Negative Maps: Fetishistic Disavowal and Reflexive Impotence & Existential Problems Are Real Problems (2nd edition)
With introduction by Don't Even Dream About It
Written by Cody Without Organs
&
Introduction by Don’t Even Dream About It
Sections:
Introduction
Fetishistic Disavowal and Reflexive Impotence
Existential Problems are Real Problems
Introduction
How does one begin to recognize one's problems without resorting to an indecisive nihilism on the one hand, or the denial of real problems on the other? In the proceeding pages, this is exactly the question that Cody begins to unpack.
But rather than sinking into a Landian acceptance of capitalist realism1 which demands that we should not only understand the reality of our modern-day problems but also love their necessity.
Or just as damning, that we understand our problems, becoming overwhelmed by their pervasiveness, and simply deny or refuse them.
Cody instead says, calling on the ghost of Mark Fisher, that we should recognize our problems as Real (in the Lacanian sense) -- that is as a break in our experience of reality -- and wield our own psychic powers of repression against these problems productively.
In “Postscripts on the Societies of Control” Gilles Deleuze warns us of the new problems which he saw as defining control societies2: a 'pervasive atmosphere' of Capital and Empire3 which moves through bodies like a gas.
Famously, Deleuze declares, “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons”.
Cody chooses to employ a plurality of artillery -- primarily Lacanian psychoanalysis, Marxism and Schizoanalysis.
After all, some of us are still Marxists!4
Our problems are the result of material conditions.
They are not locked in stone, embodied in pure ideal forms, nor are they unstoppable.
They are changing, in flux, and moldable by concrete action.
Thus the equation laid out by Mao in “On Contradiction”:
we go from the particular (micropolitical), to form a universal (molar), and then employ this new understanding to make a change in the particular (back to the micropolitical).5
It is up to us to change the world.
Which involves shaping our own psychic and unconscious conditions, and the material conditions of our problems in a parallel fashion.
This is our double movement, our double articulation6.
Fetishistic Disavowal and Reflexive Impotence:
'Hyper-awareness' or when a problem becomes "too real"
What do we do when we come across a problem?
Typically - a problem has to do with something outside of us.
A problem which is in no way connected to us, completely outside of us, is not a real problem.
Or at least, we do not consider it as such.
A real problem is in some way inside of us, and all problems can become real problems.
From the outside, turned inward.
The external, internalised.
(This is what is meant by a 'Fold' or a 'Folding' as mentioned in particular by Gilles Deleuze in his text on Leibniz)
Upon the realisation of a problem - of realising a problem is real and inside of us, classically in psychoanalysis we can see our first attempt to 'deal' with the problem as being done through a unique form of denial and repression.7
We are here firstly to discuss exactly this:
Fetishistic disavowal.
"The importance of the concept of fetishistic disavowal thus resides in what it says about the ideological implications of such self-referentiality – the combined terms fetishistic disavowal stem from an excessive adherence to certain beliefs and practices and a simultaneous denial of any genuine belief.
To explain how this concept works in practice, Žižek uses the example of Father Christmas and the way in which parents claim they promote the story only “for the sake of the children”.
He argues that beyond the youngest and most naive infants, the majority of children know that Father Christmas does not exist.
In reality, the only people who truly believe in Santa Claus are the parents themselves!
They pretend to pretend to believe, that is, in the guise of acting like knowing adults performing for innocent children, what really occurs is that adults hide behind a purported fantasy so that they do not have to confront their defining need to believe in the existence of innocent and guileless children – self-deception in the service of innocence!"
https://nosubject.com/Fetish/Fetishistic_disavowal#:~:text=The%20importance%20of%20the%20concept,denial%20of%20any%20genuine%20belief.
It's when you know something but you do almost everything you can to go on as If you don't know.
Effectively 'unknowing' it.
That is to say, when confronted with a real problem, the subject will deny either the realness of the problem or the problematic nature of the Real itself.
For example, "it's not a real problem!" we say - implying it is some kind of false problem. Or "Nothing to worry about".
One denies the problem itself, one denies reality itself.
To deny a real problem, which is real insofar as it is a part of you - Inside of you - Is to deny yourself and to avoid confronting yourself.
The real in Lacanian psychoanalysis is both the very thing 'out-there' which we cannot signify/symbolize. - the 'unnamable horror' which we can only feel - We struggle to find the words to describe it - this feeling is what we call anxiety8 - and it is at the very core of us.
It is the very heart of our being.
It is inside of us, and it is us.
The Real is at once both outside and inside.
The flipside of this inability to fathom a problem as such, to go too far in confronting this problem and ourselves is thus:
A hyper-awareness and intellectualism which turns into cynicism - or what has been called cold rationalism9 by some.
To become so full of awareness, of knowing yourself and of the realness of the problem, that it becomes debilitating.
You become impotent in the face of yourself.
Impotent in the face of the problem.
Impotent in the face of the Real.
Reflexively impotent.
This is indeed what Mark Fisher calls:
Reflexive impotence.
"By contrast with their forebears in the 1960s and 1970s, British students today appear to be politically disengaged. While French students can still be found on the streets protesting against neoliberalism, British students, whose situation is incomparably worse, seem resigned to their fate. But this, I want to argue, is a matter not of apathy, nor of cynicism, but of reflexive impotence.
They know things are bad, but more than that, they know they can't do anything about it. But that 'knowledge', that reflexivity, is not a passive observation of an already existing state of affairs.
It is a self-fulfilling prophecy."
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism
It is the name we give to the feeling and behaviour which reinforce one another10 begins with the realisation and acceptance of a problem (reflexivity) and ends with nihilistic inactivity (impotence).
It is as though the very acceptance of the problem leads to a denial of one's ability to do anything about it.
I have described the acceptance of a problem; as its 'realisation'.
It is the acknowledgement that the problem is indeed real.
A real problem.
However, I am now attempting to articulate: where one can and may end up denying or repressing (disavowal) a problem as real.
One may also end up accepting the problem as real, but finding it to be overwhelmingly real.
That is to say: too real.
A too-real problem is when you watch yourself fall apart.
You become distant from yourself.
Disconnected.
Fully aware of the realness of the problem and yet made impotent by this very awareness.
An awareness which disables us.
You become like a passenger of an aeroplane forced to remain in your seat and to watch it slowly descend into annihilation.
But yet, you are not a passenger.
You are the plane.
Your very being is the plane, and you are the Pilot!
Who upon becoming disillusioned and believing oneself to have no control, to see ahead an imminent collapse, and to reside into a state of apathy as a consequence of this.
To give up.
A refusal of the situation.
- "It is too real for me to deal with it"
which is more often spoken as: "it is inescapable. It is not a problem I can deal with. It is un-deal-with-able."
- Or "No matter what I do, I'll never be able to solve/deal with this problem."
Reflexive impotence contains within it a fetishistic disavowal.
When a problem is too real we deny it.
We disavow it - fetishistically.
"The structure of fetishism, relying on the psychoanalytic structure of disavowal, where all disavowal is ideological, but not all disavowal is fetishistic, thereby positing a crucial, often unacknowledged distinction. Where disavowal follows the structure “I know quite well how things are, but still […],” fetishistic disavowal follows the formula: “I don’t only know how things are, but also how they appear to me, and nonetheless […].”
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/QMR-12-2016-0125/full/html
However now - when confronting the real problem - is exactly the time you must not fall asleep as the pilot and become a passenger.
You must wake up and fly the plane.
Take control. Take control of the Real.
Take control of the problem and take control of yourself.
When a problem becomes too real your awareness of the problem has instead developed into a 'hyper-awareness'.
Which is to say you can no longer think outside of the problem.
It becomes necessary and unavoidable.
Unsolvable.
Too real.
You are not only hyper-aware of the problem.
Your hyper-awareness has become a part of the problem:
'Awareness is in realising a problem as real. Embracing the realness of a problem.
Hyper-awareness then is a failure to confront the problem as real, and instead to see the problem as too real. As inevitable.'
"emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable."
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism
In the face of the Real (problem) when it appears to us an inevitable. Necessary.
That is bound to go down and we are bound to go down with it.
As though we are passengers in a falling plane.
Instead, we must reveal this inevitability to be contingent.
The problem is not too real, nothing is more real than us.
We, ourselves, are the most real it gets.
The problem (just like us) is material.
Materiality and materialism are the languages we give to become-aware of things as real without falling into an idealism where this 'realness' indeed becomes too real.
It is the awareness that the problem emerges out of material conditions in the real world and that this solution is itself real.
Material.
Here with us. And a part of us. Inside of us.
When a thing is too real it consumes us.
It shapes us. Becoming our entire worldview.
It becomes inescapable.
Hyper-awareness (literally to be 'too aware') is to be so totally consumed by the thing that one cannot even imagine a world without it.
To be unable to imagine oneself as without.
This means a problem was once totally outside of us, not really a problem.
And then it became a real problem.
And in the overwhelming face of it all, we had forgotten what life was like before the problem became real.
And now it is all we can think about.
We must remind ourselves that "the solution is right here, Inside of me. The real solution."
That the solution, like the problem, is material.
We must remind ourselves of a life we had where the problem wasn't too real, and in fact, it wasn't even real at all! (remember?)
And we must remind ourselves that we will return to this state.
Perhaps this is what it means to reminisce.
To be inspired by a time previous where life was perhaps 'better'.
In the sense that we did not have the same problems.
To have already had the solutions.
As opposed to nostalgia.
Meaning "sickness of the past".
It is not to be inspired by the past but to resent it and lust for it as unattainable.
Beyond us.
To mourn the lost past.
Instead, rather than become alienated with our present by desiring an unattainable state, one which we had achieved and enjoyed before - to become disillusioned with the past - One must instead become inspired by the past.
To use anamnesis, to retrieve something from the past and to bring it into our present.
It is to move instead of mourn. Or, to inspire movement out of mourning.
So it seems we have to find some kind of dialectical sublation:
we cannot ignore the problem and we also cannot become so totally immersed in our knowing of the problem that we become disabled by our very knowing.
Here I am a total Nietzschean and would say: 'what a bliss and beauty it is to be forgetful!'
("Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders." - "Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all." - Quotes associated with Nietzsche)
I would recommend something else:
"The slightest caress may be as strong as an orgasm; orgasm is a mere fact, a rather deplorable one, in relation to desire in pursuit of its principle.
Pleasure is an affection of a person or a subject; it is the only way for persons to "find themselves" in the process of desire that exceeds them; pleasures, even the most artificial, are reterritorializations. But the question is precisely whether it is necessary to find oneself.
Is it really so sad and dangerous to be fed up with seeing with your eyes, breathing with your lungs, swallowing with your mouth, talking with your tongue, thinking with your brain, having an anus and larynx, head and legs? Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly: the simple Thing, the Entity, the full Body, the stationary Voyage, Anorexia, cutaneous Vision, Yoga, Krishna, Love, Experimentation. Where psychoanalysis says, "Stop, find your self again," we should say instead, "Let's go further still, we haven't found our BwO yet, we haven't sufficiently dismantled our self." Substitute forgetting for anamnesis, experimentation for interpretation. Find your body without organs. Find out how to make it. It's a question of life and death, youth and old age, sadness and joy. It is where everything is played out."
~Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, How do you make yourself a body without organs?
First you must know the problem. Confront it. Then you must forget the problem.
Not to foreclose11 yourself from it totally, but to repress it so that it is always there.
Ready for anamnesis.
You must remember what life was like before the problem, and you must forget the feeling of the inevitability (the too-real aspect) of the problem. So that you can act.
To produce a material outcome.
To bring about a material change.
A real change.
You must be pessimistic, realistic ("things don't always go so well" ) and hopeful ("despite this, I will try anyway" ).
Even if you feel yourself to be a lost cause, you must defend yourself.
You must protect and fight for yourself no matter what.
In spite of it all.
"these troubled times, even the most pessimistic diagnosis of our future ends with an uplifting hint that things might not be as bad as all that, that there is light at the end of the tunnel.
Yet, argues Slavoj Žižek, it is only when we have admitted to ourselves that our situation is completely hopeless - that the light at the end of the tunnel is in fact the headlight of a train approaching us from the opposite direction - that fundamental change can be brought about"
Google Book Reviews, Slavoj Žižek, The Courage of Hopelessness
Existential Problems Are Real Problems (2nd edition)
Mark Fisher and Lacan; the Weird and the Real
"What is the weird? When we say something is weird, what kind of feeling are we pointing to? I want to argue that the weird is a particular kind of perturbation. It involves a sensation of wrongness: a weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist, or at least it should not exist here. Yet if the entity or object is here, then the categories which we have up until now used to make sense of the world cannot be valid. The weird thing is not wrong, after all: it is our conceptions that must be inadequate."
Mark Fisher, the Weird and the Eerie.
The term 'existential crisis' is thrown around the social playing field - we're all having one. Yet none of us seem to experience this crisis as indeed a real crisis.
Without going too far into my own ideologies, I will make the claim that this is part-and-parcel with what Mark Fisher has called Capitalist Realism - the pervasive atmosphere in which any real alternative to capitalism cannot even be imagined.
My problem here won't be dealing with Mark's diagnosis of modern depressive culture, but instead with the specific phenomenon in which our very real problems of existence are mistakenly considered 'not real problems.'
What I mean by this is that the common experience referred to as an 'existential crisis' - precisely a crisis of existence - has lost its meaning as a 'real crisis' by being recognised instead as common.
Too common to be a, "if we are all dealing with it'.
The social-cultural normalisation of the dread we feel at the very level of our subjectivity. The paranoia which is suddenly invoked in us at the core of our very conditions of human experience.
We may find ourselves sweeping our real problems 'under the rug'.
In a more clinical psychoanalytic interpretation, one could read this as a fetishistic disavowal or a reflexive impotent.
The latter of which, Mark Fisher has revealed to us as being a symptom of life under capitalism.
Life.
These problems turn up all across points in one's life.
Problems which involve the 'larger picture'; metaphysical dilemmas, the human condition.
Whether or not one is happy in life, or whether or not one has 'wasted' their life away.
The grandness in scale of these problems is precisely what leads to them becoming seemingly unanswerable, and to that extent, not worth answering.
Problems which overstate themselves as problems, problems which since there is seemingly 'no way out' it would appear better for one not to think about it.
And when one does indeed think about it, in a social aspect, perhaps when trying to discuss this with others, it only comes about as a plaything of thought.
Nothing too serious. More of a joke of conversation than a problem worth real analysis, let alone solving (together).
I refer to moments when one has seriously found themselves stuck.
Stuck in a loop, persistent thoughts, perhaps a lingering paranoia or anxiety.
Or stuck in place, having come across an obstacle too large to face. Where the only option let is to stick one's head in the sand.
What I want to suggest is that existential problems are real problems.
These problems of life which become assimilated into normal life as 'just those moments' or things which occur every so often that can go without paying any real attention to them.
By 'real' I am referring to precisely the Real in psychoanalysis.
The Real which is only experienced as a traumatic event.
A break in one's world (symbolic/imaginary).
A break in reality.
Which forces us to transform - either ourselves or the world around us- so as to fit this break into a narrative.
This is only to say real problems are problems we encounter which leave us shook.
Forcibly changed.
Problems of the Real.
We can recognise the discourse of one's existential nihilism and inescapable angst in the form of ironic mentionings, or jokes, to which a common reply to such heavy statements amongst young people would be "same".
This is a way in which we attempt to symbolise the Real.
"Same" is to say "we have the same holes - the same gaps in our fundamental reality."
It is the sameness of the thing which we cannot fully express, which remains outside of our articulation and which haunts us as this spectre or thing that we can sense/feel (to imagine in a Lacanian sense of the Imaginary register) yet cannot fully grasp.
This is why if you ask someone who says "same" in reply to something, why it is they say it or what it is they mean by it, they will most likely reply with "just same".
It exists as a gap or break in our reality that becomes a part of our reality only once we find a means to express it. By producing and using a language to signify this 'missing thing' that becomes our paranoid obsession we repress and which enters our unconscious (only to come back out).
All "repression is the return of the repressed" - a simple Freudian premise recovered in Lacan's seminars, which means a thing repressed is always the return of that which is already repressed.
It doesn't 'disappear' but instead always re-appears. Once in the conscious, and again in the unconscious. Everything in the unconscious spills out so to speak. It is said that in analysis the Analyst is on the lookout - yet also simply just waiting - for the symptom to cough itself up.
It is also in the Lacanian sense that the "Unconscious is structured like a language".
The Unconscious is not some hidden chasm, an abyss or pit in the psyche which fills itself with vanished concepts. It is the surface layer which reveals itself as a gap in the surface.
To try and express this simply, when a thing 'goes missing', we forget or repress something at the psychic level, it doesn't go somewhere. It goes nowhere.
It isn't embraced in the language i.e the everyday, in the symbolic.
And thus becomes an unexplained 'x'. It turns up somewhere else. What we forget, will be remembered somewhere else. Psychoanalysis warns us that the body speaks too, and that it can remember and speak for us, what we have forgotten.
The Unconscious is the process by which a thing moves - from where it was to somewhere else - the unrecognised movement of a thing from a space in our cognition to somewhere non-cognitive.
Is an anxiety or panic attack not an example par excellence of what it means for the body to speak for itself?
It is often unwarranted and comes as a sudden surprise to us. It feels as if something else has taken control of us (precisely why Freud referred to it as the Id, which comes from a translation of 'the it'. As opposed to the self (ego) or 'over-self' (superego). The it is that which is inside of us yet feels completely other to us)
It is the movement and exchange between "a signifier for another signifier".12
It is this exchange from one type of word to another (such as the words spoken by our body, in aches, pains, sudden desires, wants, and needs) that we do not and can not fully account for.
Which come out of nowhere - the Unconscious.
Where we purposefully or otherwise forget to pay attention is where the unconscious comes in.
An equivalent epistemological take is that of the 'God of the gaps' - an allegory that refers to how historically, circumstances which were at the time 'unexplainable' became associated directly with God.
What was once unexplainable was solved with "clearly it is just God, who is beyond our knowing".
The unconscious works precisely as God does here:
"For the true formula of atheism is not God is dead—even by basing the origin of the function of the father upon his murder, Freud protects the father—the true formula of atheism is God is unconscious."13
Signifier exchange, I.e to symbolise and give language to the Real, that repressed thing which lurks outside our lexicon, the horror beyond comprehension, becomes comprehensible the more we symbolise it. The more language we use to express it, the more it can become embedded into our world-narrative.
God has been the signifier given to the Real until the natural sciences came along and replaced God with phenomena and independent variables. God of the gaps had been replaced, those gaps became filled with naturwissenschaft. The language of science.
Nietzsche had already made this claim, when in the Genealogy he speaks of how Christianity and the Will to Know gave rise to the sciences and eventually Darwin. Who of course in bringing about the theories of evolution and natural selection, effectively killed God.
This is to say it is Christianity itself which has killed God.
It is in Lacan then where we are warned the formula for atheism is not God is Dead but is God is Unconscious, and by going back to Nietzsche we can realise and exercise this God which haunts us in its death.
The point being that God much like the Unconscious functions by means of Gaps.
These signifiers which we give to the gaps in the world and ourselves are not always so sufficient as to fill the gaps, but they're more like markers which point to them.
They are landmarks which point to where something isn't.
God and the Unconscious end up being used to mark the absence of something. "something is missing - and it is God/Unconscious"
Science had then come along to indeed fill the gap.
A harsh lesson from Lacanian Psychoanalysis is that the gap (the Real) is indeed never filled. The gap is more of a black hole. Which absorbs all that comes near it.
Language then, that is the signifiers we create and use, only work in making the gap appear filled until we come across the Real once again. In believing the gap is filled we foolishly step into it. Only to fall.
Existential crises are indeed these events where we fall into a black hole which appears full on the surface.
They are not 'gradual' occurrences. Building up slowly over a long time.
One is instead thrown (Heidegger uses the term verfallen or 'fallen-ness' to describe a fundamental aspect of being itself - to be is to be thrown into existence) into a crisis seemingly out of nowhere, and our attempts to explain this feeling seem to fail at truly grasping it (the lesson perhaps being there is nothing to grasp and there never was).
It is the feeling of going nowhere, or not going at all.
It is a dismal insignificance.
It is a comic nihilism, a loss of sense (of self), a dreaded knowing or not-knowing of something wrong with existence itself at large.
What a profound, human experience.
In some cases, this feeling seems to slide. Disappearing somewhere.
For others, a shift has been made in the narrative they have about themselves and the world around them. About existence.
Both are still affected by it.
When one experiences the Real, it comes to us as a loss. Our own loss, brought about purely by existing.
In both cases, the Real has come into the picture, and something has to change.
For the former, the change becomes Unconscious.
By choosing not to pay attention and symbolise this new imagined thing (repressing) it returns in another form.
It is expressed not by us, but by the parts of us which will speak for us.
Suddenly something is different, perhaps about ourselves, or about the world itself, but it is not noticeable. It goes unnoticed. It is here the speaking which is done for us shows itself: anger, depression, hunger, illness, fatigue…
"a signifier for another signifier."
This page is dedicated purely to exploring what is meant by "the subject is that which is represented by a signifier for another signifier"
Please feel free to skip to the next page to continue
"The subject
which is to say, the subject of the unconscious. Not the ego; that is, not the notion of ourselves that occurs within the stories we tell ourselves and other people about who we are, and not the notion of ourselves insofar as identify with such a narrative. But rather that which is at work in us prior to these stories, whose working was underscored by Freud's work on the unconscious; that whose work in us is revealed in our recurring patterns of behavior, our self-sabotaging, our anxieties, our preoccupations, even and especially when these seem unfathomable to us.
is that which is represented by a signifier
so that, first, on the side of the signifier, the subject is something represented. That is, the subject expresses itself, for example through recurring patterns of behavior and so on. While, second, on the side of the subject, the subject comes into being through the distance from itself that is involved in the act of expression, and in particular through the context which permits and prohibits certain kinds of expressions, so that by virtue of the fact that there is something that need be expressed, that is removed from the scene and replaced, as it were, by its expressions, we say that the subject is there.
for another signifier
where these expressions are directed toward not another subject, nor an ego, but rather to the field of expression itself, in which they take their place alongside, and mean to exert their effect through their relation to, other expressions."14
If we don't pay attention, instead we change in a way we don't realise we have.
The change itself will go unnoticed.
" I change, but it isn't me who is doing the changing. Something else changes me. Someone else."
To the point where the change is not recognised sometimes at all.
And it is in these cases where sometimes nothing is done.
"I haven't changed, there is no change."
When we do finally speak of it, it comes as jokes, irony, nihilism.
Attempts at humour with a kind of hope that we will in a sense be heard, but by a part of us which we didn't recognise as speaking.
When the Unconscious itself speaks. And it hopes to be listened to.
In the latter, the change is recognised, and one can speak of it, and makes the choice either to or not to.
I write this because it is in the interest of analysis, of desiring, of listening to ourselves, that we attempt to pay attention to the Real.
To recognise the feeling we describe as a crisis of the existential order (e.g.worthlessness on a cosmic scale, incompleteness, the radical hopelessness of the future) is indeed Real, and if not attempted to be heard or spoken about, will force in us a transformation which we are not prepared for.
A transformation in us which we cannot explain.
Which haunts us.
"something is missing" -
Yet this missing thing is just out of reach.
In this way we become missing to ourselves. We lose a sense. Our ability to control what we manifest as reality becomes fickle.
To instead draw out this unexplained feeling, to embrace the Real head on and bring about a means to appreciate its existence, the more we can insert this missing something into a subjective narrative. Which makes sense.
And which comes to represent our ability to control the reality which manifests itself and which we manifest.
In the same way science had come to fill the gaps previously in the world and in our knowledge of the world - where once God was used as a poor attempt at covering it up.
Psychoanalysis too marks the gaps and then provides a language which 'fills them up' - to make sense of the unexplainable something missing, by dealing with the Real head on:
"According to Lacan, to reach its endpoint, an analysis must modify the relationship of the subject to the real, which is an irreducible whole in the symbolic from which the subject's fantasy and desire derive."
https://nosubject.com/Talk:Real
"Psychoanalysis is not a religion. It proceeds from the same status as science itself." - Sigmund Freud
"Every science is based on observations and experiences arrived at through the medium of our psychical apparatus. But since our science has as its subject that apparatus itself, the analogy ends here." - Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
"While it was originally the name of a particular therapeutic method [...] it has now also become the name of a science - the science of unconscious mental processes." Sigmund Freud, Outline of Psychoanalysis
“I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there’s no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it’s through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.”
Jacques Lacan on television (1973)
Existential problems are Real problems.
Allow yourself to take something which bothers you seriously.
Allow yourself the space to come to terms with the things which surprise us and which leave us in suspense.
And in that suspense find a means to bring calm, comfort and familiarity into this space - to patch the break/gap in our reality with language.
"a weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not EXIST [...] Yet if the entity or object is here, then the categories which we have up until now used to make sense of the world cannot be valid [...] it is our conceptions that must be inadequate."
This is not to say that by expressing your problems they magically go away; it is to say 'that which we ignore as a real problem will (in an almost seemingly obvious irony) always come to reveal itself as a real problem in another way'.
One then has the choice to begin analysis and acceptance.
To start a journey by which one's transformation is controlled.
As opposed to out of control.
Or, to allow this possibility of analysis void.
To ignore one's own self at the expense of one's own self.
To deny that what one needs is help.
Please allow yourself to process your problems as Real problems.
No matter how grandiose, or 'normalised' they are.
It is in this way that normalisation can go from being the acceptance of repression at the level of the collective cultural consciousness - to the normalisation of treatment, care, and in helping one another deal with the problems which torment us.
This is itself a key to the solution Mark Fisher began to provide us with to the problem of Capitalist Realism.
To realise that although our suffering is unique and individual, the causes of our suffering are collective. They are material. Political. Economic. Social. Historical.
A problem at the level of the collective requires treatment at the level of the collective.
At the level of the material, political, social, economic and historical - this is what schizoanalysis aims at.
And through this realisation, to escape the "pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action." 15
“This makes capitalism very much like the Thing in John Carpenter’s film of the same name: a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact.”
“Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.”
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism.
To escape the thing which haunts us (for the left, Capital, an existing horror and threat at the level of existence) requires us to first accept it as such.
As a spectre which requires an exorcism.
Then, we must only begin to imagine possible alternatives; a world in which this spectre is exorcised and we are no longer haunted,
To break the 'invisible barrier constraining thought and actions' requires first we need only to imagine us breaking out.
And then by expressing and symbolising this imagined way out, by formulating and creating a language around the Real thing which horrifies us, we embrace and introduce a means to escape
'find your lines of flight' as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the thinkers behind schizoanalysis, suggest.
To use the productivity of désire (desiring-production) to bring about the new.
To create, to find, to imagine, to produce.
"Find your black holes and white walls, know them, know your faces; it is the only way you will be able to dismantle them and draw your lines of flight."
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This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO.
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Experiment, don't signify and interpret! Find your own places, territorialities, deterritorializations, regime, lines of flight! Semiotize yourself instead of rooting around in your prefab childhood and Western semiology.
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Where psychoanalysis says, "Stop, find your self again," we should say instead, "Let's go further still, we haven't found our BwO yet, we haven't sufficiently dismantled our self." Substitute forgetting for anamnesis, experimentation for interpretation. Find your body without organs. Find out how to make it. It's a question of life and death, youth and old age, sad-ness and joy. It is where everything is played out.
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This is not a phantasy, it is a program: There is an essential difference between the psychoanalytic interpretation of the phantasy and the antipsychiatric experimentation of the program. Between the phantasy, an interpretation that must itself be interpreted, and the motor program of experimentation.5 The BwO is what remains when you take everything away. What you take away is precisely the phantasy, and signifiances and subjectifications as a whole. Psychoanalysis does the opposite: it translates everything into phantasies, it converts everything into phantasy, it retains the phantasy. It royally botches the real, because it botches the BwO."
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
Referring to the philosopher and "father of accelerationism" - Nick Land - and the critique of his position as a rightist/reactionary from the left which is exemplified here by Mark Fisher and his book Capitalist Realism.
The 'message' as such of Capitalist Realism is in describing a malaise in which Capitalism has invaded the imaginary, making it virtually impossible to think outside of it. We are forced to view Capitalism as inevitable. 'Necessary'.
Which begins with a comparison being made to Michel Foucault's Disciplinary Society.
A reference to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's book title of the same name.
Don't Even Dream About It here has combined the materialist dialectical approach of Mao (Particular-Universal-Particular) with the rhizomatic approach of Deleuze & Guattari, micropolitics & macropolitics, molar & molecular. Inviting the Rhizome into dialectical thought, or introducing difference to contradiction.
A concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in the plateau: 10,000 B.C: On the Geology of Morals (Who does the Earth think it is?)
These are how the neurotic deal with the problem (in modern psychiatry, neurosis is often replaced with the term 'high-level defense mechanism', and psychosis with 'low-level defense mechanism) typically. In analysis, the psychotic may 'deal' with the problem by foreclosure. This is the definition given by Jacques Lacan in his 'Seminar III: The Psychoses' of psychosis. It is foreclosure.
In Lacanian psychoanalysis, anxiety is the feeling of the over-proximity of the real, it is the unwanted and uncertain presence of the Other and their desire. Or what Lacan calls the objet petit a.
In the classic model of cognitive behavioural therapy; the aim is to observe how emotions/feelings, thoughts/cognitions, and actions/behaviours reify or reinforce one another as a kind of triad or triangle which connects these things together
A Lacanian term regarding a total barring or disclosure of a signifier.
"the subject is that which is represented by a signifier for another signifier" - Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p59.
"Capitalist realism [...] is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action." - Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism