Subjectivit*ies*

In other news, Guattari in The Machinic Unconscious is (and has for a longtime (longtemps, ha!) been) talking about Proust, and it's great. It is simultaneously clarifying what Guattari has been talking about with much-needed examples, and making me want to re-read Proust.

I finished Flow, and needed a new non-fiction book, and ended up downloading one of Meg-John Barker's free books. I came across their work on gender, and have intended for a while to read this, but on a whim went with the first of their free books listed instead. It's on plurality/plural selves, and I am finding it fascinating. The idea - as I understand it, so for, anyway - is that in order to develop the sense of a singular unified subjectivity we cut away aspects of the self that we deem bad, inappropriate,or even just too different to be convincingly incorporated. [AKA we cannot make those notes fit into the piece. I spent a week stuck on the fact that I couldn't find this Nietzsche reference, it's the one about someone who improvises/plays their life so well that they are able to make even the "wrong" notes sound as if they fit. When I finally find the quote I'll see how well my half-remembered paraphrasing captured it]

The plural approach (again, as I understand it so far, I have only read a bit on this, caveat work in progress etc) consists in identifying (nb - I like "identifying" as a word, it feels pleasingly as if it can cover both finding and creating something as...) these aspects as distinct personalities or selves. Rather than the self having to operate as a single atomistic entity, a smooth and solid billiard ball, it is more akin to an organisation. By developing the different aspects as characters, giving them names, and exploring how they relate to each other, it becomes easier to find ways for them to live comfortably and productively together. It makes it easier to resist rigid hierarchies - I can feel more sympathy and investment in a part of myself that has its own name and personality, and am more willing to fight for its interests / my interests as that aspect, than I am to cheer on the id against the superego.

The coexistence of plural selves within us is something that has (unsurprisingly) comes up a lot reading Guattari - I didn't call the non-hierarchical organisation an assemblage just now, but, y'know.. that is what I meant. What it made me think of most was Daniel Stern on the pre-verbal subjective formations of very young children (in The Interpersonal World of the Infant, the first of the many Chaosmosis references). The Freudian idea is that as we develop between the ages of 0-2, we go through several stages which subsume or replace each other (with the possibility of getting problematically stuck in one along the way). Stern suggests that the earlier stages never go away - as we develop, we add additional selves or senses of self, each of which brings new ways of relating (to others, to ourself, to the world), through expression, movement, language etc, and which continue to exist in parallel throughout our lives.

(side note: looking through my notes on Stern, repetition and a sense of timing are key in the development of different stages. Stern talks about how we need to recognise the same "rhythm" of behaviours across different modalities in order to experience a perceptually unified world (p.152))

In fact, taking it out of a side note - if we come back to the wrong-notes-being-incorporated-into-the-piece idea, the idea of embracing plural selves as different rhythms makes a lot of sense. An aspect or note that cannot be incorporated into or seems at odds with a singular rhythmic self develops new possibilities if we consider the self as polyrhythmic, with other selves within it.

But perhaps what I initially found most striking about Barker's writings on plurality was how my first reaction to the idea was that it felt strikingly alien to my own experience of how I consider my"self", and then almost immediately (nanoseconds) after this potentially extremely productive as a way to consider myself. Hence my insistence on the creation-though-meaning aspect of the word "identify", and the discovery of aspects of the self as an act of creation / autopoesis. They/we must create ourselves.

Barker also raises the idea of the different selves as aspects / deities to draw upon as a pantheon. To create the self as a pantheon of gods feels somehow much more healthy - and exciting - than the project of becoming god (singular).