This is the sixth session of the 2021 seminar on The Freudian Spaceship project. In this session, I look at the idea of dreamspace. Notes from the session are below the video. The first part of the video discusses Goffman’s idea of ‘total institutions’ and the staff/inmate role functions. Most of this was not in the notes below, which mainly cover the second half of the video.
TFS Session 6
The inmate and the staff
The threefold
Seeing without Seeing, Hearing without Hearing
Practical necessity / necessary matter
Philosophy contains within its methodology a particularly potent desire, located more often than not around the idea of necessity. Necessity, for Marx, is in relationship to freedom, in a kind of inverse relation. For Marx the realm of freedom begins where the realm of necessity ends, which is in many ways in sharp contrast to philosophy, which often appears to present necessity as a kind of achievement of the intellect.
For example, it is common to find a distinction within philosophy between something contingent and something necessary, let’s say between two types of linguistic proposition. On the one hand a contingent proposition – it’s raining outside, I’m 5 foot 10 inches tall, I have a beard – all propositions about which it may or may not be the case. Facts, we might say, although that’s a rather grand name for these trivialities. I have a beard, but it’s just a contingent feature, accidental, it could easily be otherwise – I could have a shave, for example, and would no longer have a beard. So on the one hand, something like a contingent fact, something that could have been otherwise, could be otherwise. That a contingency expresses this sense of ‘could be otherwise’ easily lends itself to being associated with something like a feeling of freedom. Freedom, as the sense that something is not necessary, as the sense that it – our response to the situation – could be otherwise.
On the other hand, we find that philosophy associates necessity most often with something that seems peculiarly human, or peculiarly constitutive of the human, with reason itself. Reason as the realm of necessities, discovered in those things that get called ‘a priori’ statements, things known before experience, from within the logic of logic, immanent to and arising from reason itself, necessities that impose themselves on us, like an overwhelming sensation that possesses us, occupies us. This realm of reason, this space of thought, with its laws and logics and necessities, somehow becomes the space of freedom – perhaps nowhere more insidiously than in Spinoza. Yet freedom is always a kind of acceptance, or to use a concept that is central to this project, a logic of compliance. Freedom is in this situation a little like the good bourgeois, it is demonstrated in the capacity to comply, in the capacity to be mature enough to know the limits of reason, but also being mature enough to know the limits of the human in the face of reason. For philosophy, freedom is too often bound into this curious compulsion to comply with reasons necessities.
So these two subterranean senses of freedom exist in philosophy – on the one hand, as a kind of accident or contingency, on the other as a kind of compliance or submission to necessity. These senses aren’t opposed, rather they operate as two sides of the same abstract machine, two modes of expression of the same machinery of thought, one in which the connections are to be, as it were, causal, where commitments and entailments run like lines of compulsion from one moment of a syllogism to the next, from one moment of an argument to the next. One of the strange reproaches to philosophy that arises from poetry is with regard to this sense of necessity.
Poetics operates without the sense of causal connection that is deeply embedded within philosophical concepts of reason. It can do so because it can deploy the necessities of association, necessities that do not pre-exist the associations. If the necessities pre-existed the association, somehow making the particular association the result of a prior causal necessity, as though somehow the association between a ship and travel pre-existed the experience of travel on ships, then the association would be little more than the expression of necessary conjunction. We would associate one thing with another because all we are doing is recognising that they are associated by some more fundamental process in the world. By contrast, poetics produces necessities as the result of association, rather than producing associations as a result of necessities. If the poetics is powerful enough the necessity it produces in its association is necessary enough, sometimes so necessary as to be absolutely necessary enough.
Here we can glimpse another sense of freedom, one produced through association, one that is discovered as it is created, one that is in some sense an inversion of Marx in that the realm of necessity begins where the realm of freedom ends. Marx and poetics offer two ways of encountering necessity and freedom quite distinct from philosophy and its rationality. They offer a different abstract machine, one that is not searching for the causal connections, whether they be natural or rational, but one that is producing necessities from freedom, producing associations from creative conjunctions. This particular abstract machine is operating when the artist is struggling to find the right tone or the right conjunction of tones. It is also operating when the worker is struggling to find the right tool or machine, the right assemblage. In both cases a kind of creative play of conjunctions isn’t absent-minded, isn’t idle, rather things are tried out in order to reach the point at which ‘it works’. When ‘it’ works – and it’s useful to remember that the Id is just a posh jargon name for ‘the it’ – then that ‘it’ that we refer to when we say something like ‘it works’ is the moment of necessity. The worker and the artist – and here I’m talking about these personae in their non-alienated state, in what might be an idealised image – the worker and the artist aim to make it work. They conjoin, disjoin and rejoin themselves with objects, marks, others and networks, sometimes reaching momentary metastability where the machine just works, where it hits the sweet spot. Maintaining that balance, that flow, is to encounter the necessity of the machinic, the moment of necessity that flows from the active, creative forces of life.
For Marx, of course, there is a more basic sense to his formula that the realm of freedom begins where the realm of necessity ends, and it’s something like, you cannot be free until you’re needs are met. Needs, those things which must be met before something else – free activity – can begin, are notoriously plastic however. Even the basics such as food are subject to transformation, converted into technics of the body. Without touching on the complex role that food takes within our contemporary Western world, we only have to note the roles of feasting and fasting to see how food is not a simple system of meeting needs but operates as a complex system of transformative technics. A transformative technics is perhaps the name of the abstract machine at work in Marx and within poetics, a particular mode of relationship with the world in which repetition and reproduction take second fiddle to difference and production. In both cases, the question is more like ‘what can the world be’ rather than ‘what is the world’.
What can the world be? If we talk of a ‘new Earth’, one that is not dominated and over-coded by the logic of capital and commodity, then this new Earth arises from a dream. Deleuze once offered insight in an aphorism that is relevant here – do not get trapped in the dream of the other. The first trap might be to feel the dream as insubstantial, as having no power, because it cannot be situated within some kind of chain of causal relation that matters. This is a dream of the other, one in which the dream is an accident, a free contingency of surreal associations. Yet this is too crude a concept of the dream. It rends waking and dream states, offering the waking state as one of light, the dream state as one of darkness, operating with a distinction between the two that immediately devalues the dream in the hierarchy of waking and dreaming. We can see this logic at work in the calls to wake up, in the dismissive language of sheeple and zombies and stupidity, a language that speaks from a self-declared position of being awake, of seeing clearly, a language that explains the failure to make a new Earth as rooted in people having been nullified in their desires. The awakened speak of the rest of the Earth as though it were little more than dumb flesh. They prescribe thinking like them as the answer, although they couch it in terms such as ‘education’, as though self-destructive behaviours were a matter of bad choices and if we only knew more then we’d minimise such failures of reason. This is the dream of the other that has captured us, one in which we think that what we think is right. This is the dream of philosophy in too many of its forms, its major forms, a dream that is undermined by a thought from within no doubt but that still overwhelms thinking too easily.
Rather than being called to awaken, we need rather learn how to dream a necessary freedom and the freedom of necessity. These are the strange dreams of the sorcerer and the psychoanalyst and the revolutionary, the ones that they know are no longer dreams but that speak to them, that let them see that which they cannot see. Intuitions of the imperceptible. Such intuitions arise in the intervals, in the gaps, in the in-betweens and the transports between one space and another, between the face and the mask. Which is not to say between the authentic and the inauthentic, but rather between one mode of relation and another.
Let me just call to memory that refrain, the one-to-one, the group and the community. These three modes of relation, this legend for a map-making process, as a tool of disruption of the dreaming. There is a one-to-one relation to the dream, a relation of intimacy, a relation of the body with the personality, in which the dream is felt, lingering in the morning. Or where the dream returns, time and again, to the same point. Or where the dream is a screen through which the world retains enough to be livable. I have my dreams and my dreams have me and the intimacy of this is never adequately expressed in any account I give. Yet the group dream also takes me, grips me, perhaps as a kind of shared family, perhaps as a shared game. Then there are the dreams that constitute a community, the imagined communities of nationhood or the communities of strategic identity.
To whom does the dream happen? Where is the dream? If the dreamer is thought as existing in some specific individual – you, me – then do we not have collective dreams? We dream. Whilst it might be a kind of intellectual game to talk about the dreamer being dreamed, and to wonder whether I’m a king dreaming of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being a king, the volatility of borders within the dreamspace, the slips and slides, the morphing and mutating, all speak to the power of the associative dimension of production, to an acausal realm of necessities. Nothing is more necessary than the nightmare. Its imposition is precisely this awareness of being trapped in the dream of the other, but whilst that imposition might be most acutely encountered in the nightmare, its smell lingers across the dreamspace. It lingers in the materials of association, the elements and ingredients and already existing associations that make up the dreamspace. Adrift in the ocean of plastic waste, a dreamspace surrounds and sweeps below each island of waking.
William James says somewhere that each of us might be an island, but that what this implies is that our separation at the surface hides a deeper connection beneath the waves. The Earth. This Earth dreams, has a dreamspace, one in which I might dream as easily from the encounter with a viral companion that has taken up residence, as from the compressions and intensities of the singular libidinal economy that organises my body. The dreamspace is not an ideological or symbolic structure because it is primarily a flow of bodies and connections.
Take the example of the women who took up a protest for life at Greenham Common. They camped at the gates of the airforce base, offering up bodies of resistance to the machinery of warfare. This singularity arose in part because of nightmares, shared nightmares of nuclear destruction, shared across letters in newspapers, words in conversation and poems of resistance. This shared nightmare took place across a moment and place, taking hold of the dreamers and, in doing so, shifting the tone of the waking world, transforming it, opening it, listening and responding with a call to life. Maybe it needed a particular moment in order for the nightmare not to be dismissed as ‘mine’, as ‘my reaction’. Maybe it needed a moment of collective consciousness-raising to prepare the ground, a Womens Liberation Movement to provide a network, and the political conjunction of two governments, the US and the UK, having to find a particular place within the geographic distance of targets. Maybe it needed all these other factors, but it also needed this sense that the dreamspace spoke, that it was capable to hear, underneath the clamour for peace through strength, a kind of runaway machine and an Earth that spoke against it, that called for another World.
There is perhaps nothing more futile than asking someone who wants something done, something to change, to dream. Let’s make a broad and overly sweeping claim here: most of the time the answer to the question ‘what has to be done’ is obvious. Only rarely is there actually a need to consider seriously various options. Usually, such considerations reveal competing forces at work, with each having its own ‘obvious’ responses. The difficulty is that this ‘obviousness’ is like an acquired taste. We have acquired it whether we like it or not. Its impact is felt across our bodies and within our social lives. Yet the obvious – that which is taken to be obvious – is not the result of conscious processes, in fact, it cannot be the result of conscious processes as it’s one of the grounds of them. In the face of the obvious, we cannot help it. In the face of the obvious, we can resist and, via training – repetition and practice – shift some of the responses away from a kind of automatism. Yet the obvious itself is like an atmosphere. It is, to adapt Guattari’s concept, the grounded content of an ethico-aesthetic domain. Within a particular domain – such as that of this Earth, this Earth in which capital has become the dominant logic – a field of obviousness arises as a kind of dreamspace, an ocean in which islands appear distinct but which still rest on the same Earth. So the strategy of resisting the obvious that is part of a series of oppressive, divisive habits is a valuable tool. However, the need for a new field of obviousness still remains and it’s through the dream that the new obvious is to be created. This new field of the obvious is constituted via the associative power of the dream as a series of new necessities. What was once unimaginable now becomes the everyday.
Again, this sounds like a prescription for the future, for the new Earth, that rests on too flimsy a foundation. Where is power, where are the forces of production, the confrontations and coalitions that must occur if this World is to be transformed? Yet it’s not a prescription of some wishful thinking, rather it’s a description of the capitalist revolution, that revolution we live in the aftermath of. Or rather it’s a description of the flows which capital was able to parasitise in order to become the ubiquitous natural fact that it appears as.
(end part one)
Points for second half
The processes which brought capitalism to dominance as a logic of the World – constituting a new dreamspace of capital – are not specific to capital.
The capitalist, the power relations, property relations, an underlying logic of enclosure
For the Marxist, class struggle (all history etc) – historical materialism.
For schizoanalysis, social desiring-production (de/re territory – enclosure)
Physical enclosure / Psychological enclosure (indeed, a psyche as a result, an enclosed space) (DOUBLE ENCLOSURE – DOUBLE ALIENATION – PSYCHIC ENCLOSURE IN DREAMSPACE ).
“Tosquelles liked to repeat that in the course of his life he had been exposed to multiple physical and ideological “occupations”: as a Catalan citizen fighting Spanish imperialism; as an activist in the POUM struggling against Stalinist domination; as an opponent to fascism first in Spain and later in the Resistance in Vichy France; as a refugee incarcerated in the deplorable conditions of French internment camps. These various forms of segregation, colonization, or incarceration had rendered him particularly sensitive to the dangers of “concentrationism”—which he also called le-tout-pouvoir (the-all-power). “Concentrationism” was the potential of any institution or any group to become authoritarian, oppressive, discriminatory,and exclusionary. As the war had made clear, “concentrationism threatened more than our modes of social and political organization: it was also a behavior, a psychic disposition. Alienation was indeed always both social and psychic. It is in this sense that Tosquelles referred to Marx and Freud as the “two legs” of institutional psychotherapy: when one leg walked, the other needed to follow. Both were complementary and inseparable in understanding and fighting against the “voluntary servitude” in which humans lived.
It is at this crossroads of Marxism and psychoanalysis that institutional psychotherapy was born as a tool to diagnose and also to fight against ‘double alienation.’”
Tosquelles and Institutional Psychiatry – Camille Robcis, Frantz Fanon, Institutional Psychotherapy, and the Decolonization of Psychiatry, Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 81, Number 2, April 2020, pp. 303-32
razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution 
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