The concepts of markedness, thirdness and intersubjectivity embody contemporary psychoanalysis’ radical solution to the question of how subjectivity develops and grows. These concepts, in turn, represent a radical alternative to the disappearance of truth, and the consequences of this disappearance; dictatorial subjectivity, lying, illiberalism.
In this way, modern psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity truth differ from other post-modern interpretations, which are legitimately criticized for promoting creating cynicism about meaning and truth. I want talk briefly about the differences between the meaning making subjectivity of contemporary psychoanalysis, and the cynicism engendering subjectivity of other post modern expressions, because I think we can learn from what we get it better. Take, for example literary criticism.
In her recent book “The Death of Truth”, literary critic, Michiko Kakutani lists multiple causes for the same issues we are grappling with here today. Many I mentioned earlier; today’s bankrupt relationship with truth. These include information overload, fake news, the attention deficit related to the internet and the rise of subjectivity. I believe that she frequently makes the classic statisticians error of confusing cause with correlation – funerals aren’t lethal just because lots of people seem to die around the time they occur – but she also describes, accurately, what is happening to truth from multiple perspectives. It is a particularly interesting as a psychoanalyst to examine her literary critic’s perspective on the problems inherent in what she calls “perversely enshrined subjectivity”.
Kakutami is a modernist, and some of her harshest reviews in the New York Times center around her dislike of postmodern fiction. According to Kakutani, postmodernism rejects “the possibility of an objective reality” and, in its deconstructivism and cynicism, “substitutes perspective and positioning for the idea of truth”. In this way, she concludes, postmodernism “(e)nshrine(s) the principle of subjectivity”. In her view, a pejorative form of self absorbed narcissism, in all of its irony and cynicism, is in part responsible for the “Death of Truth”.
There’s a lot wrong with Kakutami’s analysis from a psychoanalytic perspective, starting with pejoratively equating subjectivity with pathological narcissism, or what in the context of what we are talking about today I might call dictatorial subjectivity. I think, however, that appreciating the shortcomings of her perspective entitles us to a rare pat on the back in terms of our relationship with postmodernism. More on this, but first I want to indulge in reading, in its entirety, another quote critical of postmodern fiction. This from David Foster Wallace, in an interview with Larry Mccaffrey.
“For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you’re in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. “For a while it’s great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat’s-away-let’s-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody’s got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there’s cigarette burn on the couch, and you’re the host and it’s your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house. It’s not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it’s 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody’s thrown up in the umbrella stand and we’re wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders’ patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We’re kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we’re uneasy about the fact that we wish they’d come back–I mean, what’s wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren’t ever coming back–which means we’re going to have to be the parents.”
First off, I wonder whether you hear the parallels between Wallace’s view on literary postmodernism Plato’s view of the end of democracy? The idea that the longer a democracy lasts the more “freedoms multiply”, the more deference to authority “withers”, and the more the structures that create order and discourse erode.
Wallace and Plato are both talking about what happens when the dialectical space created by thirdness collapses into entropically determined dualism. It’s not that the white men haven’t exerted an oppressive influence, a literary manspreading of the kind white men are wont to do. It’s that killing the dead white men yet again has consequences; it leads to a kind of orphaned emptiness. And what Wallace and Plato don’t say explicitly, because it is not their metaphor, though they all but say it, is that this kind of Lacanian parricide, which in the broadest sense is an obliteration of necessary “facts” where “facts” stand for alternative subjectivities, also annihilates the space of discomfiting difference and disagreement that is necessary for the creation and sustenance of meaning.
Civitarese and Ferro (2013) write:
“In the consulting room, (t)he patient arrives with a variously sized bottle of ink (his anxieties and proto-emotions—in the jargon, his beta elements), which he keeps pouring
on to the special kind of blotting paper represented by the field. The field absorbs the ink and becomes thoroughly soaked in it. Analyst and patient dip their pens into this ink to write down the text of the session. What was previously a mere formless blot is transformed into stories, narrations, and
constructions. In this way, what at first had a soiling effect becomes susceptible to thought, narration, and sharing.”
This quote, along with many others in the psychoanalytic literature, points to precisely what contemporary psychoanalytic thinking about subjectivity and intersubjectivity gets right.
Mr. A.’s Trumpian ink did not transform me into his blot. I believe that I, the container, was not subjugated into the shape of the contained, as is the case with modern lying and illiberal thought. Because of the marker, and again I use the word “marker” as the representative of the myriad expressions of the components necessary for the creation of transitional space, of thirdness, of intersubjectivity, Mr. A.’s subjectivity did not become dictatorial, or, as Kakutami puts it, “perversely enshrined”.
Psychoanalysis has, I believe, benefited from post-modern phenomenology in its willingness to move away from analytic positivism, which is, in its worst incarnations, is itself a form of dictatorial subjectivity. At the same time, our post-modern informed theory does not lead to that 3am orphaned emptiness, that cynicism about meaning and truth, in the way that other expressions of postmodernism are wont to do.
I believe that a major reason for this, perhaps the major reason, is that in our translation of postmodernism, “alternative facts” – things like science, news, and opinions we disagree with – are markers. They serve as stakes in the ground against the subjugating spread of our subjectivities. They are reminders that it does matter whether or not there is a cat in that box, even if we must respect the fact that it can be hard to know that truth from within the ever moving and ever refracting lens of our own subjectivities.
It certainly matters to the cat.
The structure of thirdness, however, is fragile. Entropy is powerful and relentless. Under duress, our autonomic nervous systems turns on, and that old evolutionarily essential pull to dualism and illiberalism kicks in. As a result, intersubjective space often collapses, indeed it wants to collapse, into the dualist space in which there is ultimately room for only one subjectivity.
In the relentless, energetically mindful effort necessary to withstand such collapse, I have found it helpful to keep in mind the difference between optimal psychoanalytic structure and what is happening in our truth-impaired culture (which, in fairness to Kakutani, does parallel what she describes in her critique of postmodernism). Just as the loss of thirdness, and with it the rise of dictatorial subjectivity, is at the core of today’s cynicism and amorality, the creation and sustenance of thirdness is at the heart of today’s psychoanalytic endeavor. To borrow from Wallace’s belief about good fiction, psychoanalysis is, at its best, all about “what it is to be a fucking human being”.