PGC2020
Erica Burman: Lockdown Vistas: Time, Space, Solidarity, Action
If the lockdown experience is one of occupation, or colonisation, then such identifications are worth reflecting upon. In this paper I consider what the current pandemic state, and nation states, are doing to our states of mind. Attending in particular to the role of vision and embodied action in the elaboration of individual and group subjectivities. I explore three different, albeit all psychoanalytically-informed, frameworks to think these questions through: Fanon’s psychoaffective discussions of colonialism, group analytic discussions of median, as well as small and large groups, and Lacan’s model of group constructed individual subjectivity. In all these, vision turns out to inflect and produces group and individual subjective possibilities, including of and for solidarity – which, from both Lacan and Fanon, turns out to be both a subjective and objective matter. I suggest that, together, these ideas might support critical thinking about nationalist, as well as global, collectivities and agendas we are being recruited into, that might, in Fanon’s terms, help turn reaction into action.
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