Klein's splitting, binary extremes, anti-discourse

"Despite limitations, the founding insight of the group-relations approach remains, supported by synchronic empirical studies: that psychic defense mechanisms may inhere as properties of collectively held cultural systems." (373)"Splitting, then, involves a reductive form of thinking: objects are either all good or all bad. The integrity of the object is fragmented, as is the perception of it and the ambivalence that it evokes. In this state simple difference becomes imbued with extreme evaluation. Complex and subtle perceptions of the object are evacuated." (374)"Juliet Mitchell notes that while "Freud's theory revolves around the question of a past" (1986:26) and, specifically, of repression, for Klein "the past and the present are one . . . a position is a mental space in which one is sometimes lodged" (1986:28). Hence defenses may be observed not only in infancy but equally in adulthood." (374)"Given my earlier point about the stripping away of pseudohistories and over-elaborate developmental schemes, a Kleinian perspective allows conceptually for the potential for change in a prevailing psychic structure, for investigating the conditions of possibility of such change, and for analyzing nonteleological historical process." (375)"Two key issues arise from Moore's discussion. One is the need to deconstruct Western assumptions by showing the variability of the categories female, male, nature, culture, and of their alignment: that is, the need to trace the specific contents of different gender classifications. The second is the question of where gender ideologies arise from and their articulation with social relations and practices." (376)"The binary division is at the same time highly evaluative. This most basic of classification systems, in its great variety of enunciations, characteristically evinces splitting. Moore calls these phenomena "gender stereotypes." But they are more: they are derogatory, reductive, emotive, reified, naturalized, and legitimized by reference to physiology or to powerful metaphors. In short, they have all the properties of ideology. Classification plus splitting equals ideology. That is, classification plus the tendency to idealize one pole while denigrating, fearing, and persecuting the other is the way ideology works in relation to gender, class, race, or ethnicity." (376)"... arbitrariness of the evaluation attributed to the object of splitting: the interchangability, in principle, of idealization and denigration or fear, and the unstable oscillation between the two." (376)"What is needed is attention to how the political is articulated with persecutory and/or envious dynamics (e.g., Rose 1988) and under what historical conditions such mechanisms come to be pervasive" (378)"... splitting and denial may contribute to advancing one discourse over coexistent or rival discourses, instigating a momentum that tends to reproduce its hegemony and contribute to its reification, by "absenting," annihilating, or subordinating its others." (378)"I have proposed the term antidiscourse to sum up this phenomenon of a discourse that is produced in the process of simultaneously denying another, coexistent, and rival discourse. This term may be contrasted with Michael Halliday's (1978) concept of antilanguage. It refers not simply to purely linguistic forms but to discourse more broadly conceived, in the Foucauldian sense, to include characteristic practices, social relations, institutions, technologies, and forms of knowledge. Moreover, Halliday portrays antilanguage as a marginal code that negates aspects of the dominant code to express resistance. By antidiscourse I imply a discourse that is engaged in the denial or "absenting" of the existence of a rival discourse. Antidiscursive denial may thus be as characteristic of hegemonic cultural systems as subordinate ones. It may also be central to the reproduction of dominant cultural systems over time. In the historical analysis of modernism it is the most rigid and enduring aspects of the discourse, its continuous constructions of absolute difference from popular culture, that show evidence of splitting and denial."(379)"It is the omnipotent discourse, grateful to the mission for delivering things back to the Fuyuge, which is explicit, while the uncertain discourse about the experience of being decentered is somehow lost." (380)"I suggest, however, that certain dominant cultural systems tend toward continuity and the absorption or suppression of difference because of the cumulative momentum of historical authority and power, their capacity as antidiscourses for the omnipotent denial of rival discourses, and their capacity for forming subjectivities in the image of their own psychic dynamics" (381)