So, my choices. Witnessing, first of all. All four Prismatic Heresies are dense and clotted with words. One person, discussing the effect of their many years of therapy and their spiritual and artistic practice, describes how psychic pain was first encysted and then worked through: “It was unbelievable how perfectly encapsulated the pain had been and how I had carried it around in that bubble all that time and had I not persevered as much as I did I would have carried it for eternity”. They display grace in suffering, crafting humour from stabilising cliches: “When he walked away I thought how, ever, and then someone said, you don’t bloody know, do you?” Another participant explains their critical theory of transgender and non-binary: “My previous identity as a man didn’t allow me to be soft and I think I was losing a lot. This kind of shield, this softness, becomes more a perforated one. There is interaction.” One trans woman spoke powerfully to her brief experience of therapy: “Yeah, where is my thinking time? What am I? Gay? Transgender? What the fuck am I” Am I Dad? What am I? I’m nobody!” and reflected, “I was worried abut putting aside that side of me, the fighter, I was worried about how I was going to be feminine, if my nature is ‘fighter’, it took me a while to realise what ‘fighter’ means and how to use it, now I’m bringing it with me.” Another person looked back on their history, “Drama, in performance by women I knew, my mother, myself ”, and paused, shifted posture, inviting me to respond as a psychoanalyst, “you’ve reached something puzzling, a resistance”, and then told me a dream, a waking dream, “Being alone, travelling across the Sahara, and everything it carries with it. The idea of a rebirth.”
Secondly, I could produce a scholarly discussion of Donna Haraway’s influence on my thought and the thought of others. This may be a personal connection I’m forging: faking or making metal and fire. In an enactment, part of a network of intellectual community is actualised in a row of books I assemble in my bookcase, a sampling of the material-semiotic practices that took place and ramified from a particular place and time, accreted in books that one hopes are more than ephemeral. I gathered together 4 books of Donna Haraway’s, 2 of Liz Grosz’s, and 1 book each by Terese de Lauretis, Eve Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, and my dear friend Sandy Stone. Here are 3 of Jessica Benjamin’s books and a few books on transgender and psychoanalysis: Gherovici and Gozlan. All this earnestness is balanced, is bookended by a teddy bear I placed in my consulting room after an oddly solemn discussion group on the topic, “Why should we—or should we not— have a teddy bear in our consulting room?” The toy bear is not my childhood transitional object. It’s 20 years old, bought after my brother and I, both adults, started play-fighting with two bears displayed on a market stall.
My teddy bear has been used analytically by my patients, for example, in the story one analysand told about her attempts, as a child, to build and preserve a den for her teddy bear, despite the intrusive tidying of her parents. However, for me, the strongest association, after, that is, playing as an adult, is with Donna Haraway.
“Teddy-Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936”, is Haraway’s (1989) material-semiotic analysis of the dioramas in the Natural History Museum in New York. It’s a symptomatic reading that treats the opposition between thought and action in a non-binary way: material-semiotic; the material (action, event), and the semiotic (whether Lacan’s signifiers or Barthes’ Mythologies) are not opposed; the aporia is suspended, held open.3 ((I draw on Haraway’s material-semiotic way of working in my use and analysis of neo-Marxist geography in my first book, Social and Virtual Space, (Chernaik 2005), starting with the narrower, core argument, the critique of the Marxist opposition of base/superstructure, and moving on to the wider implications.)) Teddy bears weren’t always ubiquitous; the toy was named after the progressivist, big-game-hunting American president, Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt. Americans still call soft toys “stuffed animals”, like taxidermy. The animals in the dioramas in Karl Akeley’s African Hall include several provided by Teddy Roosevelt. The taxidermied animals are displayed in their settings, in what Winnicott might have called their “facilitating environment”, and what Haraway does in her Deleuzean argument is to extend outwards from this in her analysis, tracing lines of force from diorama to history:
Akeley and his peers feared the disappearance of their world, of their social world in the new immigrations after 1890 and the resulting dissolution of the old imagined hygienic, pre-industrial America. Civilization appeared to be a disease in the form of technological progress and the vast accumulation of wealth in the practice of monopoly capitalism by the very wealthy sportsmen who were trustees of the Museum and the backers of Akeley’s African Hall. The leaders of the American museum were afraid for their health; that is, their manhood was endangered. Theodore Roosevelt knew the prophylaxis for this specific historical malaise: the true man is the true sportsman. Any human being, regardless of race, class, and gender, could spiritually participate in the moral status of healthy manhood in democracy, even if only a few (anglo-saxon, male, heterosexual, Protestant, physically robust, and economically comfortable) could express manhood’s highest forms. (Haraway 1989: 42).