biological sex, creates a discursive space that allows for a more nuanced understanding of gender" (20)

…& GENDER EXPRESSION

"refers to how one chooses to indicate one's gender identity or others through behavior and appearance, which includes clothing, hairstyle, makeup, voice and body characteristics' and, importantly it "can very over time" (21)

…but GENDERISM is more ideological, and

"refers to the beliefs and practices that privilege stable, binary gender identities/expressions and that subordinate and disparage transgender people and other individuals who do not adhere to dominant gender expectations. The term encompasses individual acts of discrimination as well as systemic and institutionalized inequalities (…) Genderism is also evident in the binary basis of much of the language involving gender - from the ays in which women and men are conceptualized, to the lack of acceptance for gender-neutral pronouns, to the common use of gendered forms of address such as 'sir' and 'ma'am'" (21).

With these terms in place they turn to a considerations (with many tables) of the survey respondents wrt many of these terms' referents, noting though that "even people who use a common terminology can have a very different understanding of what those words mean. It was in this section that I found the information mentioned in a previous posting about the 479 unique responses to the question of the respondent's gender identity. Also in this chapter we get the classificatory system that Beemyn & Rankin will use. This appears to me to be smartly chosen as well, the authors use four broad boxes or frames MTF/T (male to female/ transgender), FTM/T (female to male/transgender) where these two categorizations capture both those who identify simply in accord with their gender identity as well as those who describe themselves as transsexual or transgender, etc - and then MTDG and FTDG (male or female, to "different gender") which is the author's convenient catch-all for any and all subjects whose terms of self-identification are not M, F but but something else.

…in considering the race of the survey respondents I note the detail that "the largest group was American Indians (152 people)" and that this finding is congruent with another study which also found the highest number of trans people amongst American Indians where it comprised 6% of the people in their study. I note it just because it seemed notable (snick)… i.e., I thought it interesting and would be curious to know a bit more about its prevalence within Native American communities versus other communities - is it more or less common there? etc.

…the sexual orientation of respondents had quite a few details of some interest to me. After noting Kinsey's research the authors concur that sexual orientation varies with many degrees of difference, but that it is "usually discussed more narrowly in terms of three distinct, immutable categories: heterosexual, gay/lesbian, and bisexual" (31).

"Theorists in these areas suggest that sexual orientation is inherently flexible and that it develops continuously over the life span out of an individual's sexual and emotional experiences, social interactions, and cultural influences. From this standpoint, individuals may experience transitions in sexual orientation throughout their lives" (32).

…with ref. to the straight-bi-gay tripartite divisions generally assumed they ask "How does a female-presenting cross-dresser who is attracted to men while cross-dressed, but to women when not in 'women's' clothing, identify hirself?" (32).

"Almost one-third of the study respondents (1,120 people) reported that their sexual orientation was bisexual" (33).

…considering issues of 'physical, emotional and cognitive challenges' amongst the respondents, the research findings show that the "prevalence of these conditions in the transgender population appears to be no greater than in the cisgender population" (35).

[to be continued]

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

2012-04-04T17:35:00.001-04:00

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.

Are we pathologizing yet? Lacan's structures of desire: Neurosis, Perversion, Psychosis

2012-03-31T19:15:00.000-04:00

I know that this is going to be an issue I'll be forced to navigate, probably more than once, as I'm hoping I'll be able to argue the case that psychoanalysis, specifically Lacanian articulations of it, have something useful to offer for thinking about trans subjectivity and embodiment (and about human subjectivity and embodiment more generally). That larger argument is likely not to take on much shape for some months to come, and may take years. Who knows?

Talkin' about my d-d-d-dissertation.

But, given the justifiable intensity of negative responses on the part of trans people to the pathologizing discourses of psychiatry, medicine, and yes, that highly suspect brand of "psychoanalysis" which has become part of the ideological psychiatric state apparatus,.. psychodiagnostics might well be a hard sell. My basic contentions in regard to the psychic situation of trans people feel to me like they ought be utterly noncontroversial, even banal. Here are two of them (maybe all of them, actually);

* There is absolutely nothing inherently "dysfunctional" or "pathological" about being a trans person. Which is not to say that a trans person can't be bat shit crazy, just as, in principle, anybody can be bat shit crazy (I'm thinking of a GSU prof in the music department for example).

* Psychoanalysts who would wish to claim that all trans people conform to any specific structure of desire (neurosis, perversion, psychosis) are being very bad analysts. Just as not every person with bleach blond hair is going to be "conservative", nor is every person with a hairlip going to be "shy" nor is everyone who has had braces going to be "promiscuous". Every person's inhabitation of a structure of desire will be unique, even if those structures qua structures are of a somewhat limited number (neurosis, perversion, psychosis - with the subtypes; hysteria, obsession, paranoia…. sometimes phobia, sort of). I would argue that, if anyone, claiming to speak with analytic authority (already a dubious notion) insists that all of any possible demographic set of people are going to share a single configuration with regard to their desire, that this cannot be anything other than an imaginarization of that "analyst", an elaboration of their own fantasmatic investments in their object of study (those folks they are charged with helping). Certainly these same analysts would be up in arms about my failure to appreciate the uniqueness and specificity of each subject were I to suggest that all heterosexuals or all men were perverts, psychotics or any one structure.

Weirdly though (sadly, depressingly) there is lot of both of these things going on in the psychoanalytic lit on trans, giving the banalities stated above something of a radical character. Weird, huh? (not that there are any psychoanalysts listening) The commonest reference points are psychosis and hysteria, but I have also seen perversion and phobia suggested. The very plurality of these claims ought to raise some suspicions even before evaluating them. Applied as such, this very much deserves the name of pathologization and it is against the spirit of psychoanalytic thought as I understand it, in that psychoanalysis is not an agent of normalization. If it is used as such, it becomes something else, something other than psychoanalysis (for me at least, we can argue it elsewhere).

But this is where it also gets complicated and fraught for a number of reasons and reasons which ought not be swept under the rug.

Before thinking about what might be problematic about the following psychodiagnostic categories, I'm going to try to give a brief overview of what I take the Lacanian position about structures of desire to be. I'll be speaking out of the bag here, not running about like a good grad student and looking for other people who have said similar things to convince you that I am not wrong. How bout you decide?

The different structures of desire are all responses to the impossibility, once we have become speaking beings, of signification ever equalling being. Or we might think of this as a response to language's inability to capture being. There are thus three basic responses to this impossibility and the discomfort/suffering, etc that it imposes. We can deny it and construct any number of fantasies which resituate it not as forever lost (as it is) but as having been stolen, or mislaid, or forbidden or whatever. That would be the neurotic response. Or we can disavow that this happened, a sort of "I know it is lost but it isn't really lost" claim which allows that the subject can be the object, or control the object. This is the perverse response. Or, finally, one can foreclose. That is, one can rule out in advance that there could ever be any signification or even recognition of the loss of being that language entails. The response, in essence, forecloses the Symbolic by means of reducing it to the Imaginary. This is the psychotic response.

While Freud and certain other analysts have speculated or even insisted that analysis is irrelevant to those with a perverse or psychotic structure, Lacan disagrees. At issue is simply that 99% of what we think of as analytic technique is actually more accurately described as "the technique of the clinic of neurosis". I saw it suggested that to proceed with a psychotic's analysis as if they were a neurotic could in fact be actively detrimental to them.

Now, a few more points to remember when thinking about psychodiagnostics and lacanian nosological categories.

1. For Lacan there is no "normal" space to occupy. In fact normality as a concept, reference point or standard is absent from Lacan's theory.

2. To be a subject of desire is not a "pathology" because there is no normal against which one would have to judge to say that this or that sort of desiring structure was a deviation and hence, pathological.

3. To be a neurotic does not require that incessant and endless doubts a la Woody Allen (but without the humor) be manifested at the level of someone's everyday behavior. To be a pervert does not require that this subject have anything at all to do with fetishism or any of the sexual practices that we mark as perverse in the vernacular. To be a psychotic does not require that this subject is a raving looney, speaking in nothing but inscrutable babble and unable to make use of logic or reasoning, ever.

No, the donut is not a fetish.

i. Neurosis is said to be the most common structure. It's central anxiety, that which it doubts most, appears in the form of a question and this question is said to vary whether one is hysteric or obsessional. The hysteric wonders "am I a man or a woman?" and desires to know just what being this or that means (thus we see the denial I mentioned above, the neurotic persists in denying that being can be captured in words). The obsessional asks "am I alive or am I dead?" which is again a question which demands that life (read: being) be given a definitive meaning (i.e., made dead, like the letter).

ii. Perversion is marked by a kind of certainty (of course it isn't, but IT IS nonetheless) and this certainty is about the object. The pervert knows that they are the object of the Other's jouissance. Cops, judges, military - these are prime perverse life paths as they afford endless opportunities to be the instrument of the big Other's (largely painfully exacted) enjoyment. "Of course I know that I am not the agent of the Other's jouissance, but feel how much the Other enjoys when I punish the lawbreakers!"

Hi, I'm feeling both ordinary
& a wee bit psychotic

iii. Psychosis too has a sort of certainty involved, though it is different in character I think. To play it out in an impossible monologue, we might imagine it like this; "No object can be lost." But when we speak of psychosis as well as the word "psychotic," in the popular mind, this means raving psychopath or serial killer or some such thing. This is not what it means to Lacan. I've long wondered about the psychic state of the psychotic who has not had a dramatic "psychotic break". I understand that J-A.Miller and perhaps others have written some about this under the heading "ordinary psychosis" but I have not read any of this work. Suffice to say that most psychotic subjects are not in a psychotic break at all times, rather contingent factors in their may lives provoke such an event by undermining the master signifiers that allow psychotic subjects to operate in the social world. I see no way to sustain an argument about whether or not most psychotic subjects will or will not ever have a psychotic break during their lifetimes, but my ungrounded hunch is that a great many never do and probably have as good a chance as any other sort of subject of being a "productive member of society" (or whatever)

4. No structure is immune to being shaken. The psychotic break is surely dramatic (at least in one's imagination, if not always in "reality") but neurotics have break-downs and perverts undoubtedly as well. Likewise the implicit or explicit valuations that one now and then hears applied to one or another structure - hysteria, perversion and, via Deleuze and Guatarri "schizophrenia" (as a brand of psychosis) - which then get championed as somehow exceptional and radical and the path toward the future. I call bunk on all that. It's divisive, potentially abjecting, and simply wrong. It is not unlike the reverse image of the blanket claim that all trans people are ______…. just as ill-founded and just as un-psychoanalytic. A psychotic break is serious business, no doubt, and that it has such marked effects on language is fascinating as well. I do not know as much about psychosis as I would like, but I strongly suspect that the world has known serial killers and sociopaths who were neurotic or perverse.

5. Who is psychodiagnostics for? Seriously. How would you answer that? Here is who it is not for: the analysand. If in your analysis you and your analyst are going round and round about whether you are an hysteric or an obsessional you are not having an analysis, you are aiding in your own pathologization or you're engaged perhaps in some bassakward sort of analytic game. Psychodiagnostics is a guide for the analyst. But in principle, every analysis must have the potential to reconfigure what we understand of the theory. Psychodiagnostics in that perspective would then be a way for them to assess, as best they can, which structure this analysand might be and to adjust their clinical method accordingly, because, as noted above, simply applying the clinical methods of the clinic of neurosis to perverse or psychotic subjects would likely be ineffective (with the perverse) or even detrimental (for psychotics). Given this, when looking to psychoanalysis to help one think through one's dreams or to try to understand others or to provide a gloss on film, it pays to be much more circumspect that most (non-clinical?) Lacanians are wont to be. If a good analyst does not ever tell an analysand You Are This (hysteric, obsessional, perverse, psychotic)! I would suggest that even if one is not an analyst that a similar restraint and attendance to the unique specifics of oneself, others, or cultural texts guided by, but never ruled through psychoanalytic theory, is actually more psychoanalytic than the reverse would be.

Now, I've kinda shot my wad already - but I promised to consider these nosological categories critically as well, so here goes…

Each of these terms is fraught with difficulties, some internal to psychoanalysis and many external. Hysteria evokes centuries of pathologizing of women and indeed is tied quite firmly - even in Lacan - to feminine subjects, even if those terms, for Lacan, do not denote the same things they do for others - but this is much of the problem! too many competeing claims on a term. Perversion is heavily overdetermined in a whips and chains direction in the popular mind, but from what I understand about the BDSM scene - specifically of ideas like the 'safe word' or the practice of having a contract about the activities to come (pun?) would incline me to suspect that the majority of the folks engaged in such activities are not perverts at all. If the perverse subject acts as the instrument of the big Other's enjoyment, no contract with a mere so-n-so sort of other, or 'safe word' will place a limit on the jouissance of the Other. In fact the very offering up of oneself for "punishment" might negate the potential of it taking place if the other subject is truly perverse. & as noted, psychosis collocates with sociopath and psychopath and serial killer and lunatic and it is nearly unimaginable that a notion like that of "ordinary psychosis" will counter the gravitational push and pull of the established social meanings.

At issue, perhaps, is whether one wishes to talk psychoanalysis only with insiders, or whether one might wish to be able to bring psychoanalysis to those who know none of the terminology and who thus are NOT going to hear these terms as meant by Lacan without an enormous amount of groundwork being laid. Groundwork that will need to be laid again and again with each new person. (& if you think these are thorny issues, wait until you ponder sexuation and Lacan's understanding of the words Man, Woman, Masculine, and Feminine - and prepare for a bit of mind fuck if they are new to you).

Is there any solution to this?

One could simply foreclose psychoanalysis I guess.

One could attempt to clarify the structure, dynamics and functioning of these terms and propose other ways to name them. This looks like the best strategy to me, but it is not an easy road either.

If this woman can get a snake to drink
milk out of a straw, surely I can convince
someone to give psychoanalysis
another hearing...

& here is another wrinkle, at a tangent from the above. Per Lacan, once we adopt a structure as the basic template for our desirous relations, we are stuck there. So, once a perv, always a perv. But I find myself wondering about that. That is, for some time I entertained the idea that the psychotic break might very well be visited on anyone, and that it would at that moment impose a psychotic structure upon what had been a neurotic or perverse subject. I say this due to personal experience to a degree, when something heavily invested falls, when that S1 is undermined and no longer ties anything down... these moments can be harrowing, the values of all things seem suspended. Then, what are to we to make of the claim - relevant to the clinic of neurosis - that the analysand must becomes hystericized? If, said of an hysteric analysand, what does this mean exactly? & if said of an obsessional, ditto. (I think that this refers not to structure but to discourse, per seminar xvii, but I might be wrong). & then what about perverse enjoyment, that is when we enjoy seeing someone being subjected to the law "they got what they deserved!"… does this implicate the subject in a perverse structure in any way or not, perhaps because it is not that enjoying subject who imposes the law upon the transgressor? Or, more succinctly - how do we know that subjects are forever tied to one and only one structure? What havoc would it play with the theory if we proposed that subjects - in certain very specific situations - might move from one structure to another? Would this be a useful flexibility or a monkey wrench into the clinical theory?

Done. (dang, close to 2,500 words)

from a review essay by Heather Love

2012-03-31T15:22:00.001-04:00

Odd. Had I held off on my last posting for a few hours, I'd have had all this useful cite-age I could have deployed. That said, this speaks very eloquently to reason #3 for abandoning that term that I'd used (in my previous post). I've added some bold to indicate the points that seem most pertinent.

This is all taken from;

"'The Right to Change My Mind' : New Work in Trans Studies"

by Heather Love

in Feminist Theory 2004 5:91

In the contemporary academy, it has become a reflex to sift all representations, behaviour, self-conceptions, political positions and ways of life into the rough categories of subversive and hegemonic. The struggles that trans subjects face serve as a stark reminder of the limitations – both methodological and ethical – of such habits of mind. In a recent article on transgender studies, Cressida J. Hayes writes,

. . . so much academic literature over-determines and erases the agency of the trans subject in favor of the grasp of technology, medical discourses, history qua regimes of power, or false consciousness. On the other hand, so much popular literature is clearly naively essentialist in its understanding of transsexual experience: tropes of wrong body, being ‘born that way’, ontological necessity and historical and cultural universality tend to be grossly under-theorized and easily feed into other essentializing discourses about sex and gender. (Hayes, 2000: 178–9)

In such accounts, critics fail to attend to the complex and often highly critical stance that transsexual and transgender subjects adopt in relation to both the medical establishment and the discourse of gender. Some of the most interesting recent accounts of the medical construction of sex and gender have come from the work of trans people who have been actively engaged in a struggle for agency with doctors and psychotherapists.

While I would not want to suggest that the project of thinking critically about trans subjectivity or politics ought to be abandoned, it seems clear that the epistemological pressure on the figure of the transsexual needs to be reduced. Academics will continue to interrogate the ideological stakes of transgender and transsexual identity; to ask questions about the meaning of belonging; to redefine the limits of materiality and the human. However, such questioning needs to be offset with an awareness of the kinds of self-questioning and lived experiments currently taking place in the trans community. The new work in transgendered studies has a great deal to teach contemporary criticism – not only about the ‘meaning of gender’, but also about finding a balance between the need to be exemplary in one’s identifications and behaviour and the need for survival, for authenticity and for an expanded sense of agency. (94-5)

Recanting & Mea culpa for "the trans effect"

2012-03-31T14:19:00.000-04:00

"mea culpa"
google->image

In a couple of earlier posts, I used the phrase "the trans effect" and even made a label [meta tag thingy] for it. But, even as I offered up that term, and designated what I meant by it, I had some lingering and as yet unarticulated qualms. So, before I go on a brief stint of revisionist blogging (and either change it, or maybe just delete the label), I want to explore why this term deserves the recanting and the mea culpa.

So what was it that I was referring to? just that, because notions of M/F are so overtly and covertly foundational for so many small, medium and large scale bodies of knowledge and practice that the material being of trans people has the effect of unsettling that which had seemed so notionally solid. As I talked about this only a couple of night ago with my dear sister, "You take some body of knowledge that feels nice and solid" (right hand held out as if gripping a large invisible rock) "and you take a trans person" (left hand held out as if holding something) "not that you need an actual person, just the recognition that they exist… and you bring the one into close proximity - conceptually - to the other, and suddenly…" (making surprise face and wiggling right hand fingers) "…the supposedly solid one has gone all squishy."

This does seem to 'work'. Trans subjects do pose fascinating and complex challenges to all manner of knowledge-regimes. But, I do not wish to use the phrase any more for the following reasons, even while I still find the "effect" worth returning to again and again.

1. It risks sounding a bit cute, or worse, it risks giving the impression that this is what makes trans people value or meaningful or (ugh) useful for theory, rather than the inherent value they have as human beings, as subjects with desire, etc.

2. Given 1, I'd rather not have that phrase linked to my name as I am interested in doing theoretical work which will have some relation to extant trans issues and theories.

3. As noted in an earlier posting, I do not wish to fall into the pattern (played out with many different sorts of subjects in academic, theoretical and philosophical history) of positioning trans people - as a group - as if they were in some specific sense "the privileged subjects of history." I've argued against such claims in other areas and I do not wish to replicate that very tempting error. & most importantly, while it might be perceived by some as a positive valuation of their lives, it seems just as likely to put an unreasonable and ultimately coercive demand upon the choices of individuals such that each must accord with some unspecified radical and transgressive intent. Such a move, I would argue, both diminishes the worth of many activities that may have little political charge by themselves and further, it could also make recognizing that which truly is radical that much more difficult, through having a pre-existing template for what counts as socio-politically radical.

Mea Culpa sour cherry rakija
from Belgrade

So, to conclude and bid adieu to my unfortunate choice of terminology, let me say that while I think the term does point to something with a certain "reality" - that it is to be hoped that as time passes, it will seem harder and harder to discern this effect until there is no longer any referent for that phrase. Perhaps I am being utopian? it is not as if we have dispensed with racism or sexism or ableism or however any other biases. But, has no progress been made? To quote a source I rarely make use of (Allen Ginsberg);

America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

...no need to limit to "America" tho...