Risk Redux – Stephen Hartman, PhD

 

Remember New Year’s 2020? Six months ago feels like six lifetimes ago. Patricia Clough, psychoanalyst and media studies colleague, and I were recruited to write a book review essay that surveyed a spate of books that, one way or another, took up the topic of psychoanalysis, technology and the body. By February, our trenchant critique was fine-tuned if not a bit too critical. Neither of us had many kind words for the genre, but it felt important to take the risk of speaking out about the dangers of applying analog thinking to digital subjects.

Then, in March, our essay felt woefully out of date. The Covid body as cyberobject, as the progeny of datafication (Clough, 2018) rendered to the object world via the time-lapse temporality of charts and graphs that project Covid-risk forward (in what Clough labeled “the timing of eventness”), became our focus. The book review fell to the wayside. Then there was George Floyd’s killing, of course, and the one issue that consumed everyone’s mind traded places with the one issue that had failed to consume white peoples’ minds for 400 years.

Then, after three months commuting solo from my kitchen (where I see patients) to my den (where I commune with fellow members of the Dr Vin Gupta fan club) to my bedroom (where I Zoom with friends back east) with detours up to the roof (gotta keep fit somehow), I suddenly find myself on the Golden Gate Bridge chanting Black Lives Matter with 10,000 of my new best masked friends. What is the greater risk, Dr Gupta asks Brian Williams on MSNBC: that Covid continue to spread among protesters or that racism’s lethal effects continue to proliferate in the phantomatic gaps (Butler, 2019) that discount the violence that ravages black and brown bodies?

What we consider risk is always on the move. Back from the front and repositioned safely in my kitchen on Zoom, Ally Merchant and I are discussing an essay on sex and gender politics that Muriel Dimen first delivered in 1982. Race goes more or less unmentioned in those early feminist critiques of psychoanalytic gender theory (and in the early manifestos of relational psychoanalysis). Was the vanguard of third wave feminism race-blind? Probably, but not entirely. Civil rights earlier preoccupied many of the same women who then took up the rallying cry of sex as did Dimen in her brave text Politically Correct / Politically Incorrect (1984). AIDS will soon change all that as sex becomes dangerous, as it becomes the locus of risk. Lesbians will nurse their fallen gay comrades (Leavitt, 2013) and POC vulnerability will come back into focus albeit as a subset of risky sex. Caught up in the machinations of intersectionality, where sexuality, gender, race and class compete for airtime in a psychosocial mash-up (Hartman, 2020), the risks that cohere in black bodies are too often subsumed into the oddly more vanilla economy of sex, gender and class.

Risk informs the writing of many psychoanalysts who frame unconscious motives in relation to the exigencies of desire (Saketopoulou, 2019). I am particularly interested in how risk jumps around—as we seem to be only able to fathom one risky venture at a time. My effort to chart risk’s uptake in a social unconscious led me to coin the phrase the “risk object” (Hartman, 2013) that I describe this way (Hartman, 2019):
The risk object is a political species of bad object that manifests with the rise of neoliberalism as a participatory way of knowing crumbles and an emphasis on collective experience is supplanted by quantitative measures of individual achievement in an intersectionally imbricated collective. Scrutiny moves inward from a conceptual threat to our collective health (democracy at risk) to a risk to each of our abilities to prosper to the marked individual at-risk who then risks being identified solely by his different skin color—or was it his hoodie (Coates, 2017)? The risk object crosses intra-, inter-, and ultrapsychic registers, inhabiting positions that being at-risk represents for individuals, among groups, and, ultimately, in the virtual ontologically-because-normatively White collective.

Probably by the time I post this essay, the risk that dominates media attention (and thus Our minds) will shift again. But bodies, particularly bodies of color and bodies in the Global South, will continue to bear the brunt of that risk. Did you know that it is altogether likely that in 2020 as many people will die from HIV-related causes as Covid-19? Some risks are trendier than others. We as psychoanalysts can do a better job of tracking the virtual travels of risk in what too often goes unsaid lest what appears say-able risks ratifying a collective psychose blanche (Harris, 2019).
References
Butler, D. (2019). Racialized violence and the violence of the setting. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 20: 146-158.

Clough, P. T. (2018). The User-Unconscious: On Affect, Media, and Measure. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Dimen, M. (1984). Politically correct? Politically incorrect? In C. Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. London: Routledge.

Harris, A. (2019). The Perverse pact: Racism and white privilege. American Imago, 76: 309-333.

Hartman, S. (2013). Unbonded love. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 14:35-50.

Hartman, S. (2019). Hashtag mania: Or, misadventures in the #ultrapsychic. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 20:84-100.

Hartman, S. (2020). Carter is so Handsome. Psychoanalysis Today, 23 April 2020: http://www.psychoanalysis.today/en-GB/PT-Articles/Hartman164721/Carter-is-so-Handsome.aspx

Leavitt, J. (2013). Lesbian desire in the age of AIDS: From the head of Medusa sprung. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 59: 549-571.

Saketopoulou, A. (2019). The Draw to overwhelm: Consent, risk, and the retranslation of enigma. JAPA, 67: 133-1

 

Stephen Hartman, PhD, is an executive editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality. He teaches at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California and on the Relational Track at NYU Postdoc.  He participates in an interdisciplinary conversation on critical development studies as a member of the Collaboration for Research on Democracy, and contributes to the CORD Network Blog. Stephen is the author of several articles and book chapters that address object relations theory from the standpoint of emerging technologies, the socio-politics of a collectivist psychoanalytic frame, sexuality and gender in an intersectional matrix, and the interface of digital culture and the practice of psychoanalysis.

 

Photo credit: A. Dillard (Pexels)