by Sarah Wood
Shouldn’t a blog post have some sort of ‘live’ quality, moving unpredictably and therefore compellingly, coming from beyond the screen, sociably, having an address in the sense of ‘a manner in conversation’ (OED), a way of addressing its addressees, moving through and beyond the screen with a certain speed, brevity, ‘unpremeditated art’ as Shelley says, or ‘on the wing’ as my first analyst liked to say, probably thinking of free association and giving me a friendly nudge to loosen up in a way that the English romantic tradition often identifies with birds, birds heard by lone poets, often taken by critics for avatars of those poets and of singular imaginative freedom, yes, and it would be tempting to oppose nature to technology here but of course this isn’t possible in writing.
The poetic birds, skylark or nightingale, are never caught, they are already out on and out of the page or the screen, flying out of and networked into virtuality, therefore in some sense with and following other precursors in fugitivity, those denied psychic interiority or individual identity, cursors that don’t only show where the next character to be keyed will appear (OED) but let us feel how, in what manner, that appearance could happen, and in that sharing, showing the way, away, already inciting language and taking listeners to a pitch of sweetness and beyondness, circulating in a proliferation of inexact analogies and sweet music, that wring us to sympathy with hopes and fears we otherwise might heed not.
A blog can invite study on the internet. Legacy Russell’s work expands and extends the scope of internet studies by taking the movement of transference as a starting point for her book Black meme: ‘Blackness, always existing in transfer and transmission, is the originating cultural engine and machine’.[1] Elsewhere she describes her book’s intention to ‘expand maybe a discourse around internet studies to allow there to be other points of intersection that extend beyond this idea of what exists purely on our screens and digitality as we know it and define it now’.[2] This plural, disseminative movement of expansion and extension maintains the impulse to resist a dominant, colonial type of expansionism that derives a lot of its force from mechanisms of projection. These projections tend to linearise time at the same time as they take, settle into and violently defend space.
This brings me to Mylène Gamache’s searching and important essay on Psyche, which recently confronted me once more with the highly arresting sentence Derrida repeats a number of times in the first chapter of On Touching: ‘“Psyche ist ausgedehnt, weiss nicht davon” [Psyche is extended, knows nothing about it]’.[3]
(I imagined writing a blog post with the extensiveness of free association for example but also laconic as a dream. I supposed: keeping my supposing within the vocabulary, techniques and preoccupations of what I do for a living. Free association here is of course not free in the sense of undetermined but one of its freedoms would be to move between us, to de-individuate us, to loosen egoic control and with it dispense with the idea that I’m writing this and you are reading it, just us, nobody else here and we know where one begins and the other ends. I wanted in this way to incite awareness of telepathy, as Nicholas Royle has studied it, as a necessary precondition of all reading that does more or wants to do more, or less, than repeat a message and propagate an agenda.)
Gamache’s essay sets out to resist what it calls the ‘violent obsession’ of certain readers with ‘knowing and transfixing’ invented others, into whom otherness is put, towards whom attention is redirected.[4] She insists on this obsession and holds up a mirror to it, not as urgently as Hamlet, but by way of reading (that is, by way of writing); indirectly.
Hamlet is in no end of a hurry when he tells the players to ‘as ‘twere hold a mirror up to nature’ –.[5]
In time it starts to be less strange, when you see what Mylène Gamache is not doing and that it’s necessary as well as difficult to not-do.
I promised myself to be brief, meagre, laconic.
Now I write when I can as the regularity of the sessions and the intensities of attending, unpredictable, absolute, resisted make time day by day so that it’s not possible to think: This time is mine. This is my time. That’s not how it is.
So much to say and I find I have forgotten why I came here just now, what the thought was, whose thought it was.
I was kindly asked to write something, perhaps ‘about how theory informs your practice as a therapist or how therapy has changed your relationship to reading and writing.’ The invitation gave me time and brought time back to life but as I read it, I found I have no idea about those questions, no idea even of them. I can perhaps say something about being in for,
(Keats, who wrote an ode to Psyche, has this tempting phrase ‘in for’, where he writes about a ‘relish for the dark side of things’ and expands:
A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity – he is continually in for – and filling some other Body – The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute – the poet has none; no identity – he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s Creatures. If then he has no self, and if I am a Poet, where is the Wonder that I should say I would write no more?’[6]
This expression ‘filling some other Body’ unresistingly and revealingly links poetry, a self-affirming notion of having no self and the colonial in a way that Mylène Gamache’s essay, especially the work she does on reflection and projection, gives us new ways to think about—and watch out for.)
The in for I’m talking about is not about having or not having, or taking on, an identity. It refers more to the outstretching-ness of therapeutic work and the aphoristic or quasi-telepathic (simply telepathic?) quality of the best-because-least-dense interpretations or of the things people say when they are, one guesses, most capable of themselves.
The idea of being capable or not capable of one’s own distress comes up in the work of the forensic psychiatrist and psychotherapist Dr Gwen Adshead. I heard her talk last year about certain borderline states of mind using this phrase from Hamlet.[7] Gertrude uses it to describe Ophelia when she’s just had, or we might say come in for, these terrible experiences, her father has been murdered and her sweetheart Hamlet has been acting like a madman and being weird and nasty to her, and she loses her mind, becoming: ‘as one not capable of her own distress’ (H 4, 7; 682). Ophelia has been affected to a point where she’s no longer capable of her own feelings, they overflow her and we can see that she’s also flooded or eaten away at or caught up in the general rottenness that Hamlet points to in the court and in the Danish state, of course including the effect on her and everyone else of how that culture sees and imagines women. This combination of diffuse, severe adversity and affective intensity doesn’t readily fit into the idea of the autonomous, free, self-owning individual. Gertrude describes, and we see how in her madness Ophelia sings ‘snatches of old tunes’ and distributes flowers to members of the court. At last, everyone is listening, they can’t escape her meaning any longer, but in the same experience, the content of what she says is found unintelligible, or at times merely conventional, picturesque or folkloric.[8] She bears witness to the incomprehensible, so do we, and she is carried off along the brook and dies, tangled in her own clothes, her weeds.
According to Nicolas Abraham ‘the body proper derives from the psychic as one of its functions, the psychic having been defined by Freud as an exterior layer, an envelope’.[9] Mylène Gamache’s reading of Psyche does not aim to contemplate her or find out who she is. She envelops her, re-dresses her in writings by Hortense Spillers, Proust, Ann Carson, Cixous, Kleist and so on, so that her sleeping, dreaming drama-flesh may appear on-stage, even centre stage as the main topic of her essay, but her body is still closed for knowing from outside, sealed and opaque. She’s no longer, and therefore never was, what Nancy’s readings tried to take her for, what Proust’s Marcel tries to take her for: the kind of un-knowing creature of impulse who is out there, empty and ready, just asking to be filled up with individuating projections. Gamache follows Derrida in recovering Freud’s challenge to Kantian conceptions of space:
August 22.—Space may be the projection of the extension of the psychical apparatus. No other derivation is probable. Instead of Kant’s a priori determinants of our psychical apparatus. Psyche is extended; knows nothing about it. (‘FIP’, 300, cited OT, 11-12 and ‘RP’, 2)
Words may arrive, awake, all at once, in a general displacement and from an inside where there is neither inside nor outside. Looking must listen, must not try to make present what it sees.
I always wanted to feel something spreading out from writing.
On the facing page of the Standard Edition, following the notes Freud made about Psyche and other things in August 1938, is a letter dated 16th November. It’s the last text in the 23 volumes. In it, Freud responds to the editor of the English publication Time and Tide, who has asked him to contribute to a special issue on antisemitism. Freud acknowledges his status of displaced person, stating how he had to leave Vienna, the city he came to from Moravia as a small child, the dissolution of the scientific society he founded, the destruction of psychoanalytic institutions, also of the means of mechanical reproducibility of psychoanalysis, the press he founded and its publications, also the expulsion of his children from their professions. He cites a verse from Jean Sauvé de la Noue’s La Coquette Corrigée, to the effect that he’s not there to play the part of victim-content-provider or expert-participant-witness that is being offered to him. To ask someone affected by antisemitism to write about it, he makes clear without saying, is a displacement. It should be a matter of a call for the utterances of ‘non-Jewish people, less personally involved than myself’, who ought to feel passing through them a shared feeling of sharing a feeling, what Freud calls, in English, a ‘wave of sympathy’.[10] Where is it? Where are our waves of sympathy for the displaced?
Hélène Cixous articulates the pre-, the discontinuous, what is other than language, that helps constitute language, with the help of punctuation: ‘First we feel. Then I write’.[11] There’s a break, a point, a stop. Then she starts again, her ‘I write’ having been started by and depending on another pronoun and another verb that include her but in a way that makes it clear how writing does not arise from the individual genius. Fred Moten wrangles the Kantian wannabee feel-the-flow of spatial extension, projection, identification, colonisation by putting identity all up in writing that comes from many places, inverting and questioning the familiar word order of the invitation to feel the flow, or go with the flow, perhaps in a meme or on a poster with a picture of a waterfall: ‘feel we? fuck the flow’.[12]
For both Cixous and Moten the relation between the continuous and the discontinuous has something to do with breath: ana in Sanskrit, and another, homophonic ana-, meaning:
1. ‘upward, up in place or time,’ 2. ‘back, backward, against,’ 3. ‘again, anew,’ from Greek ana (prep.) ‘up, on, upon; up to, toward; throughout; back, backwards; again, anew,’ from an extended form of PIE root *an- (1) ‘on, upon, above’.[13]
Language fucks with its own flow all the time. The extension of ‘on, upon, above’ turns out to include its recursive counter-forms of ‘back’ and ‘against’ as well as both repetition (‘again’) and invention (‘anew’). Some readers will remember Nicolas Abraham’s coinage anasemia, in which ana- signifies a ‘strange semantic phenomenon’ whereby psychoanalytic terms run ‘counter to the known laws of discursive ratiocination’ (SK I, 85). They are words disturbed by an ‘action of moving up towards the source of their customary meaning’.
There is nothing simple about breathing any more, nor about ‘we’ or ‘feel’ or ‘flow,’ nor about ‘through’, or the Proto-Indo-European root per with its intimations of just moving forward and through, that hangs around, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, in the -pret of ‘interpretation.’ Flow and stretching out are not the same.
Everything happens in the working through. This is always a group thing, a social thing, you can’t do it on your own.
One dictionary is never enough.
Returning to the word ‘interpretation’: maybe the OED’s different suggestion, that the -pret in ‘interpret’ is not from per but comes from a ‘base corresp. to Sanskrit prath —spread about’ gets to it better, because spreading about relies on something common, less linear, less lytic, more like spreading butter on toast so it melts, or breathing, or hearing something through the grapevine, that is to say, more on the side of unbinding and the psycho/ana/lytic. It also more loosely or poetically links interpretation with the pre-.
Moten writes, not about flow, not directly about the chemistry of flow but in ‘the intrafacial lair’ he writes as if the poem comes straight out of a time, sounds like a good time, spent by the sea, that is, at the air-water interface, with company including the flow chemist Arnelle Fonlon, a member of the Herbert group at Ohio State University, where their research aims
at extending ab initio electronic structure theory (‘quantum chemistry’) to large systems. We are especially interested in condensed-phase spectroscopic experiments that probe the electronic states of molecules, radicals, and ions in aqueous solution and at the air/water interface.[14]
The poem foams language at this air-water interface with aerosol (shaving foam, maybe, for the facial hair) and sea-foam, and the immixture of languages and sound, food, spray—really the poem is nothing like this, so much better, so exact: the fontanelle of contact-barrier idiom. You hear the quiet conviviality, but also the ships, the historical wrong, but also the anasemically ‘wrong’ moves of Black speech (as he hears it in ‘anæxplanatory note’, ‘steady reciting their sighting, it’s so exciting, we so wrong, we gon’ / be aiight?’ (ATB, 125). The written or danced contact distance-writes another ‘little / history of sip and shhhh’.[15]
How do you get from wanting to be right to being all right by way of writing, except by way of the ‘wrong’ sound does in speech?
Derrida, Freud, Nancy, Gamache: the names seem to ask for more attention from me, much more to say about them, of course, here in an OLR blog, but really what’s of interest is speaking to you now like this and the names mean nothing unless you already felt them, or go off to read them wrought into a magical stream streaming and becoming, including the fatal brook, the ocean current.
Anonymous,
Last night reading Perennial Fashion: Presence Falling … but it’s in all the poems; he does the names and it so happened we came upon ‘Wrong’ Contact Improvisation.[16] You see/hear a name in the poem, no capitals, the grammar not holding a space for an individual as much as streaming them, in chemistry of physics of names, hyper-delinking language so you move along at speeds you never knew were possible. Reading together online, socialising like gamers in a long game, deconstruction probably being a long game, as is psychoanalysis, probably, we go from page to screen and back again through it and Fred Holland and Ishmael Houston-Jones dancing and talking.
Stopping to see and hear. (How not to steal, how not to own is the same discipline.) Moten quotes. Never heard anything like how son, how sonic and how speech it is before.
‘That was cool,’ said Forbes.
We read together every week, whoever we think we are, for about three years now; one way to try to imagine what already exists.[17] With, done, without introductions.
There are introdictations, like the ambient talk and noise or the talk-in or the party sound at the beginning of the song, that it’s important to be able to hear.[18]
Notes, or rather nots. The notes are prompts to recall everything at once, to start remembering going again. (I mean my session nots, not academic endknots like casting off in sewing.)
I do not return to the nots they do not stitch in place.
Forget-em-notes.
- Legacy Russell, Black Meme: a history of the images that make us (New York, Verso, 2024), 37-8 (hereinafter BM). ↑
- ‘Spectators and Witnesses: Legacy Russell and Fred Moten’, The Verso Podcast, 2 May 2024, https://open.spotify.com/episode/0PwxFT7zmTtNzZyFUfNP9x?si=793a28e881e04da6, consulted 1 November 2024. ↑
- Jacques Derrida, On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy, translated by Christine Irizarry (Stanford California, Stanford University Press, 2005), 11 (hereinafter OT); Sigmund Freud, ‘Findings, Ideas, Problems’, in The Complete Psychological Works, volume 23, edited and translated by James Strachey (London, Vintage Books, 2001), 299-300, 300 (hereinafter ‘FIP’). ↑
- Mylène Gamache, ‘Reflecting “Psyche”: a protocol for colonial readers’, unpublished essay, 2024, 40 (hereinafter ‘RP’). ↑
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet Act 3 scene 2 in The Complete Works, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998), 653-690, 671. ↑
- John Keats, letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27th, 1818 in The Major Works (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990), 418-419, 419. ↑
- Gwen Adshead, ‘Attachment, Personality and Interventions’, talk at the Oxford Psychotherapy Society, 17 March 2023. ↑
- Horatio’s description of Ophelia’s dishevelled speech describes its refusal to assume proper form or content. He says she ‘speaks things in doubt / That carry but half sense’ (H 4, 5; 678). Ophelia refuses the kind of access to the signifier that has already been refused to her because she is an unmarried woman, a commoner at court, cut loose from her menfolk: ‘Her speech is nothing, / Yet the unshaped use of it doth move / The hearers to collection. They aim at it, / And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts, / Which, as her winks and nods and gestures yield them, / Indeed would make one think there might be thought, / Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily’. This individuating idea of collection as a way of listening that takes aim at someone’s unshaped, fugitive use of speech and shapes it to fit the hearer’s preconceptions, stealing it from the speaker, has haunted psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, at least since Dora. ↑
- Nicolas Abraham, ‘The Shell and the Kernel: the scope and originality of Freudian psychoanalysis’ in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel volume I, edited and translated by Nicholas Rand (Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1994), 79-98, 87. The same logic operates in Legacy Russell’s framing of the Middle Passage as a medium of transmission predating modern media: ‘The transfer of the “Black meme” as a material comes down to the movement of Black data as carried by Black people, carried first in the form of our physical bodies. This caused a rupture in Black speech, gesture, movement, embodiment that was then co-opted by the violent project of American capitalism’ (BM, 33-34). ↑
- Sigmund Freud, ‘Anti-semitism in England’, Letter to the Editor of Time and Tide, 16 November 1938, SE 23, 301. ↑
- Hélène Cixous, ‘Writing Blind: Conversation with the donkey’, translated by Eric Prenowitz in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London and New York, Routledge, 1998), 116-125, 118. ↑
- Fred Moten, ‘anæxplanatory note’, all that beauty (Seattle, Washington, Letter Machine Editions, 2019), 124-125, 125. ‘We will fuck with flow’ is the sixth tenet of the ‘Wrong’ Contact Manifesto (see note 16 below), ‘We are black’ being the first. ↑
- Online Etymology Dictionary https://www.etymonline.com/word/ana-#etymonline_v_13377, consulted 27 October 2024. ↑
- John Herbert research group, Electronic structure theory, molecular quantum mechanics, and software, https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/herbert.44/index.html , consulted 27 October 2024. ↑
- Fred Moten, ‘the intrafacial lair’, Perennial Fashion: Presence Falling (Seattle / New York, Wave Books, 2023), 26-27, 27. ↑
- Fred Holland and Ishmael Houston-Jones, ‘“Wrong” Contact Manifesto, 1983’ and excerpt from untitled duet, 1983, sound score by Mark Allen Larson, contact at 10th & 2nd festival, Danspace, NYC, video: Cathy Weis. In CQ Contact Improvisation Newsletter, special edition CI 50th Anniversary 2022
https://contactquarterly.com/contact-improvisation/newsletter/view/wrong-contact-manifesto#$, consulted 7 October 2024. ↑
- It’s usually Moten that we read, which means we also have read Kant, Roy deCarava, Jennie C. Jones, Paul de Man and Ilse Grubrich-Simitis and taken excursions to study the works and lives of many people in Moten’s writing: ‘… we need to know something about who and what we are. We need to be able to imagine of … what … what exists in a way that’s sort of more intense I think than the need to imagine what doesn’t exist …’ (Moten, ‘Figuring It Out’, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmnFeGaCkGI, excerpted from Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, https://soundcloud.com/poetry-project-audio/stefano-harney-fred-moten-april-24th-2015, consulted 21 January 2022. I see no reason why this need to imagine would not have something to do with what goes on in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. ↑
- MC Solaar has a first track called ‘Introdiction’ on the album Cinquième As (Elektra, 2001) that opens with a sound of waves, and maybe floating radio signals, tuning sounds, scraps of speech coming through blurred or scratchy as if the means of transmission is under some kind of pressure that MC Solaar wants to communicate. Moten points to the black musical practice of indicating that ‘this is music that emerges from a social situation’, citing the work of Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, Martell Jordan and Charles Mingus, in ‘Revolution as Preservation: a Conversation with Fred Moten’ on the Being Human: Humanities at the University of Pittsburgh, podcast June 2020, https://open.spotify.com/episode/7kItvySTMUGYA193i5vKJG?si=0639aa92d2fb413a, consulted 2 November 2024. ↑
