Notes on thirty failed encounters
Critical Response to The Waiting Room by Samo Tomsic
One can often hear that psychoanalysis began with Freud focusing on seemingly small and unimportant ruptures which traverse the everyday life of speaking being. Dreams, failed acts, inhibitions, puns – a multitude of insignificant phenomena which seem to be far from what tradition teaches about the core of human subjectivity. And indeed, with its epistemological break psychoanalysis performed a radical and deep rupture with tradition, and ended up subverting the space in which one has to search for human subjectivity. The subject and the processes of thinking are not to be found in the depth of human soul, or in the chemistry of the brain, as contemporary cognitive scientism seems to impose. On the contrary, the emergences of the subject take place on the surface of language, they manifest themselves on the thin border which separates the inside from the outside, the intimate from the external, or the extimate, individual body from its surrounding. Unconscious as a phenomenon of language, or as something that is conditioned by language, is on the surface of the body, neither inside nor outside. And the same can be stated for the language itself. Its place is the surface of the speaking body. It is there that its manifestations emerge as enigmatic signs that there is an enunciation taking place, in the speaking body, which is impossible to dominate by the centralizing discourse of consciousness. Subjectivity is therefore internally split, neither inside nor outside. Thinking and being do not coincide in perfect relation, opposed to what traditional philosophy was claiming throughout the centuries and millennia. “I think where I am not, and I am where I do not think”: in my dreams, in fragmented remainders of my conscious thoughts, in slips of tongue, in all the refined and seemingly insignificant failures which disrupt the calm surface of my everyday life.
How to capture these discontinuities? And most of all, why still dedicate them such systematic research in times when psychoanalysis is publicly declared as something forgotten, outdated and even compared to a sort of superstition? These are the times when human thinking no longer allows to be duped by phenomena as the unconscious. And returning to Freud would not only be declared as something outdated, but it would even push those who take the attempt to the very margins of scientificity. Contemporary civilization is no longer marked by phenomena as castration complex, neurosis, Oedipus complex etc. And it no longer shares the same discomfort as the one Freud was analyzing almost one century ago. It is a civilization drowning in enjoyment, informations and noise. But beneath them a new discomfort is taking shape, and it is precisely here that psychoanalysis finds material for its proper re-invention.
It is precisely at this point that psychoanalysis forms its alliance with art. What the two have in common is that they are both forms of practice and that their practice consists – among other – in diagnosing the present. They make the visible visible. That is, they make visible the non-obvious but essential determinations and characteristics of the present. In other words, they both detect points of disfunctioning in the given frames of reality. And they both elevate and sharpen problems in the “banality” and “stupidity” of what is given.
How should one capture this space in which contemporary subjectivity is forced to operate and which constitutes one of contemporary conditions of possibility of subjectivity and thinking? An appropriate image of this space would undoubtedly be the waiting room. A self-enclosed space, simultaneously marked by anxiety and boredom. Men and women pass through it, and they seem to be waiting for something, but it is not clear what. Not only that the spectator of this unusual performance does not possess the knowledge, but also they agents of the situation themselves do not not profit of this privileged position. No knowledge exists, only sequences of waiting, without purpose or meaning which would come to meet them through the opposite door, or through the loudspeaker hanging on the wall.
In The Waiting Room encounters take place. Between a man and a woman. Between a woman and a child. Between random people. As a place of these numerous encounters, the waiting room is the space for contingency to emerge. But it is also a space of its impotence. In this situation contingency does not seem to have the sublime power to change anything. It takes place, it announces a rupture, but nothing follows. Sequences of encounters are short and they are always cut off at the point when something should follow. When either an encounter should take place or when the presented encounter should have produced an effect, would have been successful: when anxiety of the person waiting should meet its cause which announces itself in the form of the steps behind the closed door. He trembles, his breathing speeds up, he focuses on the door which will finally open up this hermetic situation and turn anxiety into fear. But the expected encounter never takes place. Or rather, it takes place in form of its own abolition, its own failure.
Not only anxiety, but also love operates the same failure. Love is par excellence the product of contingent encounter. All its procedure consists in translating contingency of the encounter into necessity and lasting. Declaration of love is always performative and violent gesture. Performative in the fact that it has the power to alter reality, to introduce new in the everyday, something that did not exist before. And it is violent because of this very performative power with which it changes the existing order of what I experience every day as my world and my reality. It is violent for both sides concerned, for it breaks the invisible wall that separates two subjects in the same waiting room. But this does not happen. The declaration misses its address and returns back to the void from which it emerged. It does not create anything new, but merely confirms the non-relation between a man and a woman.
Saying that the waiting room is the space of contemporary subjectivity after all implies that the subject is a solitary. In his or hers facing with anxiety, contingency, or even love, the subject stands alone. And the entire question is whether contingency, the subjective encounter with the real, will be intense enough to disrupt this solitary dream.
It is precisely why psychoanalysis is the practice of externalized solitude. In analytic session solitude is not abandoned – it is embodied in the figure of the analyst. It returns to the subjects from the outside. And it is also why in analytic sessions alienation and decentralization of the subject takes place. And why it is crucial for psychoanalysis to remain temporally unpredictable. One can never tell when the analyst will intervene and when the solitary monologue of the analysand will be interrupted and encounter the real of the subject's individual history. Short session with its non-predictability of the outcome reflects the analytic bet that the subject can be awakened from his or her's “eternal” dream. And that this particular awakening can only take place by forcing the limits of the given conditions in which human experience is possible.
When the failure takes place, the subject learns its lesson. The coin hits the bottom. Impotence of the encounter is elevated to its impossibility, and thinking gets orientated by the real. Someone said, “fail again, fail better”. |
