“Getting to” is a way of taking ahold of a
feeling you want to disavow, or deny, and staying with it anyway. Despite its
negativity, taking it. This formulation of negativity is somewhat counterintuitive.
As D.W. Winnicott writes, “Naturally
the fact that the patient was becoming conscious of the destructiveness made
possible the constructive activity which appeared in the day. But it is the
other way round that I want you to see just now. The constructive and creative
experiences were making it possible for the child to get to the experience of
her destructiveness” (121). The point of interpretation is not, as Winnicott
argues, about the object, but about to capacity that is yielded to “get to” the
experience of destructiveness.
This February, Todd Cronan (Against Affective Formalism, University of Minnesota Press, 2014) gave a
lecture, “The Medium Has No Message: The (Non)Politics of Medium from Kandinsky
to Benjamin,” which highlighted something quite the opposite: not the negativity of
interpretation, of taking on an object that allows you to make an
interpretation you would prefer not to, but of the positive value of interpretations
to illuminate “intention.” Asked “Why Intention?” during the Q&A, it became clear that
there was an agonistic or polemical political element involved in the term. In
the name of defending the humanities against the sciences (as if there weren’t
a larger problem of the university within which this division sits, and which
overcomes it), he identified this interpretive quest as one that was there to
produce the value of humanistic thought and to return deserved attention to the
human.
It’s such a problematic formulation, for many
reasons, but I’d like to think a little about the problem of this “return” to
intention, as a return to “interpretation,” and the consequences of this model
of the “intentional” psyche, which is a kind of parallel figure of the “paranoid”
reader, which Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes in her essay, “Paranoid Readingand Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think this Essay Isabout You.” For Cronan, there seemed to be an almost scientific certainty in
the idea that we are all intentional—or perhaps better, that all acts or
gestures are expressive of intention—and this then allowed him to generalize
the practice of reading intentionality (and making a subjective interpretation
about it) across the board. The affirmative aspect of this practice—its affirmation
of the idea that meaning can be uncovered in a text by a critic-reader, and
this, by the alignment of form and content in a relationship in which one is a
cipher of the other—is so “negligent,” to use the word that Stefano Harney and
Fred Moten use in “The University and the Undercommons,” because it is not able
to provide any way of thinking about the current state of the university except
in terms of splitting—the splitting of the humanities and the sciences.
It’s not surprising, although the
psychoanalytic register of his thought is not addressed, that splitting is the
predominant psychic device to be found here, because nothing is more
“intentional” than splitting, even though it is often considered a defensive or
regressive (and thus involuntary) mechanism. This may be true, in varying
degrees, but the logic that is instantiated by splitting, and which we are
turned to read if we are reading psychoanalytically, resides in the idea that
what we put onto another is destructiveness, something that Melanie Klein calls
“envy.” Indeed, splitting, or projection, is a provocative way to think about
the way that psychic processes inform social processes, but it’s also this just
at this point in the process that Cronan’s theory gets most negligent. What he
disavows is the destructiveness that his theoretical approach to intention and
the relative nature of interpretations has to take up in order to perform its
reparative project, of reestablishing the kernel of intention that is there to
be mined.
This destructiveness, which does not belong
to the projective processes, seems to predetermine what can be registered
socially (and therefore read intentionally), and is, for this reason, often
considered irrelevant to “political” analysis. It’s a notion of destructiveness
that is fundamental to human relating not because it takes shape in a drive or
because the content of aggression already or retroactively implies a feeling,
or an intention, or a subject, but because it establishes the very terms for
human relating in the sense that the movement from the not-me to the me and
back is always a registration of the production of exteriority, and, as Winnicott
finds, this production of exteriority is first a form of motility, or appetite,
that only later gets marshaled into other psychic functions, such as the
projective mechanisms. This is important because we are then able to think of
projection not as an absolute dynamic but as a contingency, something that will
get taken up by individuals in many cases but that hardly governs—and much less
thinly describes—our relations of interpretation, within and without the
university.
photo: Where is the Human in this Picture?
