Friday follow up, PC on PC
finishing the questions I posed to myself on Tuesday, which VaporSpace destroyed
So then, what would you say has happened in your thinking since the post end of last year, in sum?
For some reason(s), I feel like I’ve completed a period of intellectual re-apprenticeship after the onset of a personal polycrisis1: noticing the moral and relational liquefaction of the sector and organisation I’m working in, in 2019; having a third child in October 2019 who then was a ‘lockdown baby’ during the global pandemic; homeschooling two other children, during protracted lockdowns, while trying to work and think (especially about the far right and conspiracy theories); and traversing key works of classical sociology, psychoanalytic social theory, and Frankfurt School critical theory.
It could be a fetish or perversion, but I still feel committed to practising social theory – and now I feel *able* to do it again, in a way I hadn’t during most of the 2010s. If I’m honest, neoliberal managerialism crushed my confidence and cruelled my writing, then Provider Fever2 kept me hamstering at the wheel.
And also: I do think social theory is a practice that needs to be practised, and it’s something that ‘we’ (the tiny minority who are concerned with and love it) should do. ‘Shut Up n Play Yer Guitar’, as Zappa enjoined; LARPers be LARPin’.
And aside from Butler and Zizek and Mike Davis3, we’ve fallen off since the late 80s, when people like Ulrich Beck could write conversation-setting bestsellers (52,976 citations, and counting). Zizek’s debating Peterson in 2019 was the whole thing shitting the bed, was it not? Butler is the only one who is still great, still vital, not dead. Social theory can’t *only* be about reading dead white guys; all the same, as I wrote about here, we can’t leave ‘theory’ to the ‘all hat and no pants’ Duke book crowd, can we (and see this New Yorker skewer)?
This blog has expressed a commitment to thinking by writing, and generating momentum from the discipline of practising the practice, then hitting publish... tell me a little more...
Well, in part, as I explained, this was about unblocking my own emotional-intellectual thoughtstipation. As someone who had -0 issues cranking out words during the 00s as a music blogger and music hack, I really do chalk this malaise up to a decade ‘on campus’. Extrapolating from key ideas Stiegler takes from Simondon, all these industrial processes interrupt and hijack our own individuation process, creating symbolic misery as we’re proletarianised. Or, in Gorz’ adoption from Habermas, system colonises lifeworld, and then functional integration and (failed) social and market integration produces incoherence, heteronomy, alienation, and (if you let it keep going) social disintegration. Well, I see that happening in my mind and work –& in many of my colleagues, some of whom no longer seem to read books or use the library – and want to struggle against it.
Another thing though: I’ve had this encounter with clinical psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic social theory. What a fascinating, influential, bizarre world it is. Two things to really take from this is that achieving spontaneity in free association is really difficult, because there *is* a lot of repression of thoughts and feelings (even at the same time as the internal monologue never fucking stops ping ponging our inner conflicts).
& secondly: one really is not in control of where attention heads and dwells, as well as what it recoils from and avoids... but we can become much more aware of this, and let it.
One thing readers might notice is the slightly bizarre use of images on this blog.
These are mostly purloined from Google Images, which is our collective-digital unconscious. The mind selects its association unbidden, and after this bubbles up, cybernetic search and my own recursive filter bubble feeds me back to me the search that my search searches for when it searches those terms. & see above.
How is this obliquely a conversation with Chris?
Hugely so. A lot of what turns up here are thoughts and associations occurring to me after being in conversation with Chris – mostly on Signal, as he’s in Tokyo and I’m in Melbourne, but also in my guests on the first season of his blog, which you can listen to on pod bean, here, or Spotify, here, or Apple ‘casts, here.
You can check out where he goes with it in his great substack, which is much tighter and more popular than this one. But yeah: friendship, philia, and also being people of letters, committed to *listening* to what the other is thinking, reading, talking, and then thinking by writing in relation to what this prompts... this is all in the mix. When we used to blog together in the late 00s, we used to also do this in the comment box... since phones and social media (since the 2010s) this no longer seems appealing4.
What's happened to psychoanalysis, in terms of substantive posts/topics?
I haven’t lost this thread, but for some reason, I really want to get through Gorz’ Critique of Economic Reason(CER) by June-July. In the meantime, I’m constrained by when I can write, and also want to be responsive to what happens when I start tapping.
I will come back and complete my reading of Civilisation and Its Discontents (post Gorz), and I’ll use this as a bridge to a close-ish reading of Eros and Civilisation (final third of the year?), which I will then bring into conversation with Stiegler, Fromm, Horney, and Rosa (the latter three will be next year, I think, at this rate).
What's happened to Austria Hungary?
I mean, it disintegrated?
No, it’s very much there, rumbling away in the background. I’m still slowly reading through Hermann Broch’s works in English. Of course: read Musil’s astounding and perennially unfinished ‘Empire of Paper’, Man without Qualities5. Everyone should read Hitler’s Vienna (under-rated and incredibly illuminating and also about the deep roots of National Socialism); Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siecle Vienna (overrated and slightly pat or hagiographic and/or a bit too neat, but a limpid synopsis), Stefan ‘Pepsi’ Zweig’s World of Yesterday, Canetti’s autobiographical trilogy (great for the portraits of Musil and Broch and Grosz and a few others, although Canetti fades in and out, is not quite the genius he thinks he is, and Clive James’ catty critique might be spot on) and Joseph Roth’s wonderful Radetsky March.
I think one must truly reckon with the twin singularities of Karl Kraus and Franz Kafka (who both truly ‘stand alone’ and also ‘stand apart from all others’), Freud’s resonance, especially in the postwar Germanophone world, especially for his most interesting admirer-dissenters (Horney, Reich, Fromm, all the Berlin Psychoanalytic weirdos during Weimar, like Groddeck).
I think there also has to be a triple counter-reckoning.
how/why it is what ‘we’ ended up with Lacan as the dominant Francophone theoretical figure since the post May ’68 world (the daddy we love to kill who don’t die)? How and why do theorists from Zizek to Dean use Lacan, how and why do Deleuzians and Foucauldians tend to ‘forget’ Lacan and Sartre (in that D&G and Foucault’s 70s works were ‘responses’ to a Parisian milieu where they [and Levi-Strauss] had been dominant)? Read Turkle’s great sociological book on this.
how/why is it that clinical psychoanalysis in the postwar US ended up being dominated by psychiatrists who were also deeply orthodox Freudians; how did Adorno and Horkheimer piggyback off this, and how did this end up with the strange American worlds of Phillip Reiff and Christopher Lasch? Read Janet Malcolm’s great book, earlier in the NYer, on the NYC Freudians who were still Orthodox as a motherfucker by 1980, when Kohl and Kernberg were big.
how/why did drive theory ‘win’ in critical and cultural theory6, although it is largely discredited clinically – outside of course, the substantial minority of analysts who remain orthodox Freudians (& see Malcolm)? How/why was Horney (she was a sharper theorist, a better writer, and never slid into Fromm’s ‘chicken soup for the soul’ tendencies) so smoothly negated, annulled and ‘dismissively dismissed’ (as in, drive theory proponents just say ‘revisionist!’, but don’t read her; how is that okay)? Annulled also by the counterculture, although her premises are a better fit for RD Laing7 and a better fit for socialism and anarchism than drive theory ever was?
What else have you been reading and thinking about, and where might that crop up?
I’m currently writing a book exploring the connections between containerisation, cocaine, control power, and conspiracy theories. This will all pop up in the coming months and years.
Also, FWIW, I haven’t yet read much exploring the personal-intrasubjective effects of living in polycrisis, whether as spasms, prolonged durations, or just a chronic existential situation. Perhaps, following this post (which went viral) on breakdown in Colombo, it’s just that people adapt and go clubbing… I should find some stuff on what’s happening to ordinary people in Beirut right now, or in parts of Pakistan, and Ukraine. Obliquely, a lot of the works on Austria-Hungary and 30s Germany cover this.
I wasn’t quite prepared for what a profound (and profoundly gendered-gendering) experience this was… as well as noticing quite viscerally how I was able to repress the indignities of precarity when I didn’t have kids, due to global birth lottery privilege, youth and energy, and the idea/fantasy that meritocracy would take care of me, if I worked hard. Ledger dynamics… then you realise you actually have to feed and support people.
I mention that trio as the ‘top three’ from the Golden Age of Verso: Butler is still kicking out the jams… Zizek has really fallen off since the 2010s (his LSE talk in 2016 was an unusual return to form… but basically, like Cure albums, he gets worse and worse with time and decades). Davis… I mean, his books are actually astonishingly good, no? And so damned clear. Davis offers us a different way of doing theory, thinking with examples, telling stories, ‘excavating the future’. What, you’ve never read City of Quartz? Yes, you should.
Fruits of bitter experience: by 2012 or so, the formerly civil and generous tone was so much more poopy snarky… just as people got phones and, I think, started scrolling on the toilet (a nearly invisible social fact that I think is actually really important for thinking about the ‘shit’ people dispense into comment boxes).
Wrongly compared both to Joyce and to Kafka… I think it’s just reviewers who are like ‘um, major work of experimental modernist literature from the 20s…. um… Joyce? Kafka? Musil loathed the comparison (he loathed all comparisons), and was as singular as he wished to be. Also, it’s funny, and a good read, up ‘til the sister incest bits, where it’s just not as interesting. Interestingly, Musil *did* compare his work to Broch’s Sleepwalkers, but only to say uncharitably that Broch ‘stole’ Musil’s work… Broch, for his part, was kind and generous to Musil…. Musil was quite the pickle…
The big obvi here is that the ‘forceless force of the better argument’ does not win (sorry Habermas). There are discursive struggles, and the victors often do not have the better arguments or evidence. Power laws, network effects, and cultural resonance (among the milieu disseminating the theory) matter much much more. The critical theory that follows from this is that middle aged white Europeans resonate with drive theory because it accords with their experience, fantasy, and phantasy… if so… we need to look again at Hobbes and land appropriation, and at ‘aggression’ and control more generally, no?
Insofar as Horney proceeds from the assumption that we are seeking safety in a hostile world, and Laing proceeds from ontological insecurity (and both engage with and are critical of Freudian drive-theoretical assumptions on the basis of this [and on the basis of substantial clinical experience]).