4 :: POSTHUMAN IDENTITY
across diverse emotional scales. In a radical extension of Melanie Klein’s
psychoanalytic approach, Bion draws attention to the projection outwards, as well as
retrieval into self, of affects circulating objects. These phenomena or objects are at
once human and non-human. In order to think and to act in creative, reflective ways,
according to Bion, the individual subject must ‘let go’ of consciousness and become
immersed in sectors of pure experience. It is through such immersion in the
objectworld – both human and non-human – that the self subsequently undertakes
the creative, reconstructive work of ‘attaching meaning to experience’. As Bion
formulates this, thought precedes thinking. In order to obtain knowledge of
self-experience, a series of transformations must occur (what Bion terms ‘thinking’)
to the raw emotional materials (both human and non-human) which have impinged
on the psyche. A prime instance of this synchronization of selves, others and objects,
says Bion, occurs when the infant learns to become immersed in the experience of its
familial surround – most typically, in relation to its mother. But at the same time, this
so-called foundational synchronization of selves and objects establishes a pathway
for what Bion terms the ‘processing’ of experience over time and space.
What Bion’s psychoanalytic move involves, in effect, is an underscoring of the
intricate relations between experience, emotional processing and thinking. The effect
of running these phenomenological and psychoanalytic themes together is to
underscore the complexity of synchronized actions and objects, or identities and
systems, which structure our very form of life. This synchronization of actions and
objects – which does not, at least in this psychoanalytic account, follow any traditional
dualism between the inside and outside – is highly complex, but especially
consequential for grasping the production and performance of the posthuman
condition. Christopher Bollas, a psychoanalyst strongly influenced by Bion, reflects
on the psychic dynamics of such criss-crossings between actions and objects thus:
The concept of self-experiencing is ironic, as its referential
ambiguity (does it mean the self that experiences or the
experiencing of our self?) is strangely true to the complexity of
being human. All self-experiencing involves this split, which can
be described as a division between ourself as simple selves (when
we are immersed in desired or evoked experience) and ourself as
complex selves (when we think about experience). Naturally such
distinctive states may overlie one another, so that I may be
reflecting upon an experience in the immediate past while
another part of me is already within a disseminating experience.
(Bollas 1992: 27)