Racialized Bodies and the Violence of the Setting

ABSTRACT

Turning to object relations psychoanalysis and Black critical theory, I argue that the violence of racialization works in and through clinical and national settings. The setting is theorized in terms of its phantasmatic and phantomatic dimensions: The former refers to phantasies that ensnare certain bodies in a mythologized past, while the latter refers to the irreducibly material histories that those phantasies fail to ensnare (i.e., the phantom world). The case of a Confederate statue’s proposed removal is used to illustrate the tension between phantasm/phantom at a national level, while Searles’s writings demonstrate the interplay of phantasm/phantom in a clinical context.

Notes

¹ While this article deals specifically with the Black body, some variation of this incoherence seems applicable to many minoritized peoples, at least insofar as their bodies are surveilled, which almost invariably entails psychic splitting (derealization or depersonalization), such that the self that watches the body does not coincide with the phenomenal body itself. This”watcher” could be understood as an identification with the aggressor, wherein the racializing gaze is incorporated into the self, forming an invasive object relation (Williams, 2010) or introject that “does not merely intrude,” but “carries out the verdict: that one is hated” (Marriott, 2015, p. 166). We might think of this as an anxiety of race, gender, or sexual passing in which one must self-monitor in order to cohere with the setting.

² “Rather than glance at the most striking spectacle with revulsion or through tear-filled eyes, we do better to cast our glance at the more mundane displays of power and the border where it is difficult to discern domination from recreation … By dissembling the ‘benign’ scene, we confront the everyday practice of domination, the nonevent, as it were” (Hartman, 1997, p. 42).

³ Ironically, Wilderson and Winnicott might agree on this point. If Wilderson argues that black existence cannot be taken for granted because it lives a social death, Winnicott argues that existence cannot be taken for granted at all, since psychic (and social) death is possible for anyone who has suffered excessive “impingements” (trauma) early in life. What Winnicott obviously lacks, however, is Wilderson’s attention to the structural or onto-political dimensions of such death for blackness.

⁴ The idea here is that the “settler colonial setting” is dominated by white phantasy, and that in white phantasy, for Marriott (and Fanon), blackness cannot be conceived of as a form, but only as a formlessness in need of the form that the white imaginary will racialistically give it. The formlessness of blackness thus corresponds to an exclusion at the level of place, such that black bodies are only included as an other to the whiteness of the setting, or as an abject excluded interior.

⁵ This shift from Real to real echoes Spillers (2003) when she writes: “The three dimensions of subjectivity offered by Lacanian psychoanalysis … broach an interpretation that could be articulated with racial economy, but in its muddle concerning the Real, which is not the real … we are left stunned in the breach … What one anticipates, then, is that a fourth register will be called for in establishing ‘reality’ (of the dominated political position) as the psychic burden, acquired post-mirror stage, that reads back onto the Lacanian triangulation a distended organizational calculus. In short, the Lacanians do not give us a great deal of help, as far as I can tell, with the ‘reality’ that breaks in on the person” (p. 381).

⁶ While I am referring to this process as historical–material, its “base materiality” is partially untranslatable into properly historical (i.e., symbolic) terms. For Bataille (1985), “base matter is external and foreign to ideal human aspirations, and it refuses to allow itself to be reduced to the great ontological machines resulting from these aspirations” (my emphasis, p. 51). In its refusal, such materiality approximates a Lacanian understanding of the Real, which exceeds any historicization; but for Bataille, base matter is partially yet insufficiently represented in language, even while it refuses to be reduced as such, which might make it amenable to a Winnicottian or Spillersian notion of reality. For a distinction between Bataille’s base materialism and Lacan’s Real in the context of psychotherapy, see Noys (2005). Noys makes the argument that base matter resists every subject position, even the subject of the Real, but that it can seep into and between subjects like a kind of stench, joining them in an undifferentiated abjection. Noys borrows a case example from the late psychoanalyst Nina Coltart, who is working with a man whose smell inhabits her as an alternately attractive and repulsive force. I agree with Noys that base matter is irreducible to Coltart or her patient as separate subjects (i.e. their experience of the smell), but it seems to me that base matter (i.e. the smell) must somehow contribute to the articulation of their respective subject positions. Without that articulation, base matter’s excessiveness would have no subjects to exceed.

⁷ According to Winnicott (1967), disintegration happens after “x + y + z minutes”: “The feeling of the mother’s existence lasts. If the mother is away more than, then the imago fades, and along with this the baby’s capacity to use the symbol of the union ceases to be a fact. The baby is distressed, but this distress is soon mended because the mother returns in x + y. But in x + y + z the baby has become traumatized. In x + y + z the mother’s return does not mend the baby’s altered state. Trauma implies that the baby has experienced a break in life’s continuity, so that primitive defences now become organized to defend against a repetition of ‘unthinkable anxiety’ or of the acute confusional state that belongs to disintegration of the emerging ego structure” (p. 369)

⁸ This is different from the situation described in the preceding in which the infant is petrified into nonbeing because of the phantomatic setting’s failure.

⁹ To illustrate, we could think of a patient for whom the pillows on the couch suddenly feel coarser when yesterday they were soft and pleasing to the touch; the coarseness is not a transference to the analyst’s person—a displacement to represent the analyst’s sudden carelessness—but is instead directed to the setting as a process of care that exceeds the person of the analyst.

¹⁰ Its psychical splintering into “triplicate,” its “completely dislocated” status (Fanon, p. 112)

¹¹ A number of books take up the relation between clinical and national discourses, but one recent example is Herzog (2018).

¹² Winnicott’s (1974) distinction between “unintegration” and “disintegration” respectively parallels “self-dissolution” and “psychic annihilation.” The former is psychically endurable while the latter is not.

¹³ Soul murder is a term coined by psychoanalyst Leonard Shengold but brought into the Black studies lexicon by Nell Irvin Painter (2002), who uses it to refer to the posttraumatic effects of slavery.

¹⁴ Patterson’s death of Black potential is linked to natal alienation, which for Patterson denotes “the loss of ties of birth in both ascending and descending generations … alienation of the slave from all formal, legally enforceable ties of “blood,” and from any attachment to groups or localities other than those chosen for him by the master” (1985, p. 7). Natal alienation is thus a dispossession of potentiality, specifically the potential to reproduce, not just biologically but psychosocially, such that any and all kinship bonds produced under slavery are necessarily overridden by slave law.

¹⁵ What Morrison perhaps underestimates, specifically in her distinction between pre- and postslave law, is that the maintenance of the national setting is an enactment of violence in which slave law is still operative. Spillers (2003) follows Habermas in distinguishing laws that are no longer applicable—“no longer seeking the consent of the governed” (Sexton, 2010, p. 103)—but that are nevertheless still operative, or “historically determinate of social, political, and economic existence” (Sexton, 2010, p. 103). The violence of the latter may be quieter than the literal murder, neglect, and fetishization of Black bodies under slavery, but it nevertheless endures as an onto-political structure embedded in the national setting. From the carceral state to the public school system, slave law thus persists in the national setting. While the phantasies underpinning slave law have perhaps become more diffuse, their racist and racializing bases persist as phantoms in the national setting. From the carceral state to the public school system, slave law phantomatically incarcerates black bodies no less than prisons themselves.

¹⁶ See Sawyer (2011) for a compelling first-person account of Searles at work.

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Daniel G. Butler

Daniel G. Butler LMFT is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice, a Contributing Editor at Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and a PhD Student in the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Daniel publishes and presents on an array of topics related to psychoanalysis and cultural theory, and he is the 2019 winner of APsaA’s Peter Loewenberg Essay Prize in Psychoanalysis and Culture.