Bodies, Affects, Politics. Steve Pile
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space. This topological ordering of space ensures that people can be socially excluded even while they are spatially proximate (on this, see Allen 2003; and especially 2016). Thus, even while racialised subjects are inside the city and the museum, they are kept socially distant, either by the racial segregation of urban space or through the production of white museum spaces (see also Bressey 2009, 2014). For me, taken together, what Dikeç and Tolia‐Kelly reveal is that two orders of the sensible can coexist, even as they are held apart. Indeed, it is their coexistence that ensures that the distribution of the sensible has to be policed, sometimes brutally (see Dikeç 2018) and, arguably, sometimes with housing policy and/or with malicious neglect, as the Grenfell and Hillsborough tragedies show.
More than this, regimes of the sensible are not just organised vertically, from above, but also horizontally, between and amongst people. Significantly, what this brings into view is that the clash of regimes is not just conducted at the border of the different means of organising and policing of who can and cannot speak, be seen or not, can action or not, but is also brought about by the existing together of different ontologies, epistemologies and experiences of speech, vision, action and so on. To show that this becomes operative through bodies, affects and politics is the work of this book.
From this perspective, it is in these clashes within and between regimes of bodies that political subjects emerge. Thus, we cannot see political subjectivities as always already forged and fixed. Rather, regimes of the body, themselves, reveal that bodies remain stubbornly indeterminate, even while they furiously seek to fix and stabilise them into their proper place (as Rancière shows). The enemy of politics, in this view, would be to convert the indeterminacy of the subject into a politics of identity, where all things are already known and fixed in place. Instead, I will seek an account of politics that is grounded in both the overdetermination and the indeterminacy of affects, bodies and identities. By overdetermination, I mean the ways that bodies and identities can be determined many times over by structures of meaning and power – which I will refer to, in aggregate, as bodily regimes. Politics can, and does, emerge in opposition to these overdeterminations. However, in this book, I wish to emphasise the ways that politics emergences both through the tensions between various forms of determination and also through indeterminacy.
Understanding Bodily Regimes: Between Rancière and Freud, between Overdetermination and Indeterminacy
As we have seen, the approach I take to thinking about the overdetermination and indeterminacy of bodies, affects and identities draws on Rancière. Rancière’s notion of the distribution of the sensible invites an analysis of bodies, affects and politics that focuses on the unconscious ways (which he calls an aesthetic regime) that the bodily senses are structured, such that only certain people are noticed, listened to and understood. I have previously suggested that aesthetic regimes (the unconscious structuring of the sensible) are multiple, inconsistent, mutable and (can) occupy the same space.
The idea that the processes of unconscious structuring are many has three implications that are significant for my approach. First, an account of the unconscious, and unconscious processes, cannot be restricted to singular functions and outcomes, such as repression and the Oedipus Complex (see Chapters 4 and 5). Second, unconscious structurings (plural) of the sensible might be in tension or conflict with one another (see Chapters 2 and 3), albeit in ways that are not easily perceived or that might be opaque or hidden or even repressed. Third, conflicts and tensions within and between unconscious structurings requires a dynamic understanding of unconscious processes, capable of illuminating and understanding the mutability of distributions of the sensible – and, for my purposes, of bodily regimes (as in Chapters 6 and 7). My approach builds on Freud’s account of the unconscious, yet this requires some recasting. Thus, Rancière’s discussion of Freud is instructive and illuminating – as it, helpfully for me, sets up the analytic architecture of this book.
Rancière’s intention, in writing The Aesthetic Unconscious (2001), is to understand Freud’s use of the Oedipus myth. This discussion does several interesting things for me: first, in answering the question of why Freud chooses the version of the myth that he does, Rancière provides both a demonstration of the effects, and affects, of specific aesthetic regimes and also (I argue) an example of the coexistence of aesthetic regimes; second, this then enables a re‐evaluation of the place of the myth in Freudian thought, which allows me to de‐privilege Oedipus in my version of Freud; and, thus, third, this opens up new avenues of thought for thinking with Freud about bodies, the unconscious and the distribution of the sensible.
In The Aesthetic Unconscious, Rancière boldly asserts that Freud’s understanding of the unconscious is predicated upon a particular aesthetic regime (p. 7). This aesthetic regime, for Rancière, creates a very particular set of dichotomies between thought and non‐thought, between knowing and not‐knowing, between seeing and blindness, between listening and hearing, between logic and sense. To substantiate his argument, Rancière turns to Freud’s discussion of the Oedipus myth, which provides Freud with a cornerstone for understanding the sexual anxieties of childhood, especially concerning castration (see Pile 1996, ch. 4). Rancière is especially interested in which version of the Oedipus myth Freud selects. I am persuaded by Rancière’s argument that this selection is significant and telling.
Freud’s account of the Oedipus myth is first spelt out in detail in the Interpretation of Dreams, under the section dealing with dreams about the death of loved ones (1900, pp. 275–278). He briefly outlines the myth, which involves both the unwitting fulfilment of a prophecy and also the vain efforts of people to avoid threatened disaster. Briefly, in Freud’s telling of the myth, King Laius of Thebes gives his infant child to a servant to get rid of because of a prophecy that Laius will be killed by his own son. Unable to kill the child, the servant gives the baby to a shepherd, Polybus. The child, Oedipus, grows up ignorant of his origins. Oedipus, later, kills Laius at a crossroad, not knowing that he has killed his father. Then, he marries Queen Jocasta, Laius’ widow and also his mother, and becomes king of Thebes. Oedipus’ life begins to unravel when a plague hits Thebes. Oedipus sends his brother‐in‐law, Creon, to the oracle at Delphi to discover the reason for the plague. Creon tells Oedipus that the problem is that the murderer of Laius has never been caught. Oedipus vows to find the murderer. He sends for the blind prophet, Tiresias. Tiresias is blunt: ‘You yourself are the criminal you seek’, he tells Oedipus. Oedipus simply cannot see how this can be true. In the ensuing argument, Oedipus mocks Tiresias’ blindness, and Tiresias retorts that it is Oedipus who is blind. As Tiresias leaves, he mutters that the murderer is son and husband to his own mother, brother and father to his own children, and a native of Thebes. Long story short, through a series of misdirections and revelations, eventually Oedipus comes to know that he is the murderer that he is seeking – and once he comes to a full realisation of his situation, he (famously) tears out his own eyes.
Why this version of the myth, Rancière asks? Other versions were available to Freud: for example, in 1659, Corneille wrote his own version; and, in 1717, Voltaire completed a version while in prison for 11 months (The Aesthetic Unconscious, ch. 2). For both Corneille and Voltaire, Rancière asserts, the original myth was not only too incredible, but also too gory for the sensibilities of their audiences. It was just implausible that Oedipus would not know that he was the murderer after being told so, bluntly and unambiguously, by Tiresias. More than this, the tearing out of his own eyes was plainly too literal and too explicit. Corneille and Voltaire sought to create more mystery around the identity of the murderer by introducing new, additional suspects. And they made sure that Oedipus’ denouement occurred off‐stage, unseen by the audience. Freud selected neither of these versions of the myth, nor indeed other versions; such as Dryden and Lee’s Oedipus: A Tragedy (1679), which centres on the love affair between Oedipus and Jocasta and portrays Oedipus as noble and heroic. Against expectation,