Knowing the Causes of Power, Research Time, 21/02/2018

There were a lot of reasons Félix Guattari broke with Jacques Lacan and the whole rest of the Freudian-influenced schools of French psychiatry. I talked about a couple last time.

How one point of unquestioned rationalism survived into the science of psychiatry – to understand the causes of the condition is itself part of the cure. How the images arising from singular cases were taken for universal symbol structures of human personalities. Both thanks to the influence of Freud.

Here’s a third issue that constituted such a radical break – the image of the therapist’s authority.

I don’t mean this in the sense of practical, institutional authority. Guattari understood that therapists, clinicians, and those who are responsible for the care and cure of the severely mentally ill required authority to do their jobs. They needed to prescribe drugs, coordinate clinical activities, design a therapy regime.

You don't really want anyone to be authorized only by themselves, do you?

All those required legal authority – the power of a signature. Your decisions had weight, and so needed to be taken with responsibility. That responsibility required thought and devotion, an ethical weight of obligation to act in the patient’s best interest – to let their good guide you.

I read an essay by Guattari a while ago that described the dominant culture of psychiatry and mental health care practice drifting from that ideal. He gives us Lacan’s words, “The analyst is authorized only by himself.”

There are two ways to read this. One is ontologically. The cause of some practicing psychoanalyst in some little town – call him Jack from Paris* – having his authority doesn’t come from Jack himself.

* Paris, Ontario.

Jack has to earn degrees and certifications in the fields you need to be expert as an analyst and therapist. He’s cultivated deep technical and philosophical medical knowledge. His legal powers are enabled by a complex web of institutions, laws, and regulations.

Another way you can read it is ethically. Jack’s authority flows from the trust people put in him – those who hired him, administer his certification renewals, maintain the laws that give him the right to prescribe drugs and therapies, and enforce those laws when they're broken.

Both are correct, of course. And not mutually exclusive. Just looking at different features of the world. The conclusion from both sides of that argument is that the statement “The analyst is authorized only by himself” isn’t adequate to empirical reality. Such an attitude isn’t going to fit properly with the real circumstances of an analyst’s working life.

What happens when a guiding philosophical element of training conflicts so brutally with the reality of practice? Breakdown. You end up with a body of professional analysts who tick the institutional boxes, but practice with none of the respect for the mentally ill that you need to practice properly.

Certainly not enough to transform respect into mutual respect. That’s the authority of expertise, an inescapably ethical relationship. Guattari understood that a philosophical principle of considering the analyst an absolute power – the revealer, prober, curer – undermines the possibility of ethical relationships among therapists and patients.

You can't really hold such a principle and practice medicine at the same time. Thought conditions reality when the reality is our actions and relationships.

Yellow Wallpaper: Centuries Collide in Joyous Explosions, 22/07/2014

Last week, I wrote a post that was a philosophical analysis of Yellow Wallpaper, an original play that my friend Kristi Boulton adapted from a short story by Charlottle Perkins Gilman. I discussed many of the meta-fictional and feminist aspects of the play in the first post, based on a couple of conversations between Kristi and I. Now I’ve seen the play, and there’s even more roiling within it. The play is still running until July 27, and it's a good idea to go.

Yellow Wallpaper depicts a woman in
a multifaceted prison: a locked room,
a morality that reduces her to an
incubator, politics and economics that
make her entirely servile. Forces from
beyond her walls offer liberation.

“Yellow Wallpaper” the short story is a product of the late Victorian era, an expression of the feminist culture and the female voices that were rebelling against the period’s cultural oppression. And the trappings of the era are well on display. The costumes evoke the physical constraints of the time’s upper-class fashions and stiff pretensions. The characters themselves speak in mannered Victorianisms, which slowly strain and crack under the emotional pressures that the protagonist’s mental illness forces on them. 

This growing pressure constitutes the narrative thrust of the play. As the play begins, the protagonist just looks as though she needs a vacation in the country after a stressful period. Her husband, a Victorian doctor, is concerned for his wife, but confident that he and his brother, a fellow doctor whose Victorian coldness and status-consciousness is played for laughs, can restore her to mental health. Her sister-in-law Rachel is similarly confident and optimistic. The family maid is a non-entity. 

As the lead actress becomes more unhinged and obsessed with her visions and nervousness, her husband becomes similarly uncertain in his abilities and wracked with self-doubt. His collaborating brother becomes openly cruel to her. As Rachel sees the protagonist’s behaviour and statements sensibly questioning the Victorian morality in which the purpose of a woman is to bear and raise children, she snaps and begins losing her temper. The maid begins a scheme of her own to rise in this wealthy family at the expense of the doctor’s marginalized wife.

Yet Yellow Wallpaper is not only a story of oppression, but of liberation.

The first sign of this is in the use of names. The only use of the protagonist’s own name throughout the entire play was at the very end, spoken by the yellow spectres. She has been referred to as a patient, a wife, a mother, a threat, and as darling, but never by her own name.* The spectres call her Charlotte in the only moment where any character acknowledges her humanity. It is to the detriment of the human characters that only the spectres of the house, whose very ontological nature is obscured among many possibilities, accept Charlotte’s singularity.

* Names have a curious power in Boulton’s script.** One subtle assault on the protagonist’s security is an otherwise unremarkable character breaking her place in the social hierarchy when she calls the lead actor John.

** And I’ve just used our common naming convention to accord my friend an extra layer of respect. After all this analysis, it would be improper for me to refer to her by the familiar Kristi, trivializing her contribution to her own production. So here I call her Boulton.

Hanah Itner's masterful performance as
manic intensity itself straining against
its constraints anchors and elevates an
already fascinating play.

Charlotte is not simply mad, not simply unhinged. She is a creative figure, diegetically a nationally famous author of children’s literature, a genre that the play explicitly associates with fantasy and escape from reality. A symptom of the typical Victorian (and generally patriarchal, whether Western, global, past, or present) repression of women, her husband does not allow her to write, to express her creative drives, until she is cured. The doctors frame this cure in terms of self-discipline, self-control. Her presumptive healers see imagination, the creative act itself, as a threat.

The other female characters join with the doctors to supply the content and purpose for this discipline. She will have considered herself cured when she can hold her baby without anxiety, when she is able to be a mother, joyously happy in the care of her infant. Rachel herself articulates this ideology most clearly: she turns from Charlotte’s only apparently sympathetic ear to a dedicated enemy when she hears her express seriously the idea that not all women are cut out to be mothers. 

As a character, there is a psychological reason for this, because Rachel herself is barren. So psychologically, this is a simple expression of jealousy. However, Rachel never appeared in Gilman’s story. She is entirely Boulton’s creation, and Boulton herself plays her well. Her performance goes beyond this petty psychological motivation so that Rachel expresses one of our culture’s most oppressive ideologies: that the only purpose of a woman is as a vehicle for procreation.

It’s fitting that the day before I went to see Boulton’s play, I wrote some light reflections about how one can be happy in life without having children. I framed my own take on this in reaction to Lee Edelman’s notion that a life without children signifies a joyous embrace of death and the annihilation of the self and all others. Edelman’s Lacanian influence leads him to think this way, interpreting Lacan’s concept of jouissance as the annihilation of identity, the joy of becoming thanatos, the death drive.

Boulton told me that the more overtly sexual
elements of Granger's dance came from
collaboration with the Fringe version's lead
actress, Itner, and was absent in the original
McMaster production. A great improvement.

Because I have no loyalty to Lacan, I need not argue against this, only state my opposition, and instead argue that my own ideological perspective offers a better existence. Charlotte, in betraying her husband to the spectre women of her wallpaper, does not embrace death. Much of this is down to the physical interaction of Hanah Itner as Charlotte and Sarah Granger as The Wallpaper Woman. They relate through a sensual dance that is clearly sexual in nature, which supplies Charlotte’s positive identity: as woman, as writer, and as homosexual, a triple threat to the oppressive morality of the Victorian era and so many other oppressive cultural currents that still exist today. Granger’s dancing is explicitly a product of the twentieth century: she is a modern dancer breaking into this militarized Victorian setting. Their dances are the only times in the play when Charlotte’s body language changes from the shaking nerves of constricted energy to the smooth bodily flows of free motion. 

The Yellow Wallpaper charts many attempts to constrain Charlotte, whether through a reproductive futurist morality, the rhetoric of self-control, economic dependence, medical institutions, or anaesthetic drugs. Joining with the Wallpaper Woman is a physical and ontological transformation, setting Charlotte free. She doesn’t trade one morality from another, but articulates an ethical transformation, a complete metamorphosis of who she truly is. A new genuine identity is created, and the regimentation of Victorian identity, ideology, and political morality is impotent before the power of a woman who has finally freed herself.

Editor's note: In case you were wondering, Kristi: Yes, I thought it was good. And I hope you don't mind that I used a couple of photos from your Facebook page.

No Future 2: Entrancing Images Whose Truths Can Find No Fact to Prove Them, Research Time, 13/04/2014

Continued from last post. Lee Edelman’s book No Future has a fascinating reading of the wider cultural meaning of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, that ubiquitous storyline that is more frequently attended every holiday season by more people than go to Church. The story has become such a stereotype that everyone has done some version of it — every mediocre sitcom’s Christmas episode, Bill Murray, the Muppets, Doctor Who.* Edelman considers it, and the sentimentality that it wields for its power, to be an assault on queer sexualities and people, denouncing them as inherently evil and cruel creatures who must be converted to family values.

* The only reason I can think Doctor Who’s version of A Christmas Carol would be exempt from Edelman’s critique of the storyline is that it isn’t a child who saves that story’s Scrooge from his ethical wasteland. Instead, it’s his love for a terminally ill woman, a love that itself has no future, but lives only in its fleeting, indelible experiences. But I’m getting ahead of myself. 

As much as I love The Muppets, and the particular beauty
of their production of A Christmas Carol, Robin has always
been so cloyingly sentimental that it drives me mad.

The lynchpin of Edelman’s argument of what A Christmas Carol means in contemporary culture lies in the character of Tiny Tim. Now, what the story means today is distinct from what Dickens himself may have intended in its authorship, but something very important is lost from our understanding when we forget this historical continuity between the conditions and motives of authorship and a work’s contemporary significance. As for Tiny Tim, Dickens renders him with such over-the-top sentimentality that he is less a character in his own right than an injunction and plea for pity in literary form. He’s an entirely abstract plea for love, not for any particular child, but to all suffering children. The literary form makes Tiny Tim more remarkable an image, the kind of singularity in each of its forms (even the mawkish Robin Frog) whose evocation of sympathy is so much more powerful than the mere, “Think of the poor, suffering children!” But for Edelman, Tiny Tim is no more than the pure voice of the morality of reproductive futurism, the valorization of the child’s purity as unquestionably the primary social good.

Scrooge, in contrast, is a voice of pure death. Dickens even describes him freezing cold, making him resemble a walking corpse. Because Edelman is so Lacanian that it hurts sometimes, he understands Scrooge as a masochistic version of the Freudian death drive. So far, so Disney. But in the previous chapter, Edelman has walked us through Jacques Lacan’s argument that the death drive actually expresses a kind of joy. The technical term in Lacanian language is jouissance: the soul’s fiery exhilaration as you burn yourself away to ashes. Edelman has already identified this joyfulness with the life of the queer, because children and reproduction are not involved in this kind of love,** only enjoyment in the present. It only helps that it’s so easy to read Scrooge’s personal and professional partnership with Marley as a closeted gay relationship.

** This statement only applies to Edelman’s ideal concept of the queer, as many actual people of many sexualities are still interested in raising children in their households, and should receive all the social benefits and support for parenthood that straight people do. But Edelman introduces No Future as focussing only on what queerness and cultural products involving it figure, not what actual queer people think and believe.

So when Scrooge is finally overcome by the sentimental pleas for pity that echo from Tiny Tim, Edelman reads it as the norms of aggressive straight morality, reproductive futurism, overwriting his queer nature. In Dickens’ original words, Scrooge becomes a celibate second father to Tiny Tim. So this universally beloved story constitutes an act of violence and hostility to queer sexualities and people.

Removing A Christmas Carol from its original historical
and political context overwrites the lives of everyone who
suffered under the hideous conditions of 19th century
factory labour.

This is one analysis of the modern cultural meaning of A Christmas Carol. But the continuing phenomenon of A Christmas Carol in all its aspects is more complex than just its cultural meaning. Remember the conditions of its generation: It is essentially a political pamphlet in the form of a novella, one of the most successful such pamphlets. Charles Dickens wrote with an entirely different political consciousness than we have today. His primary political motivation was labour reform, particularly ending the prevalent practice in Britain of child factory labour. Tiny Tim, Scrooge, and A Christmas Carol constituted a touchstone in the political movement of emancipating children from tortuous factory labour. It required an immense philosophical transformation throughout European society to make people believe sincerely and wholeheartedly that children did not belong in factories. Insofar as he was a tireless political advocate for a marginalized people, the children of the poor, Dickens was an intellectual social liberator, a similar function Edelman can serve for the queer community. It’s just that Dickens chose sentimentality, not Lacanian psychoanalytic political theory, as his weapon. As such, he was much more effective.

Edelman, to me at least, seems more Lacanian than Jacques Lacan himself. So he thinks in a way that I suspect, porting frameworks of understanding from psychoanalysis to the entirety of society. But even if psychoanalysis is a useful such framework for individual people, societies operate according to entirely different mechanisms, and are constituted quite differently. Ecological and economic processes come to the forefront in the constitution of a society. So, to me, a solid framework to understand the cultural imaginary, where our cultural products develop personal meanings, requires a merger of frameworks for thinking appropriate to the individual and those for the social and ecological. The result would likely radically transform both. Lacanian social theory moves too simply in transferring its philosophical frameworks.

And I think the biggest mistake of Lacanian thinking is that the metaphorical aspect of thought, what a social phenomenon figures, becomes more important than its actual history. Just as psychoanalysis diagnoses people through metaphorical figuration, rational engagement with our most a-rational thoughts, psychoanalytic political theory diagnoses societies by analyzing cultural products as the expressions of unspoken social drives. 

It suffers from the same incompleteness as psychoanalysis: the analysis misses critical aspects of the world by ignoring the historical development of societies and the actual lives of people, each of whom are more singular than its metaphors. So the products of psychoanalytic political theory become generalities of which every real-world example is an exception. A diagnostic image that makes perfect sense, but has no practical instantiation.