In a reading group on Lacan’s Seminar X earlier this year, I became preoccupied by the casual way in which Lacan referred to “writer’s cramp” to the bewilderment of others within the group. He could assume that everyone in the room understood what he meant by this, taking it as an object of analysis without the need to explain or contextualise:
For this locus of inhibition where we learn to recognise, while I am underlining it, the correlations this matrix indicates, the locus properly speaking where desire is exercised, and where we grasp one of the roots of what analysis designates as Urverdrangung, what I might call this structural occultation of desire behind inhibition – it is something which makes us say habitually that if Mr So-and-so has writer’s cramp, it is because he eroticises the function of his hand, I think this is familiar to everybody – it is this which urges us to bring into play, to appreciate in this situation at the same place these three terms, the first two of which I have already named: “inhibition”, “desire”, the third being the act. For when it is a question for us of defining what the act is, the only possible, polar correlative in the place of anxiety, we can only do it by situating it there where it is: at the place of inhibition in this matrix.
http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Seminar-X-Revised-by-Mary-Cherou-Lagreze.pdf (Pg 222)
It was such a ready-to-hand example that he could immediately fold it into the discussion. Not only did everyone know what he meant, it was such a familiar experience that he could assume an audience of psychoanalysts would have habits of analysing this familiar experience as it was presented to them. I was reminded of this when reading Robert Boice’s Professors as Writers in which he includes a section on cramps as one of the typical ailments suffered by academic writers:
Writing cramps,⁴ the final example of a problem style in this chapter, provides a reminder of self-destructive tendencies. In mild form, one familiar to most of us, some part of our writing arm cramps up during writing. I recall a freshman essay exam where my wrist became so stiff I could hardly finish. In serious form, writing cramps prevent writers from producing more than a scribble.
Experiential accounts of cramping rarely go beyond the physical pains:
- “I could feel my hand and wrist stiffening up as I got ready to write. By the time I tried to begin, I could hardly hold the pencil. I couldn’t go on.”
If you’ve had severe cramps, you can imagine how effectively they block writing. Perhaps you can also sympathize with cramped writers who are reluctant to suppose that their cramps are self-engendered ways to avoid writing.
Pg 28
How quickly these ailments are forgotten! I wonder what routine ailments facing academics of my generation will seem bewildering to future academics, tracking as they do a sociotechnical context which has long since been transformed.
https://markcarrigan.net/2024/11/07/the-lost-sociotechnical-ailments-of-writers/
#cramp #digitalScholarship #Lacan #RobertBoice #writing