Silence (Cracking Up and Intimacies)

Bollas' Cracking Up and Bersani/Phillip's Intimacies both take the psychoanalytic situation as a model for intimacies in the broader social field.

The exemplary relation for B is linked through the way B theories the availability of selves to the world, to sensing, to reaction and feedback. The self cannot be represented fully, it can only be sensed, as a texture. We register our own selves and other selves affectively. B calls the object of this sensing a "psychic texture." He says that it occurs through the unconscious communication of one self with another, pointing to the conversation that happens underneath or to the side of every communication. This is the case in the analytic situation, which builds explicitly on this formal structure, but is also the case in the world at large, although in any given social scene, there might be deflections (are almost guaranteed to be deflections) from the awareness of this sub-conversation, this intimacy below intimacy. B calls this sub-intimacy a formal one: each self is aesthetic in that it gets registered as an affective shape, converted into feelings (some people make us bristle; others make us fall in love).

B/P are more deliberate in their linking of the analytic scene to the world: it happens because the analytic scene is a model for "impersonal intimacies," or "impersonal narcissism." The system of transference and counter-transference, when elevated to the kind of equality that Phillips wants, creates a place where two people can learn to love each other, create a future, without being attached to the love, the future, or each other via a project of defining the self. Rather, the process disseminates the self, scatters it in a relation where self and other become indistinguishable in a love that shatters. Previously, for Bersani, sex and sexuality were the greatest chances for people to shatter their attachment to selfhood (as he calls it in Intimacies).

In both books, silence plays a central role, is a key to the possibility of pleasure and the pleasureable experience of the self. For B, this is explicit: he talks about the "generative blankness," related to the Imaginary, that people need to have access through throughout their lives in order to have and project desires onto, to screen desires [see Cavell on screens]. He also talks about the silence that analysis provides for the generation of "self states," a possibility for sensing the self, for sensing the self's potentials. For asking the question "what is my self?" For B/P, the generative presence of silence is implicit in their hopes for analysis (it is part of the formal structure of analysis, even in analysis which gets re-shaped around a new equality, I presume), but also seems to be a kind of formal effect of a love which does not take the consolidation of self to be a given: in a sense, the self goes quiet in its shattering [interesting implication of Bersani's choice of vocabulary here: "shattering" implies a dramatic sound. One could from here either think about the moment just after shattering, where all goes quiet, or where the shattering rings in one's ears; or, re-think his choice of word: maybe the process he describes, a love that loses the self, that disperses selfhood, is a quiet process, or requires quiet anyway].

The possibility here is to think about the role that silence plays in encounters, in the projections that get screened within and onto any communication, for the workings of intimacy. In the kinds of intimacy I'm studying, mediated via the Internet, the role of silence seems obvious (albeit underexplored). So many online interactions are done in silence, without the noise of another person's body, the noise of another person's full or familiar presence, without the noise of a scene (although we create our own scenes for online interactions). If we pen a flame, we do it in the relative silence of our own home. Or anyway, even if we play the music loudly, sit in an internet cafe, or wherever, we are not proximate to the object of our communication in the same way. The internet screens it [like Cavell's movie screen, which institutes a kind of silencing of the world, screens the world, so that we are not present to it, while it is present to us]. The form produces a silence into which the communication can unfold like the form of the analytic encounter produces a form into which its communication can unfold. This would be a characteristic of the encounter: a relative level of silence or noise, related to a process of screening the world.

B would also seem to suggest that we could link the silence/noise of any encounter not to the presence/absense of the object of the encounter, the encountered, but to a formal/affective layer of every encounter: the communication of one self with another that propagates via the unconscious. In the first model, each encounter has a relative level of noise/silence that affects how one maps themselves onto the potential of a situation. In the second, every encounter has a silent level, or a characteristic noise pattern of layering--not exactly manifest/latent or conscious/unconscious, but more affective/rational (if we don't get too carried away with thinking the rational is super-organized and systematic).

Maybe an impersonal narcissism is a more silent relation to self: one where the self isn't amplified via the feedback loop of mistaking input for output, but successively quieted as in the echo, dispersal and silencing of a sound in a room where there is no recording device [imagine I Am Sitting in a Room without the recording device, without the microphone], where the sound reverberates, but where the people there aren't wedded to capturing it [I link recording here to a project of consolidating and elaborating the self, a personal narcissism, so I analogize the self to sound], but instead spend their energies listening.