Moten, Black and Blur

Moten, Black and Blur

"Consent not to be a single being" is Christopher Winks's translation of Édouard Glissant's phrase consent à n'être plus un seul. The occasion of Glissant's utterance is an interview with scholar and filmmaker Manthia Diawara in which Glissant is asked to reflect upon the irony of traversing the Atlantic on the Queen Mary Two while having written and thought so devotedly and brilliantly on the middle passage and its meaning. The term consent doesn't merely defy but rather unravels a set of normative discourses on agency that are either denied to or unsuccessfully salvaged for those who remain in middle passage which is, as Cedric Robinson and Ruth Wilson Gilmore have said, eternal. For Glissant, consent, which is not so much an act but a nonperformative condition or ecological disposition, is another way of approaching what he calls the "poetics of relation." With the utmost reverence and respect, I have been trying to think passage, by way of Winks's version of Glissant's words, against the grain of relation and the individuation that relation seems unable not to bear. I would like to think these essays are messages entanglement sends out to itself and I want to acknowledge, here, some of the beautiful and significant differences that nourish and enable this sending.

These essays emerge from long collaborative study with Laura Harris, and with Stefano Harney. Their making has been so influenced by the fundamental, mandatory examples of Glissant and Robinson, and of Amiri Baraka, Julian Boyd, Octavia Butler, Betty Carter, William Corbett, Angela Davis, Samuel R. Delany, Jacques Derrida, Thornton Dial, Charles Gaines, Gayl Jones, Martin Kilson, Nathaniel Mackey, Robert O'Meally, William Parker, M. NourbeSe Philip, Avital Ronell, Hortense Spillers, and Cecil Taylor, that proper citation is impossible and superfluous.

They were nurtured in friendship, in various forms of intellectual and artistic fellowship, and in a bunch of different kinds of conversation with Sadia Abbas, John Akomfrah, Julie Tetel Andresen, Samiya Bashir, Ian

Deligny, The Arachnean and Other Texts

The Charade

The unconscious?

There is psychoanalysis, it's true.

For me, psychoanalysis is a curiously foreign language. I thought I could learn it, by reading texts written in the only language I know, French. Impossible. The same misadventure had befallen me when I was younger, with English, Latin, Greek, and mathematics. However, this time the texts were written in French, a language I'm rather fond of. I couldn't understand it. I told myself that I was dealing with a kind of double language. I occasionally spent time with people who spoke psychoanalysis. I spoke as well, in my native tongue. It seemed that my remarks were being returned to me translated, interpreted, as one says, and I no longer understood them. This produced a bizarre effect, as if the others who were there were frolicking in the middle of a swimming pool whose water I couldn't see.

And then I got used to it, all the more easily when I met an autistic individual who, clearly, could no more understand our language than I could psychoanalysis.

Sometimes I would ask myself whether I hadn't purposely become resistant to this language. When I saw that Janmari was a stranger to mine, I stopped questioning my own intentions, since it seemed so clear to me that, as far as intentions were concerned, there weren't any. Thus I was over it, in the clear. I mean that I acquitted myself without any other form of trial. At peace, I could try to see whether by chance this language, which like all languages constitutes a whole that has its own coherence, might not be eclipsing something else that persists around the edges, as is the case with any eclipse: an opaque body makes a screen haloed all around with a light that seems to emanate from the body itself, just as we see a halo of light around the head of a saint.

There still remains the thought that the head of the saint itself hides something from us, something that, through an effect of optics, seems to emanate from it, but that is really nothing. It's merely the remainder; what had been concealed persists on the threshold of perception, whereas the saint, of course, has no intention of hiding anything whatsoever, his or her task being to reveal, if only the truth.

I even reached the point of telling myself that any truth conceals, eclipses the real, and that the aura that I saw, via the presence of an autistic child - provided as I was then with a sort of third eye, like the one spoken of by Tibetan monks, among whom it was standard practice to make a hole in one's forehead - glimmers of the real that was hidden by the fact of the consciousness that is incumbent upon us.

Being neither a monk nor Tibetan, I hadn't made a hole in my forehead. Janmari was there, constantly, with his own "seeing point," perceptibly distant and different from our viewpoint, which is more or less unanimous among all those who, as soon as they are born and even before, have been initiated into symbolic existence.

The real: it seems to me that I have come across this word in texts written in the French language, no doubt about that, but owing to the fact that that language is double and at the very least has double meanings, goes in two directions, it swept the words away from under my nose, and then, now you see them now you don't, who knows what became of them in that waltz whose music I didn't perceive.

It is completely discouraging to hold a word in sight, and see it spin around, pair with others, join a constellation, like a string of beads; in fact, it escapes you like a ball on a playground; others play with it cheerfully, but what are they playing at, what's their game? It's a mystery. There are no goals, no baskets or nets. They are having fun, that's for sure; the game is making them laugh. After all, words don't belong to anyone, and we would be wrong to feel ourselves deprived of them just because others use them in a way that suits them.

So what about the real? It comes from res: thing.

I have mentioned that I have read, and sometimes even re-read, a good number of pages written in psychoanalysis. I have called it a foreign language. But where might the foreignness come from? Perhaps it's that the thing, the real, doesn't exist in that language, to the point that autism is envisioned like a charade, the subject going silent and seeking refuge in identification with some object in which obliteration of the subject would be seen.

The autistic individual - and our Janmari, in this case - would thus be playing a role, his manifest attitude being a charade, his attraction toward the thing explained by the fact that S would be moved by a sort of identificatory tropism.

No things, then; there is only something like an object since there is, a priori, something like a subject and, when the latter is lacking it's because it goes to ground and obliterates itself. To put it another way, when an object becomes a thing, it is nothing.

I don't know if psychoanalysis speaks like this; but a language doesn't speak: it is spoken by some subject who uses it and, as we say, expresses himSELF or herSELF. Is this to say that all subjects who speak the same language are in agreement? Certainly not; it is thanks to language that we are able to discuss, argue with, congratulate, and accuse ourSELVES and EACH OTHER. Here we can see the importance of the WE in each case where we are dealing with the SELF. For those who do not have the same WE - the same language - there are no more reciprocal feelings, there is no more consent or resentment.

Thus it is the WE of psychoanalysis that escapes me, the S of the subject being in some way the center of gravity of its coherence.

If I read that Janmari is a subject who would identify himself with anything what- soever, and in so doing would be obliterating himself, I see an inkling of intention, an ounce of intentionality, or, if you will, the indication of the existence of the S at the center of the human system, just as, for a very long time, the earth was main- tained at the center of the solar system; it actually had been the center forever, as everything that we had been able to feel in that respect attested.

And it is true that, watching Janmari live, there's no question, he does turn around us, and we need only rely on what we can feel in order to suppose that he wanders like a soul in pain deprived of the ability to identify with someONE. But this way of feeling can come from the fact that each one of us is someONE, and that this ONE of the existing subject has an undeniable propensity for self-projection, as we say, as if every ONE of us were a soul having a hard time identifying, and then the charade comes from us, and not from the autistic individual, the fear of nothingness inspir- ing us, this nothingness being supposed by us, moreover; and it is in shamelessly identifying ourselves with the "he" in question - who is not "he" - that our only option is to interpret that he is identifying himself, for want of us, with a piece of manipulated string, a scrap of a thing that for Janmari is not "one" but that for us, can only be ONE (object) supposedly circumscribed, that is, named or almost, the real being indeed fragmented owing to the effect of the language that is incumbent on us, an effect that doesn't concern Janmari in the least, except that it deprives him of that by which we are things, and indeed real. To insist on the plurality of the word réel suggests that each one of us is a singular being, which is no doubt true for us - felt by us - but not for Janmari. It would be better to say we are reality, if only ever so slightly, except that we have long since lost the habit of being real. And rather than invoking habit, we ought to speak of attitudes.

Because from Janmari's seeing point - the third eye - the real has innate forms; why not say the word: I have nothing to lose.

I'm speaking in a different language.

It is hard to imagine a law, even if it were the law of language - and I have come across this term in writing - that would not result in a good number of formalities.

For those of us who see autistic individuals live, their manner of being appears strangely formal to us; repeating occurs constantly.

If there must be forms, is it the case that Janmari would lose himself, in his "ways," whereas we would find ourselves, in our "ways" of saying?

That is something of which I'm not fully convinced.

How can something that has never existed be obliterated? and in order for a SELF to lose itself, it first has to be.

If we find ourselves, within our own ways of saying, it's because we are already there, a position has been taken and a "seeing point" occulted, eclipsed. Who will state, and in what language, the distance between two bodies, the one that exists only in order to be seen, and knows it, and the other that exists only in order to see, without consciousness of being?

Webster, Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis

And when we want everything to change we call on fire. The dream of love is soldered to the value of creation; fire is set against this, moving in the direction of destruction, even if it is renewal. Both death and resurrection, for Bachelard, must be without any particular value-not even the transvaluation of value.

It is simply the value of transformation-or perhaps better, the value of substance-that the psychoanalysis of fire values as the only proof of existence and its continuation: endless conversion and combustion, infinite fire. By turning away from the idealization of fire-against fire metaphorically used to think of love or birth or even death-toward fire for fire's sake, Bachelard feels he has worn out the patience of his reader. He adds to his work a second warning and a surprising address to his audience regarding his own writing. He states toward the end of this strange book: this impatience in itself is a sign; we would like the realm of values to be a closed realm. We would like to judge values without bothering about the primary empirical meanings. The in-mixing of fact and value will be left behind in flames or force alone.

PSYCHOANALYSIS OF TOUCH

To the sign of this impatience by Bachelard we will add Jean-Luc Nancy's this is my body. For Nancy, the obsession with showing a this in this is my body lends itself as much to a few jokes as does fire, since the desired this-substance, this body-can never show itself with any certainty, while it is nevertheless certainly there. Saying so-this is my body-is some strange additive. Trying to hold the thing forth is at best an awkward redundancy. The assertion this is purely comical. Sensory certitude, as soon as it is touched, turns into chaos, a storm where all sense runs wild. Body is certitude shattered and blown to bits. What can this be?

Nancy calls the familiar strangeness of this in this is my body the nonmelancholic agony of nakedness, of being laid open and touched. If we are going to write about the body, it cannot be a discourse on appearance or spectacle, on the imaginary body or body as phantasm, nor can it be a hymn to immediacy or some uninterrupted real to be unveiled, as if the this was simply possible, even in a reachable beyond. Nancy states in no uncertain terms that these are religious iterations of incarnation in the model of the image-always empty or full, spiritual or disembodied. We should be wary of metaphorizing what is essentially concrete.

No access is granted to the body; still, the body is open. What never asks to be deciphered is what defines opening as space, spatial. Neither full nor empty but this, there: "it is a skin, variously folded, refolded, unfolded, multiplied, invaginated, exogastrulated, orificed, evasive, invaded, stretched, relaxed, excited, distressed, tied, untied. In these and a thousand other ways, the body makes room for existence." With Nancy, "this" body will not lead to a discourse on the ineffable, on the silent mysteries linking the body again with the spiritual. There is no "sense" when it comes to bodies. Yet the non-sense of the sensory is neither the estimation of the sublime, nor the negative coloring of absurdity, nor the contortions of knowledge. The non-sense of the body is a place of clarity in the sense of something shining and distinct rather than lucid-a brilliance of difference.

The body, Nancy says, demands other categories of force and thought, ones that manage to touch at the limit the "this" of some singular body- "touching the body with the incorporeality of 'sense.'" How could this touching of the body with incorporeal sense even be possible? Bodies, he tells us, are addressed to one another: they are "existence addressed to an outside," like lovers. In the thought of bodies is the purest of separations, namely, the separation or cut between bodies that gives form to love as address, touch- "it's the separation of substances which alone allows them their singular chance." Touch, here, is the overriding concern because it is about difference, touching difference, the attempt to cross a chasm, to affirm and overcome separation at once.

The exscription of bodies is evoked for Nancy by Freud in what he calls his "most fascinating and perhaps (I say this without exaggerating) most decisive statement," which appears in a posthumous note: "Psyche ist ausgedehnt: weiss nichts davon." "The psyche's extended: knows nothing about it." Nancy explains this: "The 'psyche,' in other words, is body, and this is precisely what escapes it, and its escape (we may suppose), or its process of escape, constitutes it as 'psyche,' in a dimension of not (being able/wanting)-to-know-itself." This exteriorization maps a terrain beyond sense-a territoriality or topos of tensions-where a psychoanalysis of touch might take shape because of this psyche that cannot know itself for what it is. So it must touch itself there.

Nancy points to a crucial part of Freud's vision of the body in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, where the question of the unconscious is much closer to a sexual terrain that could be described ruthlessly in bodily terms-zonal tensions, pain-pleasure, stimulation, substitutes-while the ego remains merely the projection of this body's surface extended, exteriorized, and having to know nothing about it. How, then, did the unconscious come to be thought in terms of interior, depth, inside, and even eventually in terms of sense or signification?

It's even more surprising then, that a certain psychoanalytic discourse would seem to insist, while denying its object, on making the body "signify," rather than flushing out signification as something that always screens off the spacing of bodies. This kind of analysis "ectopizes" (or "utopizes") the body beyond-place: it volatilizes it, indexing it to the incorporeality of sense.

The body is indexed but screened off. Nancy is not saying that the body is without sense-that would be oxymoronic-but that the sense of the body is something other than sense as signification.

We need the body of sense, the touching of body and sense; this can only take place at the limit, which is the meaning of extension, of a not- being-able to know itself there where it encounters something beyond itself. Sense as feeling, against sense as meaning, happens at the place where we make contact with the other. Everything else, Nancy says, volatilizes-making neurosis an effect of disaffected utopias, the language of the untouched, the movement of the unmoved, and the problem of an incorporeal dream. Conversion is perhaps best thought of here as the move from an incorporeal dream to a corpus, a body of work and the body as work.

Once Nancy turns to Freud, he is quick to evoke the hysteric as exemplary of this structure. He contests seeing her as a signifying or speaking body, as many would have it, since that would mean no longer being a body. Instead, he wants to see hysteria (and here he moves from the individual to the pathology) as this bodily nonknowledge:

The body's becoming totally parasitical upon the incorporeality of sense, to the point that it silences incorporeality, thereby showing, in its stead, a piece, a zone, of a-significance. (Because ultimately we would have to know whether the hysteric is engaging mainly in translation and interpretation or in something contrary and much deeper, namely, a resolute blockage of the transmission of sense. Discourse incarnate, or a blocking body: who doesn't see that there is no hysteria without a blocking body?)

For Nancy, the symptom is deployed in hysteria not in order to convey sense or meaning-to return finally to ideation, understanding taking the place of the once convulsive body-but rather to block sense, to put her body between herself and the other and render sense foreign.

The hysteric shows sense as foreign to this body, hers, with a question about what might be made between them, since bodies-mine and yours-will always retain this distance, this strangeness, this separation, and this antagonism to meaning. The hysteric places her body in relation to the other at the place that blocks the transmission of sense. She finds this point, almost, as it were, unconsciously, knowing nothing about it. And even if nothing gets through-bodies will always remain in their separate places-things do touch. The body touches the other at the place where sense is silenced and perhaps even dismantled. Touching, when this body of sense finally makes itself felt through another. This is what all lover's language concerning the heart-yes, clichéd and rather poor-is meant to convey literally, not metaphorically, being touched or having been.

Nancy's vision of hysteria exalts hysteria and quiets it, giving it an aura of calm. He protects the hysteric, touches her, affirms the limit that her body wants to find in order to be simply what it is:

The hysterical body is exemplary in its affirmation-at an unattainable limit-of a pure concentration in itself, the pure being-in-itself of its extension, which in turn denies and renders catatonic its extendedness and its spacing . . . this limit manifests the truth of the body, in the form of its implosion. (But perhaps something that opens up in pain or pleasure, and does not withdraw, something that makes room for a passage through the limit, rather than hardening it-is this not, perhaps, a kind of joyful hysteria, and the very body of sense?)

Always the most important thoughts for Nancy are in parentheses at the end of a paragraph, like two distinct halves of a thought touching. Who doesn't see? The psychoanalysts, he seems to be saying. For even if she blocks, implodes, convulses, and resists unfolding or opening in a hardening of her body, like in paralysis, room is nonetheless being given. This is how he reads the hysteric's movements, and from this he states that there is the possibility here of a joyful hysteria. Nancy finds that if you unfold the joy folded in neurotic misery, you will witness the pleasure in pure concentration, density, nerve, as a fidelity to the touch and difference of bodies.

So even if the hysteric puts her body under the sign of withdrawal, she does so as body, not as it is for others as a consequence of ideation. Perhaps she withdraws in order to tease the other, cajole them from their slumber of sense. Finally, Nancy states, "this alone," meaning this hysterical body, "can close or release a space for 'interpretations.'" What interpretation? What can be said after this silencing of sense? Nancy is quiet here, leaving us with the thought of the breakthrough of her body and the attempt to say something there and only there. He sees here the figure of writing-etching, more than speaking, the body as opening, exposing, and spacing rather than any stampede or chaos of signification. Whatever happens, it must be the birthing and sharing of bodies, not the incarnation inflating the spiritual life of the sign.

Of course, for Freud, the symptom was the parasitical element of hysteria; the symptom acts like a foreign body, a body implanted within the body, which agitates psyche. Psychoanalysis converts the symptom into the space of analysis-the symptom extending itself ever outward, transforming into the order of the day, the rhythm of analysis. It is here that analyst and patient touch each other. Perhaps we should read this in line with Nancy through the question of bodily extension, this exscription of body as the psychoanalysis of touch. With the psychoanalysis of touch, this act of rhythmic spacing, we have the figures of edge, burn, pain, anguish, and joy instead of meaning and sense. None of this should be aligned with any hysterical mysterium or melancholic incorporation but rather be thought about simply as a fact about bodies. The pathos of this kind of signification is precisely what is absent at the limit of the body. It is what is blocked in this joyful and hysterical consenting to the body.

It must be said that this consenting to something that you can never gain access to, never get the sense of, is a kind of madness constituting the double bind of being able neither to speak about it nor keep silent. This anguished joy, says Nancy, is an ordinary madness:

The madness of the body isn't a crisis, and isn't morbid. It's just this endlessly untied and distended place-taking, tending toward itself. The body's madness is this offering of place ... there's no crisis, no contortion, no foam, any more than there's room for you and me in the same place at the same time. No secret of the body to be communicated to us, no secret body to be revealed to us.

This is why he sees this as the draining of neurotic pathos or narcissistic hubris. Instead, the hysteric shows us what it means to keep pressing this body to its outermost edge, to press the body up against speech.

This offering, this injunction-body, madness, press-is all the more urgent when we reflect on the current predicament of bodies in the world,

a whole world of bodies, almost eight billion, dense, visible. The body is always already there, hiding in plain sight. How does one even begin to speak about this everywhere excess of body? At one time, it was through the language of sin and the concurrent language of purification. Now, the body, he says, has been saved before it has even arrived-saved for health, for modern medicine and technology, for sport and for pleasure, which only exacerbates the disaster, since this is the pure signification of body, forcing the body to withdraw ever inward, falling into itself, touching nobody.

This divested body mirrors the strange accumulation of body that is ever more disembodied: the singular body becoming anybody in crowds, armies, mass graves and mass murders; the transport of refugees, like so many bodies, across the globe; the billions of images of bodies, ever more indistinct, anonymous, yet there, building up, a surplus of overflowing bodies. This is to say nothing of the accumulation of pornographic displays of bodies, anatomized as zones, parts-which, for Nancy, hides the sexed body as simply the truth of the body in relation to another body.

The body is close to a subject without an object, which is not a subject in the strong sense, since it is so close to itself as objectal. Nancy describes body as weight, as always in the act of weighing-always in relation to its own gravity. The body is an urgency without knowledge, without judgment or value. The body leaves the question of destiny behind because destiny is where everything is weighed in advance, perhaps in order to escape the conundrums of weight, of having a body. Destiny is a dream of weightlessness-what it would be to be disembodied. In life, the press of the body cannot be shaken off. This is the madness. And it is probably the simple truth of separation, which is finally what it means to be this body in this place and to long for or love another.

In the psychoanalysis of touch, the injunctions, values, and vicissitudes of the superego are drained of all ideation. They are reduced to tension, departure, movement, and the thought of touch. This, Nancy says, is what psyche is present to-nothing more, nothing less-not a body to come nor an essential existence, neither a judgment nor a sense of the day, just this permanent press of the body. "Which is why, in this one note by Freud, all of 'psychoanalysis' really has its true program always yet to come." Here, a strange question emerges concerning the institution and program of psychoanalysis-it seems to dictate a program or knowledge that is always to come, that is always deferred. The body is nothing but a "nonknowledge that is not a negative knowledge or the negative of knowledge, it's only an absence of knowledge, an absence of the bond," incorporeal, "called 'knowing.'" Psychoanalysis is the experience of losing the incorporeality of knowing.

What psychoanalysis knows is only what it touches in an endless transport from one shore to another, this transference as the swerving and turning of bodies-in other words, conversion. Is this not the experience of conversion in analysis-being shaken outside oneself, res extensa? This departure of one body for another is one way to think of the psychoanalysis of touch. "This is the world of worldwide departure: the spacing of partes extra partes, with nothing to oversee it or sustain it, no Subject for its destiny, taking place only as a prodigious press of bodies." The departure signals an impatience where the possibility of passage that the body offers or affirms is there but can be blocked by sense or meaning, especially when searching for its own meaning.

Psychoanalysis has always been configured as the meeting of minds, or the meeting of words. With Nancy, perhaps we can think of it as this meeting of bodies, subverting the rule of abstinence or, perhaps better, converting it. To screen out the touching of bodies in the framework of meeting, even if in words, is to betray psychoanalysis-the one hope we have for joy.