Style, Symptom, Identification
“The style is the man himself.” So begins the overture to the Écrits[1], Lacan quoting Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. The aphorism comes from Buffon’s “Discourse on Style,” a speech delivered to the French Academy in 1753. In this text, style’s ineradicability is given further emphasis: according to Buffon, while “knowledge, facts, and discoveries” can be separated from us—because they are ultimately exogenous—our style cannot be “removed, transported, or altered.” [2] Style then would be something indestructibly our own, made manifest in the singular manner in which we traverse the processes of life.
The reason this question of style concerns me is that clinical experience demonstrates discernible elements of continuity between the beginning of a psychoanalysis and its end, between repetition and the emergence of the unprecedented, and between the symptom and its metamorphoses. These elements, which are often quite subtle and elusive to the detection of analyst and analysand alike, are more of the order of the how rather than the what: ultimately idiosyncratic and inimitable ways of mapping and moving within psychical spacetime, signature subjective gestures that are reproduced in various and diverse territories of one’s subjectivity. The solution bears an aesthetic resemblance to the problem that generated the need for the solution, testifying to the irreducibility of a personal style.
In the arena of complexity and dynamical systems, these stylistic elements can be correlated with fractals, in which self-similarity is made wondrously manifest. The fractal is a pattern that repeats throughout a system, at varying levels of scale.[3] We can picture subsystems within subsystems ad infinitum, each one possessing certain invariant structural features that become like a “signature” of the system as a whole.
Researchers in complexity have picked up on this correlation. For instance, Daniel Rockmore has discussed the developing interaction between the science of complexity and the field of stylometry, the most notable of which might be the use of fractals to authenticate a set of paintings attributed to Jackson Pollock (as it turns out, they were fake). As Rockmore notes, careful analysis of Pollock’s work revealed certain fractal properties that replicated themselves time and again.[4] We might say that Pollock had a signature, a repertoire of aesthetic gestures all his own that could be discerned even at the most minute levels of observation.
Don’t we often sense the contours of this ineluctable singularity even in the early works of a great master, before they arrive at the aesthetic territory that will become utterly their own? When we listen to the early Beethoven, though he is clearly working within a framework that bears the hallmarks of Mozart and Haydn, don’t we already hear something that doesn’t quite fit, something from elsewhere that we will later recognize in its fullest articulation in the late string quartets or in the grandeur of the Ninth Symphony? Similarly with Coltrane in the time of his collaboration with Miles Davis: don’t we already witness, in seed form, what will come to full bloom in A Love Supreme?
These last two examples might help us to better understand the interplay between three related notions: style, symptom, and identification. I would like to attempt to use the framework given here, based on the notion of style as manifest in the characteristic patterns that recur in a system, to differentiate and map the dynamics between these three phenomena.
In order to clearly articulate this web of relations, we need to first highlight a dynamic within style itself. Though the style is characterized by the self-similarity and repeating patterning cited above, it is important to bear in mind that in their own right, the echoing fractal motifs are endlessly conducive to the emergence of new system configurations. There is no contradiction; rather, the fractal reiterations constitute the warp and weft by which the system evolves and develops an indefinite series of augmentations. Style, though bearing the distinguishing mark, is essentially open and generative.
By contrast, identification is characterized by a tendency in the direction of fixity and crystallization. I think we can distinguish two forms of this phenomenon: one exogenous and the other endogenous. In the first instance (identification with an exogenous element), the system incorporates the stylistic contours of another system and propagates them as part of its own movement. In the second instance (endogenous identification), the system utilizes motifs from its own fractal repertoire, but in a manner that lacks the open generativity of the more unfettered expression of the style. In this form of identification, certain contours or gestures become frozen and disconnected. We can think of identifications of either kind as constituting attractors that generate “sticky” and ultimately routinized paths through the phase space of the system.
The symptom, in this framework, would be the insistence of the elements of style that were relegated or suppressed in the process of freezing and fixation by identification. The symptom, once avowed, will paradoxically become a quintessential aspect of the signature (as in “the stone that the builders rejected becomes the cornerstone”). Accordingly, the doorway to the style’s fuller manifestation is the symptom. It was by virtue of the symptomatic singular points within Beethoven and Coltrane—the components that did not harmonize with the identificatory coordinates of their early work—that their respective styles were able to develop and ultimately flourish.
We can go further and link this to one of Lacan’s late definitions of the end of analysis: the identification with the symptom.[5] It all hinges upon a transformation at the level of identification. The way out of the alienating identificatory matrix is identification with the relegated symptomatic elements. These elements herald a style that is coming to be and yet, paradoxically, always was (that is, even within the strictures of the identificatory constellation, the self-similar iterations of the singular gesture were perpetually rearing their head). Identification with the symptom is already identification with the style; and style is no identity at all, but an unceasing movement with a (fractal) signature.
Notes:
1. Lacan, J. (2006). Écrits: The complete edition (B. Fink, Trans.). W. W. Norton & Company. (Original work published 1966)
2. Buffon, G.-L. L. (1753). Discours sur le style. Retrieved 2024, April 27 from https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Discours_sur_le_style
3. Mandelbrot, B. B. (1989). Fractal geometry: what is it, and what does it do? Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences, 423(1864), 3-16.
4. Rockmore, D. (2019). The numbers of our nature: Is there a math of style? In D. C. Krakauer (Ed.), Worlds hidden in plain sight: Thirty years of complexity thinking at the Santa Fe Institute. Santa Fe Institute Press.
5. Lacan, J. (1976-1977). Seminar 24: L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile à mourre (C. Gallagher, Trans.). Retrieved from http://www.lacaninireland.com