There is perhaps a tendency to think the symptom as a sort of tick. You are before your symptom whenever you have a repetitive twitch, perpetually fail in some repeated endeavor, can’t help saying a particular word, and so on. Yet perhaps a better way of thinking the symptom is as a way of receiving or even welcoming the Other. As Lacan liked to emphasize, the words of the Other always carry a certain surplus. “You’re telling me this, but what is it that you really mean?” Were there words an act of seduction, an act of aggression, an act of rejection, an act of indifference? This person here is talking to me, but what is the desire behind their talk. To say the symptom is a way of receiving the Other is to say that the symptom fills out this anxiety provoking void. A friend recently pointed out to me that I often take comments addressed to me in a hostile manner, interpreting them as criticisms or attacks, rather than as elaborations of what I’ve said building on that thought and exploring it. This would be a sort of symptom, a way of welcoming the Other. Of course, in welcoming the Other in this way the Other doesn’t feel very welcome. Indeed, the symptom drives the Other off, beats them down.
The aim of analysis is a sort of fundamental re-orientation of the symptom; a transfiguration of the co-ordinates within which you experience the symptom. The symptom allows for infinite variation, but it produces the monotony of the same. Like an algebraic function– F(x) = 2x –we plug in the values of x (all the Others we encounter), and we get an infinite series, but they are all variations of the same pattern: for 2 we get 4, for 3 we get 6, for 4 we get eight. Always the same welcome of the Other fit into the function without the Other ever arriving.
What would it really mean to welcome the Other? Lacan says that the analyst’s desire is an impure desire: that it desires absolute difference… That difference that composes the analysand. Of course, judging by the case studies we hear at Clinical Days and psychoanalytic interpretations in the world of theory, this is seldom achieved. But all the same… What would it mean to truly welcome the Other? What would it mean to hear beyond the symptom or the frame? I think of all the voices that have fallen silent in the last two years. Bloggers that grew quiet. Conversations that fell off. Blogs that went cold. All of these encounters gone. Did I not welcome beyond my symptom? Did I murder the difference of alterity? What would it mean to encounter in such a way that your difference is not effaced or absorbed, while truly welcoming the stranger, the Nebensmensch? What would it mean to escape the logic of Territory.
February 5, 2008 at 6:20 am
Maybe you have just developed a severe language problem. Really! If other people are “the other”, then we all have a big problem. I prefer to think of other people as real people. I always thought that psychologically, “the other” is another self with whom one is involved in an interior dialogue, in the development of personal identity. Bringing this kind of interiority out into the world and laying it on other people seems like a derangement, an imposition, and an example of a first class superiority complex. Not to mention a guarantee that you will never know these people; no wonder they keep disappearing.
February 5, 2008 at 6:34 am
I think the central question is how to think of others as “real people”. Yet the issue is that we always encounter them through a frame that undermines or assimilates that “realness” by filtering them through a particular interpretive network. Looking about at how “real people” actually behave towards one another, do you think that severe language problems are a unique pathology?
February 5, 2008 at 7:02 am
I don’t think of other people as having severe language problems. I think of them as more real than myself, and I think of myself as unresolved: “a person put together by others”, as a poet has said. The fact that you put “real people” in quotes–I would classify THAT as a severe language problem; of the type peculiar to intellectuals, especially those who study such things as psychology. I share this fallibility, but I don’t think other people in general have a pathological language problem, certainly! If they did, the language would shrivel up and die.
February 5, 2008 at 7:05 am
Lloyd, are you familiar with Lacan whose language is being used in this post? And why aren’t you encountering me as a real person?
February 5, 2008 at 7:29 am
I began by suggesting PRECISELY that you have a severe language problem (at least in this post); though I assume you are a real person, with only a localized, or temporary, severe language problem. I am familiar enough with Lacan to know that a transposition of the concept of his “the other” to other actual people in one’s life is a kind of comic error. And also to know that he has a similar severe language problem–which, fortunately, as also in your case, does not affect the language itself. I will not be offended, though, if you tell me I am talking through my hat.
I am just a sort of self-indulgent fiction writer, defending the language.
February 5, 2008 at 7:32 am
I’m confused. Why is ‘the other’ not a real person? I mean, I get that often it is an abstraction which can produce the distance required to throw one’s hands up in despair and say ‘I’ll never be able to deal with them! They’re crazy/stupid/irrational/whatever.’ but I don’t see the *necessity* of that in what Sinthome has set out here.
Eric of Recording Surface (sorry, I can’t html-it-up, but feel free to edit my comment, if you like, Sinthome) and I have been conversing around precisely these kinds of questions of late: how to permit alterity to matter beyond the grasping, ‘getting’ logic of possession. Perhaps part of the welcome is to do precisely as you’re doing here, Sinthome: to open up space in which you permit the negotiation and renegotiation of styles of engagement such that others might be allowed proximity sufficient to alter you, not just superficially but fundamentally. I don’t intend this to sound lecture-y, and I know it comes off a little… erm… personal (unsurprising, I suppose, given the content of your post), but I’ve been working over these ideas a lot of late.
The acknowledgement that one is not complete, finished and whole is, I think, part of what permits space for the other to affect me. This is a form of generosity not to be underestimated; it’s tempting, always, to claim one’s theoretical position or subjectivity as already-fully-constituted, with the concurrent assumption that one’s perceptual practices are more than adequate to ‘see’ another (or to answer every question the world could throw up). In not claiming such sovereign coherence, in not fully ‘getting’ ourselves, in allowing ourselves to be in process, and permitting that to be seen, we enable the possibility of being altered by the other beyond what I ‘get’ of them—the other *as* other—an alteration which IMHO is, in fact, welcome itself. Perhaps that *is* derangement. It certainly takes an unusual form of courage, I think, because it requires a troubling of what is supposed to be most solid (the me-ness of me!), but the risk is often worth it for thousands of reasons. Not least, from what you’ve said, the challenging of the belief that people, in finding your ideas interesting and evocative, are being hostile. :-) But more than that, the other draws me on to dance (okay, that’s unlikely to make sense without some reading of Diprose, Nietzsche or my recent posts); but what I mean is that the alteration in welcome of the other offers the subject the possibilities of new futures, of new ways of thinking, of new styles of being, of new lines of flight, new becomings (to play it Deleuzean, in which I’m not overly practiced! Although he’d probably quite like the idea of derangement in this context, come to think of it.)
(Now I’ll just run off and feel foolishly paranoid about trackbacking – I sincerely hope that wasn’t construed as hostile!!)
February 5, 2008 at 7:32 am
In his work during the 50s Lacan speaks of the Other in terms of the opacity of the Other person. It makes up the benchmark of seminars 4-6. It’s a polyvocal term. Yet that aside, you seem to be in a performative contradiction as you simultaneously speak of what it would mean to speak of the other as real person while generalizing an other you encounter.
February 5, 2008 at 7:34 am
Oh, and to be clear: my Lacan is thoroughly lacking, and with Irigaray by my side, that’s just the way I like it ;-P (Sorry, I couldn’t resist the joke: I just mean that if I’ve misconstrued on the basis of not knowing Lacan, I apologise in advance.)
February 5, 2008 at 7:36 am
And, of course, one might wonder about your motivation of “defending the language”, which, as a literary trope, I’m sure you sense, evokes all sorts of metaphors about battlements, territories, boundaries, and so on.
February 5, 2008 at 7:53 am
You are driving a hard bargain here. I have not made the proposition of other people provisional at all; I have categorically declared other people as real. Except in your case, when you write this way. And that is precisely because you are hiding behind this intellectualized language, which is a severe problem if you intend to communicate with others, who are real people–outside your particular community of people who also indulge in Lacan-speak. (You can communicate with “the Other” all you want in this language; you might even get a reply from the Other, for all I know.) If you just mean to say that I am dancing around the topic, yes–that is true enough.
February 5, 2008 at 7:54 am
There’s a specific language real people speak?
February 5, 2008 at 8:09 am
I liked this post for the opening or space it attempts to create, through the recognition of a particular difficulty confronting communications and interactions – the difficulty of how we see past the very interpretative frames that must also see through. I’m not sure whether to find it appropriate, or to find it an irony, that what should then immediately become the flashpoint for the discussion is a conflict over the different connotations of the vocabulary in play in the post… Regardless, the sorts of communications that move us beyond ourselves require, I would think, a recognition that vocabulary is not always “charged” the same way for all people – the presumption that we are talking about the same things, through the same terms, generally isn’t a safe presumption. The presumption that the impact a statement empirically has on us, was the intended impact, also isn’t a safe assumption. I thought the post did a nice job, and an important one, thematising these issues.
I have a similar reaction, I have to admit, of incredulity at the implication that “real” people speak in some particular way – a way that seems to be positioned as more authentic or less troubled than intellectual discourse. Of course I probably would say that… Still, this position seems to require a strange reification and romanticisation of the perceived authenticity of certain ways of speaking or being in the world. Strangely, this kind of romanticisation strikes me as intellectualist – it would seem to involve a strange view that positions itself outside what it claims to speak for?
Regardless, I would hope this issue doesn’t cause the loss of the question of how it becomes possible to cultivate interactions, communities, exchanges that stretch us across our current habitual ways of encountering others…
February 5, 2008 at 4:13 pm
Unfortunately, I’m strapped for time right now. In fact, the stack of papers waiting for to me to mark up is mocking me as I’m typing this, so I’ll try to get it all out quickly and then leave.
Anyway, the exchanges above remind me (because it’s rather fresh in my head) of John Searle’s critique of computational models of mental processes, esp. the “Chinese Room” thought experiment in which a man locked in a room and given a good deal of Chinese characters an a program written in his native language for using/manipulating these characters, which, he can only identify by their form. A person on the other side of the locked door pass the man questions in the form of particular arrangements of characters, given the program the man can follow the instructions and construct replies of different arrangements and pass them underneath the door. The answers given by the man (and Searle’s point is that a computer program, an input machine, a game that imitates reality etc) cannot be distinguished from a native Chinese speaker who understood the questions being passed under the door. The point being, sure we can simulate the communication of meaning by invoking rules etc, but that’s different than actually realizing such meaning. However, on the other hand, the Derridean response (esp in Limited Inc. and the “monograph” on Levinas in Writing and Difference where he is asking if Levinas is speaking Greek or not) is interesting and goes something like “to pretend to speak say, Chinese, we have to speak Chinese,” which is to say to pretend I actually do the speaking, but I have only pretended to pretend.
Now, look, given Derrida’s “rebuttal” to Searle the idea that there is a specific language that “real” people speak is disingenuous, especially from say, a novelist, or someone who manipulates language. The logic behind Derrida’s logic of pretending seems to me to point to a way in which interrupt our habitual ways of encountering others, as well as providing some commentary on the comments to this post, the post itself, which I haven’t commented on directly, will have to come later.
February 7, 2008 at 6:02 pm
And that is precisely because you are hiding behind this intellectualized language, which is a severe problem if you intend to communicate with others, who are real people–outside your particular community of people who also indulge in Lacan-speak.
Lloyd your words sound especially convincing due to that worn-out Leonard Cohen look you´re sporting in an effort to convince us of your realness!
February 7, 2008 at 11:46 pm
I freely admit to being a fictional author. I am just challenging the status quo of global culture, if you know what I mean. Somebody has to do it.
February 8, 2008 at 5:49 pm
Ah you just reminded me that our slogan changed to Deepthroating Global Culture, I have to update my advertising
February 11, 2008 at 12:41 am
Why would the movement of people out of the blogosphere have anything to do with you? I’m puzzled by the end of this post.
February 11, 2008 at 1:51 am
I’m not sure I understand your question, Jodi. What is the more plausible and generous interpretation of the post? That I somehow believe that blogs that ceased posting had to do with me, or that perhaps I was talking about specific interactions I had with others that petered off?
February 11, 2008 at 5:45 am
“Except in your case, when you write this way. And that is precisely because you are hiding behind this intellectualized language, which is a severe problem if you intend to communicate with others, who are real people–outside your particular community of people who also indulge in Lacan-speak.”
What is the problem–unless you assume that the act of reading/hearing entailed a kind of conversion to what you are assuming the words to have meant… or total rejection, rather than an assimilation to your own place in the relationship, awaiting… asking for… a response, from you… as the other, which the very act act act of speaking and writing acknowledges, without yet knowing as existent.
In other words.. an invitation. But how do we invite the other to respond without ourselves defining–however permeable–limits, boundaries? If you want to engage … me… whatever that is, whatever I am… here are the boundaries I’ve come to understand up to this moment… can you meet me here? No… will you, are you willing to meet me here? As this is all I know, as far as I am able to go at this moment…
Does anyone, ever… ever… do more than that?
The burden then, is on our own capacity to respond.
February 12, 2008 at 12:40 pm
That I somehow believe that blogs that ceased posting had to do with me,
Dr Sinthome I think this is what Dr Fossey meant indeed
February 15, 2008 at 11:56 am
I found this to be a very stimulating post, although my knowledge of Lacan is not very robust, and derives largely from Žižek (dangerous, I know).
Immediately I think of two works I’ve encountered recently, Judith Butler’s “Giving an Account of Oneself” and Walter Benjamin’s essay on Nikolai Leskov.
Butler’s book grapples with an issue that could be seen as the inverted image of the symptom, as you delineate it, namely the idea of “testimony,” “bearing witness,” articulating one’s experience, and so on. Specifically she considers the paradox according to which our articulation of ourselves necessarily depends on a historical horizon on which we were first configured before we became ourselves — in other words, how we necessarily bear within ourselves traces of a determining “prehistory” (the Symbolic order). Because of this paradox, giving an account of oneself always bears witness to a certain dispossession, as well.
In Benjamin’s essay he contrasts the story and the storyteller with the novel and the novelist, drawing several interesting conclusions. But what stayed with me was his argument that the storyteller sought to communicate his experience, or the experiences of others, so the telling and the reception of the story was founded on the potential communicability of experience. Benjamin argues that this communicability is on the wane, and that the novelist, by contrast, seeks to convey what is utterly individual and “incommensurable” in human life.
Oh, a third thought! The ultimate ethical relationship in Georges Bataille’s eyes, would be eating together. :) He writes a lot about communication in “The Accursed Share, Vol. 2″; Bataille being Bataille, his use of the word is pretty idiosyncratic, but striking in its ethical contours.
Lastly, like N. Pepperell I find many of the comments you’ve received somewhat bizarre in their (apparent) wish to police the bounds of “normal” speech, conventional interpretation, common sense, “the way real people talk,” and so forth.
February 19, 2008 at 3:53 pm
I don’t know, I’m puzzled…
If we, after 21 centuries of Western Cristian civilization – not to speak of the other centuries and civilizations left behind by my ignorance – still ask the question of how to think of others as “real people”, then I might be tempted to conclude that something is wrong.
Maybe it’s my symptom … I don’t know.
February 19, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Gustavo, the question wasn’t that of how to think of others as real people, but how to encounter them in their difference without subordinating them to pre-established categories and assumptions inhabiting your cognition. Since you bring up 21 centuries of “Christian civilization”, maybe this issue can best be understood in terms of Christian-European colonialism. Recall the manner in which the Europeans encountered the various indigenous populations of the Americas. In most cases they were seen as barbaric peoples with no morals or values, in need of either conversion or outright eradication. In other words, these explorers could only encounter the people of the “new world” in terms of their own sedimented cultural categories, and as such they could only see these others as deficient or lacking. What they could not see was these people “for themselves” or in terms of the immanence of their own world. Something similar happens daily in our encounters with new others on a daily basis. We encounter them not in terms of their difference, but in terms of the frames we bring from past experience (not unlike the way in which Kantian categories give form to the matter of experience and are imposed by mind). Wildly Parenthetical has written a rather nice post on this issue, attacking it from a slightly different perspective in terms of Merleau-Ponty:
http://wildlyparenthetical.wordpress.com/2008/02/05/questions-of-temporality/
February 20, 2008 at 5:58 am
I like your description of the tic (tock) repetition of the symptom.
The ways that Freud wrote of the Other speaking (the Other being the unconscious, and as I see it, being the gloss we place
on different people in the world – what we wonder about or fear
– and including sometimes our bodies, or the idea of the world)
was in jokes, slips, dreams, bungled actions. The symptom was different, a compromise between the unconscious thought and repression. So a kind of half saying, half stopping. A conflict. The driving people away in wecoming them is a good example because there is a paradox there, and perhaps some suffering.
February 20, 2008 at 6:38 am
Honestly what I’m talking about here is closer to the phantasy than the symptom, but then the symptom is a function of the phantasy so it all bleeds together. What I’m trying to get at is the idea the symptom is always intersubjective, referring to the other in some way as a sort of message to the other and way of metabolizing the other.
February 20, 2008 at 7:44 pm
“What I’m trying to get at is the idea the symptom is always intersubjective, referring to the other in some way as a sort of message to the other and way of metabolizing the other.”
From this excellent comment of yours it occurs to me you might enjoy this poem, “Sympathetic Suffering”. Here is a link to a live performance in a nightclub (29 Minutes) I did a decade ago here in Rochester, New York USA, with a band called The Media Assassins. Archives, etc. of those days of what we called STAGE POETRY COMPANY are my other blog:
http://stagepoetrycompany.typepad.com/ (where I use my real name) The bottom link is to the text of the poem. Hope you enjoy this, I think it directly addresses the reality of the “intersubjective” . . .
[audio src="http://sulaco.us/stagepoetryco/1995/Sympathetic%20suffering.mp3" /]
http://sulaco.us/stagepoetryco/Sympathetic_Suffering.txt