Promises, Promises

Promises, Promises summary: Through a series of essays based around book reviews, puns, jokes, close readings and case studies, Phillips both posits a similitude between psychoanalysis and literature, and also complicates that conjunction.

Passage for close-reading: “Anyone, in other words, who prefers not to, once, very definitely, preferred to—and it got them into trouble. And it is this trouble that we always end up talking about, and they often don't” (295).

This passage serves as the literal last words of the essay, “On Eating, and Preferring Not To,” which itself appears quite late in Phillips' text. The essay as a whole has been musing on the connections between appetite and desire, and between the text, the case study, and the meal, through the apparatus of reading, side-by-side, Melville's tale “Bartleby the Scrivener” and the truncated tale of Chloe, Phillips' own anorexic patient. Chloe, in the narrative Phillips grants her, never quite gets her appetite back, but, in her only enlightening session, incites Phillips to think about what it means for him to have or lack an appetite, or for anyone to have one at all. In the paragraphs immediately preceding this passage, Phillips guesses that the anorexic's distorted appetite arises out of a wish to maintain a stridently pure hunger, the result of a trauma that forces the person, belatedly, “to restore the viability of appetite” (294). In the same sense that a traumatic occurrence might be unconsciously transformed into an expression of sexual fantasy, Phillips posits that an eating disorder is a similar form of self-cure in which the trauma has been “appetized” rather than sexualized. From this clinical setting, the last sentences of the last paragraph veer back towards Bartleby and the essay's opening, echoing the story's famously repeated line as well as, in the very seeming banality of its prose, complicates the relation between analyst and analysand, between desire and trouble, between text and food.

Although the essay revolves around the ways in which Bartleby might be read as a metaphorically anorexic subject through his apparently desirous refusal, the specificity of the connection between refusing food and refusing words remains to be filled in. Rather than putting the two stories in conversation, Phillips' essay revolves around parallel close readings of each, suggesting the reader construct the logical leap that seems to take for granted that Bartleby's lack of appetite is akin to Chloe's, with only the existence of each participant's leaden silence and the food metaphors surrounding Bartleby as evidence. If Chloe's problem, for her analyst and her parents, although not apparently for her, was a failure to eat, then Bartleby's parallel problem is an anorexic failure to write. Or rather, a binging cycle of writing followed by long abstinence and eventual hospitalization. In either case, the value of the comparison lies not in the thing rejected, but in the rejection itself and perhaps even more so in the recalcitrance and resilience with which that rejection is voiced. Despite the genteel conditional of “I would prefer not to,” or the patient quietude with which Chloe puts up with Phillips' attempts to cure her, each refuses to submit their bodies to processes that would, at least potentially, detract from the purity of desire. Although both food and text are prime candidates for consumption and ideally introjection, Chloe and Bartleby are united in the intensity of their appetite which values deferral over possession.

If the meaning of the essay as a whole is constructed in the gap of the unelaborated connection between Bartleby and Chloe, the sentence itself is similarly constructed around the importance of division. The first sentence in the passage in question is broken up by a plethora of commas into a series of tiny, fragmented phrases, of thoughts broken into bite-size pieces. Within the first half of the first sentence, no phrase is over four words long, with the subject consisting only of a pronoun, and another phrase consisting only of the adverb “once.” After this appetizer, the sentence shoots off in another direction, rhythmically and temporally, by the division of a dash. The dash is an insouciant, mobile mark of punctuation, symbol of casual, quickly shifting, evanescent thoughts. This dash suggests a choppy flow that comes to a full stop, a slicing-up of text into bite-size pieces in order to more readily consume it that then pulls up sharply with a full stop at the threat or memory of trouble. After the dash, the first sentence resolves itself into an independent clause, albeit a colloquial and child-like one, connected to the fragmented main clause by a simple coordinating conjunction. The second sentence is then constructed on the same pattern of conjunction followed by independent clause, carrying over the word “trouble” as a remainder from the sentence before, and repeating the structure once again in the final clause of the sentence, and the essay. This repetitive, progressive system of clauses in the second sentence, along with the slowly increasing word length of the first, makes the two sentences together feel like a therapy, a slowly developing system of successive approximations of bite-sized clauses building up to the “proper meal” of the full sentence.

If this is a therapy, it remains to be asked who is being treated. If the subjects of the essay have been first Bartleby and then Chloe, the subject of this sentence shifts drifts towards generality. As a pronoun, “anyone” is both general and specific, in that the “one” suggests a particular and identifiable subject, while the “any” suggests an indefinite number of individuals who could fill that role. Here, the “anyone” implies that this is a process that affects or could affect all of us equally. The sentence above the ones in question tell us that people with eating disorders “appetize” trauma, parenthetically noting, as if it were unremarkable, that “all of us, to some extent” fit this category. We are all potential anorexics, but also, potentially, the opposite of anorexics in that we, like the analyst, are not hungry enough. The pronouns, then, shift into undecidability. Who is the “we” and who the “they”? It seems that the inclusive “we” would be psychoanalysts, or more widely, those whose appetites for reading and writing are unimpaired, who prefer to and don't get in trouble for it, while the exclusive “they” are the patients, the Chloes and Bartlebys, who flatly refuse more textual or alimentary stimulation. Yet the paragraph ahead says that analysts, and those who might identify more broadly with the therapeutic
“we” are not hungry enough, so that there arises a passionate, even saintly purity of the desire of these conscientious objectors. How would we become hungry enough, if not by going over to the side of those who prefer not to, and thereby finish the collapse of the distinction between pronouns of us and them?

A Voice and Nothing More

A Voice and Nothing More summary: Dolar seeks to locate the voice as the uncanny object which neither is sublimated as it conveys meaning, nor is ossified by veneration into a fetish object, but which functions as the blind spot in the distinction between outside and inside.

Passage for close-reading: “Bringing the voice from the background to the forefront entails a reversal, or a structural illusion: the voice appears to be the locus of true expression, the place where what cannot be said can nevertheless be conveyed. It seems still to maintain the link with nature, on the one hand—the nature of a paradise lost—and on the other hand to transcend language, the cultural and symbolic barriers, in the opposite direction, as it were: it promises an ascent to divinity, an elevation above the empirical, the mediated, the limited, worldly human concerns” (31).

These sentences occur in the first chapter of Dolar's book, in which he explores the linguistics of the voice, in a section which details the linguistics of the non-voice, including hiccups, coughing, laughing, and singing. Continuing my interest in the musical metaphors serving as a sort of uncanny remainder within Deleuze and Guattari's text, I find myself drawn to the specificity of singing as a voice which pulls both ways in the very moment of seemingly fixating most purely on voice as object, to the point that the singer loses the elusive uncanniness of the object voice in the development of the perfectly controlled singing voice as object. In the sentence immediately preceding the ones in question, Dolar asserts that the fixation on the musical qualities of the singing voice serves as the invert of the attention to the object voice that he is pursing, but that even this inversion is dualistic. The gesture pulls both ways: music both “evokes the object voice and obfuscates it” (31). This passage, then, is admittedly existing on a narrow level of Dolar's text: a position that only partially approaches the object of his own examination, occurring in a specific example of a class of at least four non-verbal, and, in some cases, non-vocal sounds. Nonetheless, I'm interested in the ways this passage enacts the ambivalent gesture of obfuscation and evocation at the same time as setting up this paradigm as one of fetishization that removes attention from the elusive voice as object a. If the rhetoric of this passage pulls both ways at once, it does so at least in part through a series of visual metaphors, and specifically an optics of magnification, that exists in tension with the auditory profundity of the voice, and serves to outline the gap at the heart of Dolar's own object under the guise of a tertiary example.

The first sentence begins by “bringing the voice from the background to the forefront,” an act that can equally well apply to Dolar's own project of bringing forth the elusive qualities of the object voice from behind logocentrism, and to the opera aficionado's aim of highlighting the musical qualities of a beautiful singing voice over the comprehensibility of the words they utter. Before the colon, this first sentence is cast in the passive voice, with no clearly delineated actor who is responsible for drawing the voice forward. The void created by the lack of an agential subject places the emphasis on the action of bringing the voice forward, so that the voice itself takes on the role of both the actor prompted to step forward, and the uncanny frontrunner of a force that originates elsewhere, and which takes its force from its spatial dislocation. Furthermore, this first sentence in both its halves is organized around visual space through which this voice traverses. Before the colon, the voice is brought “from the background to the forefront,” terms which are both artistic and theatrical in their spatial specificity. If the spatial progression suggests an actor crossing the stage towards the footlights, underneath the visual image is the whisper of that actor's spoken lines brought forward from the back of the house, spreading throughout the theater in their sonority. Yet this motion entails, specifically, a view of the process as a “reversal, or a structural illusion,” a repetition which seemingly solidifies the spatial complex surrounding the concept of the voice. The word “illusion,” unlike, say, “hallucination” or “misconception,” is a specifically visual mis-recognition, while the “structural” implies both that the structure of a voice traversing a theatrical space is illusory, and that the illusion itself takes on a visual structure.

After the colon, the voice, despite its apparent ephemerality, “appears” in seemingly visual glory as the “locus” of true expression, a term which is visual in the specifically spatial register of a geometrical point, from which the disembodied voice expresses with profundity “what cannot be said [but] can nevertheless be conveyed” (31). From the vantage point of the voice's “locus of true expression,” the unsayable is dispersed outward from the very specific to the very expansive, like the first notes of an opera spreading from the vocal cords of a single singer to expand acoustically across an entire concert hall.With “conveyed”, the sentence ends as it begun, with visual terms that connote a traversal of a specifically delineated space. Both these phrases, however, surround the spatial and visual core of the sentence: “illusion.” Situated in the middle of the sentence, this is an illusion that visually pulls both ways, as if one were looking through each end of a pair of binoculars in turn, so that the object of vision was first remarkably distant, and then unusually proximate.

The final sentence of this series continues the metaphorical binocular optics, as a scale of visual binaries that pulls both ways, into the specificity of the very small as well as the profundity of the very large. The sentence begins with a gesture towards the ocular trope with the simple verb phrase “it seems,” where the voice serves as the antecedent of the pronoun. This visual resemblance serves to reiterate, rather than simply produce, the “link with nature” which forms one half of the visual paradigm, reaching back into the minutia of a mythically distant and yet literarily specific, past, a “paradise lost.” “On the other hand,” in the second half of this sentence, the dichotomy reaches in the “opposite direction, as it were,” stretching infinitely upwards in order to “transcend language” (31), so that the two directional registers are situated neatly on the radial symmetry of the body. If the beginning of this second sentence posits music's ability to initiate a return to the specificity of a natural, paradisaical past, the second half of the sentence promises a “musical ascent to divinity,” an upwards trajectory from whose “elevation” one can gain the properly immense perspective on the dimensions of “limited, worldly concerns.” This double-optics system resembles the medieval scale of arranging life in visual, hierarchical ascensions from animal to angel, with man securely ensconced in the center of the concentric series. Yet here, there is a blind spot at the heart of these visual representations, a blind spot that is occupied exactly by the uncanny voice. The optical oppositions of the very large and the very small, each situated “on the other hand” of the other, have no body between them, but only the voice which echoes with profoundly illusory transcendental meaning. The structures of bringing the voice into the foreground is itself an illusion, both from within the perspective of the fetishization of the voice that this paragraph details, and within the larger aims of this chapter and this work. Through verbs like “being,” “appears,” and “seems,” the passage sets a reader into a viewer's position relative to the voice, hence himself both evoking and obfuscating the object voice within a realm of visual metaphors in the very act of commenting on the ways in which music does the same thing. Despite its ecclesiastical specificity, the passage functions to open the “gap that cannot be filled” through a series of visual metaphors which obfuscate the voice at its very moment of fetishized prominence.

Anti-Oedipus Week 2

Anti-Oedipus summary:

“Savages, Barbarians, Civilized Men”: Deleuze and Guattari delineate the ways in which, by flattening the voice onto writing, desire is inscribed onto the full body within the territorial machines of primitive societies.

“Introduction to schizoanalysis”: Deleuze and Guattari outline a practical ethics of schizoanalysis, promulgating the use-value of a malevolently destructive desire that purifies as does a curettage.

Passage for close-reading: “Good people say that we must not flee, that to escape is not good, that it isn't effective, and that one must work for reforms. But the revolutionary knows that escape is revolutionary—withdrawal, freaks—provided one sweeps away the social cover on leaving, or causes a piece of the system to get lost in the shuffle” (277).

This passage occurs early in what Deleuze and Guattari call their “Introduction to Schizoanalysis,” which, naturally, comes at the end of their tome on the subject. In the first few pages of the first section, one might classically assume that the positioning of this passage suggests it is of an at least preliminary importance for outlining what schizophrenia is and how it progresses.The chapter traces three points of view, that of regression, that of the cycle, and that of the disjunctive or at least potentially disjunctive community, before claiming that the familial investment is simply an “application of the unconscious investments of the social field” (277) through which application the child, who can be considered neither a precursor nor a basis for the adult, sets into motion “a delirious interplay of disinvestments, of counterinvestments, of overinvestments” (277). The sentence in question appears at the end of a paragraph devoted to outlining two different poles of social investment around which the child, or the adult who supplants and surrounds but never succeeds him, can construct these delirious interplays. Last week, I started with this situation of the text in context as a way to elucidate the ways the rhetoric of the passage pulls out that semantic ground from underfoot, performing the schizoanalysis which it, on another level, recommends. This week, I chose to start here again because I am interested in the line of flight, and in order to talk productively about an escape, it seemed necessary to discuss the setting from which the text would stage its escape, an escape that is both internal to this text and this sentence, and eccentric to it, both forming and breaching a double barrier. Throughout the second half of this book, I've noticed the figure of the line of flight appearing as a briefly lucid tangent to the ostensible purpose of the discourse, so here I'd like to try to follow at least a short stretch of this movement, and the ways in which the line of flight, like the curettage Deleuze and Guattari elsewhere compare to schizoanalysis, structures by means of pulling out the insides of a rhetorical position.

The phrase “line of escape” first appears in this context as the qualification of the second type of social investment. If the first pole is that of the “paranoiac fascisizing” type that disinvests any potential figure of desire by flattening and homogenizing it into presumed universal desire through the sibilant reassurance of “yes, I am your kind,” then the second pole inverts this process to invest in the figure of the Other. By claiming flatly, “I am not your kind” the schizorevolutionary type speaks from an already-established eccentric position, and follows the centrifugal line of this tangent through the motions of desire, “breach[ing] the wall and caus[ing] flows to move” (277). This drift along a line of escape is immediately contained by the beginning of the sentence in question, where the proverbial “good people” tell us not to flee. Here, the “good people,” by their very universality and the banal simplicity of their descriptive adjective, take on a matronly air, suggesting cozy church matriarchs who dispense wisdom about the value of integrating oneself into the status quo. The “good people” provide us with a litany of such proverbial reminders: “we must not flee,” “to escape is not good,” “it isn't effective,” “one must work for reforms” (277). Taken together, these gentle reminders serve as a sort of pedagogical plea, with their repetitive parallel structure as verbal complements serving to lull the listener into a position of receptivity, as does, for example, the refrain of a children's song. The soothing quadruple repetition is coupled with basic syntax and vocabulary within each clause: the binaristic “good” against the implied “bad” of escape, the pedagogical “must not,” the generalizing appeal of the “one” who must “work for reforms,” with the promise that if one does so, one will be celebrated as a productive member of society. Even in the clause, “it isn't effective,” the longest word in this sentence is packed between two other clauses that clarify the meaning in context, in much the way that a teacher surrounds a complicated new vocabulary word with the contextual clues her students need to begin to develop an understanding of its meaning. In this way, the sentence places the “good people” in a maternal role at the same time as it structures the listener or reader into a child's position, pedagogically directing the reader away from their hopes of escape along the line of a lullaby.

Despite the comfortingly repeated simplistic adjective “good,” this paradigm serves to both infantilize and entrap the potentially schizophrenic revolutionary, so that the line of flight must take its trajectory directly away from these nostalgic associations of this family in order to be truly effective. Within the space of the next few words, the rhetoric does exactly that, with the subject growing up from a undifferentiated child in relation to a maternal figure to a “revolutionary” who emerges intact from this social fabric, who “knows that escape is revolutionary” (277), provided one unsettle the comforting layers of maternal, or more broadly, familial, subjugation as one does so, not only rejecting the “good people”'s doctrines but tearing apart the lines of the song from the inside out as one emerges. Even the interjection within the sentence instantiates the necessary aggression of this trajectory. Inserted between the sentence's main clause and its attendant supporting details, the interjection “withdrawal, freaks” unsettles what might otherwise be a simple counter-pedagogy. Unlike the four parallel terms of the “good people”'s lyrical advice, the two terms here, bursting from the text of the sentence between a pair of dashes, also have an uncertain and arrhythmic relationship to each other. Are they a pair of nouns in a series, separated by a comma, and hence slightly pushing aside the grammatical rules, lacking both a third term and a coordinating conjunction? Do they instead form an imbedded imperative sentence which reclassifies the revolutionary of the main clause as a “freak” which would be even more radically removed from the oppressively comforting paradigm of the good people? In either respect, the revolutionary interpellated by this interjection functions to disrupt the stable pieties of the familial system as represented by the matriarchal “good people” who settle their children into comfortingly soporific positions. In this way, he thereby purifies these relations by reducing them to rubble, in the hopes that “a piece of the system will get lost in the shuffle,” (277) leaving a hole that the most careful reconstruction of the paradigm would be unable to rectify.

Anti-Oedipus Week 1

Anti-Oedipus summary: Through disjunctions and proliferations of desiring-machines, Deleuze and Guattari reject the repressive schema of oedipalization, and the internalized fascist desire to be led, in favor of the unbearably joyful process of becoming-schizo.

Passage for close-reading: “We are also of a mind to believe that everything commingles in these intense becomings, passages, and migrations—all this drift that ascends and descends the flows of time: countries, races, families, parental appellations, divine appellations, geographical and historical designations, and even miscellaneous news items.” (85).

This passage occurs in the chapter, “Psychoanalysis and Familialism: The Holy Family” in a subsection entitled “The Conjunctive Synthesis of Consumption-Consummation.” I start here, as if the passage in question can be triangulated through a process of successive approximations: this chapter, and this section, at the end of this paragraph with a clear transition between what went before and what comes after. I start here, as if by locating something I have made it meaningful, I have put it into a set and crystalline relationship to something else. I start here, because it is my usual, pedagogical approach: there must be something to grab hold of here, if I only start large enough and settle everything into its proper place. My usual approach is useless here.

Rather, this act of triangulation backfires on me: the sub-chapter begins by returning to the figure of the body without organs as an egg, “criss-crossed with axes, banded with zones” (84), a reiterated observation whose refrain brings out the new overtones of a biochemistry of schizophrenia, a science that sounds more like calculus with its attention to “the distribution of field-gradient-threshold” (84). These languages in turn slides into those of travel, of the voyage of the undifferentiated body which exists from the beginning and looks forward, feels forward into the horrific depths of its own impending journey with a multiply dispersed gaze. This journey, as Beckett's characters also suggest, is both interior and exterior, although even that cozily coordinating conjunction sets the two terms apart as something separate and opposable, while Deleuze and Guattari maintain that these seeming opposites, stripped of extension, form and quality, emerge in their purity as coupled intensities, radiating with unbearable emotion in all directions, all times at once.

It is this dispersal of intensive, disjunctive flow in several dimensions and media that undermines my desire to triangulate my position in the text from the outset. Everything commingles to the point that there is no longer (if indeed there ever was) a distinct series of items on which to settle an interpretation. The very verb “commingles” blends connotations of social party-goers cheerfully interacting, with suggestions of a fermenting trash pile, where the discrete discarded things meld into the chemically-distinct “everything” of intensive flows. The rest of the sentence becomes itself a flow, consisting of the synthesis of three sets of conjunctions: the “becomings, passages, and migrations,” the ascent and descent, the pluralized flows of time, and, most notably, the partial list of items after the colon that partake of these flows. Becoming, passage, and migration are all directional terms with a suggested teleological aim: a migratory bird traces the same path season after season; the verb “becoming” encapsulates an end-term which the subject will eventually, concretely, become; and a passage suggests two endpoints with a traversable space between, be it a secret passage between rooms or a middle passage between continents. With each term pluralized and the three terms enclosed in a disjunctive series, however, this teleology is undermined by being multiplied past recognition, constructing instead a body without organs, crossed with zones of intensities, axes, thresholds. All this drift likewise both ascends and descends, where the coordinating conjunction leaves open the possibilities of the temporal order of these motions: first one, then the other? Some ascending while others descend? Everything going both directions at once?

The list after the colon is a litany of identifications, arranged in both ascending and descending order, with everything commingling in orders of scale. The list tellingly ends on “miscellaneous news items,” with the promise of journalism to tell the whole truth objectively. The newsboy's call, “read all about it!” implies not only that one can read all there is to know about a given story within the confines of a single sheet, but that through reading, “it” will become clear, it being both the specificity of the news article and the social milieu in which that article is placed. The news traditionally promises meaning through miscellany: if you read all the fragments, you too will know all you need by the end of your first cup of coffee. These news items, however, undermine such pretensions to certainty. Coming at the end of a flow of magnitudes, the news item is the smallest link, and the most prominently miscellaneous in a list constructed for miscellany. After the news items, the next sentence shifts into a list of potential becomings, each of which serves to open a potential of becoming something else. Everything shifts, from God to the daily news, and the importance lies in the ability of one to flow and shift into another, to impregnate another with meaning.

The temporal order of the sentence as a whole, despite its seeming progression from the clarity of a transition to a list of examples, undoes it own teleology from the beginning. “We are also of a mind to believe” puts me in a mind to believe that we are elaborating on the point established in the paragraph above, through the seductive appeal of the “also.” Yet, it is at this very moment that my desire for triangulation is undermined, the semantic ground shifting underfoot. The unassuming first-person-plural subject could refer to Deleuze and Guattari themselves, which, although a seemingly simplistic and even obvious denotation, already layers two subjects, two sets of intensive affective voyages, into the space of a single speaking position. Which one intones the words “we are also of a mind...?” If there is “no reason to oppose an interior voyage to an exterior one,” there is no reason to oppose interior authors to intertextual ones. The “we” of the subject includes, tangentially, the voices of Lenz, Nijinksy, Beckett, and Laing. Ultimately, their voices resonate together, indistinguishable, with only the plural pronoun standing in for the buzz which characterizes perfect unison.

The comforting “also” itself, in tune with the prepositional phrase “of a mind” and the infinitive verb construction “to believe” further layers these doubled-yet-singular, intensive-and-extensive voices. “To believe” is a verb laden with ecclesiastical overtones, as is the “law” that, elsewhere, they express hesitation to use to describe chemical processes for that very aroma of faith. Yet this spiritual, classically internal and intensive action is made grammatically dependent on the shifting ground of the phrase “of a mind,” suggesting that this belief is contingent on this mind, whose indefinite article promises any number of potential minds, in an infinite (albeit unexpressed) series of also/ands, each with their own attendant constellation of beliefs. This mind's belief, “that everything commingles in these intense becomings, passages, and migrations,” takes up the rest of the paragraph, but despite that topical unity, the seeming topic sentence really exposes an infinite series of possible arguments, enacting the disjunctive sleights of hand at the heart of schizoanalysis.