Self and Emotional Life

by Adrian Johnston

  Despite displaying the gesture of reaching out a little bit to the natural sciences, Green ends up unfortunately perpetuating the inaccurate image of these disciplines as essentially hostile to any nonscientific (read “antireductive”) explanatory discourse (such as psychoanalysis).94 Situating psychoanalysis with respect to the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment tension between science and religion, Green depicts analysis as sharing religions’ ostensibly warranted worries regarding the reductive tendencies of the natural sciences and their institutional and ideological offshoots. However, in supposed solidarity with the sciences, the Freudian field is said to be adamantly materialist. And yet, Green’s analytic “materialism” refuses to ground the psyche in the brain.95 Instead, with a nod to certain religious notions, he “pleads for a ‘laicized’ soul that we designate as such in order to oppose it to cerebral machinery, which is nothing but a pale caricature of that which is the psyche.”96 He immediately warns one not to “confound this psyche with the religious soul of a divine essence.”97 And yet, he subsequently resumes flirting with religiosity, laying out a vision of psychoanalysis as raising the truth of religious antireductionism (as opposed to the purportedly reductive mechanistic materialism of the sciences, including the neurosciences) to the dignity of its secular, demystified Notion.98

  However, in contrast with Green’s compromise position between religion and science, what if, reenacting the uncompromising Leninist stance of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908), one objects that this psyche qua secularized soul really isn’t all that secular except for a scientific explanation of how this entity escaping the jurisdiction of scientific explanation emerges from the lone immanent material ground(s) of concern to the physical sciences? (Similarly, one could treat the choice between religion and science as a Badiouian “point,” that is, a fundamental, unavoidable choice between two mutually exclusive alternatives in which no honest third way is truly possible.)99 This isn’t to plead, against Green, in favor of a science-fetishizing reductivism. Rather, this is to insist that any materialism worthy of the title must perform, in order to be truly materialist yet simultaneously nonreductive, a sort of theoretical jujitsu trick, namely, a vaguely Gödelian-style in- or decompletion of the natural sciences. A materialism entirely divorced from the natural sciences (i.e., a staunchly antinaturalist materialism) is materialist in name only; a materialist (as opposed to idealist) antinaturalism requires a natural-scientific account of the material possibility conditions for the emergence of the antinatural (as more than natural or material).100 Playing off an irreducible nonnatural subject, portrayed as a mystery utterly inexplicable in scientific terms, against the fictional straw man caricature of a natural neuronal machine governed exclusively by the blind mechanisms of the efficient causalities of evolution and genetics merely reinstates a version of those dualisms that rightly are so anathema to the tradition of authentic (dialectical) materialism.101

  When it comes to the subjects of concern to psychoanalysis (i.e., human beings as speaking subjects), the real challenge is to pinpoint and link up two parallel, complementary nodes of explanatory incompleteness within scientific and psychoanalytic discourses. A properly formulated neuro-psychoanalysis does precisely this. It engages in the double move of (1) complementing Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis with a naturalist or biological account of the material underpinnings of denaturalized or more-than-biological subjectivity and (2) complementing the neurosciences with a sophisticated, systematic metapsychological theory of subjects whose geneses, although tied to brains, involve much more than bare organic anatomy. (These emergent subjects also come to have significant repercussions for the biomaterial bases that are the necessary-but-not-sufficient aleatory conditions of possibility for their very existences.) One can and should strive to develop a scientifically shaped (although not purely and strictly scientific) account of how humans defying and escaping explanatory encapsulation by the sciences become what they are.102 Correlatively, a materialist psychoanalysis must be, as Lacan would put it, not without its scientific reasons, while maintaining itself as a specific discipline whose objects of inquiry cannot be absorbed unreservedly into subjectless material being(s).103 I believe that psychoanalysis nowadays can make a convincing case, on natural-scientific grounds, for its irreducible autonomy and specificity vis-à-vis the sciences of nature (especially the life sciences). The brittle, doomed strategy of unconvincing recourse to dogmatic foot stamping and fist banging about irreducibility in the face of advancing scientific knowledge is no longer necessary or appropriate.

  As regards Green specifically, of even greater interest in connection with outlining a neuro-psychoanalytic metapsychology of affect is an early essay by him, “The Logic of Lacan’s objet (a) and Freudian Theory: Convergences and Questions,” written under the influence of Lacan and published in 1966 in the third issue of the journal Cahiers pour l’Analyse. Therein, in a subsection of his essay on “The Problem of the Distinction Between the Representative of Drive and the Affect,” he addresses the relations between, on the one hand, Freud’s Vorstellung and Lacan’s signifier and, on the other hand, affective phenomena as distinct from such ideational representations and their logics or structures. Speaking of the later Freud, Green enigmatically proposes that “the affect takes on the status of signifier.”104 (He reiterates this a few years later in Le discours vivant.)105 To Lacanian ears, this sounds odd, to the point of perhaps sounding paradoxical or self-contradictory insofar as Lacan tirelessly insists on the difference in kind separating affects and signifiers. A few paragraphs later, Green seems to reinstate Lacan’s distinction between signifier and affect by claiming that the latter, unlike the former, is noncombinatory: “The specificity of affect is that it cannot enter into combination.”106 Unlike Lacan, the early Green, in line with Freud, allows for the possibility of affects succumbing to repression.107 But, in Green’s view, whereas repressed signifiers qua Vorstellungen come to light only through indirect, winding webs of associative combinations involving multiple ideational representations of the same type, repressed affects “can be expressed directly—that is, without passing through the connecting links of the preconscious”108 (i.e., the matrix of word-presentations [Wortvorstellungen], as per Freud’s schema according to which unconscious thing-presentations [Sachvorstellungen], in order to gain the potential of possibly entering into consciousness, must be matched up with word-presentations in the preconscious).109 One of the guiding assumptions apparently steering Green’s proposals in 1966 (an assumption he appears to abandon by 1973) is the notion that affective phenomena, in contrast with linguistic-symbolic signifiers as structured ideational representations, enjoy a nonrelational self-sufficiency, an immediate identity-to-self as sameness, in contrast with the mediated non-self-identity of signifiers as (to quote Saussure) “differences without positive terms.”110

  The final move I want to make, the explication of which will occupy me in the remainder of what follows, can be introduced through reference to Green’s text from 1966. In terms of this reference, this move consists of rejecting his manners of maintaining a clear contrast between affects and signifiers as a consequence of putting a new twist on his suggestion that “the affect takes on the status of signifier.” This proposition can be twisted into the ultimate infinite judgment (as per the Hegelian infinite judgment) of a Lacan-inflected neuro-psychoanalysis: affects are signifiers. Interestingly, both Lacanian psychoanalysis and affective neuroscience seem to concur that this equation is problematic, if not nonsensically impossible. Empirical studies of the brain have uncovered evidence supporting the Freudian-Lacanian thesis regarding the distinction between emotional affects and cognitive representations.111 However, one should bear in mind that the neurosciences also often simultaneously maintain that, in most real-time brain dynamics, emotions and cognitions, although distinguishable through neuroanatomical analysis, are de facto indistinguishable through neurodynamic synthesis insofar as they are inextricably intertwined in lived reality.
Apropos Lacan, one of the best ways to secure a grip on the nature of and justifications for his fashion of differentiating between signifiers and affects is to return to the topic of deception.

  For Lacan, both signifiers and affects are deceptive. But, they each deceive, according to him, in ways that are fundamentally different in kind. Going through Lacan’s corpus and cataloguing the numerous forms of deception engendered by signifiers detailed therein would be a daunting, protracted task (one not to be undertaken here). Žižek, for instance, often draws attention to the title of Lacan’s twenty-first seminar of 1973–1974: Les non-dupes errant (“the non-dupes err,” roughly homophonous with le Nom-du-Père [the Name-of-the-Father]). Succinctly summarized, the Name-of-the-Father, as a master signifier (S1) underpinning the symbolic order as the universe of other signifiers (S2), is a bluff, fake, fiction, illusion, myth, semblance, and so on.112 The entire Symbolic big Other constitutes a fantasmatic “virtual reality” not entirely governed by what is presumed to be actual concrete being.113 The late Lacan, in the twenty-fourth seminar, goes so far as to declare that “the symbolic tells nothing but lies.”114 And yet, as Žižek, following Lacan, is fond of reminding his readers, he/she who refuses to be “taken in” by the trickery of the signifier-mediated virtual reality of the symbolic order—such a cynical nominalist, empiricist, or positivist “non-dupe” stubbornly sticks to beliefs in absolutely singular and unique entities, conceptually unprocessed raw perceptual experience, and brute facts-in-themselves wholly independent of sociosymbolic mediation—errs most, losing contact with those abstractions that, in the topsy-turvy inverted world of human existence, arguably are more concrete than the (imagined) concrete itself.115 Near the end of his life, Lacan counts himself among the dupes (who presumably don’t err).116 One contextually appropriate manner of fleshing out what is meant here involves referring back to the preceding Hegelian critique of Panksepp’s handling of the issue of linguistic labeling in constructing a taxonomy of emotion systems in the brain: those who cling to the conviction that clear-cut affective distinctions dwell in the posited extrarepresentational concrete real of the central nervous system entirely apart from the hazy, murky representational fuzziness of abstract affect-languages are the ones who err, both theoretically and empirically; the vagaries of affect-languages are not without their impacts on the emotional brain itself. That is to say, the “lies” of “inaccurate” emotional terminology in natural languages become the (partial) truths of affective life an sich, right down to its material bases.

  In the sixteenth seminar, Lacan distinguishes between “dupery” (duperie) and “deception” (tromperie). The latter implies a standard of representational accuracy or faithfulness vis-à-vis an extrarepresentational point of reference. Degrees of deception, in Lacan’s specific sense, are measured according to the criteria of a correspondence theory of truth. As he rightly observes, psychoanalysis is not in the least bit invested in a correspondence theory of truth, at least as it’s commonly construed. Analysts aren’t (or, at least, shouldn’t be) preoccupied with speculations about the representational veracity of, say, childhood memories or depictions of recent events transpiring off the couch outside the analytic consulting room. One could say that analysis concerns itself more with a coherence theory of truth, with the consistencies and inconsistencies of the networks of associative connections internal to the webs of analysands’ monologues. Whether the nodes in these verbal networks are realistic renditions or fictitious fantasies is both unknowable within the framework of an analysis and ultimately unimportant to its long-term progress. For example, an analysand who consistently lies to his/her analyst, fabricating all of his/her reported dreams, fantasies, and so on, still discloses to the analyst the truths of his/her unconscious, telling “true lies” despite him-/herself insofar as the very selection of the fabricated verbal material cannot help but be itself revealing; such an inadvertent “telling the truth in the guise of lying” would be the mirror-image correlate of the Lacanian notion of “lying in the guise of truth.” This is one very Freudian reverberation of Lacan’s opening line from his television appearance: “I always speak the truth” (“Je dis toujours la vérité”),117 the “I” (“je”) in question here being the (subject of the) unconscious. But, although not preoccupied by deception, psychoanalysis indeed is very interested in dupery, specifically, “the dupery of consciousness.” Lacan defines a dupe as “someone who someone else exploits.” Consciousness is duped to the extent that it’s “exploited” (i.e., pushed around, manipulated, and so on) by those signifiers forming symptomatic formations of the unconscious generating perturbations within the narrow, restricted field of self-awareness.118

  As regards the topic of affect in psychoanalysis, Lacan appears to maintain that affects deceive whereas signifiers dupe. Generally speaking, he reduces affects to felt feelings (Empfindungen) and characterizes such consciously registered sentiments (or senti-ments) as either opaque signals confusedly gesturing at a reality of a different order than their own (i.e., the unconscious “other scene” composed of signifiers as nonaffective ideational representations [Vorstellungen]) or the red herrings of affectuations disguising and concealing repressed signifying structures. In a sense, Lacan judges affects according to a correspondence theory of truth, albeit one internal to the (in)coherent “psychical reality” of the parlêtre talking on the couch: the relative truth or falsity, honesty or dishonesty, of affects (as felt feelings) is measured against the standards of signifiers (as purportedly different in kind from feelings).

  Another angle of approach to these issues is to observe that, from Lacan’s perspective, signifiers and affects both can be misleading, although they mislead in utterly distinct modes. In this view, affects tend to mislead at the level of why they are, but not what they are. When one feels angry, sad, and so on, what’s misleading is not the qualitative phenomenal feel of the feeling per se, but rather the true (unfeeling) causes, logics, objects, and reasons (all situated within nonaffective representational registers) responsible for the emergence in conscious experience of this feeling state—and this insofar as Lacan, as already noted (in chapter 11), regularly argues that affects, limited to the status of felt feelings and nothing more, are only ever displaced within consciousness along unfurling chains of signifiers, some of which are repressed or unconscious in ways that affects, according to him, cannot be repressed or unconscious. Lacan’s psychoanalytic appropriation of Saussurian linguistics combines, among other things, Saussure’s definition of the signifier as a purely differential (non)entity determined by its relations with other such (non)entities and Freud’s psychoanalytic thesis that representational contents and associative connections in mental life—for Lacan, these contents are signifiers and these connections are their relations—can be (and often are) unconscious. One implication of this, in terms of the modes in which signifiers and affects can be misleading, is that, unlike affects, signifiers can and do mislead even as to what they are. If a signifier is what it is by virtue of the sum total of its differential relations with other signifiers, and if repression and other defense mechanisms delineated by psychoanalysis are able to render one or more of these other signifiers unconscious, then consciousness can be misled (or duped) about what a given signifier really is if some of this signifier’s co-determining relations with repressed other signifiers are unknown to this same consciousness.

  The entire preceding project, especially through its return to the textual details of Freud’s discussions of affective phenomena and explorations of current affective neuroscience, undermines this Lacanian fashion of differentiating between affects and signifiers. In the combined lights of Freud and the neurosciences, if the term affect refers to much more than just consciously felt feelings (i.e., Freudian Empfindungen, as distinct from Affekte and Gefühle), then a very disturbing, unsettling truth reveals itself: affects can and do mislead at the level of not only why they are, but what they are, that is, how they feel.

  In a Hegelian-
style formulation, perhaps it could be said that the distinction between affects and signifiers is a distinction internal to the category of the signifier itself. With respect to Lacan, this formulation isn’t as objectionable as it might seem at first glance. To cut a long story short, Lacan’s signifier isn’t necessarily a unit of language as per linguistics. Rather, anything can be a signifier if its status and function rely upon its positions in constellations of synchronic systems and diachronic dynamics in which spatial and temporal differences are decisive. Other materials besides the phonetic and graphic materials of natural languages can and do operate as signifiers as defined by both Lacan and various versions of a post-Saussurian general semiotics.119

  But, one lingering, nagging question remains: if affects can be signifiers insofar as the category of signifier is a formal rather than a substantial category, then what are affects? During his television appearance, Lacan, in response to Miller drawing attention to the word unconscious, says regarding this master word for psychoanalysis: “Freud didn’t find a better one, and there’s no need to go back on it. The disadvantage of this word is that it is negative, which allows one to assume anything at all in the world about it, plus everything else as well. Why not? To that which goes unnoticed, the word everywhere applies just as well as nowhere.”120 If, as these observations indicate, the problem with the word unconscious is that it’s a negative term (un-) for a positive x—Lacan immediately adds, “It is nonetheless a very precise thing”121—the problem with the word affect might be the exact opposite: it’s a positive term for a negative x, namely, the absence of a coherent concept referring, in a precise one-to-one correspondence, to a clearly identifiable set of phenomena. Even drawing boundary lines circumscribing a general domain that would be the realm of the affects proper (as manifestly distinct from other things) is incredibly tricky and uncertain. And yet, just as Lacan chooses not to jettison the word unconscious despite its noted drawbacks, maybe the fuzzy word affect ought to be retained precisely because the realities it designates are themselves fuzzy. If affect is indeed a positive term for a negative x, this negativity isn’t merely epistemological-representational (i.e., a deficiency or lack at the level of the concept alone).