Meeting Place: The Human Encounter and the Challenge of Coexistence

Catching Up

Catching Up 33 I want to give two examples of practices that illustrate the poetic disposition needed to begin to discern the distinctive character of the meeting place. One is taken from psychiatry, the other from the human sciences of the central Australian Arrernte people. They would not normally be construed as related. Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault, the seul maitre en psychiatrie acknowledged by Jacques Lacan, was head of l’Infirmerie Spéciale des Aliénés de la Préfecture de Police de Paris between 1920 and his death in 1934. His fascination with drapery is well known but tends to be pathologized . The reciprocal obligations that tie parts of the natural and human universe together in totemic thinking are of interest to anthropologists and advocates of ecologically progressive place-based learning; but they rarely surface in discussions of the western crowd. What these seemingly unrelated northern and southern anecdotes have in common is an appreciation of cladding. I am not trying to make them meet by staging this juxtaposition ; I am suggesting that in the emergent discourse of the meeting place chance encounter is not unthinkable. The key point about de Clérambault is that he kept his eye on the fleeting appearances of phenomena. This manifested itself in two related ways: in the attention he gave to the voluntary and involuntary gestures of the aliénés he was charged to examine, and in his study of drapery. Between 1920 and 1934 de Clérambault processed over 13,000 aliénés. Each admission required a certificate to be issued. To interview so many, to reduce theirdiversedisorderstoasemblanceofpsychiatricorder,demandedobservational acuity. Oddities in the way the aliéné presented needed to be captured and described. A system of psychiatric classification was also needed. To uncover the history of an illness, associative reminiscences had to be 34 catching up elicited—without a theory of the origins of neuroses and psychoses, any pathway into these would be hit and miss. However, in de Clérambault’s case, the temptation—that Freud took to extremes—of removing one layer after another in order to unveil an original meaning was reversed. He attended instead to the superficies of his subjects—to the appearance they made, their casual tics, habitual gestures, oddities of physiognomy or grooming. De Clérambault treated his aliénés as outlines in whose surfaces contradictoryimpulsescompetedformastery .Facesanimatedbypainorpleasure, clothes draping the body in folds, bunched here or spreading there—these were not the external symptoms of hidden conflicts but a psychophysical meeting place, a shimmering maelstrom of electric impulses to be studied on its own terms. De Clérambault bracketed off the before and after of the patient’s life, concentrating exclusively on the superficies of their appearance (their presentation). In his view, faces, hands, clothes, and gestures were not superficial (surfaces concealing a hidden body). A hand raised to cover the left eye, a shoe tapping the floor to an intermittent rhythm of its own, laughter about nothing, a corrugation of the brow as if an electric current ran through the aliéné’s skull1 —the very expressiveness of these expressionsjustifiedhisphenomenologicalreduction—thatdeliberatesuspension of received ideas about madness. Theideathatappearancesmightbetheverystuffofbeing2 leadsnaturally to de Clérambault’s fascination with l’étoffe, the material—the cloth, fabric, fur, or silk in which women in particular wrapped themselves. De Clérambault held quaint views. For instance, he thought the sexual appeal of materials was gendered. Fur was pussylike in more than one sense: it tickled the hand that stroked it, wanting to be caressed.3 It appealed to the active principle in men. On the other hand, the intrinsic qualities of silk—consistance, éclat, odeur, bruit4—were passive, ideally suited to clitoral self-excitement (aformofmasturbationhethoughtdilettantish).5 Theseportmanteauprejudices aside, his erotic materialism remains original. Fur and silk masturbators might associate these materials with erotic scenes, but these mental pictures were, he insisted, not essential to producing the desired effect.6 It was the sensuousness of the materials that produced the passion, and it was the erotic properties of the stuff of appearance that de Clérambault made his study. The truly radical implication of this antimetaphysical reduction of desire was that it unveiled the blindness at the heart of seeing. Even if science catching up 35 renouncedthequesttounveilthetruthandsatisfieditselfwithstudyingthe surface appearance of things, it remained committed to the nexus between vision and insight. But the next step in de Clérambault’s chain of...