Psychoanalysis or "When did you stop sodomizing your mother?"

Psychoanalysis compels laughter from everyone who doesn't belong to the small (and hopefully shrinking) tribe of untrained, unqualified but proudly "professional" pseudo-psychoanalysts who populate English departments.  I ignore them whenever possible--and shudder when I consider what they would make of my name*--because their every word they say causes my more important veins to veinify.  Arguing against psychoanalytic concepts, I've found, one must inevitably participate in a "psychoanalytic discourse."  Therein lies the problem.  Take, for example, Kristeva's attempt to refute Lacan's claims about the Phallus.  The result?  Tthe theory of the Chora--literally Greek for "womb"--which, in a nutshell, states that since men write from the Phallus, women ought to write from the Chora, which

as rupture and articulations (rhythm), precedes evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality, and temporality.  Our discourse--all discourse--moves with and against the chora in the sense that it simultaneously depends upon and refuses it.  Although the chora can be designated and regulated, it can never be definitively posited: as a result, one can situate the chora and, if necessary, lend it a topology, but one can never give it axiomatic form (26).

Or, in the words Seda Peksen (an English graduate student from Middle East Technical University in Ankara)

The chora is associated with the mother's body.  It is unrepresentable.  Therefore, women's language should come from the chora which is a place we know from the semiotic but have forgotten when we entered the symbolic...Thus the chora is the place in woman's body that gives birth to her language.  Even if women do not attempt at creating a language that comes from the chora, yet somtimes there are eruptions of the semiotic in the symbolic order.  These eruptions are mainly poetic such as silences...

While it may appear I'm forcing some guffaws at a non-native speaker's ESL defects, I'm not entirely sure that she has an ESL problem.  She may, in fact, have a theory induced writing disorder (TIWD) that's put her in the uncomfortable position of having to write poorly on purpose in her non-native tongue.  That she makes any sense whatsoever is a testament to an intellect that atrophies with every sentence she reads and every sentence she writes.  She and her cohorts at Meowpower are obviously bright, motivated scholars, so I hate to be the bearer of dread knowledge.  But I will be.  Because they're responsible for sphacelating whatever little brain fold helped me identify self-parody.  To wit:

I am struggling to write-and live-some other corporeality. If I succeed I will butcher the tendency toward both textual and bodily assimilation. The underbelly cut open, vulnerable, fragmented, and inconsistent, is astutely mine. A body or a text without normative punctuality is obscene, unrequited. It arrives late to the masquerade, attracts fearful attention during the dance, and absconds alone and abashed. Textual mortification signifies a death of possibility. The text and the body entangled so that centuries of repression of the body spawn infinite chapters of standardized discourse. If the ears repeatedly hear the phrase "remember", the purveyor (us) is less likely to produce dreary and banal discourse. Yet the cultural mantra most often heard is "forget", whispered hypnotically while we squirm through institutions. Forget what enraptures you and do what everyone else has done. Walk down a corridor enclosed by walls, enter a lackluster room. The docile body begins here. Construct yourself as you have already been constructed; repeat what you have remembered; develop ways to cope with the cemented punctuation of your body (or text)

Knowledge I knew but embodiment evaded me. McRuer infers that I should be able to encapsulate bodily difference inside text. Cixous did it. Many have dug a deeper trench than I am about to dig. I am writing the body into the ground. The embodied feminized earth, dark sin (without) an association with war. Strategic disembowlment or as McRuer writes, de-composition. Though its not of any body nor is it anybody. It's a specific body. One unencumbered by any other. Pleasantly unadjudicated. The phrase itself-the body-evolved as a linguistic conundrum. Many have said that no universal entity exists called the body. It would bewilder us if some iconoclast referred to every tree as-the tree-yet we constantly legitimate a universal body without ever remembering the fallacy. This anomaly of universalizing many bodies into one body signifies the extent to which culture demands that all bodies measure up to the universalized One. Greek god hails judiciously from past centuries. Most of us flee.

I choose content, voice, and tone and steer discourse and materiality away from what is familiar. That's what scared the anonymous him. Not just its mention, but mostly its significance. Writing vulva n(ot any old vulva but a vulva that resembles no other vulv)a. Putting vulva back into the equation. Googling it (try it), understanding it, staring at the photos in its irregular, incoherent, loose wet state. The response was one of "hmmm" (himmm) "what do you mean, this writing on the body?" I am told not to-that it won't get me published or it won't be appropriate or neat or nice. We need information instead "we are looking for objective information. An (al)maniacal deluge would not be enough information. Can't you write nice?

When Cixous wrote the body 30 years ago she wanted women to put themselves into the text, dig deep, write out-loud, and reconfigure phallocentric language (try google-ing "phallocentric language" and you'll find "step outside phallocentric language" under the heading of "alien"). Strategic disembodiment happens at birth when they slap it out of you. You were a body now you are a gender. The third gender puzzles doctors everytime as if something that happens naturally somehow is not a natural happening. Stagnant. Still. Everything is fine in its little box, tightly concealed. From womb through the canal squeezed out into space (defined by matter) while momma is sewn back together. You were a gender now you are a worker. Not any worker but a worker that resembles no other worker. Punctilious.

Freelance will do that to you. Digging a deep trench, I shove corpus animus down into the earth and feel the muck and sludge of so many failures. Can't you write nice? As the one universalized body must be ideal, so must the text. Even the term "the essay" fondles modernist rhetoric. The literary essay is known both quantitatively and qualitatively as the great warrior Hannibal (who was actually black). I want to write the body because it is dangerous and erotic. Writing matters only when I write the underbelly of the essay. Bodies and texts are socially constructed so that I do not wish to replicate uniformity or able-bodiedness in my writing. This essay is not to be judged against an ideal yet it is meant to be embodied in a person, a voice, hands typing, sexuality, ethnicity. Ideology is unveiling the skin beneath your clothing. Concepts are the fullness of your curve. Embodiment happens when events occur, when reality of the body is the presiding phenomenon at that time. Bodies have been extracted from history and reality except as 1) ideal or 2) disfigured, deformed, or abnormal. No. 1 exploits no. 2. Embodiment is agency when mind/body subject/object public/private coalesce. The scene is institutional hegemony and the act is resisting the compulsion to submit to anything other than what is safely erotic. You are the agent. As Burke writes, the bodily overlaps with both the intimate and the institutional. Foucault's "docile body" stiffens with today's perfunctory education and we have lost contact with our underbellies.

Hang on. The health of this text is at risk. It is at risk of being scorned by neocons and traditionalists-or worse-of not being published. This text as my body might be colonized or forgotten. The cultural practice of composition offers no protection against vulnerability or perfectionism. The body must be strengthened, manicured, and fixed…continuously. The text must be primed for the swim suit competition. Only those without prior health conditions need apply as if there is this other universal thing called "health". Show me the perfect person and I'll show you the perfect text. I am hobbling away now.

Fish in a barrel, my friend, fish in a barrel.

*A Lacanian with whom I briefly shared an office once informed me, and I paraphrase here, that "Lacan thought seriously about names and their effect on development.  I don't see anything wrong with teaching a lesson in a freshman composition class on how Richard Caputo's politics derive from the fact that he is, nominally and probably really too, a 'dick head.'" 

Comments

[Your Advisor]

This is your advisor, "Acephalous." Get back to work, smartass! I want your completed dissertation in my box by Tuesday.

[A. Cephalous]

Fuck you, Michael, fuck you. Seriously, I'm working on it right now, sir, and it'll be done by the end of the week. LATEST. Or by next Monday, but that's it sir, the absolute latest, and I can pull it off sooner if I don't sleep, don't teach, don't eat, the boy's a time-bomb...