I should start by being upfront: I
think this is an interesting, but profoundly disappointing book. Jerry Aline
Flieger’s Is Oedipus Online is published in the Short Circuits
series, edited by Slavoj Zizek. In an introduction, Zizek explains the use of
the "shock of short-circuiting" as a metaphor for a critical reading
of classic texts, using Lacanian psychoanalysis as the "privileged instrument"
for doing so. In Flieger’s case, the texts themselves are Freudian. What
Flieger wants to do in this volume is "refute the assumption that we are
living in a post-oedipal world where Freud’s founding paradigm no longer has
purchase" by suggesting a "Freudian take" on the "seismic
shifts…of twenty-first century thought" (p. 4). She notes perceptively
that although Freud may be under attack in the academy, "even when his
speculations are outlandish, Freud is never simply wrong: many of the cutting-edge
works that purport to be anti-Freud or post-Freud are in fact deeply indebted
to Freud’s insights." (p. 9)

Part One of the book first focuses
on "resiting Oedipus" through a consideration of major contemporary
theorists, among them Zizek himself, Deleuze and Baudrillard, while Part Two
turns more generally to Freud in contemporary thought. Flieger starts out in
chapter 1 by examining the relevance of oedipal theory in an age that,
according to Zizek and others, no longer has need of it to account for the
emergence of social beings with an awareness of boundaries between self and
other or between genders (and indeed, where novel technologies can permit those
boundaries to be relatively easily breached). Chapter 2 examines Zizek’s own
work on cyberinteractions, while in chapter 3, "The Listening Eye",
Flieger engages with texts by Baudrillard, Zizek again and Lyotard that reflect
on the potentially anti-humanistic effects of technology. In Chapter 4 she
re-examines the reputation of Gilles Deleuze as an anti-Freudian (a not very
surprising reputation given that he coauthored a book entitled Anti-Oedipus).
Nevertheless, Flieger shows skillfully that Deleuze is less anti-Freudian than
appearances suggest, and indeed that "the Deleuzian critique of Oedipus is
applicable only to the most rigidly construed Freudian orthodoxy" (p.
102). Flieger returns to Deleuze and Freud in chapter 6, this time through a
consideration of the emergence and self-organization of organisms and psyches,
and specifically in the organization of gender.

Much about this book is valuable,
especially up to this point. The two chapters in which she gives a critical
reading of Deleuze are insightful, and for many readers the book will be worth
the cover price for that alone. It’s in the second part that things begin to
unravel, and I will be going into this in some detail because I think that what
goes wrong is symptomatic of a common, and flawed, idea of what is demanded of
cross- or interdisciplinary engagement. In the second half Flieger attempts to
connect science (knot theory, topography, fractals, and the occasional
fashionable nod to genetic modification) with Freudian thinking. Undoubtedly,
Flieger’s project is to dissolve or at least make permeable some of the
disciplinary boundaries between science and the humanities; this is a valuable
endeavor, and one for which psychoanalysis, uncomfortably located as it is
somewhere between fictionalized neurology and medicalized fairy tale, would
seem perfectly suited.

The trouble is that in order to
pull off this kind of interdisciplinary conversation you need to be much more
secure in both disciplines than Flieger is in science. Flieger makes a good job
of summarizing knot theory, for example, or fractals, and these sections are
interesting to read in themselves. But despite her avowed intention to show the
relevance of modern technological culture to Freudian or oedipal models, the
connections are simply too superficially discussed, or use too facile a reading
of the science, to be convincing. Over and over again, connections are sketched
out and then abruptly dropped: occasionally they are returned to later, but
often that’s the last we hear of them. It may well be that Flieger intended
consciously to adopt what she describes as the "rhizomatic" structure
of hypertext over the linearity of text, but the price is an overall impression
of intriguing ideas thinly worked out. (One can’t help feeling that Freud would
have approved of it as free association but have been less happy about the lack
of working-through.)

Where she makes apparent bloopers
in the science, the superficiality of the discussion generally makes it
impossible to tell if these are due to drastic, and hence misleading,
oversimplification, or to a genuine lack of understanding. To give one example:
discussing self-organizing systems, so that she can later draw an analogy with
psychic development, she describes (p. 112) "matter-energy…moving in the
field of opposing attractors (like an Olympic snowboarder swooping back and
forth between valleys and peaks)". This is confusing because it sounds
as if she thinks the peak and the valley represent two attractors, rather than
what is actually going on, which is the dissipation of energy and momentum
around the single attractor of gravity. To compound the problem, too often it’s
impossible to clarify or amplify a statement by turning to the original
literature, because — outside of psychoanalytic, and particularly Lacanian,
works — the book is under-referenced. Claims are sometimes made, and even
authors’ work cited, with no references at all, while there are some others to
websites that are no longer accessible, and at one place to a Discovery channel
program.

Although Flieger clearly knows a
lot about topology and nonlinearity, outside these areas there is a disquieting
sloppiness. Discussing Lacan’s "fractal" model of subjectivity (p.
205) she claims that "…even our DNA code may be studied as a version of
[complex Borromean knots]. As a spiraling helix of linked structures, our own
material blueprint might instantiate Lacan’s version of subjectivity".  I
really don’t know what to make of this statement. Some, very specialized, forms
of DNA do take up shapes that can be studied mathematically as Borromean knots;
but the structure of DNA is not equivalent to a code; and few biologists
today would allow DNA the status of a straightforward blueprint. (And being really
picky, I’ve not yet met a helix that didn’t spiral.) Lack of attention to
accuracy and to detail like this makes no convincing case for the putative link
between Lacanian subjectivity and DNA molecule being anything more than a
metaphor, and a strained one at that.

These might seem unbearably
pedantic points, and in writing this part of me does feel like the worst type
of science philistine, swatting down innovative thought with my slide rule. But
another part of me finds Flieger’s lapses profoundly discourteous to those
other disciplines, the science and technology that she is implicating in this
Lacanian conversation. I feel compelled in fairness here to note that another
reviewer found Oedipus to be "an exemplary work of
interdisciplinary scholarship". My own opinion, for what it’s worth, is
exactly the opposite: it’s the kind of work that gives interdisciplinarity a
bad name. Written with the best of intentions, it also undermines the efforts
some of us make to convince our skeptical colleagues that psychoanalysis has
anything worth saying to, and about, science.

© 2006 Jackie Leach Scully

Jackie
Leach Scully is a bioethicist at the Universities of Basel, Switzerland, and
Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom, with a professional interest in moral
psychology and psychoanalysis. In a previous incarnation she was a molecular
biologist.

Categories: Philosophical, Psychoanalysis