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Always More Than One

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

PRELUDE BY BRIAN MASSUMI...................................ixACKNOWLEDGMENTS............................................xxv1. Toward a Leaky Sense of Self............................12. Always More Than One....................................163. Waltzing the Limit......................................414. Propositions for the Verge..............................745. Choreography as Mobile Architecture.....................996. The Dance of Attention..................................1337. An Ethics of Language in the Making.....................1498. The Shape of Enthusiasm.................................184NOTES......................................................223BIBLIOGRAPHY...............................................257INDEX......................................................267

Chapter One

In Esther Bick's psychoanalytic theory, the infant's relation to the world is mediated by the skin's capacity to serve as a container for experience: "In its most primitive form, the parts of the personality are felt to have no binding force amongst themselves and must therefore be held together in a way that is experienced by them passively, by the skin functioning as a boundary" (1987, 114). Before there can be introjection or projection, Bick argues that the infant must become "able to hold himself together in his own 'skin' in the absence of the external holding object, without spilling out and falling to bits" (2002, 209). As the infant develops, containment increasingly expresses cohesion of self, as fostered by the continued interaction with the caretaker: "if the caregiver is meaningfully present, then the infant's mind will likely be experienced as integrated—as bound and held together, while if the caregiver is meaningfully absent, then the infant's mind will likely be experienced as unintegrated—as broken and falling to pieces" (Lafrance 2009, 7). Through an emphasis on particular forms of interaction—forms that specifically involve skin-to-skin touch—an infant is given the receptacle necessary for eventual interactive self-sufficiency. With the skin closed by a sense of self-containment, the infant will not later risk the deterritorialization caused by leakage, a deterritorialization that, in true psychoanalytic form, will come with myriad symptoms associated with the necessity of creating "second skins."

What if the skin were not a container? What if the skin were not a limit at which self begins and ends? What if the skin were a porous, topological surfacing of myriad potential strata that field the relation between different milieus, each of them a multiplicity of insides and outsides? Following psychoanalytic theory such as that posited by Bick, skin-as-container reinforces feelings of aliveness and existence, whereas the lack of containment fosters a state of incoherence associated with anxiety and annihilation. Without self-containment, "the infant fears that its self will dissolve and, ultimately, leak into a limitless space" (Lafrance 2009, 9). To posit skin-as-container as the starting point for the notion of interactive self-sufficiency is to begin with the idea that the well-contained human is one who can actively (and protectively) take part in self-self interactions. Self-self interactions depend on a strict boundary between inside and outside. They occur within the realm of clearly bounded selves, including the clear boundedness of objects. Interaction is understood here as the encounter between two self-contained entities (human-to-human or human-to-object).

What if, instead of placing self-self interaction at the center of development, we were to posit relation as key to experience? Relation, understood here in a Jamesian sense, is a making apparent of a third space opened up for experience in the making. This third space (or interval) is active with the tendencies of interaction but is not limited to them. Relation folds experience into it such that what emerges is always more than the sum of its parts.

Finally, what if neither skin nor self were the starting point for the complex interrelational matrix of being and worlding? Being and worlding depend on the activity of reaching-toward. Reaching-toward foregrounds the relationality inherent in experience, a kind of feeling-with the world. This tending-toward is a sensing-with that does not occur strictly at the level of the sensory-motor. It happens across strata, both actual and virtual. A looking becomes a touching, a feeling becomes a hearing. But not on the skin or in the body. Across strata, both concrete and abstract, that constitute an assemblage. This assemblage is a sensing body in movement, a body-world that is always tending, attending to the world.

In equal measure, the world also tends toward the becoming-body. Body-worlding is much more than containment, much more than envelope. It is a complex feeling-assemblage that is active between different co-constitutive milieus. It is individuation before it is self, a fielding of associated milieus that fold in, on, and through one another. For the associated milieu is never "between" constituted selves: the associated milieu is the resonant field of individuation, active always in concert with the becomings it engenders. Becoming-self is one of the ways in which this folding (body-worlding) expresses itself, but never toward a totalization of self—always toward continued individuation. "To think individuation it is necessary to consider being not as substance, matter or form, but as a tensile oversaturated system beyond the level of unity" (Simondon 1995, 23). Self is a modality—a singularity on the plane of individuation—always on the way toward new foldings. These foldings bring into appearance not a fully constituted human, already-contained, but co-constitutive strata of matter, content, form, substance, and expression. The self is not contained. It is a fold of immanent expressibility.

Daniel Stern's account of infancy expresses this in psychological terms. For Stern, relation is always the first principle of worlding: "How we experience ourselves in relation to others provides a basic organizing perspective for all interpersonal events" (1985, 6). Stern's argument makes relation primary, constituting the relational as the very core through which any kind of sense of self is constituted. While Bick's and later Ogden's psychoanalytic theories make interaction a necessity, their matrix is not relational: it always presupposes a constituted, bounded self and other (or self and self ). Stern, on the other hand, treats the relation as the node of creative interpersonal potential, shifting, I would argue, from a self-self model of interaction (where the relation is posited as passive between active subjects) toward a radically empirical notion of immanent relationality where relation is considered as "real" as the terms in the relation.

Stern begins in the preverbal realm, suggesting that "several senses of the self do exist long prior to self-awareness and language" (1985, 6). With the assertion that there are "several senses of self," Stern emphasizes that tendencies outlined in early infancy do not build toward a contained view of self, but rather lead toward the creation of a multiplicity of strata, each of them differently expressive under variable conditions.

For Stern, a core sense of self involves a...