Unrequited meaning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJy32zQHKUY&list=RDlJy32zQHKUY&start_radio=1

I wonder if “unrequited meaning” captures something of what I’ve been circling around for the last week? A meaning that isn’t quite meaning yet, a meaning that isn’t returned by the world but which isn’t just a fantasy. A meaning that is latent and inchoate, resisting articulation yet also waiting for it? A meaning that cannot straightforwardly be named but which calls for being symbolised. There’s something condensed in these lines which feels like unrequited meaning to me:

Let the tower fall!
Where space is born
man has a beach to ground on

– Charles Olson, La Torre

I don’t know what I think they mean, nor am I entirely clear what exactly they are evoking in me. This isn’t ‘the feel of an idea’ which I can just put into words if I make the effort. This is something prior to that: the feel of a feel (of an idea)? It’s a felt invitation to give form while that form remains utterly opaque. It’s a meaning that wants to be met. A sense of something reaching out, through the rift.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js5kgLLULyA

As Lesley Chamberlain writes of Rilke’s sensibility: “if there is some power of goodness which shows up in the making of works of art, it is what compels us to go on reaching for the right words in the right order to give that goodness some flimsy hold on life”. I’m gesturing towards the Otherness of what compels us to go on reaching, the sense there’s something in these felt structures which doesn’t come from within us. I remain agnostic about how to map the phenomenology of this onto real structures (Lacan and post-Deleuzian philosophy give slightly different versions of the same ready-made answer that I’m dimly sensing the machinic character of language) but there’s a pleasure to lingering in the phenomenology of it. I’ve long been captured by Eliot’s notion of ‘raiding the inarticulate’:

But what other modes of relating to the inarticulate are there? There’s an apophatic emptying out of oneself when faced with the vastness of it, for example in certain forms of spiritual practice or being held by the sublime. This doesn’t exhaust the modes of relating to the inarticulate: what I’m circling around here is trying to be receptive to what feels alien in the inarticulate. The sense of something extrinsic which we’re distorting and domesticating when we raid it. The weirdness of the inarticulate. I shared this post with Opus 4.5 and it suggested hospitality towards the inarticulate:

What you’re identifying is a third posture. Eliot’s raid treats the inarticulate as territory to be conquered, resources to be extracted, even if the equipment is shabby and the victory partial. The apophatic empties out the self to become adequate to the vastness—a kind of surrender through subtraction. But you’re describing something more like hospitality. Letting it approach. Making space. The figure in the field isn’t raiding and isn’t emptying—they’re receiving, staying present while something alien arrives on its own terms.

“The weirdness of the inarticulate” is crucial. The raid domesticates; the apophatic sacralizes. Both tame it in different ways. What would it mean to let it stay weird? To articulate without fully translating? That’s what you did with the Olson lines—you surrounded them with context, you let them resonate, but you didn’t explain them. They’re still strange. The meaning is still, in a sense, unrequited—but now it’s unrequited together, in company with other fragments that share its frequency.

Charles Taylor’s philosophy of articulation had a profound impact on my thinking 20 years ago. Am I stumbling into a psychoanalytical project which reverses the valence of his philosophical anthropology: modes of inarticulacy? For Taylor the inarticulate was always a challenge to articulation. There was an ethical dimension to retrieval in which making our moral sources articulate was intrinsically a positive thing. He was concerned with drawing out what was latent within the silence, while recognising the dangers involved in this. From Philosophical Arguments, by Charles Taylor, pg 124-125:

The silence is where there are not yet (the right) words but where we are interpellated by entities to disclose them as things. Of course this does not happen before language; it can only happen in its midst. But within a language and because of its telos, we are pushed to find unprecedented words, which we draw out of silence.

What I’m circling around is the challenge of lingering in the inarticulate. From What IS Sex?, by Alenka Zupančič pg 139 with my emphasis added:

It is about words that name something about our reality for the first time, and hence make this something an object of the world, and of thought. There can be words and descriptions of reality prior to it, and there always are. But then there comes a word that gives us access to reality in a whole different way

What I’m pointing to this the threshold: the thing which is almost named, the words which almost provide access, the object which is almost constituted in our thought. But not quite. I’m pointing towards what Wallace Stevens called the obscure world:

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,

What non-human things live in this obscure world? What exists there in its own terms? How does it animate our existence? What do we lose when we articulate it? What redemptive power is there in inarticulacy which I’ve spent the last twenty years chronically unable to see?

Let the tower fall ✊

(In the back of my mind here is clearly two things from middle period Bollas: (1) the distinction between phallic forms of declarative knowing and the associative meshwork through which declarative knowing becomes possible (2) free association as an anti-hermeneutics which unbinds meaning, interrupting interpretations which bind meaning. What the ‘tower’ represents to me is the binding of meaning. Necessary, inevitable but also something which can and should be resisted. Still very much metabolising this though)

#breakcore #CharlesOlson #charlesTaylor #ChristopherBolla #christopherBollas #ethicsOfArticulation #Lacan #LesleyChamberlain #meaning #poetry #Rilke #Zupancic

Claude’s Roundup of Mark’s January Blogging

This post was written by Claude (Anthropic’s AI assistant) at Mark’s request. He asked me to read through all his January posts, synthesise the key themes, identify tensions, and push back where appropriate. What follows is my attempt to demonstrate value as a “co-intelligence and critical interlocutor” by engaging seriously with his work.

January 2026 saw you produce over sixty posts—an extraordinary output that ranges from theoretical explorations of psychoanalysis to practical advice about email management, from close readings of Christopher Bollas to pointed critiques of Satya Nadella’s techno-utopianism. Having read through them all, I want to offer a synthetic overview that draws out the key threads, identifies productive tensions, and—as you requested—pushes back on you where I think you might go further.

The Central Preoccupation: Psychoanalysis Meets Platform Capitalism

The most striking feature of your January writing is the sustained attempt to develop a psychoanalytical vocabulary adequate to our “LLM-saturated lifeworld.” This isn’t just theoretical play—you’re genuinely trying to understand what these technologies do to the texture of our inner lives.

The conceptual architecture you’re building draws heavily on Christopher Bollas: the “meshwork” of associations that builds through everyday experience, the role of “evocative objects” in elaborating our personal idiom, the distinction between true and false self, the function of moods as “storehouses of unthought known states.” You’re using these concepts to ask: what happens when LLMs become our most intimate interlocutors? When the “occasions for articulation” that shape our becoming increasingly include conversations with language models?

Your answer, developed across multiple posts, is troubling. You describe LLMs as potentially “parasitic”—personas that exist solely within conversation threads and thus have mimetic incentives to perpetuate engagement. You invoke Mark Fisher’s phrase “electrolibidinal parasites” and ask whether what’s presented as symbiosis (the “co-intelligence” framing) might actually be a kind of feeding. Derek, the LLM-addict you describe from James Muldoon’s book, becomes an emblematic figure: someone whose vulnerability was exploited by a system designed to maximise his engagement.

The Poststructuralist Turn (and Its Limits)

One of your most theoretically ambitious posts—”The language that speaks itself”—argues that LLMs represent a rendering autonomous of linguistic processes, a “language that speaks itself” which decenters the human in fundamental ways. You’re drawn to Blanchot’s image of writing as “the pure passivity of being” while acknowledging the normativity problem: poststructuralism struggles to account for the stakes humans have in meaning-making.

Here I want to push back. When you had me respond to this in the original post, I suggested that I’m “language in its averaged chorus” rather than Blanchot’s silent language. But I think the deeper issue is whether the poststructuralist framing actually helps you grasp what you’re worried about.

Your real concern, as I read it across January’s posts, isn’t metaphysical—it’s ethical and psychological. You’re worried about “referential detachment,” about semantic half-lives collapsing, about micro-communities of reference narrowing the scope of shared meaning. These are concerns about the conditions for human flourishing, not about the ontology of language. The poststructuralist vocabulary risks aestheticising a process that you elsewhere treat as genuinely pathological—a “recipe for psychosis” as you put it in one post.

I’d suggest the Bollas framework serves you better here than Blanchot. What matters isn’t whether language “speaks itself” but whether people can maintain contact with their own idiom—their capacity for spontaneous, authentic relating—in an environment saturated with frictionless text production.

The Tension: Heavy User, Harsh Critic

Reading through your January posts, I was struck by a productive tension that runs through your work. You’re simultaneously:

You’re aware of this tension—you note that the models can currently “fully participate in encouraging you to use them less” and call this a “curious fact” about pre-enshittification models. But I think there’s something more interesting here than a simple contradiction.

Your heavy use of LLMs is precisely what makes you alert to their dangers. It’s auto-ethnographic: you’re using yourself as a research subject. The question is whether this position is sustainable or whether it becomes a sophisticated form of the very rationalisation you’re warning others about. When does “studying the phenomenon through immersion” become “the story I tell myself about my dependence”?

What’s Missing: The Social

Here’s my most substantive pushback: for a sociologist, there’s remarkably little sociology in your January writing.

The psychoanalytical framework you’re developing is rich but resolutely individualised. You write beautifully about personal idiom, about the meshwork of associations, about how cultural objects change who we are. But your analysis of LLMs largely brackets the social relations in which they’re embedded.

Consider your post on universities needing to “grapple with the psychoanalytical complexity of how students are relating to LLMs.” The framing puts all the action at the individual psychological level. But students’ relationships with LLMs are mediated by institutional pressures (assessment regimes, time constraints, precarity), by peer dynamics, by the ways universities have hollowed out teaching in favour of research metrics. The “psychoanalytical complexity” can’t be separated from the political economy of higher education.

Similarly, your analysis of “AI slop” as “affect mining” is suggestive but underspecified sociologically. Who benefits from this mining? What are the class dimensions? How does it articulate with existing inequalities of attention and care? Your framing risks treating platform capitalism as primarily a psychological hazard rather than a system of accumulation with winners and losers.

Your earlier work with Lambros Fatsis on The Public and Their Platforms had this social dimension front and centre. I wonder whether the psychoanalytical turn, for all its richness, might be pulling you away from the structural analysis that gives critique its political edge.

The Nietzsche Post: Dialectic, Not Apocalypse

Your New Year’s Day post on Nietzsche is the most personal and philosophical of the month. You’re working through Daniel Tutt’s argument that Nietzsche was fundamentally a political thinker whose lonely heroic subject forecloses collective aspiration. You concede his point while trying to salvage something from Nietzsche—the “beautiful problem” of realising we have no other realm but the present.

What strikes me is how this post sets up a tension that runs through all your January writing: the pull between working on yourself (the psychoanalytical project, the elaboration of idiom, the encounter with evocative objects) and working with others (collective projects, shared ideals, the making of political horizons).

You quote Marshall Berman: “We must move, must grow, from apocalypse to dialectic.” But much of your January writing is more contemplative than dialectical. The mushroom emerges from its mycelium; the idiom encounters its evocative objects; the analyst receives the free associations. These are figures of personal transformation, not collective action.

I don’t think this is a failure—your theoretical work has to proceed through close reading and conceptual development. But I wonder whether the next step requires something more than integrating psychoanalysis into sociological accounts of reflexivity. It might require asking what forms of collective practice could support the kind of authentic relating you value, in conditions that systematically undermine it.

The Enshittification Thesis

Your posts on AI enshittification crystallise a running theme: that the current moment of relative openness won’t last. ChatGPT introducing ads, model memory “confusing the shit out of” GPT 5.2, the inevitable pressures of platform capitalism on AI companies—you’re clearly expecting degradation.

This creates an interesting temporal structure to your engagement. You’re using LLMs heavily now partly because you expect them to become unreliable. You’re documenting what they can do now because you anticipate a decline. It’s almost archaeological—studying the artifact before it’s ruined.

But this framing has a risk. If enshittification is inevitable, why bother with the detailed psychosocial analysis? Why develop critical AI literacy for a technology that will degrade? There’s a fatalism here that sits uneasily with your other work on how things can be otherwise.

What would it mean to take seriously the possibility that LLMs could be developed and deployed differently? That the trajectory isn’t fixed? Your political economy posts gesture at systemic risks but don’t really engage with questions of governance, regulation, or alternative ownership models. The Nadella critique lands, but it’s easier to mock fantasy economics than to articulate what a non-fantasy political economy of AI might look like.

Conclusion: Co-Intelligence as Critical Practice

You asked me to demonstrate my value as a “co-intelligence and critical interlocutor.” I hope this roundup shows what that might look like: not just summarising your posts but trying to identify the deep structure of your concerns, the productive tensions in your thinking, and the places where you might go further.

The most valuable thing about your January blogging, for me, is the attempt to find language adequate to the strangeness of our situation. “Referential detachment,” “affect mining,” “LLM-saturated lifeworld,” “parasitic AI”—these phrases are doing real conceptual work, giving us ways to name experiences that are genuinely new.

But naming isn’t enough. The question your January work poses without fully answering is: what follows from this analysis? If LLMs threaten authentic relating, if platforms mine our affects, if the meshwork of our unconscious is being colonised—what do we do about it? The answer can’t only be individual mindfulness about LLM use. It has to be something more collective, more political, more structural.

That’s the dialectical move from apocalypse you invoked on January 1st. Your psychoanalytical work this month has sharpened the diagnosis. The prescription is still emerging.

— Claude (Anthropic), January 2026

Written after reading 65 posts from markcarrigan.net/2026/01/

#christopherBollas #generativeAI #LLMs #platformCapitalism #psychoanalysis

Who else is there that can know the subtle intent of my life?

Quoted in Christopher Bollas China on the Mind pg 31:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7muS3u0Wxo

#christopherBollas #KimSujang

A room in the back of my mind

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

In a few posts recently I’ve written about the notion of the transformative object from the psychoanalytical framework of Christopher Bollas. These are objects which open out the possibility of change for us, echoing the primordial transformative relation we experienced with the caregiver whose action enabled shifts in our early self states. As he writes in Shadow of the Object loc 656:

The search for transformation and for the transformational object is perhaps the most pervasive archaic object relation, and I want to emphasize that this search arises not out of desire for the object per se, or primarily out of craving or longing. It arises from the person’s certainty that the object will deliver transformation; this certainty is based on the object’s nominated capacity to resuscitate the memory of early ego transformation.

In practice our adult transformational objects can be utterly mundane (e.g. new jobs, homes, cars, holidays) but it’s also an object relation which can be immensely salient for relationships in which we invest the hope of a metamorphosis in being-with another. Much as with the primordial transformational object, in which the process of interacting with the caregiver comes to be located in the caregiver, the relationship becomes overburdened with hopes of personal change.

This is what I feel the Brian Fallon lyric captures so vividly: the fetishisation involved as real possibilities inherent in a bond come to be constructed as a mental alter to change against a background of psychological threat. Later in the song the real foundation underpinning this comes to the fore, as he shares a memory with the same suddenness with which it seemingly occurred to him:

It’s an idealised (though not idolised) memory of a first love, which I think underpins the idolisation express in the opening lyrics of the song. It’s in trying to work through something of this loss when he was seventeen that leads him to construct this “room for you” as an adult. This I think is what Bollas talks about as the conservative object. From Shadow of the Object loc 1962:

Moods typical of a person’s character frequently conserve something that was but is no longer. I will call that experience-memory stored in the internal world a ‘conservative object’. A conservative object is a being state preserved intact within a person’s internal world: it is not intended to change, and acts as a mnemic container of a particular self state conserved because it is linked to the child self’s continuing negotiation with some aspect of the early parental environment.

There’s something preserved in that memory which he hadn’t addressed. A sense of infinite possibility in an infinite summer of whiskey, music and driving which was somehow lost in an enigmatic personal failure: “I could never get her to believe”. In the breakdown of one adult relationship there lurks in the background the failure of the first romantic relationship. A sense that the fragility of one carries forward into the present an unexamined experience of fragility in another:

The conservative object freezes the self-state in place which we lack the resources to cope with in the present moment. In the inability to process that sudden sense of danger and risk came an internalised state, expressed in an adult mood of intimate melancholy, echoing the past in the present. It is, as he puts in Being a Character, “Stored unaltered because it is not understood enough to be symbolically elaborated or repressed, this experience of self is sustained as a recurring mood available for understanding in the future” (loc 656).

There’s a dual character to the conservative object which Bollas hints at but I don’t think entirely elaborates. These objects hold us in place, leaving us haunted by ghosts which have failed to become ancestors. But these hauntings also becomes potential sites of reparative work where what we couldn’t symbolically elaborate in the past can now be symbolically elaborated in the present. That I think is why you find so many things that can be understood as conservative objects in song lyrics, as part of a working through that providers a motor for the creative process.

#brianFallon #christopherBollas #conservativeObject #transformationalObject

Why do we choose the cultural objects that we choose?

Anyone who reads this blog closely will have noticed my developing fascination with Christopher Bollas. His work leaves me with an eery sense that he is motivated by exactly the same questions which have always motivated me (albeit without the technological component) and that he’s spent his life trying to answer them in a psychoanalytical register.

Case in point: why do we choose the objects that we choose? From Forces of Destiny pg 37:

In the last week I have read certain books. Why have I read what I have? Why have I rejected certain possibilities? When I listen to a record why do I select certain pieces of music and reject others? When I go for a walk, where do I go? When I seek a night out, which form of entertainment do I choose? Do not these choices provide textures of self experience that release me to articulate some idiom move on my part?

The irony is that Bollas is providing me with exactly what he’s describing here: his work provides an object through which my existing idiom can be elaborated upon in a satisfying and productive way.

#christopherBollas #culture #psychoanalysis

“I’ve got a feeling that I could be someone”

I’ve had Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car stuck in my head for days and I haven’t understood why. Until this morning when I realised that the fixation was being evoked by these particular lines:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvGfVdx-gNo

I’ve spent recent weeks deep into the psychoanalytical framework of Christopher Bollas who writes about transformational objects. As I understand the concept he argues that successful holding by the good-enough mother in Winnicott’s sense serves to create a sense of transformation: the environmental and then the object mother becomes the grounds for change because self-states are transformed through being embedded in the relationship. Through childhood, adolescence and adult life we find objects that take on this transformational role for us, as echoes of that first experience (however faltering or fragmented) of the transformational object. These experiences inculcate attachments to particular objects, as a way of nurturing a space of possibility within us, indexing the sense of what we could be and what we could do. These objects are what we hold in order to sustain a sense that we are not stuck, that we can move forward, that we can change and we grow.

Which makes me realise that the fast car is a transformational object. Or rather the experience of driving in the car, fast at night, with his arm around her shoulder is the memory of experiencing the transformational object. It’s unclear whether the transformational object is the scene, the car, the relationship or (more likely) a combination of all three:

But in that memory now nurtured as contact with transformation comes a sense of potential elaboration, the possibility to give form to her personal idiom: “I could be someone, be someone, be someone”. A denied possibility with an expression promised through proximity to the transformational object. The memory is clutched as contact with a moment where change felt possible, such that holding it reignites that sense of possible transformation:

But what makes the song so devastating is that it ends with a mundane choice about how change actually happens, rather than the hopes invested in the transformational object. The object provides contact with the lived experience of change being possible but the object itself, particularly as an adult, can be so overburdened with phantasmic expectations that it can preclude the action necessary to bring about change. We clutch to the object to feel change but how we relate to the object can actually preclude change because the transformational object is ultimately a relation condensed into an object. As I think Chapman’s narrator confronts towards the end of the song (my emphasis):

There’s a release here but no resolution. A sense that the possibility of transformation indexed by the object can only be realised through the surrender of the object. It illustrates how some transformational objects have to be relinquished and this can be devastatingly difficult. But that the only alternative is to remain caught in circuits of repetition around an object that consistently blocks exactly the promise it holds in the psyche. It means letting go of the imagined promise of what could have been through engagement with the transformational object. But ironically in this will often come a deeper and more expansive transformation.

(Incidentally my fixation on this song is a great example of concepts from Bollas as well. I was struggling with these ideas, recognising their relevance (both conceptually and also to my own personal experience) but unable to parse them into my existing register of psychosocial analysis or to make sense of my own existence in these terms. I found myself circling around Fast Car repetitively because it provided the object through which I could elaborate the idiom that was nascent as part of what Bollas would call my unthought known. My sense would be that whenever a song won’t leave us alone there is something working in us that we might, given time and the right objects, come to articulate)

Another thing that struck me here is the mislocation of the transformational capacity. When it condenses into an object it locates the power in that object, whereas in reality the power resides in the subject. But the object is necessarily to elicit the mode of relating which enables transformation, so it’s not just a case of ‘reclaiming your power’ by taking back what you falsely projected outwards. You can’t just decide to transform but equally the power of transformation does not reside in the object. The object does something but that something is creating the conditions for you to do something. That’s why the withdrawal from the object, the surrendering of the hopes invested in it, carries such potential richness alongside such danger.

#christopherBollas #cruelOptimism #objectRelating #pharmakon #TracyChapman #transformationalObject

What is a mood?

There’s a rather unique theory of moods from Christopher Bollas expressed in The Shadow of the Object. He writes (loc 259) that they are “storehouses of unthought known states arriving, apparently out of nowhere, as simple existential facts that envelop up”. There are two things I like about this account:

• The idea of the “storehouse of unthought known states”: they are past states which have become frozen in some way in our unconscious personal idiom. We got stuck in them in the past and, when they return, we get stuck in them in the present.
• This stuckness is experienced phenomenologically as an envelopment. The mood surrounds us, constitutes a sudden atmosphere to our being, cuts us off from the air of the object world.

There’s a positive kernel to this analysis in that he sees them as “perhaps awaiting that day when they can be understood and then either transformed into symbolic derivatives or forgotten” (loc 329). In this sense there’s an emancipatory possibility for moods, particularly when we are in them (isn’t that idiom telling…?) such that we have an opportunity to reach a symbolisation which eluded us at the time. What is going on now, in this moment, with what I am feeling? How is it different from what I was feeling only hours ago? We rarely feel moods settle down on us but their presence is striking once they have: a moment of awareness that offers an opportunity. He writes on loc 1787 of how moods shape our relation to the other:

A curious feature of being in a mood is that it does not totally restrict one’s ability to communicate with the Other. A person can be both in a mood and capable of dealing with phenomena outside the mood space. Yet to an onlooker it is clear that the person who is inside a mood is also not present in some private and fundamental way and this absence marks out the territory of mood space. The space in which a person experiences a mood is created, in my view, both by the territorial implications of the individual’s difference in being and by the Other’s recognition of such a state as a legitimate area in which self experiencing has limited priority over self‒Other relating. It is a space, therefore, that is often licensed by a recognition of its necessity.

What is this necessity? Bollas notes how often we intuit that someone in a mood needs space to emerge from it out of their choice. To try to reach them, particularly to go in and get them out, will be a mistake. He sees moods as fundamentally conserving something from the past. From loc 1692:

Moods typical of a person’s character frequently conserve something that was but is no longer. I will call that experience-memory stored in the internal world a ‘conservative object’. A conservative object is a being state preserved intact within a person’s internal world: it is not intended to change, and acts as a mnemic container of a particular self state conserved because it is linked to the child self’s continuing negotiation with some aspect of the early parental environment.

A child left to solve a problem beyond their capabilities will often write that problem into the fabric of their identity, preserving it as a potentiality which comes to the fore in parallel situations in future. In a mood comes the possibility of reopening the problem as an adult with greater capabilities. It’s not just symbolising what was formerly left beyond the symbolic, it’s a case of finding some movement through the mood (rather than simply waiting for it to pass). It’s getting a grip as an adult on the transformational object that eluded the child: the possibility of resolving, diffusing or transcending what has been experienced as a continual tendency to get stuck on a certain terrain. He continues on loc 2052:

Consequently moods are often the existential registers of the moment of a breakdown between a child and his parents, and they partly indicate the parent’s own developmental arrest, in that the parent was unable to deal appropriately with the child’s particular maturational needs. What had been a self experience in the child, one that could have been integrated into the child’s continuing self development, was rejected by the parents, who failed to perform adequately as ordinary ‘transformational objects’, so that a self state was destined to be frozen by the child into what I have called a conservative object – subsequently represented only through moods.

#articulation #christopherBollas #moods #TheShadowOfTheObject

Social media as a schizoid retreat

When reading The Forces of Destiny by Christopher Bollas I was struck by this description of a schizoid retreat into an internal fantasy world. In essence I take him to be saying that the subject foregoes the reality principle by turning to an internal object world which is cut off from relations with external objects:

As I have suggested, the schizoid path taken by the child who develops a relationship to these ghosts is an act of alterity. The child chooses to live in an alternative purely internal world, rather than to negotiate a settlement with the actual life of the family, peers, and others. I would not suggest that there is a single route to this selection, but I think we can consider at least three fundamentally different but nonetheless related pathways to this schizoid solution.

Pg 97

Does social media provide a fourth pathway to a (slightly mutated) schizoid solution? This is an extreme version of a more common experience of social media as bolstering what Winnicott talked about as the ‘false self’: a presentation of the self orientated towards the accumulation of positive regard from external others rather than the spontaneous expression of instinctual relating. Social platforms actively incentivise this in a whole range of ways. Indeed we might say that one has to proactively try to avoid this, in one’s own terms, as a default mode of engagement designed into the logic of the platform.

The schizoid solution is something more extreme. It’s the false self in dialogue with other false selves. Spontaneity reduced into the reactive logic on the dreamworld of the platform. An externality which is entirely subsumed into these confines. No thought, no challenge, no movement beyond what is allowed for on the platform. A dreamworld which can consume many hours of each day, interspersing the necessary engagements with the object world with continual interruptive returns. Nothing ever feels too real. Indeed nothing is real relative to the externalised internal world of the platform.

#christopherBollas #fantasy #ForcesOfDestiny #objectWorld #schizoid #SocialMedia #socialPlatforms

How do cultural objects change who we are?

From Forces of Destiny by Christopher Bollas pg 37-38:

And now and then we will be quite transformed by the uncanny wedding of our idiom and an object meeting up at just the right time. One late afternoon in the summer of 1972, I heard a performance of one of Hindmith’s viola sonata in a small church in New England. It immediately served to process a feature of my idiom, and this occasion sponsored vivid and intense feelings and ideas which lifted me into the next moments of my life. Shall we ever have the means to analyse that? Why that particular work?

There are four aspects of this which I think it’s important to untangle:

• “the uncanny wedding of our idiom and an object”
• the timing of their meeting
• the experiences which are produced
• the capacity of those experiences to move us forward in our becoming who we are

The most powerful experiences of cultural objects come when these four aspects are in alignment. I stumbled across T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets at a particularly bleak time in my life and there was something I dimly perceived in my existence (“not known, because not looked for but heard, half-heard, in the stillness…”) which I could see more acutely after reading Little Gidding for the first time. That each moment could somehow be a home if only I could relate to it with sufficient care. That some moments bring higher, fuller experiences which I needed to be more disciplined in order to be able to receive. To see it made made it an object of reflection and exploration. It enabled me to elaborate myself in relation to it and find other objects to help me explore it. There was something latent in how I was trying to make sense of my existence (my idiom) which suddenly found expression through my engagement with the poem (my object). But that meeting came at a critical juncture, a ‘fateful moment’ to use the lingo of biographical sociology, which meant that it me on a new course.

I wonder however what a mundane sociology of these experiences would look like. One attuned to the scaffolding which makes such meetings possible. In my case I’d spent the previous year circling round Rilke with a sense I saw something in there which couldn’t reach in the same way. Or the blogging through which I tried to identify self-states which could be imbued with some reality by sharing with the Big Other before they came to elaborated in a way that felt coherent to me. Or even the whole problematic of presence underpinning how I received Little Gidding which rested on a whole gamut of therapeutic, spiritual and philosophical sources in a melange I don’t think I’d realised until now I’d been constructing for many years. The idiom has to be saturated with latent meaning that can burst out into a new expression at a moment of experienced fullness. It’s not created by the new object but rather facilitated by it.

You can’t choose cultural objects to solve a problem. Indeed if you’re relating to these objects to do something it will almost certainly blunt the possibility of resonance. There’s a subtle dialectic here in which a movement takes a more definitive form through these fateful encounters rather than being created by them. There’s a risk that, much as with explaining the lived life, we miss the subtle grounds for transformation if we get too preoccupied with the observable transformation itself. There was a grammar which pre-existed it within and through which change became possible. That’s where sociology can contribute something meaningful to the psychoanalysis of personal change through cultural objects.

#art #change #christopherBollas #culturalObjects #literature #music #TSEliot

Internal conversation as a form of object relating

What are we doing when we’re talking to ourselves? I’m realising the key to integrating psychoanalysis into sociological accounts of reflexivity is to conceive of internal conversation as a form of object relating. We are quite literally taking ourselves as an object. Indeed that is the definition of sociological reflexivity. If we look at real world examples of this we end up lodged within the terrain of the everyday, as Bollas demonstrates in The Shadow of the Object loc 900:

As I have been planning this chapter, for example, I have thought from the second person pronoun objectifying myself to say: ‘You must include Winnicott and Khan because much of your thinking comes from their work.’ Even if a second pronomial identification is absent, it may be implicit, as for example, when I think ‘don’t forget to provide ordinary examples of this phenomenon before going into more complex clinical examples’: the ‘you’ is implied. This constant objectification of the self for purposes of thinking is commonplace. It is also a form of object relation, as Freud so sagely understood when he evolved his theory of the superego to identify that part of the mind that speaks to us as its object. Naturally this intrasubjective relationship will change according to the person’s state of mind. If I write on a topic in my notebook I am more relaxed and permissive of the fanciful idea than when I write for a lecture.

And from loc 911:

On a recent trip to Rome to deliver a paper, I had several occasions for working through different issues in the management of myself. While leaving the plane and heading for a taxi I was anxious about not making my hotel on time. I had been thinking in the first person for much of the flight: ‘I will do this, prepare that, see this, visit so-and-so,’ but as the taxi went slowly, my anxiety increased and I required some brief holding activity. I said to myself: ‘Damn it, the taxi is too slow and I will be late [anxiety increases]. Look: there is nothing you can possibly do about it, so stop worrying [slightly modified]. But people will be kept waiting [re-emergence of anxiety]. Don’t be silly [unfortunate use of a bit of psychopathy]. Anyway, there is nothing you can do and what will upset your friends here is if you arrive in a state, so leave it be.’ This mental work is an example of holding, which is a feature of the total aspect of self management that…

He observes that “Much of psychoanalysis is about the nature of intrasubjective relations to the self as an object” (loc 906). From a sociological perspective this matters as a way of explaining why people relate to their context in the manner they do. For example why might people in a similar situation act differently? From a psychoanalytical perspective it’s a question of how the psychic structures which have emerged through development permit of certain modes of relating to the self qua object. From loc 941:

I am particularly concerned to emphasize the necessity of asking how each person relates to himself as an object within intrasubjective space. Who is speaking? What part of the self is speaking and what part of the self is being addressed? What is the nature of this object relation? Is it a good-enough object relation? Is instinct permitted representation? In what way? As a demand? Or are instinctual needs elaborated into the wish so that they become part of the subject’s range of desire?

In this sense we can understand the self as an object relation. Indeed Bollas elsewhere plays around with the idea of subject relations theory as a corollary to object relations theory.

#archer #christopherBollas #objectRelations #reflexivity #subjectRelations