#christopher-bollas — Public Fediverse posts

Why do we choose the cultural objects that we choose?

Anyone who reads this blog closely will have noticed my developing fascination with Christopher Bollas. His work leaves me with an eery sense that he is motivated by exactly the same questions which have always motivated me (albeit without the technological component) and that he’s spent his life trying to answer them in a psychoanalytical register. Case in point: why do we choose the objects that we choose? From Forces of Destiny pg 37:

In the last week I have read certain books. Why have I read what I have? Why have I rejected certain possibilities? When I listen to a record why do I select certain pieces of music and reject others? When I go for a walk, where do I go? When I seek a night out, which form of entertainment do I choose? Do not these choices provide textures of self experience that release me to articulate some idiom move on my part?

#christopherBollas #culture #psychoanalysis

Social media as a schizoid retreat

When reading The Forces of Destiny by Christopher Bollas I was struck by this description of a schizoid retreat into an internal fantasy world. In essence I take him to be saying that the subject foregoes the reality principle by turning to an internal object world which is cut off from relations with external objects:

As I have suggested, the schizoid path taken by the child who develops a relationship to these ghosts is an act of alterity. The child chooses to live in an alternative purely internal world, rather than to negotiate a settlement with the actual life of the family, peers, and others. I would not suggest that there is a single route to this selection, but I think we can consider at least three fundamentally different but nonetheless related pathways to this schizoid solution.

Pg 97

Does social media provide a fourth pathway to a (slightly mutated) schizoid solution? This is an extreme version of a more common experience of social media as bolstering what Winnicott talked about as the ‘false self’: a presentation of the self orientated towards the accumulation of positive regard from external others rather than the spontaneous expression of instinctual relating. Social platforms actively incentivise this in a whole range of ways. Indeed we might say that one has to proactively try to avoid this, in one’s own terms, as a default mode of engagement designed into the logic of the platform.

The schizoid solution is something more extreme. It’s the false self in dialogue with other false selves. Spontaneity reduced into the reactive logic on the dreamworld of the platform. An externality which is entirely subsumed into these confines. No thought, no challenge, no movement beyond what is allowed for on the platform. A dreamworld which can consume many hours of each day, interspersing the necessary engagements with the object world with continual interruptive returns. Nothing ever feels too real. Indeed nothing is real relative to the externalised internal world of the platform.

#christopherBollas #fantasy #ForcesOfDestiny #objectWorld #schizoid #SocialMedia #socialPlatforms

How do cultural objects change who we are?

From Forces of Destiny by Christopher Bollas pg 37-38:

And now and then we will be quite transformed by the uncanny wedding of our idiom and an object meeting up at just the right time. One late afternoon in the summer of 1972, I heard a performance of one of Hindmith’s viola sonata in a small church in New England. It immediately served to process a feature of my idiom, and this occasion sponsored vivid and intense feelings and ideas which lifted me into the next moments of my life. Shall we ever have the means to analyse that? Why that particular work?

There are four aspects of this which I think it’s important to untangle:

• “the uncanny wedding of our idiom and an object”
• the timing of their meeting
• the experiences which are produced
• the capacity of those experiences to move us forward in our becoming who we are

The most powerful experiences of cultural objects come when these four aspects are in alignment. I stumbled across T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets at a particularly bleak time in my life and there was something I dimly perceived in my existence (“not known, because not looked for but heard, half-heard, in the stillness…”) which I could see more acutely after reading Little Gidding for the first time. That each moment could somehow be a home if only I could relate to it with sufficient care. That some moments bring higher, fuller experiences which I needed to be more disciplined in order to be able to receive. To see it made made it an object of reflection and exploration. It enabled me to elaborate myself in relation to it and find other objects to help me explore it. There was something latent in how I was trying to make sense of my existence (my idiom) which suddenly found expression through my engagement with the poem (my object). But that meeting came at a critical juncture, a ‘fateful moment’ to use the lingo of biographical sociology, which meant that it me on a new course.

I wonder however what a mundane sociology of these experiences would look like. One attuned to the scaffolding which makes such meetings possible. In my case I’d spent the previous year circling round Rilke with a sense I saw something in there which couldn’t reach in the same way. Or the blogging through which I tried to identify self-states which could be imbued with some reality by sharing with the Big Other before they came to elaborated in a way that felt coherent to me. Or even the whole problematic of presence underpinning how I received Little Gidding which rested on a whole gamut of therapeutic, spiritual and philosophical sources in a melange I don’t think I’d realised until now I’d been constructing for many years. The idiom has to be saturated with latent meaning that can burst out into a new expression at a moment of experienced fullness. It’s not created by the new object but rather facilitated by it.

You can’t choose cultural objects to solve a problem. Indeed if you’re relating to these objects to do something it will almost certainly blunt the possibility of resonance. There’s a subtle dialectic here in which a movement takes a more definitive form through these fateful encounters rather than being created by them. There’s a risk that, much as with explaining the lived life, we miss the subtle grounds for transformation if we get too preoccupied with the observable transformation itself. There was a grammar which pre-existed it within and through which change became possible. That’s where sociology can contribute something meaningful to the psychoanalysis of personal change through cultural objects.

#art #change #christopherBollas #culturalObjects #literature #music #TSEliot