A Conversation
This is a writing-program blog, but so far, in addition to me only Gray Kane has regularly contributed to it. After I posted on Byron Hawk's book, I tried to get him to post about vitalism, and he responded to my email ("Have you had a look at ...?") with another email:
I replied:
Gray's dissertation, a rough draft of which is now being written, is on Heidegger and Lacan in the FYW classroom--specifically the four discourses of a Heideggerian Lacan and pedagogical theory. He responded:
And I replied:
Yeah. I haven't read the source and didn't find a point of entry into the subject matter to get me excited one way or another about it. I understand the desire for consistency between the form of an argument and its content, but I didn't see what was so exciting about the content for me to care.
To put it another way, forget for the time being how "true" vitalism might be and the corresponding imperative to bring this "truth" to the larger critical community. What does this "truth" enable us to do that we weren't able to do before? That's what I didn't find.
What does interest me is this critical tendency to dismiss the content as "crackpotty" because of its form. This aspect of the post of course reminds me of the arguments levied against "convoluted" theory in general. To communicate the ideas to a broader audience, a writer has to abandon each idea's form, but to a certain extent this damages the idea's content, such that people who already know the ideas easily see where the clarity paradoxically convolutes. I see that this is also what happens to vitalism. When critics fail to address each other's arguments in such a way that acknowledges how vitalism posits their relationships, the act of writing initiates a mind-body divide and disembodies an argument about somatic exchange. This perspectival problem not only reduces what is visible through its lens, but also distorts what it does see.
If a writer of perspective A wants to communicate idea "a"
to an audience of perspective B, how does that writer avoid transforming "a" into something contaminated by the audience's different framework? How does the writer stop "a" from looking like "b"?
I replied:
The point of entry I imagined was that, while you and I have some points of contact in our theorizations, there's a fundamental difference between our approaches, and this book has made me think that it's maybe that I'm a vitalist and you aren't. Specifically, you seem to me to be interested in the critical thinking going on in individual heads, and at most in individual teacher-student dyads, and seem to resist my pressures to understand critical thinking in the larger systemic (ideosomatic) terms. You recognize the potential validity of those larger terms, of course, but don't seem particularly interested in them--and so leave them for me to theorize.
Which is interesting, because Hawk draws a lot on Heidegger--as well as Nietzsche and Deleuze and Guattari, of course--specifically, the technology article and the passages from Being and Time where Heidegger discusses tools and their "ecological" situatedness.
Gray's dissertation, a rough draft of which is now being written, is on Heidegger and Lacan in the FYW classroom--specifically the four discourses of a Heideggerian Lacan and pedagogical theory. He responded:
As you acknowledged, it's not that I disagree with vitalism. It's that I don't see how it can help us. I see the answer to that question more in your textbook, but that answer still isn't worked out for me.
What I most appreciate from your textbook is the strategy for primary and secondary audiences and the distancing of authorial persona from the imagined configurations of a "true" self. In other words, what I most appreciate from your textbook is not necessarily tied to a theory of embodied exchange--at least from my perspective. In fact, I see the paradigm in terms of Other/other and split subjectivity.
That question of "usefulness" is my lack of point of entry in vitalism. And I find it interesting that in your reply to my email that you didn't offer an answer to that question.
I realize that Heidegger produced an interpretation of "meaning" that involves our retrospective configuration of how other human beings have manipulated the material world such that we are engaging those beings in our engagement with the material world. This is why he disagreed with technology: it impossibly distances the human fingerprint from the being's manipulation of the world, which consequently encourages the mind-body divide. But even though I can find usefulness in parts of Heidegger's paradigm, his desire for the "truth" of his subject matter overcomplicates his analysis to the point of his obfuscating its usefulness, from my perspective.
I realize that I'm caught in a paradigm of "usefulness" (bourgeois bricolage) that limits my ability to appreciate tangential lines of thought as equally central lines of thought. I think the comps and prospectus processes damaged that part of my appreciation: the external pressure for me "to get to the point." However, I don't feel a need to correct this problem since my abidance to it will help me publish and get a job.
So, since I'm not going to correct my interpretive lens' starting point of "usefulness," let me try to clarify how that usefulness plays a role in my interpretation of what others see to be useless. Maybe this can help you target my concerns about vitalism.
In Lacanese, "meaning" is always a somatic exchange and might have more in common with vitalism than you realize. Objet a is the source of bodily pleasure that we ignore but that nonetheless is essential in our "meaningful" attachments to objet a's externalizations, its semblances (in Schema L, a'). It's why we enjoy chasing the soccer ball even when we're so intent on the ball that we forget that what we're enjoying is our bodies. Meanwhile, we can't experience our bodily objet a in a "meaningful" way (in other words, objet a doesn't exist) until we locate it in the Other-- for instance, in the missing object in the gleam of the Other's eye. Lacan's dialectical desire and its "short circuits" through the drive are always somatic
exchanges: the discovery (and repression) of the body in an ontological network of human interaction.
I find "usefulness" in this because I can see in it a strategy to intentionally move the perception of "meaningfulness" (like Dupin in Poe's "The Purloined Letter"), which has incredible applications in pedagogy. (And politics, although I'm tiring of the unification of pedagogy and politics.) This is what I don't see thus far in either Heidegger's Dasein or vitalism.
So again, how does vitalism enable us as teachers or critics to achieve something that we otherwise couldn't achieve without it?
And I replied:
Yes, the split self is part of the poststructuralist/ postmodern bolus I'm smuggling into FYW. But for me a vitalist approach is so important precisely so that we recognize the ways in which a split self is not merely a pile of dead fragments that we can gloat over in a death-of-the-subject spirit, but a living (vital) complexity ORGANIZED for us by society. When we split off a part of ourselves and call that part "reader," and then split off another part and call it "writer," and give them new names and contexts and purposes and so on, we aren't just playing clever games; we LIVE the lives of those parts. We are invested in them. If we weren't, of course, writing and reading literature would be impossible, watching plays and movies would be impossible. (Or perhaps not so much impossible as cognitively difficult and affectively empty, affectless, disaffected.)
Hawk argues (drawing on someone else's reading of Heidegger, someone whose name I can't check because the book is in the room where Agnes is sleeping) that Heidegger didn't so much argue "against technology" as against the reduction of technology to efficient cause--against the instrumentalization of technology. According to Heidegger, EVERYTHING is technology, but it's a technology that's complexly saturated with the local ecology of meaning-production. In fact, that ecology is also the ecology of das Man. It's an ideosomatized ecology, the highly nuanced and constantly shifting production of reality and meaning by the group. (Something like that. I'd need to check the book again to get the argument exactly right.)
As for Lacan, I'm just learning to use the term "vitalism" in connection with his thought, but I've always read the Other AS the somatic exchange. In your paraphrase you mentioned "the missing object in the gleam of the Other's eye," but as I read Lacan that is exactly wrong. The Other is never another person; that's the other-small-o. As the Subject enters into a dyadic (or as I insist group) interaction with an other, that interaction is vitalized by both the idealized ego and the Other, both of which are collective (I would say ideosomatic) organizing "forces" or "vitalities" that bring complex order to the interaction.
The pedagogical usefulness of this perspective to my mind is that teaching is always a group interaction, and it's extremely useful to have a conceptual framework for the exploration of those vitalizing/organizing forces that work behind the scenes to structure and impose meaning on that interaction. At the sheer "textual" level of student writing (and peer-editing, etc.), those forces vitalize/organize text-production through an imagined (but actually felt) writer-reader interaction; at the pedagogical level of teacher-student interaction, the pressures of print culture and various other Others for us, and of SMS culture and MTV culture and whatever else for them, all impose various kinds of divergent and difficult to (re)organize vitality on our classrooms. And to my mind (Freud: where id was, let ego be) the more AWARE we are of those vitalities, the better able we may be to channel them.
posted by Doug Robinson at
3:07 PM
10 Comments:
The Other is connected to actual human beings in certain circumstances. In an individual's maturation into subjectivity, the Other appears first as the mOther in the subjective stage of alienation (the differentiation between self and Other) and then as the father in the subjective stage of prohibition. (By the way, others easily can fill the roles of mother and father--who they are, even on the level of gender, is irrelevant so long as they play these roles in the family drama.)
When the actual father distinguishes himself from his role (the provider of principles that transform the subject's behavior into meaningful activities in the Name of something), the father collapses into other, and Other becomes a mere vantage point. This is the master's discourse, but it's not the whole story of the Other.
The Other gets tied to an actual person again whenever the subject experiences love, which is Lacan's definition of transference.
The Other also gets tied to a human being when the subject engages in the hysteric's discourse. However, this not the omnipotent mOther or the principled father. It's the Other in the father's very fall from the principles he articulates. In other words, it's the twilight between the father's transformation from Other to other: the impotent father whom the subject rejects but to whom the subject wants to restore in a position of authority. In this discourse, the Other is an actual person on a pedestal who spews meaninglessness.
As for your explanation of the usefulness of vitalism, I have two interjections:
1) While I understand the philosophical concern about the application of mechanistic descriptions to human activities, I don't feel that concern. I don't feel that I've lost something that I need to mine out of theory to recover. (Lacan would have a field day with this statement of mine!)
2) Can you get more specific in what you're saying about the vitalization of group activities. In other words, can you distinguish it from mere "community learning" in such a way that increases its apparent usefulness? How specifically do you propose the harnessing of this vitality?
With Lacanian psychoanalysis, the teacher can construct different assignments that change the circulation of desire: the enjoyment of a knowledgeable identity; the externalization of enjoyment in the pursuit of intellectual objects; the enjoyment of discovering the limits of an idea, where the idea breaks down. Each of these Lacanian discourses plays a different role in critical thinking. And the teacher can shift the assignments when one particular circulation of desire stops yielding critical results.
There's a way of envisioning this Lacanian pedagogy as the very harnessing of classroom vitality that I think you're after. But again, I don't have a clear picture of what you're after: what the specific strategies are or their specific objectives.
Try to sell this to me as if I were SACS. Maybe that'll help.
Gray,
Right, the Other is CONNECTED to actual human beings, but it ISN'T those human beings. Or, to put that differently, it is a collective "guiding force" that is ACTUALIZED in specific human individuals, but may also be actualized in groups (the mob Other, the spirit of a political group or movement, the Zeitgeist, etc.).
I would say, too, that the Other is never "a mere vantage point." Does Lacan ever say this in so many words? If he does, I would want to see the spot. I bet he's messing with somebody in that spot.
Your interjections:
1) While I understand the philosophical concern about the application of mechanistic descriptions to human activities, I don't feel that concern. I don't feel that I've lost something that I need to mine out of theory to recover. (Lacan would have a field day with this statement of mine!)
For me the "loss" is one of explanatory power when we try to do without Freud's unconscious, or Lacan's Other, or the Christian's God, or whatever other vital force we posit as the organizing power behind our NEED to do things a certain way, even when we tell ourselves rationally that we shouldn't (Paul, in the Epistle to the Romans somewhere: "that which I would do, I do not; that which I would not do, I do.")
2) Can you get more specific in what you're saying about the vitalization of group activities. In other words, can you distinguish it from mere "community learning" in such a way that increases its apparent usefulness? How specifically do you propose the harnessing of this vitality?
That's way too big a question for a blog comment! I've written four books on this subject!
I theorize what you call MERE "community learning" as ideosomatic habitus, social differentiation mobilized by millions of approval/disapproval signals disseminated through group body language (which may be actualized in a single individual's body language in relation to another single individual, but which is always in large part collective).
The trick in the classroom, then, is to create "community"--a sense of belonging, shared by teacher and students alike, which organizes somatic response in collective ways--and then to send regulatory somatic impulses through that community. And in fact many of the students will be working very hard to regulate back, either through determined resistance or through deflection, distraction.
That's the short version.
Lacan draws a system of equivalences between the Name of the father, the gaze, anchoring point, point of caption, and the Other. I say "a system of equivalences" because they are not equivalent at all times--which is your point of contention--but they can converge into an equivalency in a specific instance. In that sense, yes, Lacan does actually say that the Other is a vantage point (point of caption, anchoring point). While I don't have page numbers ready for you in this conversation, I believe you'll find what you're looking for in Seminar VII.
The other is in fact the Other the moment the subject sees an autonomous consciousness in the other. This is Lacan's configuration of the master-slave dialectic.
While there were primordial others in the subject's first configurations of Other that persist in each new manifestation of Other, the objective of analysis relies on the possibility of a completely new configuration of Other. Analysis requires that the subject argue with the originary others/Other in the figure of the analyst. This essentially one-sided argument on the screen of the analyst reconfigures the Other to the point of creating a new subjectivity for the patient.
I'm not a fan of enabling students' struggle with the teacher as analyst (I experience countertransference too easily), but the blank screen of a Word document also functions as an analyst. In fact, I love the idea of a digital analyst: the subject's confrontation with an Other that will never degrade into the wizard of Oz behind the curtain.
As far as vitalism is concerned, I think as long as you can't talk about vitalism's real classroom strategies and positive results in a few simple statements, you're going to encounter befuddled resistance as you try to sell this idea. This is what I think has been happening with some of the adjuncts, instructors, and gradstudents in our program. You have to give them bullet points that target their concerns: namely, the method and tangible results. That's why I'm trying to get you to produce those bullet points here in such a way that you can use them to sell this vitalism to those who aren't already predisposed to the idea.
I bring this up because this is a problem that we both have in our marketing of "high" theory to the pedagogical community.
That's also why instead of trying to explain Lacan's discourses here, I merely listed the goals of three assignments:
"the enjoyment of a knowledgeable identity; the externalization of enjoyment in the pursuit of intellectual objects; the enjoyment of discovering the limits of an idea, where the idea breaks down. Each of these Lacanian discourses plays a different role in critical thinking. And the teacher can shift the assignments when one particular circulation of desire stops yielding critical results."
Give it a try. Or are you concerned this exercise will transform idea "a" into "b"? That concern was my initial point of entry into this conversation. If we're pedagogical salesmen, can we produce selling points without destroying what we're selling?
Gray,
I've only just begun, while reading Hawk's book, to think of vitalism as a useful heading (or what Burke calls "god-term") for my pedaogical thinking; I'm not ready yet to reduce it to bullet points. And in fact may never be--my "method," such as it is, is to work slowly and pragmatically with the instructors in the program, helping each one individually and whatever groups I work with in professional development sessions to transform their thinking and teaching practices a little each time, in a general direction rather than to some specific practical and theoretical destination. I don't have a gospel that I want to convert people to; I have a very general and fairly vague (but practically complex) sense of the direction teachers should be growing/expanding in, and want to push people to grow and expand in that general direction as much as possible on their own terms, by extending and complicating and heightening their own teaching personas and strategies.
I also theorize all this, of course, in my books and articles, and have attempted to find objective correlatives (exercises and so on) for it in Writing as Drama, and will continue to do so; but I am disinclined to reduce it to bullet points in order to "sell" it--at least to the instructors in the program. I've written bullet points for the textbook, in an attempt to sell it to reviewers, and thus to McGraw-Hill; but that's to get it published, not to make it possible for individual instructors to convert to it (or reject it out of hand).
I have a similar approach to some writing assignments in class, in fact. In my graduate seminars, for example, as you'll remember, I require a weekly response paper but do not give a lot of specific advice or instructions on what exactly I want in them. That's because I want those response papers to be shaped collectively, with a lot of input from me as we go along, but with perhaps even more guidance provided by the group, by the students in the seminar, through modeling, through various forms of unconscious regulatory pressure.
I know this seems to fly in the face of my avowal, in an earlier post, of a Freudian ethos of enhanced awareness of what has been unconscious! In fact I think it only partly contravenes that avowal: to the extent that the most important bringing-to-consciousness work is done not by me but by the group, it allows more powerfully for both regulatory guidance and individual innovation.
As for your clarifications of the Other in Lacan's thought, I see nothing that contradicts my thematization of the Other as the somatic exchange!
My objective was never to contradict your interpretation of the Other as the locus for somatic exchange. It was to clarify that at times the Other is in fact an actual human being. To disembody the Other from the other as the pure locus of somatic exchange would be to confuse the Other with objet a and its semblance. In other words, I wasn't contradicting so much as offering a way of avoiding misinterpretation.
In fact, I believe that objet a and its semblance might offer you a better site for somatic exchange.
Gray,
"My objective was never to contradict your interpretation of the Other as the locus for somatic exchange."
Not the LOCUS of the somatic exchange; the somatic exchange itself.
"It was to clarify that at times the Other is in fact an actual human being."
See, I have tremendous difficulties with that ontologizing "is."
"To disembody the Other from the other as the pure locus of somatic exchange would be to confuse the Other with objet a and its semblance."
How do you figure "disembody" in a somatic theory?
My theory is specifically that the somatic exchange "is" the guiding force of group interactions--a channel of guidance that somehow simultaneously works both dyadically between actual human beings (subject and objet a) and from behind or beyond or whatever those human beings. And whatever else it is, it is ALWAYS embodied! (The somatic exchange is the emergence of group guidance out of body-to-body affective communication.)
If you remove the Other from the other in the circumstances in which the two are the same, then you're disembodying the Other no matter what your philosophical stance might be. Take the mOther for example. The mother is the first and at this stage the only Other. There is absolutely no way you can separate the two without the master signifiers of prohibition.
The Other is not "the somatic exchange itself." In alienation, the Other is a simultaneous byproduct of somatic exchange and a promotion of further somatic exchanges. In the case of prohibition, the Other is also a byproduct. In these cases, the Other is an effect of somatic exchanges.
In the hysteric's discourse, the Other is the source of an externally imposed demand that the subject cannot articulate into a system of understanding. In the university's discourse, the Other is an excess of potential subject positions for the subject to occupy. In the master's discourse, the Other is knowledge to possess.
If the somatic exchange is the "group guidance," then it's not the Other, but rather objet a. Lacan says this very clearly (for Lacan) in Seminar XVII.
Otherwise, you're running the risk of conflating "group guidance" with the superego, which I don't think is what you're trying to do. I think you're trying to discuss (Lacanian, not Freudian) ego exchanges, shared egos, ego circulation, ego proliferation, etc, and their affective consequences. That's objet a.
Gray,
You're binarizing the somatic exchange: it has to be EITHER this OR that. And I'm insisting that it's always both.
"If you remove the Other from the other in the circumstances in which the two are the same, then you're disembodying the Other no matter what your philosophical stance might be."
No. The somatic exchange cannot be disembodied, because it only works through and as body.
"Take the mOther for example. The mother is the first and at this stage the only Other. There is absolutely no way you can separate the two without the master signifiers of prohibition."
Not true. The mother is not the (m)Other. The (m)Other is born out of the infant's interaction with the mother, and the (m)Other comes to structure that interaction, but the two are NOT the same thing.
"The Other is not 'the somatic exchange itself.' In alienation, the Other is a simultaneous byproduct of somatic exchange and a promotion of further somatic exchanges."
Not just in alienation; this is the case in all human interactivity. Kristeva says that in depersonalization the Other is replaced by a usurper Other that spreads disorder and detachment and despair where the healthy Other had promoted connection; that usurpation is indeed a product of a somatic exchange, and it also, you're right, promotes further somatic exchanges. But it is also the guidance exerted on interactivity BY the somatic exchange.
"In the case of prohibition, the Other is also a byproduct. In these cases, the Other is an effect of somatic exchanges."
Yes. But why do you insist on binarizing the somatic exchange and its effects?
"If the somatic exchange is the "group guidance," then it's not the Other, but rather objet a. Lacan says this very clearly (for Lacan) in Seminar XVII."
You're thinking "group guidance" in nonsomatic terms. Somatically speaking, "group guidance" feels like the voice of conscience, or even of reason, or of God. It's the collective agent inside the individual's head.
In my previous comment, I wrote: "If you remove the Other from the other in the circumstances in which the two are the same, then you're disembodying the Other no matter what your philosophical stance might be."
You cited this passage and then responded with "No. The somatic exchange cannot be disembodied, because it only works through and as body."
Doug, I am not saying that "the somatic exchange" disembodies. I am saying that you personally are disembodying the Other from the other. I haven't phrased this in any other way, and now I've phrased this way three times.
Phenomenologically, from the infant's perspective, there is no infant or mother until there's the mOther. At least not in Lacanian psychoanalysis.
You keep saying I'm binarizing, but I've outlined for you five different paradigms of the Other in just the last response. Before that, I pointed out that the Other also has points of intersection with the Name of the father, the gaze, anchoring point, point of caption, and the screen. In addition to that, I'll point out that the Other also intersects with the superego. While a particular stage may involve a binary, I don't think this means that the theory is binaristic, Doug. The theoretical rejection of binaries is not metanarrativistic denial of their possibilities.
As your comment about Kristeva points out, you're arguing with me about Lacan with ideas that come from elsewhere.
As we both know, we have two different interpretive frameworks. The two may occasionally overlap enough for our arguments to be productive, but at this stage they are no longer productive. You're using non-Lacanian uses of the Other as your entry into my side of the conversation, and I'm using Lacanian objet a and its semblances as my point of entry into your vision of somaticism. While such debates can be fun at times, after a while, as has happened here, the argument breaks down into the differences of definitions. And we lost track of what we were trying to accomplish.
I don't know what you were looking for in this conversation (I'm assuming we both had a point), but unfortunately, I never got what I was looking for: a clear justification for the promotion of somaticism beyond the logic of "bring the truth to the people."
Shame. Oh well. Until the next debate....
How are Svetlana and your baby daughter doing?
Gray,
Okay: let the debate die. Clearly, if what you're looking for is clarity, and my answers to your two "perspectives" on April 27 at 4:54 PM don't qualify as clarity, then I've got nothing more to offer. Most likely the case is that the clarity you're looking for involves clear distinctions (what I called binaries, but at base are just clearly delineating this from that), while the complexity I'm looking for almost always involves blurring those distinctions.
Svetlana and the baby are doing fine.
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