De Kunst van een Onmogelijk Genot, Philippe Van Haute (The art of an impossible pleasure)

notes and references

Writing this summary and comments, I hope to practice a skill. I want to become better at clarifying some notions on the territorialization of science, by articulating them onto the vocabulary, the logic and the problematizations found in a particular case of that territorialization: namely in a study of the concept of hysteria in Freud and Lacan. Also relations are sought with sociology and philosophy of sciences and meta-scientific practices, such as that of Latour in his Actor-Network-Theory. The authors of ...an impossible pleasure ... insist on the clinical-anthropological dimension of psychoanalytical praxis and theory, which opposes it to an orthodox scientific view on mental health. But still in their language one can find some hidden assumptions about the extent to which the structure of scientific self reflection may be overturned. ...an impossible pleasure... connects the fields of arts and science beyond Freud's hypothetic analogy between hysterical daydreaming and the novelist's fantasy. The book does this by reinventing the relation between phalogocentric science and the hysterical question what is a woman? or the later formulation by Lacan in terms of the possibility of an Other feminine pleasure, beyond the phallus. In the following I also propose a structural investigation of science, by comparing the anthropologic perspective of Bruno Latour on science, with the dynamics of the relation between master-discourse and hysteric discourse. Finally I lift out one possible connection that can be drawn in the collection of topics touched by Phillippe Van Haute: the relation between master and hysteric can be sublimated in humor. The art of an impossible pleasure studies hysteria as a notion that was seminal for Freud's development of psychoanalysis, although in general such definite diagnostics as expressed in the term hysteric is now outdated, and hysteria itself is now a theoretical position of the subject rather than a strict etiological category. To articulate this seminal character hysteria is said to be the cause of psychoanalysis. The idea of a science who's cause was fleeting, seems to go counter to the scientistic tendency of Freud. But it fits with the later effort of psychoanalysis to reintegrate the concept of cause into its terrain after the devastating passage of the derogatory use of the concept psycho-somatic illness without real cause. Namely it seems to double the concept of disappearing cause, by taking it from the level of diagnostic practice, to that of the structure of psychoanalysis as a science. Freud tended to take what today we call exact science, as the gauge of all knowledge. Even if, as Phillippe Van Haute shows, Freud tried to break with the normalizing tendency inherent to the science of his time, and in particular mental health, he held up the scientific attitude as an ideal to which all rational thought should aspire. This scientistic view comprises such elements as cumulative knowledge production, progressive course corrections, and strives for a total picture that is gradually drawn. But these elements are not immediately reconcilable with psycho-analysis and its origins in the phenomenon of hysteria. As a diagnostic strategy the latter 's appearance was short-lived indeed. But this ephemeral character is al too hastily thrown in the scales as an argument to disqualify psychoanalysis' claim of logical consistence. That argument points at the following paradox: On the one hand there is the disappearance of hysteria apart from its vulgarized afterlife as a diagnostic category. On the other hand psychoanalysis still considers itself a practice structured by the knowledge gotten from the treatment of some hysterics avant la lettre, and takes these cases for seminal structures of its own development. In turn ...an impossible pleasure... disqualifies such argumentation, contrary to the views of those that dismiss Freud entirely, and declare total scientific heresy the further elaboration by

De Kunst van een Onmogelijk Genot, Philippe Van Haute (The art of an impossible pleasure)
notes and references

Lacan. The Lacanian claim, that the case of hysteria is not merely seminal, but it actually constitutes the logical cause of what psycho-analysis can be as science, indeed from an orthodox position is said to undermine any demarcation of the scientific character of psycho-analysis. Orthodoxy denounces the above-mentioned ephemeral character, as a lack of foundation. Psycho-analysis has no ground in a persistent real object of study; it goes against normal sciences' claim of necessity. From the point of view of psycho-analysis though, it is rather this necessity that needs to be put under the microscope: a closer look at the concept of hysteria in the development of Freud's writings, leads to a question as counter-argument: what exactly might be the cause of a science, what is the antecedent in this supposed relation of necessity? In what way can a science be caused to come into existence, or in the other sense of the word cause, what is its commitment and how should we take it up? Just like hysterical symptoms are not 'caused' by physical lesions, but rather are the expression of a psychological syntagm, which itself might still have a cause that rather than be clearly expressed, has disappeared. To explain a little more the problematizing of science as I experience it in ... an impossible pleasure... let's take a look at a concrete passage of the book.
Totem and Taboo is not so much a hypothesis on the prehistorical origins of religion, as it is a description of how the obsessive driveconstellations find, in religious taboos and rituals, the perfect terrain to socialize themselves.

In the expression finding a perfect terrain for socializing independent of the authors' intention to counter moralizing interpretations of Freudian psycho-analysis and his term 'socializing', there is still a hint of an rigor with causality pure. I paraphrase the above: at work hidden in the interior world of the individual, there is a drive which brings it to become the specific social actor that it is. The grammar suggests a hierarchy in the relation between individual and social and the direction of causality. I would rather speak of the meeting surface between the social and the individual. In other words, Marxist dualism of individual and society. A little further on one finds the comparison of psychology and infections in which a disease's external causes are opposed to the concept of inherent mechanisms that psycho-analysis identifies with. Here the positivist notion of cause under critical scrutiny here is explicitly complemented with the topological notions of inside and outside. This is not to deny the value of this topological vocabulary. On the contrary, by freeing it from enunciations that seem to take the power of these notions for granted, their potential can be engaged again. On a side note, contemporary understanding of infectious disease also has come to include a continuum of phenomena that may be seen to abolish the hard line between normal and pathological, so thinking along terms as immunology can perhaps still provide productive problematization of psycho-analytic experience too.
The hysteric is without doubt a poet, even in the mimetic expression of his fantasies, but he doesn't take in account the limits of his audience's capacity for reading between the lines.

When Freud's thought on a maturity without neuroses is denoted as an ideal fiction one must ask what is the valuation implied in the characterizing it as 'ideal fiction'. With the complement of Lacanian interpretations, this ideality can itself be seen as an inherent structural function of the human condition or the necessary role of ideology in science stated by Badiou. But even Lacan speaks of the hysteric's incapacity to take a position as an object for exchange, a position in a system of commodities that circulates in the economy of desire. Finally I would suspect further study can be interesting. Namely the problematization of this notion of incapacity can get

De Kunst van een Onmogelijk Genot, Philippe Van Haute (The art of an impossible pleasure)
notes and references

inspiration from performance theory, and its notion of performativity. There is a tendency within science to promote itself as an ideology of sanity. This tendency in fact consists of the paradoxical practice of trying to achieve a state of exceptional health, through the study and invention of a conservative norm. Social science and orthodox psychology seem to be always running behind the facts, concerning the rise of new socio-psychological phenomena. Take for instance the idea of concentration and the explosion of patients diagnosed with an attention deficit. Phillippe Van Haute goes on to clarify the relation of two subject-positions, or two discourses as Lacan puts it: the hysteric and the master. From this approach, the ongoing practice that constitutes the discovery of psycho-analysis, is also a source of inspiration for the problematization of knowledge as such, beyond the domain of science. In fact the relation of the hysteric with his/her analyst, and the scrutiny of the latter's position, under the label master, puts the question what does the analyst know? And from this I would extrapolate: how do we know? Or What is this place called knowledge? Concerning science one can ask what is the relation between normality, the instruments of a science, the visibility of its object and the notion of transparency that the particular science holds of itself and of science as such. Psycho-analysis' story is concerned with how retro-active knowing is constitutive of knowing as such, and it parallels this with its talking-technique and the investigation of memories. And as a practice it investigates the potentialization of our knowledge-constitution capacities, and it opens spaces where this operation can be studied with its complements such as repression, demand, imagination,... The tragedy of psycho-analysis, is that the drive is still, after all, seen as a stupid, unknowing force. On the contrary, definition of unconscious as that which is knowable of ourselves, but only by the other, seems to put the unconscious right in the middle of its original terrain: the research on hysteria as a discourse that makes demands to a master. Following Freuds symptomatology, a science of daydreaming is thus called for too. Psychoanalysis is then viewed as a Latourian alliance between the orthodox- scientific operation of framing and the fragility of fantasy and play. If being drawn in by the dreams evoked by a novel, is the culturally accepted variation on daydreaming, then it is the equivalent shame at the apparent loss of purpose which science is confronted with presently, given its ecological apocalypse, which pushes the scientist to make science into its culturally accepted form of paranoia. In stead I propose a periodically hysterical science, which might take root in the bare grounds of Latour's Actor Network Theory. Hysteria can be seen as an attempt to meet, as a mode of reciprocal concentration developed between a master and a demand. Just like the joke is a last attempt at evading aggression. The importance of the formal as surplus value in both the joke and literature, lays also in its performance of the rule breaking metaphor. The joke chooses to confront the symbolic-order-as-law, rather than the real of physical injury or symptom. This is a true meeting. It gives space to the appearance of a real beyond the plain flesh, which is unknown to both parties in the meeting. The real appears when it is no longer reduced to the social order implied in every non-humored speech act. This real interrupts the struggle for power, a fight which serves only the identity of one of both parties in the meeting. I sense a comical dimension in Actor Network Theory, similar to the pleasure from non-sense that is constitutive of the practice of jokes and literature, by the use of formal language games, which always institute at least a momentary loss of sense.

De Kunst van een Onmogelijk Genot, Philippe Van Haute (The art of an impossible pleasure)
notes and references

Joking is a practice of the duality of form and content, but it exemplifies excellently the impure relation of this couple, to the point that one has to admit that is is itself a joke of a wedding. Because to understand what is truly going on in the joke, requires only to stay one small step ahead of this dual reasoning. It is a step, so simple that it really should get anyone in laughing fits, when one sees that we still adhere to this duality at all. In effect one can find in a joke a use of syntax and grammar that in its manner diverges from the norm - wether norm is taken to mean no more then 'the most common usage' or also connotes a moral for instance concerning truth and lies. This divergence poses a problem for the listener: the automatism of interpretation established by repetition has to be interrupted in order to understand a joke. So an expression that is not conform with syntax and grammar, thus breaking a rule, makes the point of rupture itself into an element of expression, or a matter of concern, asking for interpretation. Thus form, in the reciprocal agony of both the teller and listener, becomes content. In the form they find what is the matter for them. It is by the potential for a new linguistic slippage, offered in the formal game, that desire can drive us again, in spite of the resistance offered to a destructive impulse. This linguistic desire is at the same time a desire for the knowledge which might be revealed in the topological transformation of language. If any selfdeclared victim of the joke would retort by pointing out the perceived aggression of the abovementioned rupture, the joker can either retreat by pretending it was just a manner of speaking. With the latter expression the joker actually regresses and conforms again to the norm. On the other hand the joker can choose to affirm that his power is exercised in the realm of language, in an effort to create a renewal of the Other's multiplicity, an effort of wit to open up a space that lays beyond the duality of form and content, even beyond the ground zero of destruction or the void of lawlessness. An altogether different logic space, for both parties to cultivate their boisterous exchange on. In a first period of Lacan's theoretisation, the hysteric suffers from the incapacity to take a role as commodity, as an object in an exchange. Or rather: he or she can not relate to that role, which we all get anyway in the egocentric menageries of the Other, the subjectivation structures that make us who we are. Now, if there is a similarity between this description and the statement of Actor-NetworkTheory on its uselessness you cannot do anything with ANT insists Latour as a moto for his vision of a new place for science to operate in then what is the rest of the story? One could make the analogy in the other sense also: In the lineage leading from Freud, by Lacan to Van Haute, what would be a Latourian extrapolation of psycho-analysis? Or is psychoanalysis already unframed? Does the idea of deconstructing Actor Network Theory on the basis of the structure of the hysteric, imply looking for a master relation, and a question of sexual identity? Actor Network Theory does have students, but does it look for a master? As a science it does perhaps, by trying to find the subject of knowledge-constitution. Or in a negative-socializing way by trying to get recognition from orthodox science. And what about trying to get cognition rather than recognition? What if Latour were to apply orthodox methods to the social appearance of his own ANT? Is the humility reflex of Actor Network Theory not a kind of mood swing, between the roles of master and hysteric? the role of science and critic of science? The systematic and conscious use of the signifier as such, and for its own sake, pointed out in Lacan's characterization of Minstrel culture, is also present in Latour's self-explication on ANT. The distress sung by the Minstrel is then paralleled by ANT's self-announced incapacity to be of any use, besides its inability to conform to class law. I ask whether the desire for knowledge is as such hysteric. This question is as a joke also. The joke of sexing knowledge. But what other relations exist to knowledge? And if it is one of desire, what would make it diverge from the hysteric's? Could one speak of a paranoid desire for knowledge: a black hole of knowing, only absorbing, always keeping secret? At the periphery of knowledge production than he extremist-copyrighter-inventor-patentor is such a paranoiac, but is there also a secret at the heart of science?

De Kunst van een Onmogelijk Genot, Philippe Van Haute (The art of an impossible pleasure)
notes and references

Some loose remarks to leave the reader wondering: The view that the hysteric is not a state but a practice which one slips in and out of incessantly, this fits the place I would like the foam scientist to take but the question is, with respect to what master? The master of the Universe versus Le Troubadour de la Mousse!!! The Minstrel of Mousse. What is the role of expliciting, next to the difference between a theory that describes a state and descriptionas-part-of-a-practice. (p.134) The hysteric incarnates the truth of the master he or she addresses, namely that this master is inherently also lacking, or castrated. Is there a dance in this incarnation. As opposed to the incorporation, or anthropophagic relation... These questions are to general of course to make a performance out of, without the addition of some condensation core. The father as master is castrated. But what is the relation between knowing and mastering. What about the ignorant schoolmaster? The msentente of the castration is not the only obstacle on the way to knowledge (if comparison to Freud's search for knowledge is in its place here)