psychobabble and the genetic indictment

Music: Passengers: Original Soundtracks 1

Ken over at his Ghost in the Wire blog posted an intriguing polemic yesterday about the validity and of psychoanalysis as an interpretive method or perspective in general. I've replied to his remarks there a few times, but I thought I'd recast my remarks on this page, because I like the discussion and I think Ken raises some important issues.

For the bystander who is unfamiliar with what I write as a part of my job, lately I've been working with psychoanalysis as a perspective for critiquing elements of popular culture. My latest work has focused on a Lacanian reading of demagoguery and I'm currently using Freud on group therapy to help makes sense of the films of Stephen Spielberg as well as reading a bunch of Jung on alchemy for a project with Tom on The DaVinci Code. Needless to say, I'm pretty deep in psycho-think at this point.

Ken argues—somewhat hyperbolically—that psychoanalysis is a false art or techne that is better read as a symptom of a larger, epistemological shift that has occurred (and presumably is still occurring) in the wake of the death of the sign. Psychoanalysis is better understood, he suggests, as a sort of epiphenomenal repetition compulsion, a symptom of the demise of the logic of the symptom. What has blinded its proponents to its failures as a true, explanatory discourse is a "genetic privilege" that eclipses any consideration of its necessarily mediated preformation as a discourse, a chief insight of Gadamer on the hermeneutical process.

To make this argument, Ken makes the following claims: (1) the fundamental problem of the human sciences is the transcendental character of interpretation, which is always already mediated by a language broadly conceived as a technology of representation/mediation; (2) [rhetorical?] scholars have yet to seriously reckon with the problem of interpretation because of a tacit, ontotheological tendency to assert a master discourse (rationales are various, but I'm happy to see that publication politics is part of this); (3) a good case study of the problem is the blindness of psychoanalysis. (3a) Psychoanalysis presumes underlying structures, so if one does not believe in such underlying structures, or finds such structures false or misnamed, then validity can go out the window; (3b) but we're more concerned with genetic privilege here. So far, then, the set-up to this argument is that too little attention is given to the conditions and particularities of a given, and presumably interpretive, discourse, and psychoanalysis is the poster boy of this sort blindness.

Ken's argument, however, is that if we reverse the privilege between representational preformation ("epigenesis") and psychoanalysis—if we read psychobabble as a symptom—then we might profitably understand it as a mournful discourse: psychoanalysis registers the death of the sign. He offers two "justifications" for this move: (1) psychoanalysis "dresses up" contingency as a necessary, underlying structure; (2) it's really not expository, but reactive.

Over on Ken's blog my reaction to this calling out (since my work is directly addressed) was initially that I don't have much to quibble with here. Indeed, what discourse isn't a mediation of some sort? And who would dispute the basic, Gadamerian understanding of the horizons of interpretation (as well as its limits) as a gesture? Or perhaps as Nietzsche put it, we always operate "on the backs of things," and that means there is no un-mediated access. Thinking through this earlier today, I would add, however, a number of responses.

First, theory is a name game. Insofar as I buy into the transcendental argument (call me Kantian or Derridian, but there is no access to the outside; we're stuck "in here," if by "in" we mean, basically, the outside/socious too), the critical task of thinking is, well, critical: what names work and what names to not, and what are the consequences of this name, as opposed to that one? I wish I could make recourse to some meta-theory to better illustrate the case, but, I regret this was in part Lacan's understanding of "discourse" in the technical sense: most theory, philosophy for certain, is a "master" discourse that necessarily asserts what Ken is calling "genetic privilege." In a sense, what Ken is talking about is what Lacan is talking about in Seminar 20: the university discourse is the master discourse in disguise.

Second, the "genetic privilege" of psychoanalysis is no different from any other interpretive discourse insofar as it speaks in the name of authority. Why? Because I would gamble the analytic meaning of interpretation entails authority/mastery: All interpretation presumes the object being made meaningful (primary) is not self-transparent, but requires another discourse—requires utterance about it--to ferret its truth. Insights into the truth of the object, however, always entail a certain blindness, a blindness to the preformation of its own interpretive procedure. Another way to put this is that every discourse, most especially that of a master, requires an "off scene" or, if you want, an ob-scene. We sometimes call it the unconscious.

Third—seeing that I agree with Ken at the level of the epistemic here—such observations imply even media-ecological (is that a word?) approaches to cultural objects, such as reading the psychoanalytic discourse as a symptom, will suffer its own blindness. Since I'm just learning the literature of that discourse, I'm not so sure what that might be at the moment, but I would hazard a Missy Misdemeanor Elliott "flip it and reverse it" gesture by suggesting media ecology's own libidinal investment in the gadget (the central object of all group psychology) blinds it to the agency of the signifier. If psychoanalysis is fundamentally mournful (and I think it is), then media ecological approaches are too joyful.

Fourth, instead of a reversal, why not an equalization or some perspectival form of homeostatis? This seems precisely the project of the work of Larry Rickels, who plays media-ecological and psychoanalytic discourse off one another, fundamentally to avoid reifying either as a master discourse (see, for example, the massive Nazi Psychoanalysis" series).

Finally, if Ken is right, that psychoanalysis can be understood as a symptom, it does not follow that it is not therefore expository. Exposition is not the same as interpretation (although ideally the latter leads to the former). In my reading of the psychoanalytic discourse—colored, admittedly, by Lacanian folks—the whole enterprise is not so much to make the world meaningful, but to explain how be comfortable with a certain degree of ineffability. Like I said, it's all a name game, in the end. Perhaps the fundamental issue that Ken points up is really the one of determinism: if transcendentalism is our problem and our plight, then perhaps the banishment of mastery is our goal? Still, I don't disagree with the major point of Ken's argument: the assertion of mastery entails a certain degree of blindness. For me, the best issue to consider in adopting this or that perspective is the consequence of its particular blindnesses: does that blindness get people killed? Fortunately,most university discourses do not (with apologies to Gramsci).