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Introduction Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/0162287054769931/1751251/0162287054769931.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021

MIGNON NIXON

“Psychoanalytic theory, despite a new surge to the recurrent clarion call of its demise, has so far survived; survived not only those who hope it will not do so, but those who start by relating to it,” writes Juliet Mitchell in this issue of October.1 Clarifying the distinction between “using” and “relating to” theory, Mitchell turns to a 1968 paper delivered in New York by the British psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott. She refers to his rather unexpected emphasis on “the positive use of destructiveness”—a position taken, she contends, in tacit sympathy with the era’s politically active youth and in open contradiction of the special emphasis on “relating to objects” in the psychoanalytic tradition with which Winnicott is closely associated, namely, object relations. “I propose to put forward for discussion the idea of the use of an object,” wrote Winnicott. “The allied subject of relating to objects seems to me to have had our full attention.”2 In this issue, we return to the question of how psychoanalysis is used in contemporary art, theory, and criticism. A common charge against criticism in particular is that it treats theory as doxa, or, in other words, does not dare to use it. The critic is claimed to be, as in Moustafa Safouan’s description of the “docile” psycho- analysts decried by Freud, “present her- or himself purely as an interpreter of the Text.”3 In order to extricate oneself from this self-effacing obedience to theory, Mitchell contends, the critic, artist, or theorist, like the analyst and the analysand, must use—the theory, the object, the analyst—even if this using risks destroying that object or one’s relationship to it. Only by attempting to destroy an object are we able to recognize it as an entity that exists in itself and break our identiﬁcation with it: “We can only use it once we are not totally identiﬁed with it, nor even in a state of relationship or interrelationship with it.”4

1. Juliet Mitchell, “Theory as an Object,” this issue, pp. 27–38. 2. D. W. Winnicott, “The Use of an Object and Relating through Identiﬁcations” (1968), in his Playing and Reality (Hove: Brunner-Routledge, 2002), p. 86. 3. Moustafa Safouan, Jacques Lacan and the Question of Psychoanalytic Training, ed. and trans. Jacqueline Rose (London: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 66–67. 4. Mitchell, “Theory as an Object,” p. 30.

Only when the “good enough” theory survives our attempt to destroy it are we able to use it—just as, under other circumstances, we are able to use the mother, the analyst, or the other. But “the notion of the destruction of the theory should not be etiolated to some benign notion of play,” Mitchell warns, summon- ing not only certain interpretations of Winnicott and his theorizations of Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/0162287054769931/1751251/0162287054769931.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 children’s play, but also much contemporary art in which play (and its affiliate terms, “relating” and “interacting”) frequently operates in a safe zone of modest contact with the object, or vague intersubjective engagement with the other. In contemporary art and criticism, it seems, two default positions—identification with the text as doxa and an ill-defined relating to the object or the other—avoid the risks involved in using theory.5 “The encounter between art and psychoanalysis has frequently been banal,” Parveen Adams recalled in a 1991 special issue of October, “Rendering the Real.” “Naive musings on creativity, reductive speculation about authorial motivation, sentimental descriptions of aesthetic experience, all these have played too great a part in psychoanalytic studies”—and now they are often reiterated in the curatorial strategies of the gallery and the museum, and in the work of art itself.6 Yet if, as Silvia Kolbowski wrote in this magazine in 1995, galleries, museums, and the art press have long since delivered their decisive “rejection or simplification of psychoanalytic theory or theoretical ‘work’ in general,” the present issue of October considers a diverse range of theoretical and artistic practices that take up psychoanalysis.7 In place of “theory,” these works—including photographs of the psychoanalytic setting by Shellburne Thurber and Sarah Jones, a recent video work on the psychoanalytic encounter by Glenn Ligon, an oral history installation by Kolbowski, and projects conducted on, or even in, the Freud Museum in London by Susan Hiller, Cornelia Parker, and Sarah Lucas—all have recourse to the “analytic object,” encompassing, in Mitchell’s formulation, the person of the analyst, the technique, the setting, and the theory. This recent shift from “theory” to the complex of terms constellated by the “analytic object” returns us, albeit under a different aegis, to an earlier movement in the cultural reception of psychoanalysis. In 1984, Joan Copjec noted that the work of Jacques Lacan had stimulated a change in the reception of psychoanalysis by literature and art. “The transference and Freud’s essays on therapy and technique, formerly of little concern to those who analyzed artistic or literary texts, are now assuming a new importance,” she observed, anticipating a more systematic use of psychoanalysis in cultural criticism that, by understanding it as a praxis and not exclusively a theory, would enter into the structural logic of psychoanalysis.8 Rather than apply psychoanalytic theory

5. The discourse of the relational in art is currently structured primarily by Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with Mathieu Copeland (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002). 6. Parveen Adams, Introduction, “Rendering the Real: A Special Issue,” October 58 (Fall 1991), p. 3. 7. Silvia Kolbowski, Introduction, “feminist IssueS,” October 71 (Winter 1995), p. 3. 8. Joan Copjec, “Discipleship,” introduction to “Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis,” October 28 (Spring 1984), p. 5. Introduction 5 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/0162287054769931/1751251/0162287054769931.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021

Shellburne Thurber. Cambridge, Mass.: Ofﬁce with antique clawfooted couch. 2000. Courtesy the artist. 6 OCTOBER

directly to the interpretation of artistic or literary texts—“tattletaling” on “a repressed sexuality which contained . . . the tale of a text’s meaning”—criticism informed by Lacanian theory would address the structural problem of the “relation of the subject to systems of representation.”9 Psychoanalytic criticism, that is, now informed by Lacan’s dual emphasis on language and transference, would conceive Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/0162287054769931/1751251/0162287054769931.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 the artist, critic, or theorist as a subject “inhabited by language” (like the text) and motivated by transference to the “subject supposed to know,” or the master. Doubly distanced from the possibility of interpretation by language and by transference, this subject of psychoanalysis would begin to perceive, and to reveal, “the fundamental distance between us and the point from which we speak.” Alienated from her or his own speech, the critic, like the analyst or the analysand, would begin to acknowledge that “the exteriorizing tale of our own existence” begins with estrangement—from the master, the object, the text, and the self.10 More than twenty years later, estrangement from the master (Freud as “a deceiving other, a text full of traps, contradictions, and uncertainties”) has been replaced by an excessive identification with the Text, and transference and Freud’s writings on psychoanalytic technique have all but disappeared from cultural criticism.11 Yet, in some contemporary art, the milieu and cultural history of psychoanalysis are returning, while Mitchell’s recent writings consider, not for the first time, what might be at stake in the survival of psychoanalytic theory. Mitchell’s essay, “Theory as an Object,” was first presented in November 2003 at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, on a panel that placed her in conversation with the artist Mary Kelly. Retracing their shared history, Mitchell described her own 1974 book Psychoanalysis and Feminism and Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–78) as results of “a period of profound collectivity,” forged during their mutual participation in a women’s liberation group in London. “I hope we have been destructive of psychoanalytic theory (though I know I have very often only related to it),” she declared, connecting the politics of feminism to the political potential of psychoanalysis, while also arguing that the survival of psychoanalysis depends on the political challenges that are posed to it. “[Psychoanalysis] has survived in the sense that matters: its survival can only be assured by the fact that it has changed, though certainly not utterly.”12 What political challenges, then, are addressed to psychoanalysis today that might enable it to change, and so survive? In Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Mitchell claimed that “a rejection of psychoanalysis and of Freud’s works” would prove “fatal for feminism.”13 Psychoanalysis, she asserted, offered the most profound analysis of patriarchy available to feminism, even if that analysis was often mistaken

9. Ibid., p. 4. 10. Ibid., pp. 5–6. 11. Ibid., p. 6. 12. Mitchell, “Theory as an Object,” p. 36. 13. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing, and Women (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. xiii. Introduction 7

for an alibi of patriarchy itself. Conversely, without the feminist critiques of psychoanalysis offered by artists including Kelly, who, in Post-Partum Document, used Lacanian theory to produce the absent maternal subject, psychoanalysis might not have changed sufficiently to serve feminism. In her introduction to the 1991 issue of October, Copjec claimed that psychoanalysis, “as a political analysis” structured by the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/0162287054769931/1751251/0162287054769931.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 relationship of the disciple to the master that is traditionally denied both “women” and “colonials,” invited “a radical reconsideration of its objects and its aims”— precisely from those excluded subjects.14 And Adams would later frame the objective of “Rendering the Real” as “the attempt to demonstrate the pertinence of psychoanalysis to the politics of representation.”15 In this issue, we consider, among other questions, the politics of gender—or the challenge posed by gender to psychoanalysis—through Mitchell’s recent writings on siblings.16 Contending that psychoanalysis is “trapped in the vertical”—confined to a hierarchical, intergenerational model of (sexual) difference—Mitchell argues that the Oedipal family romance is haunted by another drama, the love and strife between siblings.17 The sibling is “someone who threatens the subject’s uniqueness” such that “the ecstasy of loving one who is like oneself is experienced at the same time as the trauma of being annihilated by one who stands in one’s place.”18 Gender, by this account, is not merely a different model of sexuality from the Oedipal, reproductive sexuality to which psychoanalysis has historically devoted its almost exclusive attention, but an entirely different mode of sexuality arising from another measure of difference.19 In sexual and in social terms, siblings “and all the lateral relations that take their cue from them” describe a dimension of experience neglected in psychoanalysis but, as we know, intensively explored in art since the 1950s.20 If the structural principle of sexual difference is binary, the structural principle of gender, according to Mitchell, is serial. Through the figure of the sibling, who threatens the subject’s uniqueness, subjectivity arises through “minimal difference” from the sister or brother, even as it is also forged in “maximal”—generational and sexual—difference within the family. For Mitchell, postmodernism, influenced by feminism, pursues this lateral line of minimal difference, precipitating “a decline of the importance of descent and a rise of the importance of alliance.”21 Siblings in turn offers a new logic through which to consider some of the pivotal developments in postmodernism: the disavowal of mastery and the displacement of the master- disciple relation as a psychic and pedagogic paradigm; the weakening of Oedipal, intergenerational conflict (exemplified by “the anxiety of influence”) and the

14. Copjec, “Discipleship,” p. 6. 15. Adams, Introduction, p. 3. 16. See Juliet Mitchell, Siblings: Sex and Violence (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2003). 17. Tamar Garb and Mignon Nixon, “A Conversation with Juliet Mitchell,” this issue, p. 19. 18. Mitchell, Siblings, p. 10. 19. “A Conversation with Juliet Mitchell,” p. 24. 20. Mitchell, Siblings, p. 3. 21. Ibid., p. 4. 8 OCTOBER

concomitant emergence of peer groups and collaborative and collective practices in which there is “an increasing ‘sameness’ in the roles of women and men”;22 the predominance of the body and performative action, enacting the trauma that, for Mitchell, is an effect of the fear of annihilation by the other in both women and men; and the emergence of seriality as the dominant principle in numerous art Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/0162287054769931/1751251/0162287054769931.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 forms and practices. While it remains essential to examine these developments within broader patterns of historical and social change, the theory of “siblings” would also insist that the artistic practices of postmodernism reveal universal psychic structures which, though masked by modernism and psychoanalysis alike, are hardly absent from them. In her recent study of hysteria and in Siblings, Mitchell returns to the classic case studies of psychoanalysis in search of the missing. When, for example, we are prompted to think of Dora, the subject of Freud’s famous “fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria,” as not only a hysterical daughter but also as an over- shadowed and resentful younger sister, or to reflect upon the sexualized relationship between the Wolf Man and his older sister, we ﬁnd fresh perspectives on the Oedipal narratives of modernism and the kinship structures that underlie them.23 It is, therefore, not only the shift from sexual difference to gender in postmodernism that “siblings” reveals, but also the dynamic interaction between gender and sexual difference, and between sex and violence, that psychoanalysis has failed to explore. The one hundredth issue of October, published in 2002, reﬂected upon the question of obsolescence in contemporary culture, and perhaps no cultural theory has been more insistently relegated to obsolescence than psychoanalysis. Yet, as we observed in October 100, the very condition of obsolescence “might have a critical role to play at this historical moment,” and the contributions to this issue seem to bear out that hope.

22. Ibid. 23. Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effects of Sibling Relations on the Human Condition (London: Penguin Books, 2000).