Ruminations

In his first Seminar, Lacan said that the ideal of psychoanalysis is “to render the subject capable of sustaining the analytic dialogue, to speak neither too early, nor too late” (p. 3, 1988, Norton). It is an early statement that makes me wonder about the degree to which psychoanalysis could have been successful at all: what does it mean for a neurotic subject to come and speak well about their neurosis? What does it mean for them to sustain a dialogue? Is it not already all doomed before the analytic session starts, considering the possible cultural, professional, and even intellectual inequality between analyst and analysand? How can the analysand, the patient, maintain a dialogue with someone who, as Lacan says elsewhere, is a “wall”?

Difficult to know. Indeed, more importantly, what happens if the speech that makes this dialogue possible is impeded?

What I had been thinking about was the mask, the mask that keeps the nose and the mouth covered; the mask that keeps me smelling the heat of my own breath; the mask that is the field of protest for a rather stupid if not sociopathic political contingent; the mask which impedes the clarity of speech and which both keeps the other and their microbes away.

Lacan and Frantz Fanon and Homi Bhabha had much to say about masks and how it seems that it is only the “othered” subjects that wear them, whether because they are neurotically trying to be accepted in a white society (Fanon), or because they recognize in their own way that the mask of mimicry can be a form of subversion of colonial power (Bhabha), or because the masks can be the psychic ornament worn by the other who recognizes with a fully resigned but perhaps dignified awareness that there is no such thing as a perfect sexual relation–as we speak of it (Lacan).

But what about a physical mask: what about a material object that muzzles without restricting, that demonstrates obedience without an order, that is precisely the wall between meeting lips?

In 2016, a candidate for US president won because he convinced a large enough segment of the population to desire a wall to be built out there, on the border, far away from the suburbs of Oklahoma and North Dakota. It was a typical maneuver: an easy symbolic solution that as many studies have shown would have done nothing to curb so-called illegal immigration and which remains to this day mostly unbuilt; but it was a symbolic or even imaginary solution–in its Lacanian sense–which appeased the desire of the white American to have the worries of their ego assuaged. This ego demanded that something stark and brute and made of concrete be built to allay a certain abstract evil, in the same way that cold holy water sprinkled on the self at church will deal with an encroaching Satan.

How could these voters have known that four years later this radically othering gesture, this walling out, would take place not across the thick miles of the US-Mexico border but right in their homes and on their faces? Little mobile walls appeared over people’s mouths in supermarkets, in post offices, in the suburbs and their parks. How could they know also that they would hate it?

I see the mask as a stark reality, really, as a new phenomenology, a new way of dealing with and being in the world. Always on guard. On the look out. A wariness which is the ripe state that breeds protest and animosity. Being in this state of wariness is nothing new to those who are “others,” as Black Americans and trans bodies, for example, know to the core, but it is an unacceptable reality for those privileged enough to have never needed to be “on guard,” to have never been out of sync with society, to have never lost dominion over the tranquility which it was their privilege to think was natural and therefore irrevocable.

And so we get anti-maskers and their implosive collapses on camera, visible examples of the imaginary register crashing, the signs of the hysteric symptom if there ever was one. Meanwhile the rest of us continue on resigned and at home, hoping things will get better even as they worsen, speculating as another election looms and everything gears up again as it once did, with the difference that there is now exhaustion and abyssal division and the sense of the waste. All the danger remains. The Dow Jones keeps to its greedy flight. Hope shines as bright and strong as an ember.