Psychodynamism of Individuation and New MaterialismPossible EncountersÉmilie Filion-Donato

New Materialism

Though many scholars have written on this topic,2020Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012); Birgit Van Puymbroeck and N. Katherine Hayles, ‘“Enwebbed Complexities”: The Posthumanities, Digital Media and New Feminist Materialism’, DiGeSt: Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies, 2.1–2 (2015), pp. 21–29; Bennett, Vibrant Matter; Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, ‘Introducing the New Materialisms’, in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 1–43; Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Oxford : Blackwell, 2002); Elizabeth A. Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Elizabeth A. Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Mariam Fraser, Sarah Kember, and Celia Lury, ‘Inventive Life: Approaches to the New Vitalism’, Theory, Culture & Society, 22.1 (2005), pp. 1–14. I will focus here on Karen Barad’s account of New Materialism. Barad’s method, which she calls the Diffractive Method, is also a metaphor that was inspired by Haraway and quantum physics. It is used as a critical response to representationalist metaphors of reflection. Haraway writes about such metaphors, saying that ‘both are optical phenomena, but whereas reflection evokes themes of mirroring and sameness, diffraction is marked by patterns of difference’.2121Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 71. She adds that ‘a diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of differences appear’.2222Donna Haraway, ‘The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others’, in Cultural Studies, ed. by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 295–337 (p. 300), emphasis removed. This method, therefore, allegedly helps us to better attend to the relational nature of difference.

Using diffraction as a metaphor can help change the way that we perceive and interpret objects in two important ways. First, it helps shift the focus away from the intrinsic characteristics of ‘objects’. That is, we can see that what is expressed and hence measured, i.e. that which emerges as the ‘characteristics of the waves’, actually emerges from the meetings of a ‘prior’ set of waves. Because any measured ‘crest’ does not actually exist before its meeting with the other crest, and/or the meeting with the diffracting apparatus — e.g. an island or a rock — Barad calls this meeting an intra-action in contrast to an inter-action. The nuance is important because inter-action presupposes the existence of some fully formed ‘actants’ present ‘before the meeting’, whereas intra-action stresses the co-constitution of those ‘actants’. This move from inter-action to intra-action therefore requires one to shift ‘the primary epistemological unit’ from ‘things’ to phenomena, i.e. from an interaction between pre-existing relata to boundary forming intra-action in phenomena. Shifting our analysis from ‘things’ to ‘phenomena’ also underlines the inseparability of ‘intra-acting’ ‘components’. 2323Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28.3 (2003), pp. 801–31 (p. 815).

Second, diffraction is a helpful metaphor because it is, especially in the case of light, hard to observe without some special apparatus. Indeed, without the use of a certain set of tools, it may have always been assumed that light only behaved in a particle-like way, i.e. as matter and not as waves. Two things happen with this metaphor. First, it emphasizes humans’ (in)capacity to detect, observe, or fully grasp something without a special set of tools and techniques. Second, it emphasizes the active dynamic role humans take, with or without apparatuses, in ‘(re)configurings of the world’.2424Ibid., pp. 816, 818, 819, 821, 822, and 828. Therefore, the metaphor is not only helpful to transition from an ontology of ‘objects’ towards one of ‘phenomena’, but it is also useful to understand how specific practices shape ‘where the effects of differences appear’.2525Haraway, ‘The Promises of Monsters’, p. 300. The method/metaphor thus helps us understand how our very measuring practices are neither innocent nor inconsequential.

However, this insight confronts us — perhaps ironically — with some problems reminiscent of those faced by an ‘anti-realist’ or even radical relativist perspective. Indeed, if everything we do, down to how we perceive, has an impact on the things we measure or want to talk about, how can we ever be sure we are getting the ‘right’ measurements? Further, without an agreed upon measurement, i.e. a shared account of the world, how can we understand one another, let alone, and more importantly, act collectively? Another problem, which is not an anti-realist one per se but is still relevant to the discussion at hand, is how to make sense of responsibility given this fragmented, or even erased, subject. I suggest that part of the answer to this can be found in Evelyn Fox Keller’s use of the psychodynamism of individuation.

Psychodynamism of Individuation

Keller points out that, as is illustrated by the biblical use of ‘knowing’, and contrary to Bacon’s infamous proposition that ‘knowledge is power’, knowledge needs not only be about power but can instead also have to do with connection. Keller argues that this second possibility has been largely ignored.2626Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 115–16. Furthermore, she argues that knowledge’s relationship to power has been overblown to such an extent that domination metaphors permeate scientific writing and thinking.2727Ibid., p. 123. She stresses that the relationship to nature is all too often expressed in terms of scientists ‘attacking’ or ‘solving’ nature, or of ‘conquering’ her/it — implying that something about nature will, through the attack, conquest, or discovery of a solution, disappear and make way for the scientist’s vision and will.

In Keller’s opinion, this conception of knowledge resembles a conception of objectivity in which the knowing subject, in order to be objective, has to be detached from her object of study. This (mis)conceptualization of objectivity is due, she argues, to a specific (mis)conception of autonomy wherein there is a ‘tacit implication […] that autonomy can be bought only at the price of unrelatedness’.2828Ibid., p. 72. The shared ideal of un-relatedness in both autonomy and objectivity has persuaded her to explore the interaction between emotional and cognitive experiences and development. Not only does this shared ideal suggest that the two are related, but Keller’s hypothesis is that her study could help uncover the idea that they are, in fact, co-constitutive. In order to explore this relation between objectivity and autonomy, Keller turns to the object-relation theory of German psychoanalyst Ernst Schachtel and his take on the ‘psychodynamism of individuation’.

In traditional Freudian psychoanalysis, the process of individuation, i.e. ego formation, is thought of as the more or less tragic consequence of a self-awareness, or the delineation between inner and outer stimuli, that develops as a result of unfulfilled needs. Freud writes:

An infant at the breast does not as yet distinguish his ego from the external world as the source of the sensations flowing in upon him. He gradually learns to do so, in response to various promptings. He must be very strongly impressed by the fact that some sources of excitation, which he will later recognize as his own bodily organs, can provide him with sensations at any moment, whereas other sources evade him from time to time — among them what he desires most of all, his mother’s breast — and only reappear as a result of his screaming for help.2929Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. by James Strachey, trans. by Angela Richards, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953–74), xxi (1961), pp. 57–145 (p. 67).

That is, by realizing that her mother cannot and is not fulling her needs, the child understands that she is not, in fact — and this is contrary to what she may have initially thought/felt — one with her mother or the world. This is a traumatic experience for the child who then realizes that she must turn outward to satisfy unmet needs, and this towards an external world over which she has little control. This initiation into self-consciousness is condemned, for Freud, to a separation from the mother/world because it destroys the symbiotic illusion. This makes the child’s relationship to the world conflictual, but also de facto oriented towards instrumentalization. Though Freud acknowledges that this feeling of connectedness with the world (or symbiosis) may subside in some adults, something he calls in this context the oceanic feeling, he claims not to recognize it in himself and proceeds to link it to some primitive pre-individuated ego.3030Ibid., pp. 64–65. Because of this, the oceanic feeling speaks to, for him, some (regressive) longing to (re)unite with the world/mother.

Schachtel has a different understanding of that dynamic of individuation. For the latter, fulfilling unmet needs is one of two types of interest the child can have for the world. According to Schachtel, the child is first and foremost turned towards the world by a curiosity and pleasure that exceeds biological necessities, i.e. there is an intrinsic and independent joy brought about by merely discovering the world. This joy is explained, in Schachtel’s view, by the satisfaction the child experiences when she is connected to others and the world. Further, since Schachtel doesn’t think of the dynamic of individuation as traumatic, the kind of uniting effort such as that sought out through Freud’s ‘oceanic’ feeling can be positive and desirable.3131Ernst Schachtel, Metamorphosis: On the Conflict of Human Development and the Psychology of Creativity (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 182. This is the case so long as the transition from the symbiotic moment to the moment of individuation is dynamic. For this dynamism to be possible at all the child must have a secure sense of self, which Schachtel describes as one that can tolerate both difference and continuity between self and world. This in turn enables an attention for the world and its objects that is not only vested with or contingent upon one’s needs and desires.3232Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, p. 119. Schachtel calls this attention allocentric perception. He calls the instrumentalizing perception which opposes allocentric perception ‘autocentric perception’.

Keller uses Schachtel’s developments on perception to discuss what I alluded to earlier: a particular conception of autonomy and its relationship with objectivity. Keller terms the traditional conception of autonomy, i.e. one in which one sees oneself as separated from and impermeable to the world, static autonomy. Keller adds, however, that the allocentric perception that I just mentioned allows for another conception of autonomy, which she calls dynamic autonomy. This autonomy requires that one trust her capacities and abandon the delusion that she is fully self-sufficient, can act independently of the world and others, or can avoid being acted upon. This will allow ‘for that vital element of ambiguity at the interface between subject and object’.3333Ibid., p. 84, my emphasis.

The notions of objectivity corresponding to dynamic and static autonomy are dynamic and static objectivity. ‘Dynamic objectivity aims at a form of knowledge that grants to the world around us its independent integrity but does so in a way that remains cognizant of, indeed relies on, our connectivity with that world’.3434Ibid., p. 117. Keller compares this sort of objectivity to empathy. Like empathy, then, dynamic objectivity is an objectivity that mobilizes shared experiences and emotions between the subject and object of knowledge.3535Ibid., p. 116. In static objectivity, on the contrary, the understanding of the other can only be attained by separating and fracturing the subject from her object of knowledge, which involves dissociating the object from the subject so that the latter can instrumentalize it. This leads to a type of knowledge where difference is thought of in terms of frontiers and sharp edges. In this paradigm of objectivity, perception becomes an ‘act of aggressive violence in which the perceiver, like Procrustes with his hapless victims, cuts off those aspects of the object which he cannot use for his purposes’.3636Schachtel, Metamorphosis, p. 171, quoted by Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, p. 120.

In sum, Keller’s vision of the subject is not, strictly speaking, a ‘decentring’ of the subject in the sense that it makes the subject disappear. In fact, as we have just seen, Keller spends a significant amount of energy describing how a subject is formed, or individuated, and how that impacts her relationship to the world and therefore also to knowledge. My point is, however, that this dynamism of individuation — which at one point accepts a certain degree of separation and at another unites subject and object — forces us to think of the frontiers between subject and object as at least momentarily absent. This ‘decentring of the subject’ is the key, in my opinion, to answering the criticisms addressed to New Materialism which I have mentioned above.[Keller, Evelyn Fox]

Longino’s Critique of the Psychodynamism of Individuation

Before addressing how the psychodynamism of individuation can help to answer the criticism addressed to New Materialism, let us turn to Longino’s own criticism of the psychodynamism of individuation. Longino’s characterization of the psychodynamism of individuation focuses on the aspect of the theory that attempts to show that ‘cognitive efforts have an ineluctably affective dimension’.3737Longino, ‘Subjects, Power and Knowledge’, p. 108. From that reading, therefore, she places Keller’s psychodynamism of individuation alongside standpoint theory3838As a reminder, ‘standpoint theory’ argues that the subject of knowledge’s position (be it their gender, ‘race’, socio-economic background, sexual orientation, mental and physical ability, etc.) has an influence on the type and quality of knowledge produced. for both theories, in her opinion, aim to highlight the subjective conditionality of descriptive claims by emphasizing their ‘social and historical location’. Her criticism of both theories is, therefore, that they ‘fail to explain how we are to decide or to justify decisions between what seem to be conflicting claims’.3939Longino, ‘Subjects, Power and Knowledge’, p. 109. In other words, if subject X describes ‘Phenomenon A’ as ‘a’ and subject Y describes ‘Phenomenon A’ as ‘b’, how are we to determine who is right?

Though Longino writes that both theories fail at answering this question, she also proposes that standpoint theory attempts to solve it by ascribing more epistemic authority to one subject based on their social and historical location. It is less clear how she thinks the psychodynamism of individuation ascribes epistemic authority, but she nevertheless criticizes it on the same grounds. For Longino, the ‘analytical task is not to determine which is epistemically most adequate. Rather, the task is to understand how these complexly conditioned subjectivities are expressed in action and belief.’4040Ibid.

This criticism resembles what we have seen earlier about the ‘threat of anti-realism’ directed at New Materialism. That is to say, that standpoint theory, the psychodynamism of individuation, and New Materialism all, to use Longino’s wording again, ‘fail to explain how we are to decide or to justify decisions between what seem to be conflicting claims’. It is indeed conceivable that the accounts of a phenomenon given by New Materialism would lead to different descriptive claims about that phenomenon. These accounts may change according to the apparatus involved. So how can Keller’s psychodynamism of individuation help at all with the ‘anti-realist’ problems New Materialism seems to reiterate?

Relational Ontology

My hope is to have shown above that the psychodynamism of individuation, contrary to what Longino suggests, is not about lending epistemic superiority to one subject, but instead about redefining the epistemic subject altogether by redefining what could be called his or her epistemic virtues — a topic I will discuss in a moment — and by extending who/what counts as subject. This expansion of the subject is something this theory shares with New Materialism and what I have called here relational ontology. As for the redefinition of the subject’s epistemic virtues, New Materialism already hints at the connection between ontology, epistemology, and ethics, but does not really expand upon the topic of epistemic virtues.

I have already claimed that New Materialism and the psychodynamism of individuation share a common shift in ontological terms. Indeed, what New Materialism and, I argue, Keller, ask us to do is to try to think of object and subject in terms of the relationship they have with one another, and how these relationships are shaped by and shape these entities, critters, or relata. In Keller, this shift in ontology is captured by her discussion of the ‘vital element of ambiguity’4141Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, p. 84. and of the continuity between the subject and object, which questions the impermeability of both and highlights their inter/intra-dependence. Whereas in Haraway and Barad, the subject is ‘heterogenous’, ‘nonisomorphic’, and ‘partial’,4242Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges’, p. 586. these descriptors all point to an ontology in which subject-object formation is not only co-constitutive, but in which the relation and cosmological organization bears more weight than its ‘individual’ components. Therefore, the subject is redefined as an emerging pattern of difference, which ‘highlight[s], exhibit[s], and make[s] evident the entangled structure of the changing and contingent ontology of the world, including the ontology of knowing’.4343Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p. 73.

Furthermore, both, beyond offering a different ontology, propose in and by this ontology, an ethical framework. The suggestion that the self cannot be defined or thought of outside of its relationships has two major ethical consequences. First, it allows for a much more dynamic (and emancipating?) self-understanding. That is, one that is not confined to only one or to a cumulative list of identity. This ‘departure from identity’ is not, however, reducible to a non-identity, or a point of view from nowhere, i.e. a detached conception of objectivity which aims to paradoxically embody the universal. The positionality of every element in the pattern of diffraction is and has to be taken into account! But that account, or census of positions, does not determine future outcomes, nor does it sanction the attribution of blame. The causal chain of the elements taken into account is neither linear nor monocausal, and it is therefore neither reproducible nor predictable. Thus, identity is both constrained by some parameters and, at the same time, understood as contingent: it is processual.

Processualism and Allocentric Perception

I would now like to discuss processuality and return to the question of how a reading of the psychodynamism of individuation may answer some criticism addressed to New Materialism. Processuality is precisely what helps reveal how the ‘complexly conditioned subjectivities’ Longino worries about ‘are expressed in action and belief’. Keller’s understanding of processuality involves ‘the growing interest among physicists in a process description of reality’, whereby ‘object reality acquires a dynamic character, akin to the more fluid concept of autonomy emerging from psychoanalysis’.4444Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, p. 94. Indeed, where the psychodynamism of individuation can benefit New Materialism, I argue, is precisely through these processual, dynamic descriptions of the world that a ‘more fluid concept of autonomy’ allows for.

Therefore, and as a first response to this anxiety about the spectre of anti-realism, the psychodynamism of individuation helps us to understand how the agential cuts into phenomena are made at the human level. That is to say, according to which interests, motivations, and to what end those cuts are made. It emphasizes that knowledge claims are not innocent and devoid of emotional or libidinous investments (in the terms of New Materialism, these emotional-libidinous investments may be considered part of the apparatus). It does not contend, however, that these emotional investments are any ground to reject one claim in favour of another (allegedly less invested) or to hierarchize them into better or lesser claims. Instead, the psychodynamism of individuation calls for an investigation into these emotional-libidinous investments — as real material objects — so that we can share fuller accounts of phenomena.

Second, and while recognizing that this objective may not be achievable (immediately or forever), the psychodynamism of individuation provides us with an insight into the problem of a shared account of the world. Indeed, with allocentric perception and dynamic objectivity, a sketch of what Mirenda Fricker has called epistemic virtues emerges.4545Miranda Fricker, ‘The Virtue of Testimonial Justice’, in Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 86–108. Though Fricker’s theory of epistemic virtues is of inestimable help in the realm of judiciary testimonies as a transitional or intermediate tool in this specific context, my point of departure or premise is that, ultimately, for most knowledge projects, the sort of unbiased judgement she is after is impossible, and may not even be desirable. Therefore, in this quest for epistemic virtues, the orientation would be towards those that result in the questioning of one’s own authority and the room that is opened up as a consequence for different and possibly conflicting accounts. These virtues, in common language, might be called generosity, benevolence, patience, and curiosity — though I am hesitant to propose anything that is definitive here, and by giving these examples I only wish to make my meaning as clear as possible. What I can say about these virtues at this point, however, is that in practice they would be of the sort that maximize the possibility for a common ground — even when the language we use seems to lead to deadlocks and contradictions regarding any phenomenon’s description.

The examples I have given may seem to put the onus of the epistemological enterprise on the ‘listener’ rather than the ‘speaker’ of some information. I want to suggest, however, that the onus is in fact shared between the parties. This is because one finds oneself in either position at different times and also because these virtues, if we come back to the examples of generosity, benevolence, patience, and curiosity, do not make a demand upon the ‘listener’ alone. Indeed, in the way she conveys information a speaker can prove to be more or less generous, benevolent, patient, and curious towards her interlocutor. Keller alludes to this when she points to the empathy that dynamic objectivity requires and which consists in finding a common language in shared experiences and emotions.4646Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, p. 116. The psychodynamism of individuation therefore suggests that if non-instrumentalized perception is possible, there is finally no such thing as a fully disinvested perception. That is, this non-instrumentalized perception will have to find a common language in shared experiences and emotions which implies an emotional investment. If we accept that perception is always-already oriented and invested, what we need for finding a common ground is a way of accessing multiple grids of analysis. I contend that this is precisely what allocentric perception and dynamic objectivity offer.

Third, this encounter between New Materialism and the psychodynamism of individuation has the advantage of addressing the threat of idealism (understood as anti-realism) by encouraging doubt about the ego’s separation from the world and also encouraging processual reflexivity, which forces us to face the ways in which the ego affects objects and how objects, in turn, affect the subject. Indeed, when the subject enters this ambiguous space in which the object affects her completely, there is as little doubt about the object’s presence as there is about her own. Keller’s psychodynamism of individuation therefore gives us the means to face and negotiate the ambiguity between the inside and the outside without negating our sense of self.

Fourth, and regarding the question of accountability in the face of a dislocated subject, I contend that agenthood, and hence accountability, in this ontological paradigm is not a matter of tracing back intention and therefore responsibility to the original misbehaviour in order to ‘punish the mistake’ of a ‘unified’, ‘coherent’, ‘free-acting’ subject. Rather, this accountability is one which encourages doubt about one’s own presence as a coherent unit,4747Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges’, pp. 585–86. and, by extension, encourages doubt about one’s own (epistemological and ethical) omnipotence. This accountability is one which demands that the subject locate herself in the maelstrom of forces pushing her around and thus that she identify where her power lies. Further, this accountability is one that demands ‘reponsibility for difference’, for where one places the fateful line between self and everything else.4848Ibid., p. 585. This doubt results in what Haraway calls the ‘possibility of webs of connections’, which are ‘called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology’.4949Ibid., p. 584. This alliance between New Materialism and the psychodynamism of individuation hence shifts the focus from a cartography of matter that demands exhaustive models aimed at predicting future outcomes or at attributing blame to one that dynamically demands responses (personal and collective) to depleting circumstances. In sum, how we arrive where we are does matter (to get out of immobilizing blame and shame), but it matters less than how we can fix/change the depleting circumstances and move forward collectively, whether that be through reparations, mediation, or separation.