Stumbling on Analysis: Psychoanalysis and Everyday Life

From Culture to Everyday Life

The argument here will be staged in two parts. First, the conceptual and institutional difficulties currently besetting cultural studies are characterized in relation to what I deem to be a deficiency of theconcept of culture when construed as the object of cultural studies. Because my immediate interest lies in motivating a reflection on the concept of everyday life, I settle in this part for proposing that what troubles the concept of culture as a disciplinary object is its unresolved relation to the concept of determination. Indeed, as my subheading implies, I will propose that much as Western academics once shifted from "work" to "text," we are now poised to shift from "culture" to "everyday life." The link between the former event and the field of disciplinary objects has been detailed in Text, and I see no benefit in rehashing those arguments here (Mowitt 1992).

In a second movement, Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) will be read (about which more in a moment) so as to glean not only what it has to teach us about the concept of everyday life, but also, and of equal importance, what the key concept of parapraxis discloses about the relation between theory (if not psychoanalysis itself) and society. While the dream, in all its ontological rigor, may indeed constitute the "royal road" to the unconscious, what, I will ask, stands illuminated about everyday life if parapraxis turns out to be the footpath leading specifically to or through it? En route a quick glance will be cast toward something I designate as sociography, that is, a problematic within which the very perplexities long associated with the relation between history and historiography can be posed vis-à-vis society. Again, everyday life figures centrally here because— at least in some construals—it has emerged as the means by which to conceptualize the unsettled and ill-defined space where writing and life, theory and society, persistently run into one another. If, as Freud implies, everyday life is where accidents must happen, and if parapraxis, in leading us to the very logic of everyday life, writes the theory of psychoanalysis into modern Western society, then how might we gauge the significance of the necessary contingency that thus appears to belong to the very genealogy of psychoanalysis? Does it bear on psychoanalysis alone, or does this insight, in shedding light on the reciprocating—and therefore contingent—determinations of life and consciousness, prompt us to consider that psychoanalysis may actually harbor a provocatively reflexive theory of the, yes, material relation between theory and society?

By determination I do not mean, as an existentialist might, the opposite of freedom. Instead, by determination I mean the principle, variously defended by various Marxisms, that the superstructure is caused by the base; to put it another way, that culture—in both form and content—is decisively and inevitably shaped by the economic institutions and relations that underlie it. My path to it will be circuitous, starting with a consideration of the practice of reading, and then turning to determination proper.

In many of its incarnations cultural studies appears to be stunned by what Paul de Man once called "the resistance to theory." Not only has the field often defined itself as the disciplinary materialization of the end to which pragmatism and the new historicism put Theory, but, and this is the blinding insight behind de Man's formulation, it has put an end to reading. Although much separates what de Man thought could be read and what "textuality" rendered legible, it is plain that cultural studies resists the interminable labor of theorizing the enabling conditions of its own reading effects. Such preoccupations are, its partisans typically claim, just theory. Cultural studies, by contrast, is about identities, resistance, hegemony, in short, theory that is just. Either way theory persists, but typically obscured behind the ambivalence besetting its detractors and its devotees alike. Yes, this means that cultural studies has been there, done that with...