cathectic?
Hi. This was sort of fun in the sense that finding the definition left me slightly more unsure of how to understand how the term "cathectic" was being employed than I was to begin with.
So, this was in reference to Mohanty/Alexander (xxiii) "Both postcolonial and advanced capitalist/colonial states organize and reinforce a cathectic structure based in sexual difference (i.e., heterosexuality) which they enforce through a variety of means, including legislation"
I know we're not "supposed" to do this, but I went to wikipedia...sigh....(but seriously, the oxford definition wasn't of much help: "of, pertaining to cathexis")
So: according to the on-line encyclopedia:
"In psychodynamics, cathexis is defined as the process of investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, object, or idea. This concept was developed by Sigmund Freud in 1922. In psychoanalysis, cathexis is the libido's charge of energy. Freud often described the functioning of psychosexual energies in mechanical terms, influenced perhaps by the dominance of the steam engine at the end of the 19th century. In this manner, he also tended to think of the libido as a producer of energies.
Freud often represented frustration in libidinal desires as a blockage of energies that would eventually build up and require release in other ways. This release could occur, for example, by way of regression and the "re-cathecting" of former positions (i.e. fixation at the oral phase or anal phase and the enjoyment of former sexual objects ["object-cathexes"], including autoeroticism).
When the ego blocks such efforts to discharge one's cathexis by way of regression, i.e. when the ego wishes to repress such desires, Freud uses the term "anti-cathexis" or counter-charge. Like a steam engine, the libido's cathexis then builds up until it finds alternative outlets, which can lead to sublimation or to the formation of sometimes disabling symptoms." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathexis)
I'm still sort of baffled by what this implies...and would profoundly appreciate hearing your points of view.
Comments
I am using this space to comment on Trinh's film "reassemblage" (this should be embarassing, but I can't figure out how to post a comment - hopefully this still counts)
I really enjoyed Trinh's film - and thought it rather unobtrusively went to the heart of the topic we were discussing last Thursday ("the subject" - which kept slipping in and out of the film, but only because Trinh occasionally would remind us that we are not watching a film "on" Senegal", but "beside", or "by" Senegal. This I thought explained the silences, which, as others have very pertinently brought up, were both a sort of explanation (of the critical approach Trinh was taking -i.e., to not "speak" the subject) and a refusal to simply insert the subjects into a totalizing discourse (the documentary? anthropology? ethnology? - in a way, this reminded me of Foucault's description of how power functions in concert with knowledge to create a "documentalised subject", whose very interiority can be explained and anticipated by power...but maybe that's getting off track).
There is so very much to discuss and, pardon the very bad pun, but I'm struggling to re-assemble in my head what I jotted down in class...
But the themes I found to be the most powerful in the film were definitely those of "difference" (her critique of the western audience who's expectations are not, it is implied, so different from patrons at a carnaval freak-show: paying to enjoy the spectacle of pure alterity) and of the ethnologic/graphic documentary - interestingly enough, at the end, Trinh does bring up an object of pure ethnography (polygamy) - I found it interesting that at this point she refuses to "comment" on the question of polygamy per se, implicitly reminding the spectator of the ambivalent status of the "eternal commentaries that escort images" (I find the choice of "escort" interesting, because it seems to echo the "not on, but 'be/alongside' of the incipit of the film - but perhaps her real object is an inquiry into language...) - so, it's interesting on the one hand that she leaves the space of the conclusion open to the perspective of the "subject", but on the other hand, we don't actually hear that from a senegalese woman (i.e., Trinh is the one who is reporting the indirect discourse of the critique of polygamy) - this was somewhat ambiguous: was she drawing attention to the stark impossibility for the "other" to speak/the always-speaking-for-the-other-documentarist? Or was this more in the mode of irony (the last part about having a "man all for yourself" intrigued me). That's a bit of an impasse for me - any ideas?
Posted by: Rob | February 5, 2007 4:46 AM