This is the first session from my recent seminar course. Below the video are the notes from that first session. The seminar explored the ongoing project I’m working on with Dr Eric Harper called ‘The Freudian Spaceship’, an attempt to develop a Fanonian Schizoanalysis. The videos from the series, held during my Monday night philosophy session on Twitch, are being uploaded to my YouTube channel and Facebook page, so these notes are the text accompaniments to those video sessions. As part of the course, participants were reading through a text called ‘Breath’ that is part of the project. There are a few printed versions available, as well as a PDF, get in contact with me if you would like a copy.
TFS Session 1 – Thinking the World – notes
Session 1
Thinking the world as a Freudian Spaceship
What are we talking about when we speak of a Freudian Spaceship?
We imagine the Earth as a Freudian Spaceship – in other words, as the home of life moving through space and which is not just alive in its own right but which is also alive in a Freudian sense, that is, as ‘driven’, as comprised of drives and an unconscious formed by a moment of primary repression. It’s a working tool, one that we hope enables us to try and think beyond our own perspective as human, or animal and to try to become something other.
This use of an image or idea is also a key part of our methodology. We develop three figures (‘conceptual personae’) that we think offer modes of living that we affirm or that we can learn from – the revolutionary, the sorcerer and the psychoanalyst. We try to allow our intuitions and a ‘poetics’ into our thought as a way of allowing our bodies to speak as well as our minds. We pay attention to ‘signs’ or ‘symptoms’ and try to assemble them together into something like a ‘Body’ as a way of thinking that doesn’t dismiss rationality and yet doesn’t deny the irrational. Above all we try to find a way to respond to the world around us with honesty, knowing all the while that this is never a simple matter, bound up as it is within our own social, psychical and physical needs.
The ‘Freudian Spaceship’ is a name we give to the complex assemblage of the Earth, the World and the Planet. We might also call this our home. At the very least it is a home of life, and it is life that we pay attention to in thinking the world.
For example, the litany Earth – World – Planet (is greater than) the name ‘world’ (not just plural – but in each case there are different forms, perhaps even different laws (or at least, perhaps different ‘laws’ that matter – ie: that make a difference).
The struggle against bad abstractions. (The problem of scale – totalisations / universalities)
Concrete: Our thinking is prompted by the problem that presents itself in the conjunction of two ongoing situations, climate change and the Black Lives Matter struggle. (The problem of response – captured / freed).
Our primary resources are Schizoanalysis (Freud, Marx), the work of Franz Fanon (sociogenesis, colonialism) and our own biographies. From these we try to make tools to think with (The problem of ‘concepts’ or, toolmaking thought – ends / efficiencies).
Tools: multiple scales / forms / assemblages (Earth / World / Planet; One to One, Group, Community; Psychoanalyst, Sorcerer, Revolutionary) – Breathdrive (reconceiving the libido) –
The Interval (production of thought). We try to develop poetic formulas (comply or die) not to express something but to connect things (and see how they look, ‘in the light of…’).
Personification of processes
At what scale is the problem a problem, the event an event?
In what situation is a response capable of freedom?
With what tools does thinking operate?
Example – Michael Heinrich discussing Marx (YT Video – Karl Marx’s Monetary Theory of Value, https://youtu.be/gmYFtpfdVn4?t=2376 ) – just described a logic of capitalism where abstract processes dominate individuals, describes in terms of personification of processes – asked a question. ‘Choice of Marx to do science in this way, to start with categories, to imagine that persons are personifications of categories … what in Capital makes it right?’ – Heinrichs response: pragmatic, does it work (does the description from the logic of the categories map to the description from the activity of persons.)
Heinrich: “To justify this program we just have to see if the analysis works…” (eg: Chapter 2 of Vol 1, what commodity owners have to do, does this match to the ‘form determination’ in Chapter 1).
What scale do the ‘form determinations’ of Capital appear from? (History, Political Economy, Society, the Human). What ‘scale’ do my tools of thinking come from, work on? (This is not a ‘question to be answered’ but a kind of ‘methodological checking’.)
Philosophy often appears at a particular scale of thinking – one that is expansive, all-consuming, ‘universal’ etc – a grasping of the whole. Yet each time it’s also singular, specific, a grasping of the whole from a position. There is no ‘view from nowhere’.
This ‘nowhere’ – also no view from ‘no when’ – the sub species aeternitas of Spinoza as the final, complete position of ‘adequate knowledge’. The common tropes of philosophy – to assert the need for SSA, or the denial of its adequacy (the former, rationalism, necessity, law; the latter, empiricism, contingency, accident).
Rather than considering these as ‘opposed’, rather try think of them as ‘scales’ (this is the word I will be using, we may need to adjust/clarify).
Paying attention to different objects (different assemblages, different collections of things interacting). The scales multiply and can be multiplied, but the gamble is that of the triple or threefold minimum – at a minimum, think threefold (three folds). Think at three different scales. Why? Because it enables us to think at the intersections not the oppositions. Don’t need to think every scale possible (impossible) but rather the plurality of actual scales.
(This is not a law, it’s an attempt, an experiment, ‘see what happens’).
Training as a personification of process
Couch to 5k – personal example – at what scales does ‘the app’ appear, at what scale does it exist (be / be interacted with?)
(1) a political/social policy scale – health, well-being, medical support – limits to how quickly, for example, the training can be done, who can be reached by such a program etc – perhaps a social scale (World)
(2) in the encounter of ‘the person personifying the process’ – the runner – the decision to run, to use this app, familiarity with / access to tech, the encounter with the body as ‘running’, breath – perhaps an ‘embodied’ scale (Earth)
(3) at the scale of the micro-macro physical – gravity (space station running), perhaps the ‘hard science’ scale (Planet).
Which ‘process’ is being personified? (Which processes?). (Be careful of self-reference – ie when the process in question is personification (becoming persons) how do the process and the person fit together? (The process and the person and the ‘fit’ as a general theme).
It’s not a question of the ‘whole’ or of ‘holistic’ thinking, rather the interest lies in the tensions between scales (where one ‘scale’ operates against another, counter-acting, counter-vailing).
The ‘personification of processes’ as living the tensions.
ASIDE: But … Production / Anti-production
The example of the lock and key – the production of controlled connection dependent on the materials rigidity/solidity – yet this brings with it the ‘counter-acting’ process of friction.
Rather than a bad abstraction, which has ‘No where, No when, No what’ structure // Space and Place; Time and Process; Materials and Interactions.
We want to produce a dirty thought. (Ambiguity and Nuance, Vague edges and Cross-fertilisation).
Session 2
“Because of this the difference between Western and non-Western cultures is not the difference between civilized and primitive. That is an ideological reading. The difference is that between the first commodity-culture in the history of human existence and all other cultures. A mutation has occurred.” Sylvia Wynter, Ethno, or Sociopoetics?, p.12
(Part One of Session Two)
Breath (reflections on Part One)
Can the body host the breath?
What can be seen across the world is the problem of the breath, breathing. To explore this problem of hosting the breath we need to pause and reflect on the section called ‘Breath.’
In that section of this text we try to express our encounters with this moment, a moment we call ‘the time of the last breath’. It is not an analysis, but an expression of intensity, raw intensity and an attempt at honesty in the expression of an intensity, the effect of having had our own breath taken away when faced with what seems like a slow, horrific descent into the suffocating world our children are growing up into. Affected with anger, but also always with a hope and love that a thoughtful witnessing can embrace unforeseen connections which link to networks of resistance. The hope that the reader will be as enraged or even better, more enraged. The intention is the production of hope as enraged engagement with networks of action.
It takes our breath away to see the levels of violence against black lives. It takes our breath away to see the rise of resistance to this violence. It takes our breath away to see the forest fires, to know about the dying oceans, to listen to stories of disaster, death and destruction. All so unnecessary. It takes our breath away to see such deliberate disaster. This list could go on and on until we run out of breath. What takes our breath away perhaps most of all, what is almost too obvious to have to acknowledge, is that this is deliberate disaster.
Agasp that capitalist gain can bomb land. Profit obtained by not only gaining access to resources but letting the bombed citizens pay for the so-called rebuilding. This shock doctrine (Naomie Klein) is akin to the way the way police in some parts of Afrika will arrest sex workers, rape them and then get the sex worker to pay to be released.
In the face of this deliberate disaster, what kind of response can we cope with? Tears, anger, frustration, desolation, all these affects flow through us just as they also flow through our communities. Grief is perhaps the easiest way to describe this. Grief is also a troublesome idea however.
In grief we encounter the death of the loved one, whether they were family, or community, or even just an ‘image’. Yet in grief we encounter death as it is, arriving from the outside to cleave open the present, placing some into the realm of the ancestors whilst leaving others bereft of a future. As we move through grief we regain a future, this time reconfigured to include a new set of ancestors, where the people we grieve for take their place. This new future, with our new ancestors, re-organises us. We become a new person, perhaps a child without a parent or a partner without their companion. The grief recedes as the new future arrives.
It’s for this reason that grief, whilst perhaps the easiest way to describe our response to the contemporary moment, is insufficient as a concept. In grief, death has arrived. Yet in our contemporary moment death is becoming the horizon of life, no longer arriving from the outside but now embedded into the future of our present life. In grief death arrives and a new future is opened, whereas in our contemporary moment death is coming, always coming, and the future appears increasingly as forever closed.
When it comes to death the Western therapeutic cure is one preoccupied with letting go, moving on, but it is challenged. Narrative therapy, for example, invites one to talk to the dead. This is not about belief in an afterlife but a reframing of the process of mourning. The process of inviting our ancestors to bear witness alongside us through what’s been called a ‘critical melancolia’.
Ranjana Khanna notes that within the nation state there is something that cannot be mourned. For Khanna, it is impossible to totally digest the past, resulting in a critique of agency that engages us in what they call a ‘critical melancholy’ as the trace of trauma remains and its symptomatic embodiment is haunting. It presents an ethical, political and communal challenge to be present to that which critically insists. The strategy is to develop the persistence of the insistent, rather than its digestion or dissolution.
That strategy of dissolution is, in Philip Derbyshire’s reading of Khanna, ascribed to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, who are described as having “revised Freud?s theory” and in so doing “Ferenczi?s distinction between introjection and incorporation as an underpinning to the distinction between mourning and melancholia, becomes central. Mourning is achieved through introjection, the full assimilation of loss; melancholia involves the incorporation of the unassimilable, which, encrypted, evades integration and entails a process of endless lament.” Derbyshire goes on to claim that “in opposition to Abraham and Torok’s therapeutic strategy, which designates melancholy as pathological and attempts to decrypt the buried loss and articulate the unassimilated into narrative, turning loss into ordinary mourning, Khanna holds that the unassimilable must remain as such.” There is an echo of Claude Lanzman here, who claims that there is an obscenity to understanding when it encounters the holocaust. To ask why is too easily a salve, aiming to explain, to assimilate, to quieten the body that is choking.
Extinction is not death, it is far worse, it is the destruction of the future and the loss of the ancestors. This transformation encounters death no longer as an outside that interrupts, rather death now becomes us in ways anticipated by Foucault with the concept of docile bodies. Is it any wonder that the fascination with zombies has grown so much in the last decade or two? Our ‘collective unconscious’ expresses itself in stories of a living death, and living with a living death. Given the weight of this terror, how are we to live?
We acknowledge that in expressing our encounter with the contemporary moment within the ‘Breath’ text we present yet another dying light. We might describe ourselves as ‘war weary’, having been trapped inside the class war all our lives, played out across multiple spaces, in multiple ways. We still feel, but we also know that to feel is to fear, and ‘fear is the mind killer’ (Bion).
How to deal with this? How is it possible to look into our contemporary moment and feel without becoming numb, without relying on some kind of ‘moral heroism’ where we force ourselves to ‘face things’? For the psychoanalyst Wilfrid Bion, most famous perhaps for his work on groups, when the body is in pain but the risk to feel the pain is too dangerous, then experience is evaded. His call is to learn from experience, to be modified by the affective dimension of expression which becomes thought-feeling and feeling-thought.
The all too common strategies of ‘facing reality’ are presented as simple moral choices, but if we have learnt anything as psychoanalysts, philosophers or revolutionaries it is that the desire to live outruns any moral choices that might need to be faced up to. The difficulty is that this desire to live is too often channeled by capitalism in a self-destructive direction, either into individualism or into group dynamics that depend on a border or an ‘Other’ against whom the group defines themself. Information overload, forced habits that evade experience, thoughtless-ness prevails in the place of thoughtfulness and embodied thinking/feeling, touched by events
Whilst we would agree with the slogan “don’t mourn, organise”, quite what has to be organised is still unclear. What we think is that what needs to be organised is the interplay of new and old ways of coming to the support of life, becoming life. This is perhaps our ‘proposal’, if we had one, if we were able to make one.
It is to the question of life that we must turn our face if we want to think and live beyond the moment of the last breath.
How can we think about life? Perhaps here the breath plays its most interesting role as both a fact and concept, as a way of getting to grips with life. Life breathes but cannot breathe without a host, like thoughts cannot occur without a thinking apparatus (Bion). We might almost go so far as to say that life is primarily breath, the drive to breath, the drive ‘to breathe easily’.
The Earth breathes, the organism breathes, there is even a kind of historical or temporal breath, operating at a scale of the global climate and ecosystem.
Fundamentally breath is a metabolic dynamic, the core thread of changes and movements of energy that constitute life. Without breath, death. Without a host, no breath. The breath cannot be abstracted from the breathing bodies, as it entwines the corporeal and incorporeal in a process that produces the life that is both embodied and entangled, connected. Networks of bodies/hosts breathing into other bodies/hosts. In breathing the body is infiltrated by the world, no longer distinct but incorporated into a system, into a web and network of struggling, squirming survival.
To think about life, then, is to think about the breath as it is hosted within the system of bodies. Is the breath constricted, is it full, does it gasp or struggle, or is it easy and calm. From the panic attack to the dreaming body, the breath is hosted by the bodies it flows through, sometimes held, sometimes released. In our contemporary moment, we claim, the way in which the breath is encountered is quite specific, it is encountered as limited from the outside, in what we have called the choke-hold.
The breath is held captive, not hosted, not welcomed, not treated as the stranger that needs somewhere to rest before moving on. We live within a system that is a poor host to the breath, treating it like a slave or possession when it needs to be welcomed as our necessary outsider.
So our question, can the body host the breath, is a way for us to try and think about whether change, revolution, can be made real, whether and how we can become good hosts. Not you, not me, but us, for the emphasis is community. This plays out across the system as a whole as well as within the specific bodies each of us is that forms part of the global network. It ranges across the possibilities for climate survival as well as the breathing practices of the person attempting to find a way to live within a world of the choke-hold. It ranges from the figure of the revolutionary to that of the psychoanalyst to the sorcerer at the edge of the field, each of whom offers ways of breathing that have potential for loosening the grip of the choke-hold.
So it is through this question – can the body host the breath – and these conceptual personas, figures – the revolutionary, the psychoanalyst and the sorcerer and the children of the future – that we begin to try and think about a future beyond grief, beyond the choke-hold and within the present.
razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution 
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