Few people know that the Reeducation I actually undertook was not my first attempt. My first, short-lived attempt took place in Brazil. I had long planned to seek Reeducation and where I was living, everyone I knew was in Reeducation. If you had dollars and a good black market money changer, Reeducation with a Famous Psychoanalyst was not at all expensive. I saw my opportunity, and I took it, but it did not last since this Reeducator was fixated on my Biological Clock. I decided I would not continue. The conversation went like this:
Graduate Student Zero: Reeducator, I am not coming back. I understand your concern about my Biological Clock. I know that these Clocks are of great importance in this country, and it is true that one of the reasons I am not concerned about it is that I do not wish to visit my Problems upon any Children. It remains a fact that in my own cultural space we are not concerned about these Clocks at my age in any case, and I find myself unable to trump up concern now. I am therefore going to discontinue.
Reeducator: It is true that we do not have a real meeting of the minds here. You may be able to find a Reeducator who is less concerned about the Ticking of Biological Clocks, and who may be a more appropriate choice for you. However, I am not entirely convinced that you need Reeducation at all. It is not that you do not have any Problems, it is that you seem already to be Reeducating yourself! How to Reeducate yourself is all we really teach, you know.
It was a satisfactory conversation, and I would have done well to pay closer attention to it.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Sounds like the Brazilians were closer to the mark.
ah! Me so tired today. Kind of got into a mode of feeling all traumatised yesterday, reading that war atrocity book and relating it to my own past. As those who are inclined to use psycho-jargon would say: Very triggering.
And then I also have a minor premenstrual thing going on. Minor but annoying.
Woe am I.
Brazilians have better instincts and are not afraid to use and trust them.
I am irritated today also, partly because we have to depend on the server so much at work, and it is far weaker than the WordPress server, and the various pieces of software are so far inferior to WordPress.
Do you ever think that so much of psychotherapy — for example Lacanian — is designed for those who have become so oversocialised by the mechanics and mores of post-industrial society that they almost have no instincts, any more, to trust?
YES. Although I do not know what actually happens in Lacanian psychotherapy.
So I googled it. It appears that all therapy is about understanding your unconscious motivations for things, and not being afraid to look at them. I think that what the Brazilian meant was that I was already pretty good at those things.
This was what my actual Reeducator had trouble getting his mind around. He assumed that one would have no more instincts to trust, or that one would mistake conditioning for instinct.
I don’t know what happens in that brand of therapy, either. But what I can gather from the little to moderate amount of it I’ve studied is that it is big on the dichotomy of gender roles, which are seen to be inculcated from the very point of socialisation, after birth. Gender dichotomies were more of a social ideology of the 50s — including, apparently, in France. The Lacanian strand of postmodernist theory is therefore very conservative, from what I have been able to tell. I wasn’t brought up with such a neat position in any gender category (arguably this is behind 70 percent of the problems I have with the world). So, I meet such conservativism with a little wryness.
Yes. In Lacan everyone suffers lack and is after the “phallus,” which he swears is not a penis but I do not believe him. From what I was able to figure out when I tried to study up on him, the desire for the phallus was the one thing that never shifted – the still point in the whole structure. I do not know Lacan at all well, but I still suspect I am right on this point.
I wasn’t brought up with a very neat gender position, either, and I tend not to see what is going on nearly so well as some people I know from more conservative backgrounds. I just can’t believe it – but they can, so they can see it and step around it better, or work with it better. The gender division is also comparatively covert in the U.S. (compared, say, to in the Latin world), and that makes it harder for me to grasp as well.
The “phallus” is power and it is something akin to Bataille’s “summit”, which he renounced. Renouncing the “summit” (which is the attraction towards gaining more and more power, via knowledge or what have you) means accepting a state of abjection — in Bataille’s terms, a certain acceptance of impotence and in Taoist terms “feminine passivity”. Yet Bataille’s insight is that this renunciation is freeing, in the present day and age when transcendence has become so vulgarised by bourgeois values.
I’m very poor at observing and working with gender, too. Something is wrong with my perceptions and their ill-co-ordination with my actions. I’m very unpolitic.
So, is it true that the search for power (phallus) is the immutable linchpin in Lacan? I really should reread Bataille. At the time I read him, I found the idea of the abject repellent. This all had to do with reading postcolonial literature and coming from an abusive background. My essential reaction at the time – this was in graduate school, in my twenties – was, “we don’t need any more abjection, that may be a game some white European man enjoys – someone who does not suffer actual abjection and will never – but I do not think it is fun even as a game.”
My strong feeling is that this is the case with Lacan.
Anyway, with regard to the abjection thing — I think it is supposed to be more than a game, but actually the basis for the revaluation of values in a Nietzschean sense. In other words, it has an inextricably political agenda attached. Abjection IS the state of those who are oppressed and/or abused. But what if such people (and I include myself among them) gave up the single-minded search for transcendence or ‘salvation’, and instead reveled in that which is considered negative and repellent? This would involve a change in attitude which in turn would start to have the material effect that comes from a change in values. But above all, it would release the oppressed from their emotional thrall to the values of those who dominate them. Being thus emotionally freed from the mental hold of class society (the representative phallus), they would be free to enact a bloody revolution.
Another value in embracing abjection is training oneself to tolerate certain extreme emotional states. This is also a training for independence of mind — hence wrapped up in both the Nietzschean individualistic project and the Marxist revolutionary project.
Finally — those of the oppressed who embrace abjection become unpredictable in terms of the normative human ways of understanding rational behaviour. Being unpredictable, they are harder to rule; their behaviour being harder to predict. All good from a revolutionary viewpoint.
But: reveling in starvation, getting down on being in jail, I have never met anyone who actually likes that degree of suffering and I tend to think the idea of embracing it is the ultimate bourgeois fantasy.
I also found Bataille quite presumptuous when I read him. It is the middle, not the really oppressed classes who are in the greatest thrall of the ruling values. Being really oppressed and being passive about it often means being too hungry, too weak, or too sick to act effectively – it does not mean agreeing with the situation. Who the f*** does Bataille think he is, believing he knows what the ‘oppressed’ think? With what nerve does he ask them to take on yet greater degrees of suffering? thought I 20 years ago when I read him.
If he just means coming to consciousness, not believing in the system, and being willing to make real sacrifices to fight it, why all the masochistic imagery? thought I, once again 20 years ago.
Aha – here – from my other blog – is a Lacan post:
http://sptc.wordpress.com/2007/06/05/should-we-re-study-lacan/
which makes me realize what Lacanian analysis must be like: you listen to what the analysand says, not to what mysteriously lies behind it. The person is an effect of language (language is not a romantic “expression” of the person).
In a way I like this idea for therapy … would there be less guessing then?
If he just means coming to consciousness, not believing in the system, and being willing to make real sacrifices to fight it, why all the masochistic imagery?
Yes– the masochism is obviously distasteful to bourgeois sensibilities, including mine. But perhaps it means something different in a different context. Anyway, I have found that Marechera’s Black Sunlight is all over Bataille, and that the overall effect was not masochistic but something else much more redemptive and sublime. It’s like somebody cooks with some really nasty looking ingredients, but the overall effect of the dish, once it is done, is somehow very different from what you would have been expecting because of the ingredients being used.
So Lacan’s position is either structuralist or poststructuralist? This implies a non-dialectical view of language. Language does not so much communicate. It just “is”. It’s a process of doubling back, telling us what we already ‘know’. Actually, language is the ultimate redundancy. The ‘master’ (language) knows the slave (the subject) through and through. There is nothing that is not transparent to him. Yet this transparency itself has no value — and thus yields the practical effect of something very opaque.
Marechera – whom I haven’t read except in your fragments – I have become quite interested in and yes, this is why I am now re-interested in Bataille (and esp. the idea of ‘heterogeneity’) … I see the connection but indeed, from my vague impressions (remember I haven’t actually read Marechera and I am remembering from reading just a few texts of Bataille years ago) it is as though M. actually inhabited that liberated / heterogeneous zone which Bataille (in my view back then) seemed only able to talk about, imagine negatively, touch in the dark. [I am being *completely* impressionistic here – call it instinctual 😉 … it isn’t research based, for sure!]
Lacan, yes, and this is why, back in the day when I used to try to figure him out also, I also felt him to be terribly conservative, oppressive. And yet at the same time, if one starts working with something like translation, it really can appear that we are language-effects, floating in a sea of metaphor.
Nietzche was a philologist and has interesting commentary on language I should look into more.
Yes, you are perhaps right about Bataille and Marechera, especially in this: it is as though M. actually inhabited that liberated / heterogeneous zone which Bataille (in my view back then) seemed only able to talk about, imagine negatively, touch in the dark.
But I am a little confused somehow about what the problem actually is with the inability to touch, reach out for, and experience the heterogeneous. One of the problems is obvious because it is structurally built into the metaphysics or psychology of Bataille’s system. It is that the “heterogeneous” is that which we reject from consciousness — hence it is unconscious. Still, Marechera manages to represent it through his powers of imagination.
Another thing is that if you take the third world as representing an oppressed class as such, in relation to the first world (as Fredric Jameson does), then it is probable that the third world also represents in its experiences that which Bataille calls “heterogeneous” and the “unconscious” (in relation to first world rationality and “consciousness”). I realise that this way of conceptually dividing would obviously be taking things too far if it was reified as actuality. But, maybe considering that there could be some truth in the rough paradigm I have just sketched could open up the eyes of some of the first-worlders as to why the heterogeneous seems, to them, to be so very elusive, whereas to someone like Marechera (who was brought up as colonial refuse), it seems like some position that can be directly inhabited.
On Lacan — Yeah, I can see what you are saying about the patterns and translation. I think I’ve seen it, too. But really, I can’t find much personal use for Lacan. Except maybe in his notion of the traumatic Real, as that which (if I undestand this right), we repress with our selective memories.
My doubts about Bataille (and some other European theorists back then) were about universality and general applicability – precisely this:
“considering that there could be some truth in the rough paradigm I have just sketched could open up the eyes of some of the first-worlders as to why the heterogeneous seems, to them, to be so very elusive, whereas to someone like Marechera (who was brought up as colonial refuse), it seems like some position that can be directly inhabited.”
Back when I was studying these things, theory came from the first world and was universal. Literature could come from the third world but was only good if it fit the theory – and/but if it did fit, was then often considered to be “imitative.” And poststructuralism was king. I decided that everyone was culturally situated and everyone had context.
On language, I am not sure we really need Lacan (or Derrida) to point to its opacity … that was clear already … but I’ve always been intrigued by the Lacanian Imaginary and Symbolic orders because I have such clear memories of passage into the symbolic / into language, as per my little Lacan post.
What I am inclined to argue is that if Marechera reads Bataille and then appropriates the theory to write a book, then the writing is no longer specifically western and universal but has been appropriated in a very specific and personal and historically contextualising way by the author.
That, certainly.