It’s important to point at the state of current psychological practices, but it’s not enough. There’s something more essential to Fisher’s project that’s at the heart of this for me. A broader but not unrelated obstacle in the way of his attempt at a politically informed understanding of psychopathology is one which I really don't want to broach because of all the opinionated hackles that get raised with just one word: Lacan. It’s no surprise that a writer as focused on cultural analyses to the extent of verging on the art-critic tradition by way of Ebert or Bloom would take the work of Jacques Lacan as his psychoanalytic grounding. It ensures that we get all the popular Lacanian tidbits scattered in Mark’s work, including the reading of Kant avec Sade (in “let me be your fantasy, K-Pop), desire formulated as the force which underlies subjectivity without which we’d disappear (in ‘a fairground’s painted swing), and most recognizable, the reliance on Hitchcock and other film Canon staples to illustrate Lacanian psychoanalytic formulas.
A good example to start with is this this bit on addiction and literature:
The well-known tedium of Sadean desire is the inevitable econsequence when this impasse is honestly confronted. If the object of Sadean desire is, as Žižek, says, the eternally beautiful undead victim, who can suffer all manner of privations and yet be magically renewed forever, then the subject of this desire is, as Burroughs knew very well, the vampire-junky. The vampire-junky must be insatiable and must pursue their desires up to the point of self-destruction, but must never cross the line into annihilation. The empirical narrative would have it that the junkie is gradually “drawn into” addiction, lured into dependence by a chemical need. But it is clear that the junkie chooses to be addicted — the desire to get high is only the ostensible motivation for the drive, just as “winning money” is only the official alibi for the gambler’s enjoyment. Burroughs’ paralleling of love with addiction is thus by no means cynical hyperbole.
‘a fairground’s painted swing’
It’s got everything a theory-geek could want. Pop culture, raw pictures of real addiction, the ol’ Žižek twist-on-a-twist metatake, an elegant formulation of desire. But on some level, I’ve got to say that language like this doesn’t actually give us much to work with to face - you know - actual addiction. Now for anyone who wants to defend it, I’m willing to grant that this theory can be squared away with other approaches to addiction. Sure. I’m not saying it’s wrong; I’m saying it’s unhelpful. Despite their conceptual elitism, Lacanians haven’t made too many headlines in breakthroughs of addiction treatment. Yeah, Burroughs was a junkie, Fisher suffered from depression, etc. - stuff like this gives this whole thing an air of authenticity, but it doesn’t inherently make for applicable perspectives. As someone who's had his own forays into various colors of madness, vice, and the supposed treatments of both, I can say that my days of undergraduate theoretical purism faded in the bitter light of hospital floor linoleum reflections.
Then there’s the infamous figure of psychosis, which has a long history of being used with questionable effectiveness to establish parallel diagnoses of capitalism and of real-existing psychotic subjects. In the words of Hannah Proctor, the “lives and experiences of actual people diagnosed with schizophrenia sometimes seem very remote from these discussions, despite the centrality of the figure of the schizophrenic to them. Just as the distinction between internal experience and external label was sometimes hazily defined, it was also often unclear where metaphors ended and reality began.” Here it's easiest to recognize that the framework Fisher brings which has long been subject to exactly this critique. The project of Deleuze and Guattari, along with Guattari’s practices as a psychoanalyst, which privileged the category of schizophrenia as a mode of existence outside of capitalism (yes, I’m oversimplifying here, but like I said, the anti-psychiatry thing is for another essay), have long been recognized for the conflation of theoretical flourish and clinical reality.
Take this description by Fisher:
Classic psychosis consisted in the confusion of the Real and the Symbolic (the most obvious example of which would be hearing the voice of God). But Ripley’s psychosis resides in his conviction that only the big Other exists. Tom is not troubled by specific, named others being aware of, or suspecting, his criminality, so long as his crimes are not Symbolically inscribed. What is distinctive about Ripley’s postmodern take on the big Other is that it is radically atheistic — he neither believes in God nor in any moral order written into the fabric of the universe. The postmodern big Other is a Symbolic Order stripped of its symbolisation of itself; it no longer poses as God or History and openly announces itself as a social construct — but this ostensible demystification does nothing to impede its functioning. On the contrary, the big Other has never functioned more effectively.
(ripley’s glam, in K-Punk).
It's a solid take on today's meta-narratives of history and surely sits well with readers who are fans of Lyotard and Baudrillard. But when it comes to the lived reality of anyone actually suffers from what is also called psychosis, what does this offer? Such language can begin to sound dangerously like the song of a siren for those most willing to hear - readers who really have suffered and find a sort of buoy of promise in Fisher’s writings. This type of theory-definition usage of psychosis might in the end leave the reader (the patient? the victim?) with less of an ability to navigate the experience of things like hallucinations or dissociations.
A reliance on the severely abstracted nature of Lacanian concepts leaves Fisher vulnerable to theoretical shortcuts which end up meaning little. For instance, in the CR chapter ‘Capitalism and the Real,’ Fisher briefly discusses the tricky state of reality in relation to the reality principle, then simply states that “one strategy against capitalist realism could involve invoking the Real(s) underlying the reality that capitalism presents to us.” Sounds profound. Yet this makes little sense in terms of Lacanian thinking, and means even less once we try to apply it to anything outside of this theory discussion. Ultimately this is nothing but a rehashing of something like Althusser’s idea of ideology or even earlier debates about the cultural relativity. Go ahead and a try Invoking A Real without getting caught up in reality.
The best example of the poor fit of his Lacanian framework for a workable psychology however, is perhaps found in his Anti-Laius, where the brutality inherent in a strict Lacanianism is on full display:
As usual, however, such objections miss the psycho/ schizoanalytic point, which, as ever, is strictly formalist.
There are no biological fathers.
The Father function is semiotic through and through.
True enough, semen emitted by male-coded organisms fertilizes eggs.
But this is in no sense a relation between persons (which in any case do not exist, except as semiotic functions).
Lacan’s point about patriarchy is actually stunningly literal. What is to be a father? Well, it is to be able to give a child your surname (Sir name). Not that the name belongs to you. You are only its bearer, nothing more than the agent for the transmission of the patronym.
Sure, I get it. There is no you, only language. We’re all castrated, all fallen, and our reality is an illusion serving the behest of the Symbolic. Man is sinful and culture is corrupted. The man’s got you down. Lacan’s Catholic Platonism is shining strong here. By taking such a strong stand with this particular vein of psychoanalysis, we’re denying ourselves the ability to acknowledge the materiality of life, of real relationships, of flesh, of bodies, of lived experience, and everything else that’s so neatly explained away in the Lacanian formulas. Not to mention formulating a materially executable critique of capitalist structures which take into account a working model of psychopathology. To their credit though, Lacanians are always ready with a pun.
Lacan undeniably helped move psychoanalysis forward with his insistence that the subject’s existence occurs within structures by signification, claiming that a symptom, for example, doesn’t indicate a failure to perceive truth but rather “represents the return of truth as such into a gap of certain knowledge” (On the Subject Who Is Finally in Question). In a clinical setting, according to Lacan, the patient doesn’t use language like a simple tool to indicate an underlying reality in which their conflicts truly occur; the presentation of these conflicts to the analyst, other people, and themselves is already the true form of the conflict. This is itself important; Lacan’s bypassing of the traditional separate conception of signifier and signified suggests a helpful theory of the experiential subject’s reality which lets us move past the idea that psychoanalysis is only concerned with uncovering an essential truth that’s been obscured by faulty compromise formations.
In his words, symptoms aren’t “some irruption of truth. In fact they are truth, being made of the same wood from which truth is made, if we posit materialistically that truth is what instated on the basis of the signifying chain.” But this so-called materialism too quickly collapses the spaces between social structures and the internal world of individuals, and it’s no wonder that surveys of 20th century psychoanalysis often place Lacan at a dead-end of sorts, with his approach that "sacrifices unconscious psychic reality and the pragmatics of its enactment in the here and now in favor of reconstructing the analysand’s language” (Ahumada 1997:508). But as we’ll see in a little bit, simply collapsing the personal into the social via the symbolic isn’t as easy as these descriptions would have us believe.
To be clear, I’m not one of those types who, frustrated with the inarguably frustrating opacity and circuity of Lacan’s work throws his hands up and calls him a charlatan and tells all his followers to get a real job. I’ve spent half a decade now attending Lacanian readings, seminars, discussions, and have always found them to be of serious merit, if inevitably also frustrating and contentious. While it’d be worth sometime pursuing a fuller exploration of the state of Lacanian thought today, for now let's turn to the work of criminally under-appreciated psychoanalyst Andre Green. While also a strong writer himself, one merit of Green’s is that, as a former disciple of Lacan’s, he is able to refer to aspects of Lacan’s… let’s say spiel that, while I’m sure still disagreeable to serious Lacanians, seriously contends with the essence of its meaning. Responding to an interviewers questions about his break with Lacan, especially when it comes to practice, Green explains:
in psychoanalysis, we are committed to an alliance between practice and theory, and to the psychoanalytical institution. Therefore I cannot comply with your request to “leave Lacanians aside and talk about Lacan”, because Lacanians are Lacan’s posterity, his creations, and Lacan is responsible for what they do today. We cannot regard a psychoanalyst in the same way we regard a philosopher. A philosopher’s only concern is himself and other philosophers: a psychoanalyst must also deal with people outside his field.
How is it, you might ask, that someone who for seven years was an associate and an admirer of Lacan could suddenly abandon him, and become one of his foes? My answer is that it requires time to completely deconstruct Lacan’s theoretical mechanism and to relate it to his practice in general. At the time, I limited myself to a kind of compromise. I said: “I cannot approve of your practice, but your theory interests me”. Only in 1984 did I realize that theory and practice were considerably more interwoven than one would have thought. It is impossible to say: “His practice was debatable, but his writing is sound. [….]
The comparison between Lacan and Heidegger doesn’t work. We can not say that Heidegger’s practice is Nazism. Insofar as he is a philosopher, his thought originates from texts. But you cannot put the psychoanalyst in a similar position: he is responsible for the patients in his care. Every now and then I see some “couch-scarred” patients, people who have undergone all sorts of abuse by Lacanian analysts. Here we are not talking about theories! And patients have to pay for this! This is their practice, this is how they earn their living!Benvenuto, Sergio, (1996). Against Lacanism: A Conversation with André Green held in Green’s office in Paris, in Journal of European Psychoanalysis Vol 2.
To anybody interested in matters of psychoanalysis, I highly recommend you go read the entire interview; it’s an absolute delight. At one point, when Green remarks that “Lacan used to beat some patients,” the interviewer mounts the powerful defense: “But that was in later years, when he was already very old and increasingly eccentric.”
I want here to remind you that I am not mounting a full attack on Lacan, his theory, legacy, or whatever. I’m sure I’ll already get enough “well, actually - “ comments from this part alone. I am saying that Mark’s engagement with psychoanalysis, coming from the CCRU at Warwick, left him particularly vulnerable to an approach to psychoanalysis which made it difficult to even address the practical methods and questions of mental illness. This is no surprise, seeing that the CCRU project leaned heavily on the work of French Philosopher Deleuze, who along with radical psychoanalyst Felix Guattari criticized Lacan for being too much of a square. This has already been identified as a weakness in the work of fellow CCRU figure Nick Land:
psychoanalysis has its own tendency towards idealism, found in Lacan’s reading of Freud. This raises the question which the present thesis addresses, about the validity of this transplantation of psychoanalysis into Land’s philosophy, given its own internal contradictions between a mechanistic, materialist and positive conception of desire and its converse, which posits desire in terms of negativity, idealism and language.
Overy, S. (2016). The genealogy of Nick Land's anti-anthropocentric philosophy: a psychoanalytic conception of machinic desire. Newcastle University.
Which leads us to something I haven't seen addressed in much of the Seriously Published Literature but that anyone familiar with the virtual spaces of critical theory fandom should recognize: a particular brand of petty dogmatic partitioning of psychologies, usually into the Lacan-adjacent psychoanalysis on one side and the capitalist shills of pharmaceutical psychiatry and it's behaviorist lackey, cognitive behavioral therapy. Something about the pursuit of revolutionary knowledge makes many students and budding rebels apt to dismiss anything that reeks of institutional discipline and capitalist cooperation. (It should be noted here that this impulse is not without good reason; I'll be elaborating on the merits and hard-earned achievements of 20th century critics of psychiatry in the in vitro essay on the topic).
Yet popular geist, one at the very heart of the Deleuzian approach to psychoanalysis, is a serious stumbling block for any attempt to grapple with the lived reality of psychological suffering. So let’s take Deleuze’s spirit of philosophical renewal to heart and reject the impulse to follow a rigid interpretation of psychoanalysis in which Lacan dominates like a father of the church:
Nothing positive is done, nothing at all, in the domains of either criticism or history, when we are content to brandish ready-made old concepts like skeletons intended to intimidate any creation, without seeing that the ancient philosophers from whom we borrow them were already doing what we would like to prevent modem philosophers from doing: they were creating their concepts, and they were not happy just to dean and scrape bones like the critic and historian of our time.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? Columbia University Press, 83.
And so if we raise our glance from this particular brand of theorizing which insists on vehement exegetical arguments over Freud's every word, we can see that contemporaneous psychoanalysis and the broader field of psychodynamic psychotherapies have gone in the opposite direction.
They have increasingly begun to notice that the particular differences between theoretical disciples bears little reflection in the actual practice of particular practices. For the most part, despite inevitable internecine conflicts between schools, psychoanalysis has settled on a sort of pluralistic détente, acknowledging that is moving forward with simultaneously existing conceptual foundations that at various points don't agree enough to suggest the existence of a unified or integrated framework - I highly recommend a glance at Robert Wallerstein’s ‘One Psychoanalysis or Many’ or Peter Fonagy’s ‘Relation of Theory and Practice in Psychodynamic Therapy.’ Far from using this to attack Fisher’s whole project, I think recognizing this weakness would help us in trying to solve the problems he helped us identify, similar to the more up-to-date view on psychology I describe in part one.
This should have significant consequences for our ability to handle the most serious matters of Fisher’s work and life. For instance, he took depression to be one of the central aspects of both his personal and theoretical experience, yet Lacanians have notably little to say about depression; Lacan didn’t recognize depression as a discrete structure and went on to call depressive sadness a moral failing. Now I’m sure that there are many Lacanians on hand to explain what this actually means and why it helps us explain the real suffering of patients. That’s possible. I encourage you to ask any Lacanians you know; it’ll be an interesting conversation. But it’s looking like maybe of all the voices in psychoanalysis, Lacan and his breed are not always the best for someone like Fisher and his interests.
This isn’t just an academic argument where I’m choosing one discipline over another as an affront to some departmental prestige or disputed funding. I’m saying this because I’ve personally seen people who were experiencing a myriad of psychologically difficult situations speak approach me during the reading of texts like these by Fisher and I so quickly felt that the vocabulary derived from the texts was inadequate to handle the phenomenological reality of their experience. In moments like this, statements like that of Arne de Boever when he claims to have uncovered the issue that “money renders renders people psychotic,” and this in an essay in Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism mostly dealing with 20th century novels and some modern Marxists obsessed with semiotics, can’t help but ring laughable in my ears. Arguments in this vein about depression, anxiety, or whatever else land similarly.
The sensationalism of taking the language of madness to prove your political or theoretical point might gain you some applause, but it’s cheap and harmful in the end. I’m not saying we should throw out Lacan, as that'd be a similar sort of black and white thinking which dominates the worse parts of revolutionary dialogues in which anything that is not dogma is discarded as drivel.
Despite his figure in the history of thought as a curmudgeon, Theodor Adorno proves a voice force of inspiration on the side of life against the aggressive abstraction of the Lacanian hardliners:
The world is unique. The mere repetition in speech of moments which occur again and again in the same form bears more resemblance to a futile, compulsive litany than to the redeeming word. Classification is a condition of knowledge, not knowledge itself, and knowledge in turn dissolves classification.
Opposition to general concepts is absurd. There is more to be said, however, about the status of the general. What many individual things have in common, or what constantly recurs in one individual thing, needs not be more stable, eternal, or deep than the particular. The scale of categories is not the same as that of significance. That was precisely the error of the Eleatics and all who followed them, with Plato and Aristotle at their head.
Horkheimer, M., Adorno, T. W. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford University Press, 182.
Perhaps, mayhaps, there’s a road somewhere between Deluezo-Lacanianism and psycho-pharma storefront pop psychology, and if there’s not, we damn sure better start making one soon. The question, obviously and painfully, is how.
So far it's been difficult for me to keep a straight face and bear the critical tone in dragging on Fisher because, while I stand by the individual points of contention, in the end I also still feel he's right. It's this double sense, or rather alternation between judgements, that feels to me to be the heart of the issue. Such a feeling has long dogged the corners of my thought, and if I'm ever to be accused of an inflexible binary, this would surely be the one: so far, nothing I've seen has allowed me to accept a working perspective that simultaneously includes the reality of both the individual psychology and the social.
Sure, the theory world is rife with accounts that claim to do exactly that, notably the Lacanian stuff we just discussed, at the hearts of which lies the unconscious. In these theories, the unconscious is either a direct reflection of external historical structures transparent such that it is transparent to the sociological observer even when not to the subject in question, or as sort of ‘black box’ that is impenetrable to any observer and whose workings must be uncovered by traces in language, art, or therapy; in the end, both of these options still are still ontologically on the level of collectivity – what Pierre Bourdieu calls ‘self-incorporating history.’
Theoretically satisfying as they might be, such perspectives don't seem to sufficiently account for the "lived reality" of mental suffering. Locating the nature of psychopathology - illnesses of the psyche - in the structures of society, even if clarified that it's the specific society organized by exploitative market & power structures, etc. - erases the question of why one person experiences the distinct symptomology of bipolar I or II, why some have panic attacks and others have diffuse anxiety, and so on. As much as the socio-political crowd tends to ignore it, there exist in psychopathology some kinds of psychological experiences which are distinct from each other as well as from non-affected subjects. These are the objects by which modern psychiatric diagnostic catalogues, be they symptomological like the American DSM V & the ICD-11, or psychodynamic like the PDM 2 or OPD, are informed I'll be the first to admit the massive problems with these systems; this is one of the core themes of the forthcoming essays here at Mental Health @ the Apocalypse. Still, I must say that in the work of Fisher and his contemporaries, these questions are far too easily swept aside or left out entirely.
We can see this tension clearly in the penultimate entry in the K-punk printed collection, ‘Good for Nothing.’ In a touching passage that can be painful to read, Mark describes his own experience with depression:
Writing about one’s own depression is difficult. Depression is partly constituted by a sneering ‘inner’ voice which accuses you of self-indulgence – you aren’t depressed, you’re just feeling sorry for yourself, pull yourself together – and this voice is liable to be triggered by going public about the condition. Of course, this voice isn’t an ‘inner’ voice at all – it is the internalised expression of actual social forces, some of which have a vested interest in denying any connection between depression and politics.
My depression was always tied up with the conviction that I was literally good for nothing. I spent most of my life up to the age of thirty believing that I would never work. In my twenties I drifted between postgraduate study, periods of unemployment and temporary jobs. In each of these roles, I felt that I didn’t really belong – in postgraduate study, because I was a dilettante who had somehow faked his way through, not a proper scholar; in unemployment, because I wasn’t really unemployed, like those who were honestly seeking work, but a shirker; and in temporary jobs, because I felt I was performing incompetently, and in any case I didn’t really belong in these office or factory jobs, not because I was ‘too good’ for them, but – very much to the contrary – because I was over-educated and useless, taking the job of someone who needed and deserved it more than I did. Even when I was on a psychiatric ward, I felt I was not really depressed – I was only simulating the condition in order to avoid work, or in the infernally paradoxical logic of depression, I was simulating it in order to conceal the fact that I was not capable of working, and that there was no place at all for me in society.
In the first paragraph, Fisher takes a strong stance on the individual/collective debate on the nature of the individual, naming the voice of depression nothing more than an internalized expression of social forces. By doing so, he defines the experience of psychopathology according to a logic of external - in this case socio-political - forces. This is in itself not an unrealistic stance to take; the tension between internal and external structures and the question of authenticity is a source of disagreement at the core of both psychological and social theories of personhood. For anyone interested in this, this will be the subject of a forthcoming work of mine about Utopia and the Self, but until then I highly recommend the recently published overview ‘The True Self. Critique, Nature, and Method.’
But it’s crucial to recognize this framing because, whether intentional or not, it serves to define not just the pathology of depression, yet not the entirety of subjective ‘self-hood’ according to this systemic logic. Depression is something society gives us, yet the other parts of the self are somehow still ours. On what grounds can one ‘inner voice’ be discarded as an internalized social error while another be allowed the title of a legitimate ‘inner voice?’ This seems to be a particularly saddening case of wanting one’s cake and eating it too.
There is a massive difference between understanding psychopathology as being shaped or structured by social forces, and as something actually consisting of those social forces. The result of this can be seen in the next paragraph, where Fisher describes an experience of what even he describes as a mental disorder, a subjective entity of experience which is, as would be acknowledged by almost any reader, distinctly different from the so-called ‘healthy’ self experience others had while in the same moment of history and culture. Ultimately, it’s unfair to conflate the social environment with the substance of psychopathology. Similar short circuits can be seen in the work of his predecessor, Guattari, for whom:
The goal of schizoanalysis is not, in Guattari’s words, to re-install the universal norm in the patient’s behavior, but to singularize him/ her, to help him/her becoming conscious of his difference, to give him/her the ability to be in good relationship with his singular being and actual possibilities.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi, ‘How to Heal a Depression’
But here, if the singularity of the subject is not the theological ego, the I, the self which suffers and which was denied in the Lacanianism we’ve explored, then it is precisely everything which is outside of it - the social, political, biological, historical, moral, etc. - and so one still must choose between the idea of a uniquely located self - the psyche - or a network of the external. We still have to choose to describe ourselves as within the human or outside of it.
Therefore, the next and final chapter on Mark Fisher will explore two possible solutions to the problems described so far: one human, one not.
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