Post-structuralist and cultural studies debates have been raging on for some time now around the question of what constitutes the "material." Older marxist notions of historical materialism have been put aside in favor of arguments concerning the materiality of the signifier, the body, and more recently the materiality (externality) of ideology (specified in recent work by Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek among others). And of course, students of popular culture have noted Madonna's assertion that we are "living in a material world." What has, to a great extent, slipped under the radar of debates around the body, signification, and ideology is the vexed question of the psyche and its supposed evanescent qualities. Why does the psyche continue to be thought of as a non-material entity? The place of psychic activity and the Freudian and Lacanian topographies of the psyche are regularly excluded from the domain of the material, including the materiality of the signifier. We are all familiar with Lacan's commonplace: "the unconscious is structured like a language." Surprisingly, that notion has not been significantly challenged, though Jean-Luc Nancy and Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe did so in a cogent piece entitled "The Unconscious Is Destructured Like An Affect," which struck a sympathetic chord in this writer, though this is not the place in which to elaborate further on that striking piece.

One of the few cultural theorists, who have consistently, if not deliberately, demonstrated the materiality of the psyche rather than its non-material quality is Teresa Brennan. Beginning with her path-breaking "The Interpretation of the Flesh" and the subsequent "History After Lacan," Brennan has published several essays in which she takes for granted the materiality of the psychic. And this is as it should be. To read Brennan is to grapple with a thinker for whom my earlier question has already been answered. Taking up the question of affect and its relation to feminism, we might say that the old Cartesian mind-body split, far from disappearing, has moved elsewhere: it is now, in the late modern era, an ego-unconscious split that posits men as subjects of rational thought (the processes that take place in the ego, all the while chided along by the super-ego) and women as subjects of affect (located in the unconscious and therefore considered "out of control"). What do these observations have to with a "psychic materialism"? Brennan answers that question quite persuasively in linking the physical and the economic to the psychic. Her argument consists in showing how Freud's concepts of freely mobile energy and bound energy are the two energetic forces that govern the movement of psyche. She links an increase in bound energy to the slowing down of energetic forces in the psyche and in the zeitgeist. Her discussion of "psychic forces" hinges crucially on the latter term of that phrase: forces. She begins with the assumption that just as a reductive biologism cannot account for gender differentiation nor can an exclusion of the social and material. However, she takes this line of thinking one step further by insisting that the material processes of the psyche project their force outwards onto the "material world" in which they have their real (in the non Lacanian sense) and quite definitely material effects upon the technologized and built-up modern environment. One usually expects to find, in neo-marxist, feminist criticism the well-rehearsed argument that the speeding up of everyday life in the west since the Industrial Revolution has had deleterious effects on the psychic life of the gendered subject. Brennan suggests, in a somewhat disturbing move, that the reverse might also be the case. In other words, the process of alienation (in the marxist sense) is a two-way one: between the psyche and the "outside world." By invoking the Freud's notions of psychic forces, she insists that the "traffic between the biological and the social is two-way; the social or psycho-social actually gets into the flesh, and is apparent in our affective and hormonal dispositions." In other words, for Brennan, the psyche and its powerful forces are material in much the same way as a tree or a rock. From this, we can infer that affective responses, indeed affect itself, is located in the domain of the material. The importance of such a claim for cultural studies is, I would argue, that it reclaims psychic processes for a materially grounded historicity. Instead of relegating the psychic, and to a great degree, the psychoanalytic, to the realm of pure theory, it places the force of the psyche squarely in the realm of the material. The psyche has already been granted, as it were, the dignity of a political formation. In Brennan's previous and highly innovative forthcoming work, the psyche's materiality will perhaps be taken seriously by even the staunchest of marxist historical materialists. Marx himself said the "only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain." Why? Brennan's work will help cultural studies answer that enigmatic but important question, as well as many others that have yet to be asked.

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REFERENCES:

• Teresa Brennan. "Psychiatry Without Boundaries," Revue d'Ethnopsychiatrie, forthcoming
• --------. "Why the Time is Out of Joint: Marx's Political Economy without the Subject." South Atlantic Quarterly, v. 97, n. 2 (Spring 1998)
• --------. Interpreting The Flesh: Freud and Femininity (NY: Routledge, 1992)
• --------. History After Lacan (NY: Routledge, 1993)
• Ernesto Laclau. "The Death and Resurrection of the Theory of Ideology," Journal of Political Ideologies, v. 1 n. 2 (1996)
• Jean-Luc Nancy & Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe. "The Unconscious is Destructured like an Affect" (Part I of "The Jewish People Do Not Dream"), Stanford Literature Review, n. 6 (1989)