Psychoanalysis as “Studio Practice”

ABSTRACT

In their essays, Kathleen Miller and Katie Gentile show us ways of writing, thinking, and practicing psychoanalysis that address the onto-epistemological and social implications of taking account of the more-than-human. In their reach beyond human centrism, Miller and Gentile model experimentation and invention as well as invite us to consider what I discuss as psychoanalysis as a studio practice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Important exceptions involve those to which Miller refers; especially (see: Hartman, 2011, 2017, 2019. Also see, Zeavin, 2021 and Goodman & Clemente, 2023).

² Miller is careful to address Lila’s identification with cryptids in terms of being mixed-race and trans; how these specificities affect my references to the body in critical media studies below is not pursued here but the relationship of race and the digital image is more fully addressed, focusing on the break away from the unmarked body of the mirror stage in Clough (2023). What is important to that argument and here is that the digital image moves from vision to touch and affective intensities, showing that the body always has been open, albeit differently, to connecting with the screen of different technologies.

³ Jacques Derrida’s term, “originary technicity” is meant to deconstruct the opposition of nature and techne as it often is used to privilege nature over technology, defining nature as originary. In deconstructing this opposition, originary technicity, however, is not meant to propose that technicity is originary, but rather to recognize the inherent relationship of the technical and the human in experience and knowledge production. The term takes on even more weight considering the agencies of the more-than-human, including digital technology and the algorithm.

⁴ Hansen argues that “the technical access to and production of data about levels of experience that remain outside our direct experience give us the potential to gain an expanded understanding of our own experience and its implication within larger worldly situations,” what he refers to as “worldly sensibility” (Hansen, 2015, p. 116).

⁵ Barad has argued for a reformulation of causality and the material conditions for knowledge production. They offer as a starting point the proposition that “theoretical concepts are defined by the circumstances required for their measurement” (Barad, 1998, p. 94). This turned around link of causality between concepts and methods of measure is especially important for quantum physics but increasingly for the measuring of digital technology, which is in real-time, ongoing, and for that, it is indeterminate.

⁶ In discussions among critical social theorists, there is recognition of those who have been excluded from the very definition of human, while questioning whether their exclusion is rather an inclusion in humanism that serves to define the human. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, for example, refers to the “plasticity” of Blackness in being ascribed to whatever inhumanity is necessary to define humanness (2020). As a result, there is a distancing from seeking inclusion altogether. Also see Michelle Stephens’ recent paper in which she addresses these same issues around “human,” race, and racism, drawing on Afropessimism and other Black authors (Stephens, 2022; also see: Clough, 2016; Ferreira da Silva, 2017).

⁷ In my presentation, “The Noisy Treatment,” delivered at IPA, July 2023, I developed a related but different criticism of Laplanche than Gentile’s. Drawing on Laplanche’s remarks in “Gender, Sex, and the Sexual” (Laplanche, 2007), I develop his relationship to information theory, digital technology, and what in information theory is referred to as noise.

⁸ In bringing these three thinkers together for explaining a studio practice, Moten linked Freud’s self-analysis/psychoanalysis, with DuBois’ “autobiography of the race concept,” and Taylor’s liner notes about improvisation and experiment.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Patricia Ticineto Clough

Patricia Ticineto Clough, Ph.D., L.P. is Professor emerita of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center and Queens College (CUNY). Clough is author of The User Unconscious, On Affect, Media and Measure (2018); Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (2000); Feminist Thought (1994) and The End(s) of Ethnography (1992/1998). She is editor of The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (2007), and with Craig Willse, Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death (2011) She is faculty at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies and the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy, where she also serves on the Training Committee and the Task Force on Diversity. She is in private practice in NYC.