I made something that addressed the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis's 2017 conference on Gender, Transgender, and Psychoanalysis. The Site had offered the trainees the opportunity to produce an artistic fringe as our contribution to the conference. My work would be about psychoanalysis and about—well, not about trans; about non-binary; about me. Amongst other identities, I'm a queer theorist and a psychoanalyst, training at the Site, so the work would include serious thought about psychoanalysis; about both theory and practice. However, as I wanted to make work that could be exhibited as part of the fringe, I'd make something that was art and could be hung. For years, I've been interested in the ways that highly abstract theory can be presented and developed though works of art and literature; the fringe seemed another, very welcome, way to do so. I think it's problematic to make art from analysand's words, so I made my art—or is it science? —from the words of people who were not my analysands. I made four pieces that collectively I called Prismatic Heresy.
I set out intending the project to be undecidably art and science. Lakatos (1978) argues that science is what is debated and yields new facts in a progressive research programme. Formalism (as in Bion and Lacan's use of mathemes or Freud and Lacan's use of topology) is often taken to be the prime criterion of ‘science’, but formalism is also used in the arts and humanities; most notably, by Northrop Frye, in literature, and Hayden White, in history. Thus, Lakatos argues, we need an additional criterion: the distinction between ‘progressive’ research programmes and ‘regressive’ ones, science and pseudoscience. Notoriously, Lakatos followed Popper in arguing that psychoanalysis was pseudoscience. However, despite this, the research programme of which Lacanian formalism is part is flourishing. This paper is a contribution to that research programme. Or, it's art. Or, it's witnessing. As the world changes, as, in Haraway's words, the “comfortable old hierarchical dominations” (1991: 161) become less salient, witnessing becomes even more important, not just for suffering but also for joy.
I recorded and transcribed an encounter with four people who were not my analysands. Two of the participants had been in therapy; one for many years, one for a fixed number of sessions. I told them that I would act like I do in psychoanalytic sessions; which is, mostly, to listen. I would make something with the recorded and transcribed words, something to do with psychoanalytic listening and with the 7 colours of the rainbow flag, and I'd be happy to discuss—and work on— drafts of the work with them before exhibiting it in the Fringe of the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis's 2017 Conference, ‘Gender, Transgender, and Psychoanalysis’.1 The exchange subsequent to the interview varied, person to person: some offered detailed editorial and artistic suggestions, some focused on the ‘discourse analysis’; and some on ‘witnessing’.
So, what is this work: science? (At another conference, a colleague said, “Maybe I'll colour code my discourse analysis, too”). Art? (For example, the framer said, “I think a white box frame will work well, as it's conceptual art”). Is it ‘witnessing’, which, as theorists and psychoanalysts from Ranjana Khanna (2003) to Jessica Benjamin and Thomas Ogden (2004) argue, is a mode of relating that poses an alternative to a Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic? As Merleau-Ponty (1969) theorises, witnessing opens up a space for a third.2
A prism refracts white light into a spectrum, the 7 colours of a rainbow, hence the first word of the title, Prismatic Heresy. White light runs around and within the colours and words in all four Prismatic Heresies: for example, in Prismatic Heresy 2, “I don't know, probably not; maybe; but”, good enough words for an ostentive definition of the psychoanalytical field. All four works display the red, yellow, and blue of what Lacan calls the 3-in-1 of Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary, RSI; pronounced ‘hérésie’. I think of psychic structure (and thus differential diagnosis) within the context of what Badiou calls ‘worlding’ (2005; 2009). The intersubjective field, whether psychoanalytic transference or that called into being when a visitor to an art gallery engages with a work of art, is an instantiation of this, it is what Spinoza and Deleuze call an actualisation. Psychic structure, whether Lacan's RSI or Freud's first or second topologies, is a hypostatisation. Prismatic Heresy refracts the white light
of the field into 7-in-1, not just 3-in-1.
In Prismatic Heresy, the analyst's speech is indigo. A silent pause or cut, violet. Orange is my colour for what Bion calls alpha function, that is, for my perception that the ‘participants’ (as these 4 people were not my analysands) were thinking-and-feeling in terms of presence-and-absence. I coloured artistic practise green; and it's also play, if we take Winnicott's point that art is play for grown-ups. In one session, I heard how that person was scaffolded by artistic practise and alpha function, and I arranged the words synchronically, so the structure—the scaffolding—would manifest visually. The work, thus, is also about what Aulagnier (2001) calls, drawing on Heidegger, the violence of interpretation. The synchronic frame did violence to the profound impact of the oral history told by this subject. Also, while green colours two thirds of this image, it was in subsequent events that I was privileged to learn more about their artistic practise. ‘Subsequent events’; that is, diachrony. Time's arrow goes down, in the three other images.
So, my choices. Witnessing, first of all. All four Prismatic Heresies are dense and clotted with words. One person, discussing the effect of their many years of therapy and their spiritual and artistic practice, describes how psychic pain was first encysted and then worked through: “It was unbelievable how perfectly encapsulated the pain had been and how I had carried it around in that bubble all that time and had I not persevered as much as I did I would have carried it for eternity”. They display grace in suffering, crafting humour from stabilising cliches: “When he walked away I thought how, ever, and then someone said, you don't bloody know, do you?” Another participant explains their critical theory of transgender and non-binary: “My previous identity as a man didn't allow me to be soft and I think I was losing a lot. This kind of shield, this softness, becomes more a perforated one. There is interaction.” One trans woman spoke powerfully to her brief experience of therapy: “Yeah, where is my thinking time? What am I? Gay? Transgender? What the fuck am I” Am I Dad? What am I? I'm nobody!” and reflected, “I was worried abut putting aside that side of me, the fighter, I was worried about how I was going to be feminine, if my nature is ‘fighter’, it took me a while to realise what ‘fighter’ means and how to use it, now I'm bringing it with me.” Another person looked back on their history, “Drama, in performance by women I knew, my mother, myself”, and paused, shifted posture, inviting me to respond as a psychoanalyst, “you've reached something puzzling, a resistance”, and then told me a dream, a waking dream, “Being alone, travelling across the Sahara, and everything it carries with it. The idea of a rebirth.”
Secondly, I could produce a scholarly discussion of Donna Haraway's influence on my thought and the thought of others. This may be a personal connection I'm forging: faking or making metal and fire. In an enactment, part of a network of intellectual community is actualised in a row of books I assemble in my bookcase, a sampling of the material-semiotic practices that took place and ramified from a particular place and time, accreted in books that one hopes are more than ephemeral. I gathered together 4 books of Donna Haraway's, 2 of Liz Grosz's, and 1 book each by Terese de Lauretis, Eve Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, and my
dear friend Sandy Stone. Here are 3 of Jessica Benjamin's books and a few books on transgender and psychoanalysis: Gherovici and Gozlan. All this earnestness is balanced, is bookended by a teddy bear I placed in my consulting room after an oddly solemn discussion group on the topic, “Why should we—or should we not— have a teddy bear in our consulting room?” The toy bear is not my childhood transitional object. It's 20 years old, bought after my brother and I, both adults, started play-fighting with two bears displayed on a market stall.
My teddy bear has been used analytically by my patients, for example, in the story one analysand told about her attempts, as a child, to build and preserve a den for her teddy bear, despite the intrusive tidying of her parents. However, for me, the strongest association, after, that is, playing as an adult, is with Donna Haraway.
“Teddy-Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936”, is Haraway's (1989) material-semiotic analysis of the dioramas in the Natural History Museum in New York. It's a symptomatic reading that treats the opposition between thought and action in a non-binary way: material-semiotic; the material (action, event), and the semiotic (whether Lacan's signifiers or Barthes' Mythologies) are not opposed; the aporia is suspended, held open.3 Teddy bears weren't always ubiquitous; the toy was named after the progressivist, big-game-hunting American president, Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt. Americans still call soft toys “stuffed animals”, like taxidermy. The animals in the dioramas in Karl Akeley's African Hall include several provided by Teddy Roosevelt. The taxidermied animals are displayed in their settings, in what Winnicott might have called their “facilitating environment”, and what Haraway does in her Deleuzean argument is to extend outwards from this in her analysis, tracing lines of force from diorama to history:
Akeley and his peers feared the disappearance of their world, of their social world in the new immigrations after 1890 and the resulting dissolution of the old imagined hygienic, pre-industrial America. Civilization appeared to be a disease in the form of technological progress and the vast accumulation of wealth in the practice
Page 71of monopoly capitalism by the very wealthy sportsmen who were trustees of the Museum and the backers of Akeley's African Hall. The leaders of the American museum were afraid for their health; that is, their manhood was endangered. Theodore Roosevelt knew the prophylaxis for this specific historical malaise: the true man is the true sportsman. Any human being, regardless of race, class, and gender, could spiritually participate in the moral status of healthy manhood in democracy, even if only a few (anglo-saxon, male, heterosexual, Protestant, physically robust, and economically comfortable) could express manhood's highest forms.
It's a symptomatic reading that highlights the ways that that the medical model was thought in 1908-1936: ‘hygienic’, ‘disease’, ‘health’, ‘prophylaxis’, ‘malaise’ emphasise that this is a medical model; “moral status of healthy manhood” marks that this is a psychology. This race, class, and gender based hierarchy (“manhood's highest forms”) was, nevertheless, universalising and democratic (“any…could spiritually participate”). Haraway's material-semiotic analysis of Akeley's African Hall at New York's Natural History Museum undoes the binary opposition between human history and animal history, ‘culture’ and ‘nature’. Her non-binary notion of material-semiotic analysis became one of the foundations of the academic discipline of New Science Studies. If Haraway's approach is historical, diachronic, building on Hayden White's work, the other major figure in the New Science Studies, Bruno Latour, is more anthropological, synchronic.
The synchronic/diachronic binary opposition that structures the ways we think of time also runs through psychoanalysis: the synchrony, the structuralism of anthropology influenced Lacan, while Freud's concept of nachträglichkeit is diachronic in a complex and non-linear way. A line of force proliferates; the synchronic/diachronic difference propagates, walking the line, just like the movement of cations and anions through the semi-permeable membrane in the paragraph about the propagation of the nerve-impulse I remember memorising for my A-level in Biology.
Another profoundly influential paper by Haraway is her Cyborg Manifesto (1991), in which she critiques a whole range of binary oppositions, discussing them in the context of historical change and, in particular, the changes in kinship within which contemporary change in gender and what Lacanians call ‘sexuation’ were taking place. She argues, in this postmodern manifesto for socialist feminism, that neo-Marxists, then debating whether a change was taking place to a new economic mode, were stymied partly because they were focusing primarily on capital and class to the exclusion of the other forms of identity and difference. Her argument is Deleuzean. She argues that we are living through a transition from the “comfortable old hierarchical dominations” to “the scary new networks I have called the informatics of domination” (Haraway 1991: 161). This is, roughly speaking, a transition from modernity to postmodernity, with the modern being, in Deleuzean terms, more tree-like, more binary, and the postmodern being more rhizomatic.
At the time and place of her writing, North America in the late twentieth century, radical changes were taking place in kinship. Haraway does not only argue that these changes in kinship— the general anthropological term for the circuit within which what is called ‘gender’ and ‘sexuation’ take their diachronically and synchronically varying forms—were taking place and needed to be taken into account in our theorisation and speculation. She gives this argument a savage and ironic twist. Many people were living in families of choice rather than families organised around reproduction. At the same time, huge numbers of people in Haraway's community were dying.
Haraway seizes and transforms the term ‘replication’ (the mode in which viruses, both biological and machine, proliferate) and makes it the emblematic term for the new, the postmodern. Replication as material-semiotic practice, she explains, undermines the structuring binary opposition between machine and human. A non-binary machine-human becomes Haraway's term for the postmodern subject: the cyborg citizen. Perhaps, she argues, cyborg citizenship can become central in a late twentieth century socialist feminism. Cyborg citizenship appealed to us at the time because it was one amongst many ideas and practices that broke
with the notion of ‘reproduction’. We were uneasy with the connotations of ‘reproduction’ for the theorisation of stasis and change, whether psychic or social, for a range of reasons: Many of us were lesbian, gay, trans, non-binary, and queer. We were the post-pill, post Roe vs Wade, and post Section 28 generations for whom the separation of sex and reproduction were assumed, that is, not taken-for-granted but taken up, fought for within the reproductive rights movement and LGBTQ rights movements. Studying with Donna Haraway in Northern California in the 1980s, we lived through the AIDs epidemic. Haraway was speaking out of a particular place and time, Northern California at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and a grief for loved ones lost.
Re-reading Haraway's text now, I think: cyborg feminism had a good run but there hasn't been a clear, once-and-for-all transition from modernity to postmodernity. Hierarchies and binaries still coexist with more rhizomatic formations of kinship. The arguments for ‘cyborg citizenship’ still chime uneasily with the particular binaries of the public/private, machine/human, and human/animal distinctions that have structured kinship in much of the west since the long eighteenth century.
When Haraway argues that the trope and practice of ‘replication’ was taking over from the trope and practice of ‘reproduction’ in the contemporary informatics of domination, by means of the focus on viruses both microbiological and computational, she's speaking both about death and about new ways of living, new forms of kinship. As Haraway is at pains to remind us, replication covers a much wider range of forms for continuance of life: sexed reproduction, even for mammals, is only part of the story. For example, we can draw on epigenetics, theorising, in this way, the transmission of intergenerational trauma. Or, the cyst, a kind of three dimensional scarring, as elaborated on by Abraham and Torok in their psychoanalytic work and writing. Haraway isn't addressing psychoanalytic theory, but the resonances of her argument are with Abraham and Torok, Laplanche, de M'Uzan, and a whole range of psychoanalysts who have developed these Ferenczian arguments overcoming oppositions between body and mind, machine and animal, animal and human. I discuss Laplanche (2011) and de M'Uzan (2013) at the end of
this paper, linking that argument to a discussion of my Prismatic Heresy, to which I now turn.
As the passage I quote from “Teddy Bear Patriarchy” illustrates, Haraway's approach includes what Clifford Geertz (1973) called “thick description”, the stylistics that was introduced to counter the inequities of the power-relation between anthropological informant and anthropologist. Geertz's argument is that theorisation is an emergent quality, developing out of the richness of the descriptions, neither on the anthropologist's side nor on the informant's. So, Prismatic Heresy is a collaborative project. The violence of my interpretation, that is, the meanings of the power-relation inherent in the relation between artist or theorist and her subjects are imbricated in the colour- coding of our discourse in the work.
Prismatic Heresy was first exhibited in the Fringe for the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis's 2017 conference on Gender, Transgender, and Psychoanalysis. The exhibition, which was curated by two Site trainees and which was very well attended, was held in a different part of London from the conference. The geographical separation represented, for me, the ways that the participants and audience for the fringe and the conference only partially coincided. I've been interested in set theory and the ways it can be used to figure the logics of relations between self and other for decades; my PhD, published in 2005 as a book, began with a discussion of Samuel Delany's Nevèrÿon series, and a discussion of the critique of colonialism elaborated by means of the character called ‘Venn’. This is what Bion (1965) calls ‘transformation’, the displacement of an abstract, formalised ‘scientific’ way of thinking, G and H on the grid, into the more communicable and evocative literary or mythic level, C on the grid.
Figure 1 is a Venn diagram for two, three, and four sets that intersect.
Figures 2 and 3 are Lacanian diagrams for the Borromean ‘knots’ of 3 and 4: RSI and RSI plus the symptom/sinthome. Figure 4 is a trefoil knot, reinforced by additional loops, as in a compensated psychosis. Mathematically speaking, the Borromean figures are not knots; they are a way of thinking enabled partly by set theory and partly by knot theory; interpreted from the point of view of a person's reflective subjectivity, this becomes, as Bursztein argues, a subjective topology. The symptom (the fourth loop, as in a Venn diagram of 4 sets), loops around the object-relation, potentially (or ‘virtually’, in Spinozan/Deleuzean language) traversing these three ‘jouissances’: phallic, of the Other, and jouissance of meaning.
Lacan, like Bion, argued that formalism enables the theorist to separate out the variables from the invariants, focusing on structure and function. X is the algebraic notation for a variable; Lacan's mathemes and topologies can come into play when the analyst reflects on ‘x’ in the course of the psychoanalysis: who is this? What are their key signifiers? Where are they at, in terms of their jouissance? Bion's innovation is the ‘grid’, a table for notation in which we might plot, session to session, the rate of change (x) for the indicators of alpha and beta function, that is, thinking-and-feeling in terms of presence-and-absence versus concrete thinking and feeling. Lacan's late theory is about the structure of the psyche (RSI, the ‘third’ topology) and the object-relation (separated out into the relation to the big Other and the object little a). As in mysticism, there is a third other and fourth jouissance; the other jouissance, positioned as ex-timate, as excess, beyond conceptualisation. Earlier translations of Lacan into English (Mitchell and Rose 1985) emphasised the gendering of Lacan's various notions of the other, translating this as ‘feminine’ jouissance.
The project I came up with was to juxtapose the rainbow flag of the LGBTQ movement to Lacan's RSI. Although I think that Lacan's third topology and Freud's first and second topologies are as good as it gets in terms of a way of thinking the structure of the psyche, I am more of a field theorist. Like Ferro (2002), I argue that whatever manifests in the field of transference is a derivative of the unconscious. In addition, I suggest that we can learn from analytical work with a person living with psychosis, when transference is created moment-to-moment, again and again. Even the stable and relatively fixed psychic structure of neurotics is created moment-to-moment as sameness and in the ‘future anterior’, as ‘it will have been’.
So, I staged an encounter between the 3 loops of RSI and the seven colours of the rainbow flag. I thought that the rainbow's spectrum might figure, might represent, a way of thinking about what happens both in the process of analysis and in artistic practice and engagement. In my four rainbow prints of a person's words, the white light around and within the print is also the more-or-less white light of the room within the
viewer stands. The violence of your viewing imposes meaning or protests: it's raw! However much the white box-frame shouts “this is conceptual art!”, the words, if read, overwhelm with their immediacy, witnessing and calling us to the place of a witness, a third.
I've been attending Jean-Gerard Bursztein's seminars in ‘subjective topology’ for many years. The seminars are profoundly original and a wonderful way of getting to terms with the ways that the later Lacan's topological thinking can be extended. A central argument of Lacanian topology has to to do with the localisation of the different forms of jouissance. In the following paragraphs, I discuss this topological argument. Before I started attending Bursztein's seminars and also before I started training at the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, I attended a Bion seminar. My thinking in Prismatic Heresy is partly Bionian and partly Lacanian; but also wholly idiosyncratic and eccentric.
Let's start with the Lacanian arguments about the different modes of jouissance. To give ostentive definitions: in exhibiting my Prismatic Heresy in an art gallery and writing about it for publication, I suffer and enjoy my audience as big Other; I suffer and enjoy queering Lacanian and Bionian theory in ways that transform symbolic, real and the phallic jouissance that inhabits the zone between symbolic and real; and I experience the jouissance of meaning emergent in my analysis and practice. The feminine or other (not Othered) jouissance that Lacan conceives of as outside but in relation to the 3-in-1 of RSI is also encounterable, engageable with, in extremity; Lacan's example is mysticism, but there are a wide range of artistic, philosophical, and meditative practices that enable engagement with ‘feminine’, other jouissance. The process within which I sorted the words of the transcript into the colours of the rainbow, my Prismatic Heresy, was deeply meditative and my engagement with other jouissance.
Jouissance of the big Other, the enjoyment and suffering of our masochistic relation to, in the first instance, our primary caregiver, is localised, according to a Lacanian topological way of thinking, as being in the area that in the figure of RSI is between real and imaginary (see figure 2). If you read down the passages coloured orange in Prismatic Heresy 2,
you will hear the ways in which this participant discussed their relation to the big Other during the 50 minutes: “Do you want to transition?” “Ah, I don't know. I don't think so. I don't know”…“while I believe in the past you would either go the whole way or nothing, nowadays, yeah, like a half way through is more accepted than before”… “if someone asked me now”… “if I was with a man there would be no questions like that but with a woman the question of family, of creating a family comes into question; and then, again, I don't know how to think about it.” If we were to think of these statements in terms of the early Lacan, where psychoanalytic work is seen as a move from imaginary to symbolic, we would focus on the ways that this person, having become aware of their relation to the big Other, is now moving more into the symbolic. However, using a Bionian vertex, we can we can focus on this subject's openness to thinking and feeling as process rather than as content.
Phallic jouissance, written with the big Phi of presence-and-absence, is localised, according to this Lacanian topological way of thinking as in the junction of real and symbolic (see figure 2). The subject in Prismatic Heresy 3 discusses how they wrestle something a little more symbolic from the real, a process that is coloured orange in my image, “yeah, where is my thinking time? What am I? Gay? Transgender? What the fuck am I? Am I Dad? What am I? I'm nobody.” This, too, can be understood from a Bionian vertex: alpha function versus beta function. That is, beta function is concrete thinking, as when Bion's patient ducked and put his hands protectively over his head, experiencing Bion's words as blows. Alpha function can be expressed in many practices, in activities done in places as diverse as a martial arts dojo and a chemistry laboratory. Unlike Lacan's symbolic, alpha function isn't always grounded or knotted by a master signifier or the Name of the Father. Alpha function can be idiosyncratic (as in a work of art) or widely shared (mythology).
That which in the late Lacan is called jouissance of meaning is an experiential kind of knowing, constructed in the process of psychoanalysis or in a self-reflective, questioning and skeptical life. It's localised in the area where symbolic and imaginary intersect, according, that is, to the Lacanian topological way of thinking of psychic structure and the end
of analysis (see figure 2). In my Prismatic Heresy, this becomes another ribbon, coloured green. The 7-in-1 of the spectrum provides a way of thinking the work that is done by artistic practice, separating out differently the symbolic and the imaginary, as Lacan argues was done by Joyce (Lacan 2016). Thus, for example, in Prismatic Heresy 3 the participant says, “I've mimicked martial arts. I've done my own style of martial arts since I was 8.” To this extent I'm Millerian: whether or not there is a generalised sinthome, there is a generalised play and artistic practice.
In subjective topology, the symptom is thought of as another loop (see figure 3). It moves and transforms, and in doing so, enables us to conceptualise the ways that the loops of RSI transform within the relations configured by their topology.
This notion, that the loops of RSI transform but still keep their topological relations, is the way that Lacanian subjective topology addresses the question of the end of analysis. The question of transformations within the constraints of topology is also central to Bion's work, but, in Bion's case, it has to do with the huge varieties of alpha function, from art to science (all of which are given positions in his ‘grid’). The Lacanian arguments are illuminated by turning to the question of work with persons living with psychosis. According to a topological way of thinking, the structure of a psychotic's psyche is less clearly delineated. In terms of the three suggested topologies (Freud's first topology, conscious, subconscious, and unconscious, Freud's second topology, ego, superego, and id, and Lacan's third topology, real, symbolic, and imaginary), we might say, of a psychotic patient, that he or she doesn't repress; doesn't have a strong ego; or lives too much in the real. Conceptualising a psychotic structure as a coloured trefoil knot allows us to conceive of the analytic work as providing a way for RSI to stabilise, to separate (see figure 4).
The analytical work with a person living with psychosis focuses on the symptom, but, so to speak, spells the symptom differently (in Old French, sinthome), thinking of the sinthome as a way that a person's symptom makes their structure more stable and their ways of jouissance more localised. The idea is that the sinthome's loop reinforces the imaginary loop, enabling it to separate out from the trefoil, and the other loops, symbolic and real, follow suit and can braid. This is a compensated psychosis.
I call this a metaphor in the real, as this kind of symptom/sinthome is constructed in practice, in the real. It doesn't last, it has to be re-done as daily and weekly practice, in, for example, prolific artistic practice or in weekly psychotherapy that extends for years. We can understand this as separating out levels; combing and knitting RSI from the tangle that is the person, their sinthome/symptom, and the way they world and are worlded.
The image that I made from the words in Prismatic Heresy 1 is one of scaffolding; it shows the ways that subject constructed a sinthome in their years of therapy and their artistic and spiritual practice. Prismatic Heresy 1 is synchronic, so the scaffolding that the subject constructed over many years of therapy is central to the image, but the diachronic Prismatic Heresies 2, 3, and 4, if transposed into synchronic figures, would also show degrees of scaffolding, varying according to the ways in which the subjects uses, or doesn't use, artistic practice or other sinthomatic ways of stabilising their structure. We all can and often need to do this.
This separating out and scaffolding can be understood in Bion's terms as a transition and transformation from beta elements to alpha function. Each person's words weave a kind of blanket, a text-ile in which they analyse the way they use artistic practise. In Prismatic Heresy 2, the subject discusses the relation between personal change and changes in their artistic practice (green), “Now I have become also the subject of my art … and [I] have a conversation with the world”.
The good thing about practice—whether artistic or psychoanalytic—is that you can't predict what will happen; it's non-determinist. After
having made my works of art, after having exhibited them, and after having worked through some of my imaginary, egoic resentments about the separation of fringe and conference in my analysis, what I wanted to write about changed, nachträglich.
Of course this is nonsense; my sinthome. Typing up the transcript of the four sessions involved a deliberate non-listening to meaning; absorption in the sounds of the words and the rhythm of my fingers on the keys. Sorting phrases into seven sets, depending on meaning and affect, was an activity that, as well as being meditative, resonated with a theory of mine about differentiation. Drawing on Bernard Burgoyne's work on set theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis, I argue that what distinguishes the different psychic structures—autism, the psychoses, and the neuroses—is the extent to which someone can stably sort into sets (Chernaik unpublished; Burgoyne 2000). Binaries—self/other, inner/outer—mark an achievement of Trennung levels past T2. Making art with words sorted into seven sets was a way of playing with this theory. It becomes a question of movement between T levels (‘regression’ and ‘progression’) rather than differential diagnosis.
I agree with Winnicott that play is the ground, the condition of possibility for sublimation: this includes the arts as well as science, which I understand in Continental terms as knowledge, rather than as empiricism, quantification, and regulation. I also think, and this is a political as well as a philosophical claim, that work—productive, constructive, ‘effect-of’ kind of work—is done in the margins. Thus, my use of more than 4 sets, making the topology a braid between analyst and analysand. The mathematics become increasingly complex as more sets are added: once more than 4 sets are looped together, they braid. I'm not suggesting that the psyche is structured in a Venn diagram of 7. I am arguing that, if differentiating sets leaves traces, such traces might em-braid and structure again and again and sometimes differently. The braidings manifest derivatives which can be interacted with in transference. Braided structure suggests ways thinking in terms of flows and intensities, conceptualise-able as able to interact in a transferential field; and, most importantly, as changeable and changing. Thinking in terms of derivatives suggests
ways of thinking in terms of what Bion calls ‘transformations’–the different ways that whatever is unconscious plays out in fields as various as visual art, theatre, and psychoanalytic theory and history. As I said, this is a playful way of thinking; nonsense; perhaps a hint of other jouissance.
The four people who participated in Prismatic Heresy had something to say and the artworks/discourse analyses present their words to an audience. Collectively, this presents something of me: how I listen; who I am that listens. However, as it is a question of flows and intensities, how I listen will change, having made my colour-coded critique of Borromean Lacanian theory. This paper gives a sense of how my non-binary identity is partly personal, partly intellectual; and it's also about how I think spatially, topologically, as well as in words. It's that which attracted me to the late Lacan and which has led me to critique Borromean theory from a non-binary perspective. It's happenstance; personal history. It's also something to do with community: I made friends through this project. Even more, though, my argument is eccentric; a subversion, however sympathetic, of both subjective topology and Bion's alpha function.
This way of experiencing and living identity is, nowadays, called ‘non-binary’, at least insofar as it is to do with gender identity. However, a range of psychoanalysts think in non-binary ways about identity. For example, de M'Uzan (2013), who addresses questions of representation and the body central to my psychoanalytic practice as well as to my 4 participants in Prismatic Heresy, argues for a ‘spectrum of identities’. His argument is not too far from my suggestion that psychic structure may well involve braids far more complex than the Borromean knots of 3 or 4, all of which, in any case, manifest as derivatives, transformed in many ways.
De M'Uzan remarks that witnessing, experiencing, and living are all passive. Reading that, I was astonished; and, yet, I thought, “that's true”. As Laplanche argues, we are the analysands of texts. Passivity is difficult for me and de M'Uzan's interpretation was mutative. I now have more of a sense of how—maybe why—work with an effect of witnessing was so important to me. It's narcissistic, of course, making art and exhibiting it, and yet there's also the undoing of the ego that makes the art possible.
The de M'Uzan paper that I read as analysand of the text uses an alternative term for schizophrenia, paraphrenia. He makes explicit the ways in which his argument is in dialogue with both Bion and Deleuze; he also draws on Laplanche's seduction theory, the passivity in relation to the necessarily invasive first caregiver. To some extent, his ‘spectrum of identity’ argument is conventionally post-Kleinian, with psychosis and neurosis as extremes of a spectrum. However, in one sentence, he departs from this, saying, “but we still have to agree to separate the ‘psychotic’ from psychosis (de M'Uzan 2013: 109)”. This brings him closer to the post-Lacanian argument in which psychosis and the depersonalised and dissociative moments in a neurotic's analysis are distinguished as different formations, different responses to something that happened or happened differently, presumably in infancy. Perhaps as a way of separating madness from psychosis, he ends with a discussion of poetry and lallation, arguing against Deleuze (and Lacan) that lallation is relational and egoic, but in a very strange, twinned and depersonalised way, examples of which he finds in his work with people at the end of life. In this way, de M'Uzan brings together Freud's early drive theory with its notion of ‘ego-drives’ or drives of self-preservation and Freud's late drive theory with its notion of a death drive. For Laplanche, the question is one of translation and consistency: an attempt to reserve ‘drive’ for representation and the unconscious and ‘instinct’ for the impetus that is not part of representation. De M'Uzan is one of the founders of the Paris Institute of Psychosomatics, and this notion of an instinct that is not a drive is central to his theorisation of what Freud called actual neurosis—the range of disorders in which representation either does not take place or is extremely problematic. My psychoanalytic practice includes patients with actual neurosis, and, over time, I've found that change does take place. Some patients for whom representation is extremely difficult begin, over time, to represent far more and to discuss the ways in which they attempt to counter the short-circuit through the body and through behaviour that is somatosis and extreme enactment.
The words of the four participants in Prismatic Heresy, all remarkably eloquent, vital people show us how this is generally true, not just
for people with difficulties. This paper has been a discussion of alpha function and non-binary identity. It's been about a general critique of binarism; or perhaps a general theory for non-binary, witnessing a area in which this self- preservative/ego/death drive can become drive, not instinct, that is, it can work and have effect as representation, as alpha function. This is because these four people, trans and non-binary, each have creative and original solutions to the aporias of gender and sexual identities, fusing (as opposed to de-fusing) life and death drives. In this way, they are representative of the strength and diversity of the trans and non-binary communities; it is this I witness.
And subsequently in the Queer Arts Weekender, Shortwave Gallery, London, February 9th-11th 2018.
For Merleau-Ponty, the third is the third person, the he or she; we might also add the non-binary singular third person, ‘they’. For Ogden and Benjamin, it is a third constructed relationally in the therapeutic space; Ogden's ‘third’ is more of a field theory and Benjamin's ‘third’ more an attachment-theory based philosophical position. Khanna's argument is Fanonian, constructing a postcolonial critique of psychoanalysis and a symptomatic reading of colonialism in terms of melancholia; a genealogical approach but also a witnessing. It would be interesting to unpack the relations between genealogical, Foucauldian work, with its critique of oppositions between subject and object and ‘thirdness’. I discuss Merleau-Ponty's argument and its implication for psychoanalytic practice further in my unpublished paper Working with Psychosis, Lacan and Merleau-Ponty.
I draw on Haraway's material-semiotic way of working in my use and analysis of neo-Marxist geography in my first book, Social and Virtual Space, (Chernaik 2005), starting with the narrower, core argument, the critique of the Marxist opposition of base/superstructure, and moving on to the wider implications.