Becoming inorganic

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 29, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 547-570

  De Lauretis, Teresa ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 34147170117     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/377720     Document Type: Review

References (33)

1. A novum or cognitive innovation is a totalizing phenomenon or relationship deviating from the author's and implied reader's norm of reality. Now no doubt, each and every poetic metaphor is a novum, while modern prose fiction has made new insights into man its rallying cry. However, though valid SF has deep affinities with poetry and innovative realistic fiction, by "totalizing" I mean a novelty entailing a change of the whole universe of the tale. [Darko Suvin, "SF and the Novum," in The Technological Imagination: Theories and Fictions, ed. Teresa de Lauretis, Andreas Huyssen, and Kathleen Woodward (Madison, Wisc., 1980), p. 142]
2. John Fletcher, introduction to Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness (London, 1999), p. 22.
3. The statement, dated 8 September 1999, is quoted in Sharon Reier, "Schumpeter: The Prophet of Bust and Boom," International Herald Tribune, 10-11 June 2000, p. 17; hereafter abbreviated "S."
4. See Joseph A. Schumpeter, Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process, ed. Rendigs Fels (1939; New York, 1964).
5. See Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1943; London, 1976), pp. 81-86. On the role of the entrepreneur, see pp. 132-33.
6. Again Greenspan, testifying before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress in 1999, remarked on the "evident acceleration of the process of creative destruction, which has accompanied these expanding innovations and which has been reflected in the shifting of capital from failing technologies into those technologies at the cutting edge" - such as the microprocessor, the laser, fiber optics, and other information technologies ("S," p. 17; emphasis added).
7. The phrase has already reappeared in at least one work of literary criticism by a current Harvard professor; see Philip Fisher, Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), p. 13. I am indebted to Ulla Haselstein for this reference.
8. See Sabina Spielrein, "Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens," Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen 4 (1912): 465-503.
9. Founded in 1908, the Jahrbuch published five volumes (1909-13) and ceased publication after the Freud-Jung split in 1912.
10. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans, and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1953-74), 18: 55; hereafter abbreviated BPP.
11. See Aldo Carotenuto, A Secret Symmetry: Sabina Spielrein between Jung and Freud, trans. Arno Pomerans, John Shepley, and Krishna Winston (New York, 1982), pp. 191-95; hereafter abbreviated SS.
12. After receiving her medical degree in Zurich and having broken off relations with Jung, Sabina went to Vienna, where she remained from October 1911 to March 1912. At the end of this period she moved to Germany, and lived in Berlin and Munich. Later she returned to Switzerland, living in Lausanne, Château d'Oex, and Geneva until 1923. Then, deciding to return to Russia, she applied to the Russian Psychoanalytic Society, which accepted her in the autumn of that year. Sabina thereupon resettled in Rostov-on-Don, the city of her birth, where all traces of her vanish in 1937, a year in which her name still appears in the Russian Society's list of analysts. [SS, p. 191] After 1936, when psychoanalysis was banned in the Soviet Union at the height of Stalinism, Carotenuto comments, the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis refrained from any mention of the ban and simply eliminated from its roster the names of Russian analysts; the same was done later with regard to countries where psychoanalysis had been outlawed or virtually silenced, as in Italy and Germany; see SS, pp. 207 and 237.
13. On Sabina Spielrein's probable death at the hand of the Nazis, see Francesca Molfino, "Sabina Spielrein, la paziente," in Psicoanalisi al femminile, ed. Silvia Vegetti Finzi (Bari, 1992), p. 265.
14. A diary entry dated 24 (23) October 1910, during the period of her passionate love for Jung, reads: "Now I must make a cold compress for my head, since my wild yearning makes me feverish. Dear Lord, I should like to have some peace, at least at night, so that I may gather my forces to begin my new study, 'On the Death Instinct'!" (qtd. in SS, p. 33).
15. "Sadism would correspond to an aggressive component of the sexual instinct which has become independent and exaggerated and, by displacement, has usurped the leading position" (Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in Standard Edition, 7: 158).
16. Freud admits as much in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930): "I remember my own defensive attitude when the idea of an instinct of destruction first emerged in psycho-analytic literature, and how long it took before I became receptive to it" (Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in Standard Edition, 21: 120; hereafter abbreviated CD).
17. See also New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1933) and An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1938). Freud returns to the theoretical elaboration of the death drive in The Ego and the Id (1923) and "The Economic Problem of Masochism" (1924). Already in 1909, however, he had sharply distinguished his conception from Alfred Adler's notion of an Aggressionsbetrieb in male sexuality: "I have myself been obliged to assert the existence of an 'aggressive instinct', but it is different from Adler's. I prefer to call it the 'destructive' or 'death instinct'" (Freud, Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy, in Standard Edition, 10: 140).
18. The energy of the sexual drive, as is known, was called "libido." Born of a formalistic concern for symmetry, the term "destrudo," once proposed to designate the energy of the death drive, did not survive a single day. For the death drive does not possess its own energy. Its energy is libido. Or, better put, the death drive is the very soul, the constitutive principle, of libidinal circulation. [Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore, 1976), p. 124; hereafter abbreviated LD]
19. Introducing Laplanche's recent work in English translation, Fletcher points out that the distinction between life and death drives is a distinction within the field of sexuality. Laplanche's reading of the successive shifts in Freud's thinking about the drives traces what he calls a strange chiasmus in which sexuality, hitherto associated with the primary process, the tendency to unbinding and fragmentation in opposition to the ego, binding and the secondary process, passes over to its opposite, after the formulation of narcissism and of the life drive as Eros. At this point the concept of death drive also appears as the reaffirmation of unbinding, the repetition-compulsion, the discharge of all tensions in opposition to the bound and binding Eros. [Fletcher, introduction to Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, pp. 33-34]
20. This is how Freud reverses the commonsense perspective on life and death: The attributes of life were at some time evoked in inanimate matter by the action of a force of whose nature we can form no conception. It may perhaps have been a process similar in type to that which later caused the development of consciousness [the registering of sensory perceptions] in a particular stratum of living matter. The tension which then arose in what had hitherto been an inanimate substance endeavoured to cancel itself out. In this way the first instinct came into being: the instinct to return to the inanimate state. [BPP, 18: 38]
21. Freud, letter to Jung, 30 Nov. 1911, in The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, trans. Ralph Manheim and R. F. C. Hull, ed. William McGuire (Princeton, N.J., 1974), p. 469.
22. "In that vast metapsychological, metaphysical, and metabiological fresco" that is Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Laplanche remarks, a hypothesis "is presented without restraint, with arguments of every kind, frequently borrowed from fields outside of psychoanalytic practice, calling to the rescue biology, philosophy, and mythology" (LD, pp. 106,110).
23. See also LD, p. 58: "The principle of neuronic inertia, which in Freud's subsequent thought will become the pleasure principle, is not a principle of life and ... has nothing to do with vital functions.... It is at the level of ideational representatives alone, and not in the functioning of a living organism that this model of a complete evacuation of psychical energy is discovered."
24. In Civilization and Its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur), Freud writes that social beings are endowed with "a powerful share of aggressiveness," as well as with the gifts of Eros, the wish for love, friendship, and community. "As a result, their neighbour is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him" (CD, 21: 111). This state of affairs would not change with either the abolition of private property and the demise of capitalism or complete freedom in sexual life, as early utopian communism claimed; for "aggressiveness was not created by property...and it already shows itself in the nursery almost before property has given up its primal, anal form" (CD, 21: 113).
25. See Freud, "The Economic Problem of Masochism," Standard Edition, 19: 155-70.
26. Schumpeter's belief that both internal and external factors determine "the working of the economic organism" (Schumpeter, Business Cycles, p. 1) is akin to Freud's conception of the working of the human psychic apparatus as constituted and affected by internal and external stimuli (the former being the drives). While in the aftermath of the Great War, his patients' war neuroses and their attendant symptoms of repetition compulsion led Freud to postulate a death drive (in Beyond the Pleasure Principle), Schumpeter compares the question of whether and under what circumstances the economic system "will by its own working produce booms or crises or depressions" to "whether and why death would come about, in the absence of lesions, by virtue of the working of the human organism" (ibid., p. 12). Moreover, the presence or absence of fluctuation inherent in the economic process and the role of "equilibrium" in the economic system as described by Schumpeter (see "Equilibrium and the Theoretical Norm of Economic Quantities," chap. 2 of ibid.) strongly resonate with Freud's "economic" definition of the pleasure principle in terms of quantities of stimulation and discharge, as constancy principle or entropic tendency to zero, in the psychical apparatus as systemically conceived in the first topography (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in Standard Edition, 5: 509-621; hereafter abbreviated ID). The economic metaphor in Freud is nowhere more evident than in the curious analogy he finds to describe the dreamwork: A daytime thought may very well play the part of entrepreneur for a dream; but the entrepreneur, who, as people say, has the idea and the initiative to carry it out, can do nothing without capital; he needs a capitalist who can afford the outlay, and the capitalist who provides the psychical outlay for the dream is invariably and indisputably...a wish from the unconscious. [ID, 5: 561]
27. For a critical history of entrepreneurial research in virtual reality technologies and virtual environments (VE) in military, entertainment, and university settings, see Ken Hillis, Digital Sensations: Space, Identity, and Embodiment in Virtual Reality (Minneapolis, 1999).
28. Erogenous zones are defined as "any region of the skin or mucous membrane capable of being the seat of an excitation of a sexual nature. More specifically...the oral, anal, genital and mamillary zones" (Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith [New York, 1973], p. 154; hereafter abbreviated L). While the whole body, including all internal organs, may operate as an erogenous zone, Laplanche adds that it is the maternal care of infants by adults that, "in focusing on certain bodily regions, contributes to defining them as erotogenic zones, zones of exchange which demand and provoke excitation in order subsequently to reproduce it autonomously, through internal stimulation" (LD, p. 44).
29. As reported in the Herald Tribune article cited above, an interviewee stated: "Capitalism is restless, and somewhere in California, there is a young kid plotting Bill Gates's downfall" ("S," p. 18).
30. On the mise-en-abîme structure of Cronenberg's M. Butterfly, see de Lauretis, "Popular Culture, Public and Private Fantasies: Femininity and Fetishism in David Cronenberg's M. Butterfly," Signs 24 (Winter 1999): 303-34.
31. Through the voice of the game designer, Cronenberg's comments on how "reality shifts," or the passage between VEs, are effected in the game actually refer to techniques of cinematic montage reflecting various stages of film technology "You can get jagged, brutal cuts, slow fades, shimmering little morphs," explains Allegra. The screenplay has a fuller list: "You can get jagged, brutal cuts that shock you into responsive action [as in] the explore-and-conquer games. Others are slow fades.... Then you can make shimmering little morphs. Or sideways inserts.... Everyone does something different, puts their own style-stamp on their work. Me, I prefer the dissolve" (E, p. 120; emphasis added).
32. For example, the gypsy called the Mouse hooks up with the computer-cyborg Olga to control one of the spaceship's vanes "directly with the nervous impulses from his body" (Samuel R. Delany, Nova [Garden City, N.Y., 1968], p. 52).
33. As Laplanche and Pontalis point out, fantasy originates at the earliest stages of the formation of the ego, in the "disjunction between the pacification of need (Befriedigung) and the fulfilment of desire (Wünscherfüllung), between the two stages represented by real experience and its hallucinatory revival, between the object that satisfies [the real object, the milk] and the sign which describes both the object and its absence [the lost object, the breast]." (Auto)eroticism is born at that "mythical moment" - mythical because "more abstract than definable in time, since it is always renewed" - when sexuality, "disengaged from any natural object, moves into the field of fantasy and by that very fact becomes sexuality" (Laplanche and Pontalis, "Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality," in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan [London, 1989], pp. 24-25).