#CruelOptimism #PeacefulSabotage

You lack a positive message, they say, by only wanting to slow things down.

But my positive message is to not destroy our civilization. To evolve it constructively. And sustainably.

There is no more positive message than that.

To go where no-one has gone before, okay ... but to not be reckless and tread carefully along the way.

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I am the ambulance that never comes, the antidote you spill

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZkBA_YwMx8

The ancient Greek notion of the pharmakon refers to something which is both poison and remedy. It captures a sense that what can heal in the right amount and under the right circumstances might harm in the wrong amount and under the wrong circumstances. I understand Derrida’s interest in the concept to be a matter of the instability of categorisations of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (‘healing’ or ‘harmful’) such that we can’t sustain a clear boundary between them. For a critical realist there’s a weaker version of the same point which stresses how much of the substance of these outcomes depends on the circumstances in which the object is drawn upon and what for what purpose.

When I first heard these lyrics I thought ‘pharmakon’. The person who resolves to be both razor and pill certainly has this status but the next lines refer to something quite different. These are about a failed promise, a thwarted rescue, an expected salvation interrupted at the last moment. There’s something of cruel optimism about this in the sense of an object that impedes or refuses exactly the hope underpinning the attachment. I don’t think this is quite right either, in the sense that I understand Berlant’s notion to pertain to a more diffuse sense of flourishing i.e. the thing that I hope will expand the parameters of my existence actually prevents that expansion. That’s more like a failure of Bollas’s transformational object. The point when we realise we have to let go of the thing we thought would make life better precisely because we still believe it can and should be better.

So what is the ambulance that never comes? The antidote you spill? It’s the moment of imagined rescue that fails to arrive at the last second. The sense that “all will be well, all manner of things will be will” thanks to this impending intervention. But then… it doesn’t arrive. Or you spill it. It fails. It’s not that it couldn’t do what you hoped it would do but that something about the circumstances or the timing meant that potential couldn’t be realised. It’s not that it was false, as much as that it was a truth that couldn’t be taken at that minute. This is far more tragic I think because it’s unrealised potential rather than misidentification or mislocation.

Tracy Chapman’s fast car is an object that once worked but now doesn’t whereas this is an object that could have worked but didn’t. The temporal structure of the experience is different because there’s nothing from the past to hold onto that can condense into the present. It’s more like smoke you tried too hard to hold, to use one of my favourite Brian Fallon lyrics. It’s harder to metabolise a counterfactual. It also means the declaration of that song is emphatically bleak: I will let you down in a profound, almost ontological, way. I will not be what you need me to be, even though I’m capable of it.

I wonder if we need a taxonomy of failed transformational objects. From the transformational object which no longer sustains transformation through to the conservative object misidentified as a transformational object (cruel optimism) and the missed transformational object which only exists in the future anterior.

#bollas #change #cruelOptimism #Derrida #music #pharmakon #transformationalObject

“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

Wrote a new book review and summary.

Stolen Focus: Why you can't pay attention -- and How to think deeply again

https://njoseph.me/mediawiki/Books/Stolen_Focus

#Books #StolenFocus #AttentionCrisis #CruelOptimism #SurveillanceCapitalism #Hypervigilance #MentalHealth #Flow