Declarations of Dependence by Ferguson Scott;

Author:Ferguson, Scott; [Ferguson, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI001000 Philosophy / Aesthetics
ISBN: 5381135
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska
Published: 2018-05-07T16:00:00+00:00

A Tale of Two Symptoms

I wish to conclude the present chapter by proposing a method of critical interpretation that takes the proto-aesthetic as its object and is grounded in the mystery of care. To do so, I want to pursue an alternative account of the symptom that differs from the one critical theory has predominantly presupposed. I draw this alternative symptomology from the object-relations tradition to which Butler also appeals. According to the conventional Freudian view, a symptom comprises a distorted and debilitating return of an unconscious wish, which the dominant order has deemed unacceptable and conditioned the psyche to repress. I call this the “Oedipal symptom,” since it revolves around the power struggle between a desirous subject and paternal law.

My interest, however, lies in a second conception of the symptom offered by psychoanalysis that diverges from Oedipal symptomology. This understanding of the symptom derives from Freud’s claims referenced earlier: that dependence structures love as an ambivalent relation and that aggression toward the other risks dissolving the subject’s self-consistency. This fraught dependency becomes a foundational problematic for Klein’s object-relations theory and her followers, including D. W. Winnicott, Esther Bick, and Thomas Ogden. Rather than theorizing the symptom principally through the power struggle between paternal prohibition and infantile wishes, object-relations analysts tend to think symptomology through the affective knots that result from subjective dependency and, more generally, through the problem of care. As with Oedipal symptomology, this care symptom will yield diverse diagnoses and treatments. The core insight, however, concerns the caretaker’s role in binding infantile perceptions and drives in early development and enveloping subjectivity within a broader social and material domain.

When caretaking is “good enough,” to use Winnicott’s well-known language, perceptions and drives become integrated in relation to the enigma of the caretaking environment.51 When care is for whatever reason inadequate or fails, however, the subject will be plagued by painful and riddling symptoms. Also, while Oedipal symptomology typically revolves around the drama of having and not having, care symptomology emphasizes what Bick names care’s “containing function” and the environmental envelope, or “sensory floor” in Ogden’s writings, which care creates and maintains.52 In the care symptom, sensations of loss, incoherence, and disintegration index environmental precarity at the threshold of worldly disclosure. And symptoms of this sort function as pathological attempts at self-care and as opaque messages to the other. Finally, therapeutic interpretation necessitates tracing the failed structure of care to which these messages point, and the cure involves repairing and reconstituting what Winnicott calls the subject’s “confidence in the environment.”53

Repairing the modern money relation demands a method of critical reading that is attentive not only to symptoms of power but also to the symptomology of care. Yet care cannot be reduced to the familialism that orients the object-relations tradition. In modernity, care is a problem of money in the first and last instance. Money’s boundless public center constitutes sensuous existence as a whole, engendering a broad proto-aesthetic background against which care’s individuated difficulties can take shape. We require a politics of care that realizes money’s expansive center in finite actualizations.

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