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What’s the matter with the
unconscious?
Lucas Pohl
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
Abstract
Anna Secor’s‘Spacetimeunconscious’offers a groundbreaking intervention into the fields of material and
psychoanalytic geographies. Following Karen Barad and Jacques Lacan, she develops a concept of the
unconscious that takes place within matter itself. In this commentary, I add some questions, loose ends,
and fragments to the theory-building patchwork of Secor’s paper.
Keywords
Materiality, more-than-human, psychoanalysis, the Real, unconscious
With her recent paper, ‘Spacetimeunconscious’,
Anna Secor (2023) has published a groundbreaking
intervention into both material and psychoanalytic
geographies. Joining a series of excellent and
thought-provoking publications, Secor now chal-
lenges us to take a fresh look at what surrounds
us, constitutes us, and yet lies beyond us. I can
hardly find better words to describe the quality of
this text than Karen Barad’s words on one of her
own essays: ‘[t]his article is a patchwork’(2015:
406). ‘Spacetimeunconscious’is a patchwork, a
montage, consisting of disparate parts that ‘arise
from divisions or cuts’, but this does not mean
that these parts are ‘spatially or temporally’sepa-
rated (Barad, 2015: 406). What we are dealing
with are not ‘individual bits and pieces but a phe-
nomenon that always already holds together,
whose pattern of differentiating-entangling may
not be recognized but is indeed re-membered’
(Barad, 2015: 406).
Form and content of ‘Spacetimeunconscious’
speak to each other in an extraordinarily harmonious
way. This is almost ironic because Secor’s whole
argument renounces any kind of harmony, and
yet there is something pleasurably coherent and
almost symbiotic about how the writing and its
content are woven together. Just as the enigmatic
figure of the spacetimeunconscious cuts through
various kinds of matter, sporadically appearing
and disappearing in the fractures and gaps of differ-
ent seemingly unrelated events, the argument in the
paper unfolds through the cuts between the sections,
thereby turning the experience of reading itself
into an event of some sort. Just as the spacetimeun-
conscious transcends the realm of meaning and
representation and ultimately cannot be fully under-
stood, so too the paper remains partially incompre-
hensible, thereby making it impossible to seamlessly
follow its reasoning. Just as the spacetimeunconscious
rejects any notion of wholeness and completeness,
so too the paper remains a fragment. So, how to
Corresponding author:
Lucas Pohl, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany.
Email: lucas.pohl@geo.hu-berlin.de
Commentary
Dialogues in Human Geography
1–4
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/20438206231217562
journals.sagepub.com/home/dhg
comment on this paper without making the mistake of
trying to ‘fully’get it? In what follows, I will not
attempt to capture Secor’sargument‘as a whole’
but rather to patch together some loose thoughts that
came up during my reading.
With the discovery of the unconscious, Freud
unsettled the space of the social in its very founda-
tions. If people had previously thought that they
would have some sort of control over themselves
and their environment, it was now clear that they
were not ‘masters in their own house’. Secor’s inter-
vention reads as an attempt to radicalize this very
starting point of psychoanalysis by stating that it is
not only ‘us’who are not masters of our own
house, but the house itself that is unable to master
itself. It is not only humans who are unable to
control themselves and their environment, but
something about matter (understood as ‘spacetime-
matter’) itself that prevents it from reaching equilib-
rium. Reversing a famous phrase from Hegel, one
might say that the unconscious no longer holds
true ‘only as subject, but equally as substance’.
In the abundance of rich examples sprinkled
throughout the paper, it is Secor’s introductory ref-
erence to water forgetting how to turn into ice that
already impressively succeeds in situating her argu-
ment. When water cools down, the molecules do not
quite ‘know’how to join together in order to create a
stable structure, which is why it needs a nucleator
with a solid texture, often a piece of ice itself,
which allows them to ‘remember’how to become
ice. What we are dealing with here is, according to
Secor, a ‘knowledge that does not know itself’.
The water is not certain how to become ice, so it
takes a degree of communication to get there. An
implication underlying this argument is that the envir-
onment, in this case water, is just as full of errors as
human beings. Nature is not the harmonious back-
ground that stands apart from the chaotic hustle and
bustle of society, nor is it in balance following its
inner laws; rather, nature is just as contingent, incom-
plete, and fragile as culture and society are. Secor cap-
tures this ‘lack in nature’when she highlights that even
water is not ‘supposed to know’, and thus lacks a firm
and stable instinctual foundation, or that lightning
knows ‘nothing of the ground’before it hits the
earth. In Lacanian terms, I read this part of Secor’s
argument as a powerful statement that ‘the big Other
does not exist’–neither in culture (Kingsbury,
2017) nor in nature (Pohl, 2020). The big Other
would indicate that there is an indissoluble and
consistent ‘ground’that constitutes a firm onto-
logical basis for both knowledge and action. The
absence of such a foundation is precisely what
‘Spacetimeunconscious’allows us to take into
account.
While I completely subscribe to the idea of rec-
ognizing material reality as just as inconsistent as
psychic realities, I see a certain risk in ‘substantial-
izing’the unconscious qua ‘Real unconscious’
(Secor, 2023). A problem that arises from essentia-
lizing the unconscious is that we risk falling behind
one of the key moments where Lacan passes beyond
Freud, namely, his withdrawal from any biological
or phylogenetic roots of the unconscious to the
primacy of the signifier. To assume that there is an
‘unconscious knowledge in the ongoing articulation
of the world’,an‘unknown knowledge outside the
symbolic [that] hooks directly into the matter of
what happens’(Secor, 2023), means somehow
losing the Lacanian Real in its classic sense, under-
stood as the cut, deadlock, or impossibility at the
heart of the symbolic itself. I wonder whether the
Real at stake in Secor’s spacetimeunconscious
rather resembles a Deleuzian–Guattarian inflection
of the Lacanian Real, in the sense that we are here
dealing with the pulsing material intensity of
becoming. While Lacan treats the Real as a form
of radical negativity and impossibility, Deleuze
and Guattari rather treat it as a realm of pure positiv-
ity, a single plane of creation and endless possibility.
I wonder how Secor’s argument relates to this.
While she insists that the unconscious is not
subject to any notion of wholeness, which is also
expressed through her ‘method of the cut’,I
wonder if there is still a notion of ‘pure’materiality
taking place in this approach. In other words, if it is
true that ‘the fundamental axiom of materialism [for
Lacan] is not “matter is all”or “matter is primary,”
but relates rather to the primacy of a cut’(Zupanc
ic
,
2017: 78), would Secor advocate for such an ‘ontol-
ogy of the cut’as the basis of her method?
This leads me to the question of relationality.
New materialisms are often addressed as radical
2Dialogues in Human Geography 0(0)
relationists who do not know anything but relations.
One of the consequences of this relational ontology
is the renunciation of any ‘outside’. As Barad (2011:
150) puts it, ‘[t]here is no outside of nature from
which to act; there are only “acts of nature”’.If
everything comes down to nature, however, we
may lose track of both the unnatural aspects of
nature and the inhuman aspects of human life.
How is it possible to bring together the dreaming
in Auschwitz with the forgetfulness of water, if
not by implicitly assuming that both are situated
on the same structural level, as ‘acts of nature’?
How can we maintain a (political) position in this
thinking that enables us not to ‘naturalize’things?
Is the spacetimeunconscious leading to such a ‘nat-
uralization’of the unconscious? Or does it still rest
on a notion of the (constitutive) outside?
More generally, what is the difference between
the not-knowing of water, electrons, and other non-
human matters and the not-knowing of humans?
Secor seems to suggest that there is no difference.
At this point, I would take a different route. While
I fully appreciate the idea that not-knowing is a
kind of unifying factor that connects humans with
all other matters, it seems at the same time crucial
that humans know about their lack of knowledge
in a different way than others. As Slavoj Z
iz
ek
(2020: 151–152) puts it with regard to the difference
between animals and humans, ‘animals simply don’t
know, i.e. they don’t know that they don’t know…
while humans know they don’t know, they register
their not-knowing and are in search of knowing…
This registration is precisely the unconscious’.
How does this assertion relate to Secor’s spaceti-
meunconscious? Does the spacetimeunconscious
imply a kind of ‘registration’of matter’s own not-
knowing and its search for knowledge? Or does it
neglect this moment of ‘registration’as being imma-
nent to the (human) unconscious?
While I agree with Secor that psychoanalysis
always contains ‘more’or ‘less-than-more-than-
human’elements, I would still insist that a psycho-
analytic approach allows us to rely on the distinctive
features of human beings. The psychoanalytic notion
of becoming-humans stands in clear contrast to the
cliché of the modern image of humans as superior
beings, placed above and beyond (non-human)
others. Human beings are special not because they
are in a position superior to inorganic matter, or
because they are marked by divine purpose, or
because they are able, by means of their spirit, to
control and master the world around them. Rather,
psychoanalysis allows us to argue that compared to
other animals (as well as other non-human beings),
humans are more radically marked by failure.
Human exceptionalism, the ontological distinction
between human and other-than-human matters,
derives from lack:
The human subject is exceptional not through its
mastery over the rest of the natural world but
through its monopoly on failure. Though other
animals fail all the time –deer are eaten by lions,
polar bears don’t catch enough fish to survive,
dogs slip on the wet ground, and so on –these fail-
ures are empirical. No other animal has failure
written into its structure in the way that the
human subject does (Eisenstein and McGowan,
2012: 196).
I wonder how Secor would respond to this argument.
Does her account of various forgetful substances, and
her plea for ‘an unconscious knowledge without a
subject’, abolish this radical dimension of lack in
human subjectivity? To what extent are the failures
of water and electrons ‘only’empirical failures,
while the failures in human cases are of a different
kind, and therefore produce different geographies?
Do non-human matters ‘enjoy’their failures as
much as humans do? And what about ‘the enjoy-
meant of unexpected imaginings associated with
knowledge, and, on the other hand, the enjoy-meant
of the meaninglessness elements of speech’
(Kingsbury, 2023: 879–880)? How do we address
the nuggets of ‘enjoy-meant’that linger in the nega-
tivity of the writing itself?
This brings me to a final question: what kind of
subjectivity is doing the (patch)work in Secor’s
account? Who speaks here and ‘(re)distributes the
human and the nonhuman as fragments: unfolds
them, flays them, stuffs and stitches them, rear-
ranges them’(Secor, 2023)? My wild guess would
be that it is the Cartesian subject (in Lacan’s‘sub-
verted’form, of course) quietly walking in
Pohl 3
through the back door here. Who else could so
smoothly navigate ‘between the tense sky and the
interested earth, between ice and Auschwitz’
(Secor, 2023)? If such ‘an “inhuman”stand-
point…already implies a pure (Cartesian) subject,
the only one able to occupy this position’(Z
iz
ek,
2020: 362), is it this particular ‘inhuman’standpoint
that enables us to position ourselves as the agents
who (re)assemble all kinds of human and non-
human matter, thereby following their patterns of
differentiating-entangling in order to approach the
spacetimeunconscious?
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
ORCID iD
Lucas Pohl https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7944-301X
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