The Old and the New: Either{either/or} or And

Let me add a few more insights from my last post. I know I said I won’t talk about gender pronouns anymore, but it is actually very interesting. The …

Random Thoughts #4: Psychoanalytic Thoughts on Gender Identity and Sexual Difference

—- The theoretical society loves the status quo. Usually the way this status quo is maintained is through ideological reiteration, this is to say that all the contexts are replayed into new contexts as if the iteration is moving us forward out of old context, all the while repeating the same context.

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Lately I came across the notion of variance as a way to begin to talk about what is actually occurring, as opposed to talk about what is still being maintained. Coincidentally, I came across a paper, and a Number of authors who are beginning to incorporate the concept of variance into critical ontological estimation.

While these papers generally locate themselves under the heading of “new materialism”, I myself tend to approach from a real object ontology of substance, which, somewhat ironically, some of the new materialists are altering their own conversation toward a view where substance precedes or grounds matter.

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It is very possible, and appears historically consistent, to see that the idea of psychology came out of a kind of misinterpretation, what was 200 years ago more understood as the substantial and direct manner of coming to the truth of things in reality: The idea, amd it’s methodological correlate, idealism (empiricism, phenomenalism and most -isms are at thier root idealist).

Limited in overt ways to peer into the truth of reality, 200+ year old man used the most reliable instrument he had : Reason. Reason was more reliable than any of the instruments they had otherwise. And so the whole system of self reflecting through reason was generated into an institutional ideology and translated into what they were loosely calling at the time science. (See Foucault but also the critiques of his ideas.)

Nowadays, we tend to think that just because a word sounds the same and because we use the same word, the same meaning is transferred through time unaltered. .This is so much the case that even as we might find in historical analysis an alteration of the word, we still implicitly understand our contemporary and current use of the word as the meaning that must have been implied at all the times.

What I mean to implicate is that psychology itself still reflects upon the human being through its original idealism that was accompanied by 19th-century philosophy.

I’m not necessarily saying that it is wrong, but I am saying that if we take current knowledge as indeed current knowledge, which is to say at all times generating a type of newness that is not reflected from history, but indeed can account for historical change as the present is the manifestation of that change at all times, it is not then very difficult to see, in contrast to psychoanalysis, a “psychology” evident now that diverges with a greater fidelity to the truth from the old historical idealism which informed what psychology once was. Such a divergence is reckoned in the new materialism as concerning variance between states, disjunctures in ontological reckoning which cannot be properly reconciled to a further unitive or ‘smooth’ transitioning of a single measure.

Such variance can carry into other areas, such as semantics, so that then the smooth unity which is usually conveyed by the word semantic (for example: everyone makes meaning) and the conventional ontological assertions, itself only references one domain of meaningful register. Similar to how constraints of gravity determine viable living structures only to a certain domain or scale within a parameter of variance, such that insects and microbes no longer adhere to those gravitational constraints, we then must admit to a kind of pluralism as knowledge that does not imply a further unitive domain of a unitive ‘knowledge’; for, that implication of knowing — a single domain of knowledge — itself occurs within a further disjunction, scalable, or meaningful, only within its own domain where meaning is universally human and accessible by everyone through the, again, common discourse or what we call communication.

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The conventional estimation of Psychoanalysis has become more food for Philosophy than it is a real substance upon which Philosophy should find itself. Similarly consistent, the philosophical use of the close reading of Psychoanalysis shows itself as having little to do, anymore, with the actual psyche it supposed to be analyzing. Quite contrary to what it presupposes, such anachronistic misappropriations of Psychoanalysis work in reverse to reify a kind of religious cosmology. Less about what human consciousness is as what it is actually doing as it is evidenced, and more about a certain kind of idea which argues itself and its way of viewing over actuality; in as much as we attempt to retain an ability for a close traditional methodological reading, Psychoanalysis is an anachronistic manner of thinking that holds to manifest basically theological ideals about mentality today.

Tradition and semantic lineage is indeed sufficient to enforce a type of thinking and a way of coming up on the world that is consistent with itself, which is to say, enjoined with a Faith by which the evidence of actuality is distorted, blurred, and moves to conjure an ever-presence of the past in a present in the place of the actuality of the changing present.

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The short comment upon the link is: it holds little water to the actuality of the situation because it is based in an ideal mapping of actuality to theological dimension.x