Life asks us to mourn each passing incarnation of the self

From Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character pg 150:

In other words, if it is sometimes hard to discard the past because the pain of this past haunts our present, it can also be hard to give up a past that has been particularly rewarding; it can be hard to surrender what has brought a great deal of satisfaction. Yet if we are to give fresh editions of ourselves a chance, we must find a way of doing so. Life asks us to mourn each passing incarnation of the self. This amounts to a lifetime of mourning. There will always be regrets and misgivings. We tend to get nostalgic about parts of our past that made us happy. And we tend to grieve the loss of certain opportunities: we lament having made this choice rather than that, of having taken this turn rather than that. But most of all, we mourn those aspects of ourselves that we are forced to renounce because they have become redundant. Sometimes our mourning is so intense that we cannot bring it to a timely conclusion but instead form melancholy attachments to dimensions of ourselves that are largely obsolete.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UHEIqbbr1o

Do I discover the Thing’s glow or do I place it there?

Following from yesterday’s more extensive blog post, I was a bit taken aback by Mari Ruti’s statement here in The Creative Self loc 314:

We can be guided to the Thing’s glow by people—artists, creators, and inventors of various kinds—who possess a stronger than average capacity to either extract it from an already existing object or to install it in an object that they create from scratch. Lacan’s example of the latter phenomenon is the manner in which Cézanne paints apples. Lacan claims that an apple painted by Cézanne is never merely a simple depiction of an apple but, rather, contains an aura of a mysteriousness that viewers respond to. While Cézanne’s apples do not give us the “Thing-in-itself,” they grant us a little taste of the Thing’s sublimity.

Are the words ‘extract’ and ‘install’ uncharacteristically poor choice from this usually careful writer? Or does Ruti intend the active connotation these words carry? To me they suggest an agent deliberately seeking to bring about an outcome through their engagement with the object, as opposed to this outcome being a byproduct of the interaction. It’s the difference between “the Thing’s glow” emerging as a consequence of a creative process and someone setting out to “make something sublime”.

I’m possibly overdrawing the distinction to make the point but I feel slightly allergic to the idea we could characterise this in such an active register. Creativity to me involves a form of surrender, centering what Bollas calls the receptive unconscious, rather than ‘extraction’ and ‘installation’. Furthermore, these two phrases sit oddly with each other, given that the former identifies a residue in the object whereas the latter puts it there in the first place. In Ruti’s defence she’s talking about the capacity of a person to do this rather than suggesting that’s the intention of the process. But I do think there’s an underlying assumption of activity in her conceptual architecture here which I fundamentally don’t agree with. For example from loc 342:

Although there may be something about the object itself that makes it a good candidate for serving as a vessel for the objet a, it is we, ourselves, who unconsciously place the objet a within this object. Yet the fact that we are the architects of our own desire does not decrease the relevant object’s ability to draw us in with an inexplicable, irresistible force. We may even come to value it so highly that our desire for it feels nonnegotiable. In other words, due to the hidden link between the Thing and the objet a—the fact that the objet a contains a smidgeon of the Thing’s aura and therefore always in the final analysis refers back to the Thing—our desire for an object that seems to contain the objet a can become so strong that we are willing to sacrifice a great deal for it.

Do we unconsciously place the objet a within the object? I’m not sure that’s the case. I think in any given moment we are constituted as a being for whom the objet a is already within the object. To talk about unconsciously placing it there suggests that we are doing that, almost as a form of projection, it’s simply that we don’t know that we are doing it. Whereas I took Lacan to be saying something more unsettling: that I am someone who cannot help but be drawn in and that the question is simply how I relate to that power exercised upon me. To talk about ‘unconscious placing’ misconstrues a structural relation as a psychodynamic one.

There’s a latent volunteerism here which changes how we relate to the receptive unconscious. If we are ‘placing’ then it carries the promise we might learn to place differently, as opposed to remaining with what emerges through the structured relation to the world and changing through our engagement with what emerges. It’s staying with what happens to you rather than locating yourself as the source of what happens. It also changes the relation to the question I’m preoccupied by: why do I feel the Thing’s glow in this object and not another? If it’s unconscious placement the question becomes abut the psychodynamic pattern of my projection of the sublime onto the world. If it’s a consequence of the structural relation, the question becomes about how I was constituted as a being who feels the call of the Thing where I do. The latter question is significantly broader in the scope than the former and that matters.

I find this uncomfortable because ‘unconscious placement’ is easier to incorporate into a biographical frame. What in my past disposes me to unconsciously place the glow in this way? In contrast the structural frame becomes far more diffuse even as it lends itself more clearly to empirical objects: what is the call I feel in relation to the glow of thing? How do I relate to that call? How does it lead me to act? How might I act differently? What are the resources which might support such different responses?

Why do we want what we want?

Why do we want what we want? In recent years I’ve realised that critical realism lacks the theoretical resources to really answer this question. Archer’s work recovered the subject in a realist mode in order to account for how structure and agency interacted over time. But there was a sense in which concerns for her were simply given. They arise as a natural fact which constitutes the specificity of the person: ‘you are what you care about’ to use the Frankfurt line she was extremely fond of. It still leaves the question unanswered however as to why I have the particular concerns that I do.

Why do I care about these things? How did these come to be the things that matter to me? For psychoanalysis this is really a question about desire, even if concern and desire are not co-extensive. It’s about what I want and why I want it. Archer’s qualitative work positions the concerns in terms of unfolding experience within a formative context but it doesn’t account for why these specific concerns emerge. In her own term it’s not explanatory i.e. explaining why something is so rather than otherwise. The Reflexive Imperative gets closest to this in its analysis of natal contexts (viz the orientation of an adolescent towards the relational goods/evils they encounter there) but this mechanism is about biographical movement, it’s not about desire itself. It gestures towards it at points but I think it’s fair to say there’s not an explanation for it there.

For all its weaknesses there is a substantive theory of this in Lacan. Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character is by quite some way the clearest exposition of Lacan I’ve ever encountered. Even more so than Bruce Fink. Interestingly she centres Das Ding rather than objet a in accounting for desire. As she describes it on pg 47 this is the lost object of enjoyment which the trauma of socialisation leaves forever foreclosed. It is only constituted as an object by the fact that language and individuation put it forever out of our reach, retroactively constituting that infinite state as something we had which has now been lost:

Socialization shatters this illusion at least on two different levels. On a literal level, it introduces a wedge—an insurmountable obstacle—between us and the maternal body (or the body of the one who cares for us). On a more figurative level, it delivers a huge blow to our narcissistic sense of being the navel of the universe. In so doing, it divests us of our infantile fantasy of wholeness and uncomplicated belonging, generating an unquenchable longing for a state of plenitude that we imagine we have somehow been unfairly robbed of: a lost paradise we can never recover but that we spend the rest of our lives pursuing. The fact that we never possessed this paradise in the first place, that we were never completely whole and at ease to begin with, does not in the least diminish our resolve to recover it. Lacan designates this lost paradise as “the Thing,” indicating by the capital T that it is not an ordinary fantasy object, but a very special Thing of incomparable worth; it is the Thing that our deepest desires are made of

There’s a basic mechanism postulated here in which we constantly seek to find substitutes for this lost Thing. It is a psychic driver for our desire, setting it into motion as one object after another promises to resolve the diffuse sense of loss which provides the texture to our everyday engagements with the world. These ‘refound’ objects elicit our desire because of how they relate to this inarticulate sense of what has been lost. As she puts it later on pg 47:

Every “object” (every person or aspiration) we invent or discover is “refound” in the sense that it is always a substitute for the original lost Thing. We place one thing, one object, after another into the empty slot left by the Thing, and those objects that come the closest to reviving the Thing, that contain the strongest echo of the Thing’s special radiance, are the ones we feel most passionate about. However, because no object can ever fully replicate the fantasized perfection of the Thing, we are condemned to repeat our quest ad infinitum

This means there is always a gap, as Ruti puts it (pg 48), between “the Thing and the things we use to compensate for it absence”. In this gap lives the possibility for creativity and originality because the precarious glimmer of the sublime we find in them challenges us to make them into more than they really are. We find new ways of holding, narrating, representing that struggle to capture the ontological dignity we dimly perceive as lurking beneath the mundane shell. The inevitable failure of those responses, the sense in which these objects are merely partaking in a sublime forever out of reach rather than promising access to it, means that we must always try again. The iteration of excitement and disappointment, the sublime and the mundane, constitutes the rupture out of which creation emerges.

Why do we want what we want? There’s a deeper question which opens up now about why the Thing echoes for us in some objects rather than others. Ruti describes an object which “resonates on the precise frequency of our desire” (pg 50). An interesting thread of her substantive discussion concerns how this resonance might be foreclosed by failing to “allow the things of the world to disclose themselves to us according to their own distinctive rhythm” or a premature dissatisfaction with the object given that “even the most enthralling person is never merely this echo” (pg 50). Ruti comes closest to directly addressing the question on pg 51:

This is not to deny that there are objects that approximate the Thing more loyally than others. Such objects enchant us more than those where the Thing’s echo remains more subdued or diffuse; they transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor, so that when we are in their presence, we feel more elevated, more self-realized, than when we are forced to function in a universe of less venerable substitutes. It is as if, to once again borrow from Lacan, they contained something “more than” themselves, so that when we interact with them, we interact with both the objects themselves and the trace of the Thing that these objects hold.

The phenomenological mode of Lacanian theory here really works for me. This is what I’ve been struggling towards for the last few years and Ruti does it here better than I suspect I will ever be able to. But it still leaves the explanatory question unanswered. Why do some objects transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor in a way that others do not? Obviously this can be taken as an empirical question to be answered through a case history but I want to try and get more purchase on the question in the abstract. As she illustrates on pg 52 this echo is at the heart of human experience, such as when we encounter people, situations and things which we think are right but which do not move us in this way:

This specificity of desire is one of the major causes of our suffering, for more often than not, we cannot quite get what we want. It can be tricky to find the right kinds of objects, so that we can, for instance, go for long periods without a romantic relationship because we do not come across anyone who matches the frequency of our desire. Even when we interact with countless people who in principle meet all the necessary specifications of desirability, we cannot force ourselves to want any of them if they fail to emit a strong enough echo of the Thing.

I take much of the positive case of Ruti’s book to be about what Bollas calls the receptive unconscious. Ruti’s concern is how we open ourselves to the echo of the thing, including refusing the siren call of consumer capitalism which seeks to provoke our desire towards mundane objects which we don’t experience as having this dignity. This is existentially urgent and conceptually important in ways she conveys on pg 56:

People who complain about a general sense of apathy often do so because they have lost touch with the Thing’s echo; they have lost their capacity to distinguish between objects that correspond to the inimitable intonation of their desire and others that merely grant the illusion of satisfaction. One reason for this is that the vast commercial machinery of our society is explicitly designed to drown out the Thing’s echo. This machinery makes so many sparkly decoys available to us that we can get sidetracked by the huge volume of our choices. Such decoys, which press on us from all sides, obscure the Thing’s aura for the simple reason that they are deliberately manufactured to shine extra brightly. They flood us with a homogenizing blare that can induce us to accumulate the piles of useless junk I referred to earlier.

I still think the deeper question remains. How do we get from the infantile organisation of our incipient desire (“We learn to appreciate certain things: a favorite food, our mother’s touch, a comforting toy, our brother’s singing, and so on”) to being an adult who has an inner sense of what calls them which they can (fallibly) tune into through a set of practices and orientations which Ruti describes as an erotics of being? This entails a comfort with the passions evoked in being called, including those moments of rupture and renewal when we are called by something which knocks us out of our comfortable groves of repetition. From pg 72:

Equally important, when energies that have been trapped in the repetition compulsion get released, we have a huge amount of new energy available to us. This extra energy can initially feel destabilizing, but it is also exhilarating in the sense that we now have the necessary resources for activities that we might have formerly been unable to carry out. One can liken this experience to an author’s breaking a writer’s block: all of a sudden there is a deluge of energy that can be used productively rather than symptomatically; there is the possibility of growth in all kinds of directions that might have been previously unimaginable. If a passive relationship to our repetition compulsion signifies an inner deadness of sorts—a state of being helplessly wedged in our unconscious conflicts—breaking the repetition revitalizes us, ushering us into the midst of a new kind of life.

But what is the call itself? What is the echo? I think Ruti’s existential methodology is correct. It’s a gloriously lucid explanation of why I dimly cobbled together as a practical manual from Fink: you stay with the encounter and begin to recognise patterns in how energising (or otherwise) particular sorts of people and objects tend to be for you. In that energy, I take Ruti to be arguing, we are encountering something beyond. There is a shape emerging through the clouds, which we can see ever more of if only we can resolutely in the face of it, neither clutching too tightly or backing away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n74g5mqQ2tI

But I still think it’s possible to talk about this in explanatory terms. There’s a gap between a clinical description of the factors which drive attachment behaviour and an abstract claim about the mechanism at work in attachment as such. Consider what Ruti says here on pg 96:

It denies the fact that if our desire crystallizes around a particular person with unusual force, it is because this person contains a shining sliver of sublimity (a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo) that makes him or her inestimably valuable to us, that explains why only this person will do and why our love for this person is nonnegotiable. In this sense, love may be one of the few things we experience that has the power to induce the sublime to materialize within the framework of daily life.

This is the sublime extruding into the lifeworld. The ontology concerns that it is extruding, the phenomenology is about how it is extruding, the therapeutics is about what that extruding means for us. But I want to address the explanatory question about why it is extruding in the way that it is. I feel like Ruti circles around this question, which to be fair is my question rather than heres, with beautiful phrase (“a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo”) without accounting for the character of that relationship. Interestingly Ruti shares my affection for how Christopher Bollas accounts for the relationship with the thing, which makes me think my project of integrating Bollas and Lacan is less problematic than I worried. From pg 174:

We may feel uniquely enticed by certain kinds of investments, by certain kinds of objects and activities, yet hesitate to let ourselves be “conquered” by them, striving, instead, to neutralize their summons. Unfortunately, when we do this, when we recoil from objects and activities that call upon us in such a passionate manner, we destroy their capacity to turn our day into a space for the articulation of our idiom. Similarly, when we use the various objects and activities that the world makes available to us as mere means to an end, as inert tools or resources, their magic silently slips away; when we seek to stifle their disorienting alienness, we decline the invitation to aliveness that they extend to us.

Again though this is about how we relate the objects from which we feel this call. In his own way Bollas also circles around this, positing the ‘destiny drive’ through which we seek to ‘give form to our idiom’ but not really explaining why certain objects are uniquely generative for elaborating that idiom. Like Ruti he points powerfully to examples of this generativity, with a particular focus on aesthetic objects, but the deeper explanatory question remains mysterious. I think this can be answered, even if I have no idea yet how to do it.

Who we are arises from how we have been hurt

From Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character pg 18:

Likewise, there is perhaps nothing that contributes to the uniqueness of our character more than our suffering. In so many ways, who we are arises from how we have been hurt. This does not mean that we cannot find our way past our injuries or that they determine our future. But it does suggest that our sense of authenticity cannot be divorced from the hardships and disappointments we have endured.

From pg 21:

It may, for example, turn out that something that causes us suffering will eventually grow into a nugget of wisdom that guides us to a valuable course adjustment. And a breakdown that leaves us gasping for air can eventually lead to an important breakthrough that reconfigures our lives for the better. This is why Nietzsche believes that we should choose to love our fate—that instead of struggling against the constraints of our situation, we should actively welcome these constraints because they are the foundation of our ability to elaborate our character.

This is exactly what I found so powerful in Hans Loewald’s notion of transforming ghosts into ancestors. There’s a particular mode through which we metabolise suffering, the deep and profound ontological injuries which mean we can’t continue as we were, which makes a particular mode of growth possible. From Thoughts Without a Thinker by Mark Epstein pg 200-201:

The psychoanalyst Hans Loewald wrote of transforming the ghosts that haunt patients into ancestors, through tasting what he called the “blood of recognition” in the relationship with the therapist. He asserted that the ghosts must be led out of the unconscious, reawakened through the intensity of the therapeutic relationship, and then laid to rest, relegated to history, thus allowing the person more flexibility and intensity in present relations.

There are things we can be lost within which these wounds, or rather the process of moving through them, can lead us out of. We don’t become someone who wasn’t hurt in this way but rather become someone who can live well despite being hurt in that way. In Lacanian terms we see a reconfiguration of the relationship to our own enjoyment, as we reclaim it through a movement of traversing a (now shattered) fantasy. But Mari Ruti expresses it so much more beautifully and concretely than any of the Lacanians do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29rCU1H1oo0&list=RDGMEMBhrNM15bN0pM50WECpic-AVMRa8gSw7Djvo&index=2

Mari Ruti - Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Costs of Everyday Life.

Feminististä kulttuurikritiikkiä sinulle, joka olet kyllästynyt jatkuvaan itsensä kehittämiseen, täydelliseen suorittamiseen, tuottavuusloikkiin ja "hymyile nyt vähän"-tytöttelyyn. Miten uusliberaali heteropatriarkaatti aiheuttaa sukupuoliroolien vahvistumista ja intiimien kokemusten rationalisoimista? Yhden tähden jätin pois siksi, että lopun lacanilaiset filosofoinnit menivät itseltäni yli hilseen. Kaikilta muilta osin ihanaa, vähän vihaiseksi tekevää luettavaa.

#mariruti #penisenvyandotherbadfeelings #kulttuurikritiikki #feminismi #tainankirjavinkit #kirjamastodon #kirjamasto #luettua