Consciousness as claiming: Practice and habit in an enigmatic world

A question of composure

What does it mean to lose composure? Or perhaps the question is better phrased in its reverse: what does it mean when we have composure? To be composed does not mean to put on a mask or construct a persona in the Goffmanesque (1959) sense of the term. Rather it suggests a kind of gathering up: we collect ourselves by smoothing out our features, re-pinning our hair, wiping our brow. We pull ourselves together after we have slipped and let our body express its excessive affectivity. Composure also suggests a composition that is a wholeness that is transparent about its constituent parts. Thus, we talk about the composition of a painting, a piece of music or a living cell; creations where we see the different components working together, the intricacy and balance of delicate engineering; background and foreground, colour and texture, grammar and syntax. Even as the whole shines brightly, we continue to see the elemental ingredients. Thus, composure does not mean letting some inner immutable self-shine through. It is not the durable core beneath a fluid skin. It is always something collected and held in a manner where the arrangement is an obvious part of its construction. There is a vigilance at the heart of composure, a monitoring over potentially porous or transgressive borders. While composure may or may not be the result of a self-conscious plan (a pre-imagined concept, idea or identity that is corporeally actioned), it is no doubt the result of a watchfulness – a concern for one’s integrity.

I raise the question of composure because it is a phenomenon that I think illuminates both the promise and limits of approaching and understanding subjectivity through the lens of habit and practice. Indeed, if there were a conceptual current that summarises the zeitgeist in geography (and contemporary social theory more broadly), it would surely be the rise of interest in the practical, corporeal and broadly pre-cognitive nature of social life. While such topics have a long history in philosophy – appearing in different ways in the work of Hume, Bergson, Dewey, Pierce, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu and Deleuze – the interest in the social sciences has been more recent and part and parcel of a broader ontological turn. In geography, it can be seen in the non-representational work of Thrift (2008), McCormack (2002, 2005), Dewsbury (2003, 2011, 2015) and Bissell (2012, 2013, 2015) and in anthropology in the work of Ingold (2000, 2007, 2011), Kohn (2013) and Renfrew (2004). While there are significant differences among these authors, what they have in common is a conceptual perspective that does not begin with thought but with non-reflective actions, what Kohn (2013) calls ‘thought … at rest’ (p. 51). Social life, it is suggested, is predominantly thoughtless. And consciousness is a second order phenomenon, emerging from engagements that are practical and primary.

The phenomenon of composure, I would argue, complicates this division. On the one hand, composure is habitual. It is something learned by doing and emerges in relation to immediate situations. But composure is also something more than habitual. Composure, after-all, is something done in public. It is out-facing, something put forward or displayed. This is why it tends to be treated with some suspicion, i.e., as something feigned or acted. As Phillips (1993) suggests, composure is neither an active performance of identity nor an unconscious self-arrangement. Rather, it signals a far more basic hypostatic event. To compose oneself is a gesture of self-possession. It reveals a primordial proprietary desire. When we lose composure we say ‘we lose our-self’. And when we regain it we say we ‘pulled our self together’. The composed subject is not simply aware but attentive. She is not simply self-perceiving but self-possessed.

The central concern of this paper is not about composure per se but about consciousness more broadly and what it means to be a self-conscious subject. This is a grand theme no doubt that continues to bedevil psychologists, neuroscientists and philosophers of mind, but it is a topic that geographers and anthropologists are already engaged in – a phenomenon we are already theorising. In the endeavour to outline and illuminate the habitual, practical and non-cognitive nature of everyday social existence, geographers and anthropologists put forward theories that illustrate how self-consciousness arises out of corporeal unreflective activity. My issue here does not concern the order of this relation. I essentially agree that subjects are practical first and reflective second. Thus, it makes sense to theorise self-consciousness as something emergent and incidental. That said, I do have a concern about how consciousness itself is conceived in the practice/habit literature. Specifically, I contest the idea that consciousness is primarily an event of self-awareness; an event where the subject comes to recognises itself as an ‘I’ in the midst of its practical life and in and amongst material relations. The central critique of this paper is two-fold. First, it argues that the event of consciousness is not one of self-awareness but self-possessiveness. Consciousness is what I term a claim; declaring oneself as a self vis-à-vis other beings. To be clear, I am not arguing that consciousness equates with being or becoming self-possessed. On the contrary, consciousness is only ever a claim – i.e., it is a contention, an act of staking some ground on the self. The second argument is that practical and habitual doing is not a ground for consciousness. While this paper acknowledges and affirms the significance of practical/habitual life, it argues that consciousness emerges in response to an enigmatic dimension – i.e., a dimension that transcends the material affordances of the world. Consciousness, therefore, is precipitated not by the body and its activities but by reckoning with the existential limits of that body and its work. Taken together, this paper’s central contribution is to provide a distinctive conception of consciousness (as a claim) which emerges in and through practice/habit but whose origin resides outside that worldly context. Consciousness is more than simply being aware. It is an event of ownership or, more accurately, the event of desiring ownership. Consciousness marks an ambition to take hold of oneself – to claim oneself against the ethereal mysteries that would steal our subjectivity away.

The argument is developed through four sections. The next two sections focus on elaborating the literature on practical engagement (Practical consciousness section) and habit (Habitual consciousness section), respectively, primarily in cultural geography and cultural anthropology. While there is much overlap in these literatures and their separation is somewhat artificial, they provide slightly different perspectives on the significance of the practical, habitual and corporeal nature of social life. The aim of the Mystery within the material section is to examine the question of mystery and its relationship to consciousness. It begins by illustrating how the habit-practice literature’s conception of consciousness is limited by the material nature of the encounters it explores. By drawing upon the work of Nancy (2000, 2008) and Eduardo Kohn (2013), this section illuminates the dimension of mystery that haunts the material world and the potential it has to instigate consciousness in a different key. The final section (The ego and the enigmatic critique section) draws upon the psychoanalytic work of Jean Laplanche (1999) to properly theorise the relationship between the dimension of mystery discussed in the previous section to a conception of consciousness. Specifically, it argues that self-consciousness emerges in tandem with the subject’s unconscious recognition of itself as abiding within a world whose material gifts are unaccountable and mysterious. It concludes by arguing that consciousness is not simply an awareness of the self but a desire; an ontological wish to be self-standing and self-possessed in the face of the world’s mystery. In doing so, this section provides a proper theoretical account of what I mean by the claim and how it potentially opens the door to begin thinking about issues of identity and representation from a different theoretical ground.

Practical consciousness

The first domain of theory I want to explore is the practical engagement literature. There are without question a number of sub-literatures within this catch-all term, for instance, the environmental perception literature represented by Ingold (2000, 2011) and Eduardo Kohn (2013), the more-than-human wing of non-representational theory, represented by Hayden Lorimer (2006), Jamie Lorimer (2012), Whatmore (2002) and Hinchcliffe (2008), as well as the material engagement movement in archaeology, represented by Renfrew (2004), Knappett (2005) and Malafouris (2013). For simplicity sake, much of the discussion here revolves around Ingold who operates as a strategic anchor for discussing the significance of the practical, the material and the corporeal in the constitution of social life. The first half is a review of some of Ingold’s key insights before moving on to elaborate these insights and how they inform a particular perspective on questions of consciousness.

To be sure, Ingold’s (2000) dwelling perspective is now familiar ground in anthropology, archaeology, geography and beyond. Familiar to the point that it seems redundant to review it here even as it operates as the key theoretical touchstone for this literature. In brief, Ingold argues that the dominant representationalist paradigm that defined anthropology in the 1980s and 1990s was founded on the idea that the cognitive precedes the practical. Thus, what subjects express in their narrative, ritual and material culture is a projection of an internalised architecture of meaning and significance. In this framing, subjects work first and foremost from mental schemas; ideas, imaginations and expectations learned from normalising routines and reinforced through practice. Drawing upon the phenomenological tradition of Heidegger (1996) and Merleau-Ponty (2002), Ingold (2011) argues that social life is not primarily cognitive but practical. Using Heidegger’s famous example of the hammer, Ingold reminds us that subjects do not require a mental schema of a hammer to use it. On the contrary, the hammer only makes sense as it is picked up and put to task in a world were hammering projects exist. ‘The forms people build’ Ingold states, ‘arise within the current of their involved activity, in the specific relational contexts of their practical engagement with their surroundings’ (2000: 186). Ingold takes from Heidegger the essential idea that subjects are in the world, meaning that their existence inflects a world where certain projects (being a doctor, a shaman, a peasant or a wife), tools (university, clothes, magic) and capacities (steady hands, spiritual vision, fertility) are always already operative. Our engagement with the world, therefore, is primarily practical, i.e., we use the tools we find to pursue the projects we have been bequeathed.

Beyond this basic description, I would suggest two further features that characterise this literature. First, it often propounds a distributed conception of agency. In an effort to disinvest agency from the individual subject, agency is understood as a system of potentialities that various beings are differentially poised to exploit. This distribution can be thought both vertically and horizontally. The former is exemplified by Ingold’s discussion of an oak tree. Drawing upon Von Uexkull (1957), Ingold reveals the oak to be an entity defined by it various functional tones, providing ‘shelter and protection for the fox, support for the owl, a thoroughfare for the squirrel, hunting grounds for the ant, egg-laying facilities for the beetle’ (2000: 176). Here, the world’s properties and presence are conjured as vertical because they are infinitely deep, revealing themselves only in relation to the needs of other beings that sense and require them. In terms of the horizontal distributions, Whatmore (2002) and Hinchliffe (2008) draw upon the vitalist ontologies of Deleuze (1994) and Latour (1993) to recognise the array of agencies that come together to allow forms of life to transpire. Thus, rather than approaching a spider as a singular being, it can be seen as a composite: a network of biological capacities (its ability to make a web, the hairs it uses to sense) and material resources (window frames, branches, broken cement) intertwining to facilitate existence. In this sense, the agency of the spider is distributed horizontally, incorporating a range of potentialities that the spider enrols to make its way in the world (Ingold, 2008).

The second characteristic of this literature is its emphasis on skill. In an effort to move away from cognitive constructs of experience, this work emphasises practical intelligence, the capacity to know by intuition and corporeal memory. Practical intelligence has a long history in anthropology, particularly in the work of Bourdieu (1990). As another follower of Merleau-Ponty (2002), Bourdieu (1990) likens social life to a game of football; a game that requires an intuitive understanding of how to manipulate oneself in relation to other bodies and the constantly changing dynamics of the field. This intuitive know-how is calculating but not contemplative. It involves applying practical strategies to an intimately understood environment. In a similar vein, Ingold (2011) and Malafouris (2013) illustrate how skill is not simply a learned pattern but a calibrated response to a dynamic context. In Ingold’s (2011) analysis of the blacksmith and Malafouris’ (2013) discussion of the potter, there is a recognition that the various materials involved in these activities are always shifting and the body is in a constant state of adaptation. Thus, there is a dynamism inherent to practical engagement where the skilled practitioner perpetually modifies her comportment to materials in response to their changing conditions.

As suggested above, the aim of this section is not simply to describe this literature but to illustrate the distinctive way it conceptualises consciousness. Here, I draw attention to a final theme in this literature which is the endeavour to erode the division between materiality and mind. In the work of Malafouris (2004, 2013), in particular, he argues that the origin of thought in general (i.e. not just self-conscious thought but all thought) resides in things: ‘human thinking is, first and above all, thinking through, with, and about things, bodies, and others…. Thinking is not something that happens “inside” brains, bodies, or things; rather, it emerges from contextualized processes that take place “between” brains, bodies, and things’ (2013: 77–78). Malafouris illustrates this point in his discussion of knapping: ‘in tool making, all formative thinking activity happens where the hand meets the stone. There is little deliberate planning involved … but there is a great deal of approximation, anticipation, guessing, and thus ambiguity about how the material will behave’ (2013: 176). In emphasising the role of the materials themselves, Malafouris illustrates the difficulty of attributing agency to the craftsman. The existence of the axe in its final form has as much to do with the material as it has to do with the body shaping it. Every mental resource, Malafouris argues, grows out of the process of engagement, that is, out of the meeting between the material (and what it gives and denies) and the body (and what it senses and seeks). This observation leads Malafouris to argue that ‘material culture is consubstantial with mind. The relationship between the world and human cognition is not one of abstract representation or some other form of action at a distance but one of ontological inseparability’ (2004: 58 original emphasis). It is this dedication to distribute the subject that I think is most characteristic of this literature. In the work of Ingold and Malafouris in particular, beings are molecularised into a set of sensations and capacities that meet and entwine with resources found in the world. What I like about this work is how the subject is thought to emerge in and through these material engagements, that is, through connecting. It is the meeting of a resource and a capacity to exploit that resource that sustains life. In this rendering, self-awareness is simply another capacity; an awareness born of problems and the ability to reflect on them.

Habitual consciousness

While the literature on habit shares a number of conceptual touch points with the work on practical engagement, they are also quite different. To some extent, this can be attributed to their distinct lineages. The practical engagement literature draws primarily from the phenomenological tradition as well as from ANT (Latour, 1993), while the habit literature has a more identifiable vitalist trajectory that includes Ravaisson (2008), Bergson (1959) and Deleuze (1991). These differences are reflected in the work in at least two ways. First, the habit literature is less concerned with de-centring the question of agency. As we will see, habit is seen as a particular type of agency that many beings have to differing degrees. In this sense, there is less emphasis on constantly keeping agency divested of any human quality. This leads to the second distinctive feature which is that the habit literature is simply less vexed when it comes to talking about humans. Because habit is taken to be a feature of all living systems there is no danger of being ‘humanist’ when discussing the habitual nature of human behaviour or even how habit informs human consciousness. It is for this reason that the habit literature, I would argue, offers a more comprehensive understanding of human agency and consciousness even as it affirms human existence as primarily habitual.

If the previous discussion is dominated by anthropologists and archaeologists, this discussion is situated more squarely in geography. Although key figures reside in philosophy (see Carlisle, 2010, 2013; Malabou, 2008) and Cultural Studies (see Bennett, 2013; Grosz, 1994), the geographers David Bissell (2012, 2013, 2015) and JD Dewsbury (2011, 2015) have been central in elucidating habit’s distinctive nature and exploring its implications for thinking spatial-practice. Throughout their work, they illustrate how habit should not be thought as a passive rehearsal of norms but as an active modality of engagement with a dynamic world. Felix Ravaisson (2008) is perhaps the most significant character informing their work. While Deleuze (1990, 1991) and Bergson (1959) are also significant, Ravaisson’s focused treatment has made his treatise a central reference point for thinking habit as something more than a short-hand for dumb reiteration. To develop this conception of habit properly (albeit briefly), I will focus on two key features that I think characterise Bissell and Dewsbury’s approach. The first is the ‘double law of habit’ and the second is habit’s ‘intensive’ nature.

The double law of habit refers to the fact that inculcating practices through incessant repetition both refines the body and, in Ravaisson’s terms, weakens passion. As an action becomes second nature – i.e., one that can be performed expertly and without contemplation or thought – the body’s perception of that action lessons to the extent that the movement is no longer felt or perceived. Obvious examples include active habits like riding a bike or passive experiences like working in extreme heat. In either case the weakening of perception is not seen as a negative. On the contrary, it signals the body’s capacity to accommodate and adapt to change. As Bissell (2012) suggests, the double law illuminates the body’s essential plasticity, ‘this is not an elastic body that returns to an originary form but one that becomes modified through repeated practice. Here, habit gathers rather than disperses, holds rather than releases … The force of habit … becomes one of specialization, rather than flexibility’ (no page). Such plasticity allows beings to not simply accommodate to their environment but cultivate resources for further adaptation and change. Thus, it is precisely because the bike rider’s perception of the bike has receded that she is better able to sense a challenging terrain and re-calibrate. In other words, habit extends the bodies capacities rather than dampens or curtails them. As Shapiro (2009) suggests, habit is an abiding resource for adaptation, ‘the ability to receive, prepare and transform difference’ (no page).

The second key feature of habit is its intensive nature. For Ravaisson habit and routine can be found everywhere, e.g., not only in the opening and closing of flowers, the nocturnal and diurnal habits of animals, but also in the metabolisation of nutrients, the division of cellular structures and the vast universe of micro-level processes that allow life to proceed. Thus, habit cannot be thought (nor identified) only in terms of visible routines. As Bissell (2013) suggests, ‘habits comprise not just the actual movement or practice that can be empirically seen or experienced, but the potential for that movement to happen. The repetition of a movement generates propensities and tendencies, and these are virtual forces that entrain and carry’ (p. 141). A simple example of these virtual forces can be found in the phenomenon of me getting out of bed (Bissell, 2012). While this action happens every day and as such can be recognised as a routine, it is by no means a habit nor a highly refined skill. And yet, the actions needed to complete this routine are reliant on a deep hierarchy of pre-perfected capacities consciously pulled together to complete this powerfully willed act. To suggest that habit is intensive is to acknowledge the layers of dispositional tendencies accreted in any movement that carries the body along. The implication of this characteristic is it allows us to see habit as what Bissell (2015) calls a virtual infrastructure: a dynamic and evolving architecture of intensities developing and modulating in relation to emerging situations, circumstances and milieu. Habit, therefore, is not simply the routine contraction of a particular muscle mechanism in relation to a particular encounter. Rather it is a synthesis of diverse dispositions – established through past practice – that can be actualised, adapted and sometimes eroded in response to present problems and impending futures. It is only by understanding habit virtually that we can see it not as a set of structured routines but as a set of material capacities whose actualisation is both dependent on and open to the exigencies of circumstance and situation.

The final concern of this section is how this virtual conception of habit bears on the question of consciousness? For Dewsbury (2015) consciousness is conceptualised as an event that emerges in relation to a particular milieu, that is, it arises as certain virtual capacities are actualised. The perspective is similar to the practical engagement literature in that it is the material affordance immanent to the world, and the extent to which they resist or submit to appropriation, that allows consciousness to appear. Even though habit allows for the ascension of corporeal intelligence at the expense of self-conscious willing, if the materials of the encounter resist, deny or undermine the body’s habitual dispositions, consciousness and self-awareness will arise. Such situations are most obvious when the body endeavours to learn something new or when it needs to adapt to sudden change, as Dewsbury (2015) suggests, ‘the sense of self … comes about as the body becomes aware of the physical effort to do something when encountering the resistance in any sensation-perception of objects’ (p. 38).

While this approach to consciousness is similar to the practical engagement literature – in that it conceptualises consciousness as something that arises in response to specific circumstance or milieu – the habit literature also understands consciousness as something that emerges and recedes. As Carlisle (2008) notes, Ravaisson makes no clear distinction between habit, instinct, consciousness and willing. Indeed, for Ravaisson the difference between these states is one of thresholds, what he calls a matter of degrees: ‘it is by a succession of imperceptible degrees that inclinations take over from acts of will’ (Ravaisson, 2008: 55). Thus, the movement from habit to will is always in flux, always moving in relation to what is in need of address, i.e., in relation to the milieu and the demands that a milieu makes upon the body and its dispositions. The idea that consciousness emerges and recedes in relation to various obstacles presents us with a conception of consciousness that is essentially responsive. It is something that arises in degrees and in relation to the manner in which it is called. What I like about this notion of consciousness is it presents the origin of awareness and willing not within the body but within the world itself. Consciousness is a modality of cognition that emerges in response to being called in a particular manner. The aim of the remaining sections is to illuminate other ways that the world calls us and seeing how these calls elicit their own distinctive mode of self-awareness.

Mystery within the material

To briefly summarise, the aim of the last two sections has been to illustrate how corporeal theories of subjectivity conceptualise the emergence of self-consciousness. In the practice literature, bodies are composites and consciousness emerges when the relational structures that hold them together are blocked or disjoined. In the habit literature, bodies are a virtual infrastructure and consciousness emerges and recedes in relation to the pressures, problems and obstinacies of the world. In either case, self-consciousness is conceptualised as something that arises in relation to exteriority that is in relation to things, obstacles and blockages outside the subject. The aim of this section is to conceptualise exteriority differently and in doing so, lay the groundwork for an alternative conception of consciousness.

The central argument of this section is that the concept of exteriority that arises in the work of Bissell, Dewsbury, Ingold and Malafouris is one where the subject and the world are in relation. In other words, exteriority is understood primarily in material terms, that is, subjects emerge through touching; self-awareness waxing and waning in relation to the world pressing on the body. This is not to deny the way this literature explores the world’s resistance to connection. But such resistances appear as a feature of the world’s materiality itself rather than as something that transcends its immanent form. In other words, the literature does not address how the world also denies being touched or how it withdraws, completely and utterly, from relation. As Nancy (2008) suggests, in every event of touching, the body touches upon what cannot be touched, a dimension of the material that closes itself to all touching. In his discussion of his heart attack in L’Intrus (2000), Nancy illustrates how the experience of feeling his own heart (the feeling of it touching him) allowed him to recognise it as something that withdrew from his possession. Rather than his heart being part of him, an intimate component of his being, his heart revealed itself as an intruder, something foreign and utterly outside his dominion. The heart that sustained his existence revealed itself as something that could never be his, i.e., something enigmatic in its operation and direction. The point is that in touching – in feeling the touch – of those material agencies that engender our existence, we feel their connection and their withdrawal. We recognise them as elements of our existence and as things outside us, as things that have a life of their own, unaccountable to us or the urgency of our reliance. Indeed, it is precisely because the material agencies that sustain my life are agencies – i.e., that they have their own lives – that they also reveal themselves to be profoundly mysterious and distant.

To illustrate this conception of exteriority further I want to discuss Eduardo Kohn’s (2013) wonderful book How Forests Think. I have chosen Kohn’s text because it exemplifies the promise of thinking culture, consciousness and subjectivity through a framework that emphasises the significance of our material relations. However, I would argue that it also illuminates the limits of such a framework. Kohn’s central argument is that for both humans and animals, relations with exteriority are mediated by signs. These signs are not the heavily mediated signs we associate with human symbolism but the simple indexical relations that constitute an everyday component of our conscious horizons – e.g., steam coming off water means heat, the heaviness of air means rain. The world, as Kohn effectively illustrates, is full of such signs; it is laden with signifiers that tell the interpreter (human and non-human) that something is coming. Through his exquisite and intimate descriptions of Avila, a network of small villages located in the rain forests of Ecuador, Kohn elucidates how signs introduce moments of prevarication that engender self-awareness; intervals that connect an event to a potential future which requires a decision. Both humans and animals face these intervals and the decisions they make carry significant consequences. The reading of signs, therefore, is a constitutive event in the emergence of an ‘I’. Signs, in essence, present beings with material problems: they bring them face to face with potential futures, with questions that require an answer, and in doing so elicit whatever thinking capacities are available to respond.

One story Kohn tells takes place during a hunting trip with two informants in the rain forest. When they find a monkey hiding in the canopy, his companion decides to chop down a nearby palm hoping the noise will scare the animal from its roost. Kohn’s interest is in how the monkey interprets the noise of the felled palm. She recognises the falling tree as a sign of danger even as she is unclear about the precise nature of the danger or were it will lead. Thus, the sign of the felled palm is a material/sensory event that initiates a certain anticipation of the future. It leads the monkey to consider her present situation and its potential outcome. ‘We humans’ Kohn states ‘are not the only ones who do things for the sake of a future by re-presenting it in the present. All living selves do this in some way or another. Representation, purpose, and future are in the world – and not just in that part of the world that we delimit as human mind’ (p. 41).

I understand why Kohn suggests that the future is in the world and I agree with him as far as it facilitates a sense of consciousness and awareness in the monkey. However, I would also suggest that his story illustrates how the future is not just in the world. For Kohn the structure of the sign lies in the relations it situates between numerous potential presents – i.e., present possibilities that are illuminated by the material situation the monkey sees. What he does not acknowledge, however, is the relation it sets up with the dimension of the non-present. While the monkey might have the capacity to make choices based on the conditions that present themselves, it is less clear whether it has the capacity to recognise the existential nature of the situation itself, for example the possibility (sadly realised) of its own death. The monkey’s situation, in other words, signifies a dimension of the future that transcends what she can see; a dimension of mystery and silence that inheres in every choice due to the unknowability of the consequences. While I cannot comment on whether animals are aware of this dimension, humans are. And it is precisely this capacity – this distinctive modality of hearing the silence, of being aware of the unknowable – that allows us to see that signs signify more than we can see; that the future is not simply in the world.

To reinforce the point, I draw upon another story in the book. During a bus-ride to Avila, Kohn relates how the bus gets stranded due to a landslide wiping out the road. Trapped by mudslides in front and behind, Kohn’s understanding of the terrain and the carnage he has witnessed by past landslides, instigates in him a profound anxiety, a feeling that is amplified as he realises that he is the only one on the bus that is scared: ‘as my constant what-ifs became increasingly distant from the carefree chattering tourists, what at first began as a diffuse sense of unease soon morphed into a sense of profound alienation. This discrepancy between my perception of the world and that of those around me sundered me from the world and those living in it. All I was left with were my own thoughts of future dangers spinning themselves out of control’ (pp. 46–47). Kohn’s point here is to illustrate how easily our self-consciousness and self-awareness can become unmoored from the material conditions that create them and how easily they can take on a life of their own. His anxiety is interpreted as thought unanchored; a set of cultural, linguistic ideas spinning away from his present material situation instigated by the discordance between his own internal anxiety and the lack of anxiety he finds in those around him. I, however, have a different reading.

Kohn’s anxiety was a response to the future possibilities that could not be seen – that withdraw from sense and that could not be touched. While it may be true that his anxieties were unmoored from his material situation, they were no less unmoored than the lack of anxiety exhibited by the tourists. In other words, the futures Kohn foresaw (and the futures that the other tourists did not see) were possible, even as they were mysterious. The landslide opened a sign where the future that was seen by most (we need to turn around, we need to stay the night, our trip will be delayed, these things happen) was haunted by other possibilities; futures that could (perhaps) happen; futures that transcended what could be seen. Indeed, what Kohn’s encounter with the mud reveals is not a loss of relation with the material conditions (or with those around him on the bus), but rather a recognition of that with which he had no relation, a dimension that defied relation. The mud and its potential sliding had no relation to Kohn, to the tourists, to his anxieties or their good humour. It stood outside those relations and those relations had no bearing on whether the mud slid or not. Thus, while I would agree that material problems do give rise to modalities of self-consciousness, I do not agree that this is always a matter of relation. The world precipitates consciousness, I would argue, precisely because it eludes relation, i.e., because it stands outside us. Kohn was at the whim of mud and gravity in the same manner that Nancy was at the whim of his heart. He was brought face to face with his own incapacity – of his vulnerability and exposure to agencies that were utterly unaccountable to him, his anxieties or his fellow travellers. This is a world over which he had no purchase and no power. It was not something he could lay hold of but, as Levinas suggests, it laid hold of him (Levinas, 1987). Thus, I interpret Kohn’s anxiety not as an attunement to a broken relation but to a recognition of relation’s absence. While the mud appeared as a sign, it was a sign that pointed to the limits of signification, i.e., to that which Kohn could not see; the outer limit of Kohn’s capacities and relations. In this sense, Kohn’s anxiety illuminates a dimension of exteriority that lies not only beyond the material but beyond relation, i.e., beyond what he could touch, feel or see, but that nonetheless appeared to him, if only as a silence or shadow.

In sum, the point of this section has been to illustrate that in and among those signs that allow self-awareness to arise, there is also darkness, a dimension of mystery, that withdraws and denies relation. While the world appears as gifts and light, it is its unaccountable temperament, the fickle nature of its bounty that reveals it as mysterious. The world’s materiality is a vision of beneficence and plenty hiding an arcane and unreliable origin. With every touch, we tap upon that which we cannot touch. And if self-awareness arises out of external relations that are essentially material then what kind of awareness or consciousness might arise from that dimension which denies relation – from that which withdraws from touching? How do we understand our self, our body and our world when we sense this distance? Such awareness, I would argue, summons a different and distinct modality of consciousness, what I have termed claiming.

The ego and the enigmatic critique

As suggested in the introduction, the central argument of the paper is that consciousness emerges as a claim – a gesture of self-possession. Drawing upon the psycho-analytic work of Jean Laplanche, this section properly describes the relationship between the dimension of mystery (discussed above) and consciousness (as a claim). Specifically it develops Laplanche’s idea that the ego emerges in response to signs that are cryptic and undecipherable – what he terms enigmatic.

Understanding Laplanche’s notion of the enigmatic begins, somewhat obliquely, through his discussion of trauma. For Laplanche, one of Freud’s most ingenious insights concerns how trauma arises not from one event but two. The first event is the one we commonly think of as the traumatic event; an event that overwhelms the subject because it defies their capacity to understand it. For example a child who is exposed to sexual assault, a natural disaster or any situation where normalcy is radically overturned. In these contexts, the subject does not have the faculties to process what has occurred and the event is repressed. The event is removed from consciousness because the subject lacks the capacity to reckon with it effectively. The second event of trauma reminds the subject of the earlier occurrence. This event may be violent or trivial but it triggers a reminiscence and in doing so releases the original feelings of disequilibrium and vertigo. In this sense, Laplanche remarks that Freud understood the original event as something that sits in the unconscious ‘like a foreign body which long after its entry must continue to be regarded as an agens that is still at work’ (Freud quoted in Laplanche, 1999: 65). The trauma is thus alive but dormant, what Fletcher (1999) calls a strangeness or foreignness that sits at the heart of the subject’s psyche waiting to be awoken.

Laplanche’s (1999) reinterpretation of Freud’s conception of trauma is predicated on two manoeuvres. The first is a radical expansion of the initial traumatic episode. While Freud understands this episode as a specific event, Laplanche conceptualises childhood in general, and infancy, in particular, as traumatic. Childhood, according to Laplanche, is the experience of being surrounded, infiltrated and overwhelmed by that which one does not understand. The adult world, Laplanche explains, is full of signs, signals and messages that the infant cannot comprehend. While adults have learned (to varying degrees) to cope with the unconscious signalling sent by other adults, infants have no such capacities. They sense their arrival, but cannot process their content. The messages of adult life are as mysterious as they are ubiquitous. The example Laplanche (1999) often draws upon is breastfeeding: a practice which releases a surfeit of conflicted messages signalling love, sexuality, anxiety, frustration and repression. While these signs are not conscious they nonetheless impose themselves on an infant who “possesses neither the emotional nor physociological responses which correspond to the…messages that are proposed to it” (Laplanche quoted in Butler, 2005: 72). In this sense, the first traumatic event is instilled from infancy. The infant’s primary experience is that of being overwhelmed by signs whose content is enigmatic.

The implications of this position are not simply that infancy is universally associated with trauma. More importantly, it situates the unconscious as something wholly formed by exterior agencies. As Thomas (2014) suggests, for Freud the unconscious, genetically and intrinsically, belongs to the subject: Freud ‘comes to assign a “mine-ness” to the unconscious’ (Thomas, 2014: 204). Laplanche, however, situates the unconscious as constituted by an enigmatic outside. Thus, ‘the unconscious is never one’s own’ (204), i.e., it does not belong to ‘me’. For Laplanche, the unconscious is a repository of all that the subject is given (without asking) and cannot sublimate. This framing helps us understand Laplanche’s second manoeuvre which concerns the constitution of the ego. For Laplanche, the ego manifests the desire to make the unconscious comprehensible – i.e., it is how the subject contends with being overwhelmed. As Laplanche states, ‘the small human being has to cope with … strangeness. And his way of coping with this strangeness is to build an ego … [The ego] is bound to the very fact that we have to cope with the strangeness’ (Caruth, 2014: 30). In this rendering, the ego is built to respond to the enigmatic and its effects. The ego is not a self-sustaining architecture but emerges as a means to manage, suffer, endure and wrestle with that which it cannot comprehend. It is built to take hold of itself in the face of too much otherness. As Butler (2005) puts it, it is the experience of ‘having been given over from the start that an “I” subsequently emerges’ (77).

The relationship Laplanche establishes between the enigmatic and the ego is thus a paradoxical one. On the one hand, the ego is utterly dependent on the enigmatic. Its emergence originates in the enigmatic messages of the other and the mysteries therein. On the other hand, the ego is a psychic structure designed to limit or contain the enigmatic. As Laplanche (1999) suggests, ‘the development of the human individual is to be understood as an attempt to master, to translate, these enigmatic, traumatising messages’ (165, also see Stack, 2005). The operative phrase here is ‘attempt to master’. As a response to the traumatised unconscious, the ego arises to bring the enigmatic into the sphere of comprehension, making its messages legible, understandable and manageable. And yet, this is a gesture that must (by definition) fail. Silencing the enigmatic – i.e., making the enigmatic no longer enigmatic – would erase the ego’s own raison d’etre. Thus, even as the ego arises (as a capacity) to master the enigmatic, this is a task that must be interminably delayed. The ego can never reach consolidation and completion since doing so would mean silencing the enigmatic summons that is its source. As Hinton (2009) suggests the enigmatic, ‘plagues us like an ongoing riddle’ (641). Like Freud’s foreign body, the enigmatic calls the ego into existence and yet forbids its realisation. This is why Laplanche describes the ego as emerging on a ‘Copernican stage’ (p. 82): a stage where it is sustained by that which is forever outside it, the earth orbiting around its source while imagining it is the centre of its universe (also see Thomas, 2014). Thus, while the ego is born as an agent of self-mastery and self-possession, it must fail to realise its purpose. It is Sysiphysian in its manner and direction – striving and failing and striving again.

To conclude this section, we can see how Laplanche’s conception of the ego provides a useful theoretical lens for understanding the central argument of this paper, i.e., that self-consciousness is a claim. While subjects no doubt cross numerous thresholds of self-awareness through bodily encounters, the claim signals another dimension of consciousness; a modality of knowing where the subject becomes not only conscious of itself in the world but aware of the precarity of that situation; aware of its utter and complete dependence. Laplanche’s unconscious is one that recognises its being as at risk, i.e., as reliant on and exposed to an enigmatic outside over which it has no understanding or recourse. In this context, the ego emerges as an attempt to master; an ambition to understand, comprehend and translate the enigmatic dimension with the purpose of making it legible and thus sublimatable within a subject’s capacities. It is for this reason that I specifically use the terminology of claiming. For Laplanche, the ego is always an ambition; an emergent desire to bring the self into consolidation and completion in the face of that which always undermines it. The term claim captures this tension between desire and failure. On the one hand, to claim is to assert; to make a pronouncement or gesture that is positive and strident, e.g., ‘I claim this title’, ‘we claim this land’ or as the run-away slave Sethe reflects in Beloved ‘bit by bit … she had claimed herself’ (Morrison, 1987: 94). But on the other hand, to claim is an allegation. It is an attempt, and thus, appears as something questionable, perhaps even dubious and deserving of scrutiny, e.g., an insurance claim, a legal claim or Twain’s famous distinction between those who do things and those who claim to do things. Understanding the emergence of self-consciousness as a claim means understanding it in both senses, i.e., as something that should be taken seriously (in its strident positivity), but also something dubious and of questionable ontological standing. Claims are summoned by the enigmatic to answer the mysterious problems the enigmatic presents. But they provide no answers – only claims to answers. They cannot silence the call that is the subject’s origin nor put to rest its enigmatic nature. But they can respond. While such responses may be strident, they are utterly vulnerable. While they appear autonomous, they are wholly dependent. The claim to self-possession – i.e., to being a self-standing, consolidated being – is a subject’s only possible response to the enigmatic. But it is only ever a claim. It expresses a desire that must be expressed but cannot be fulfilled.

Conclusions

As stated from the beginning, the aim of this paper has not been to deny the primacy of corporeal existence. I agree that beings exist through the composition of material agencies and/or the actualisation of virtual infrastructures and I also agree that non-cognitive engagement with these agencies constitutes our dominant mode of being. But there is a difference. At the heart of this paper is the suggestion that the question of consciousness is of a different order. While it may be true that ascending thresholds of awareness emerge in and through non-reflective life, the question of consciousness is a question about why we claim that life; why we identify the body with which we sense and feel as our own body that is as something that is ours? Such questions, I have argued, emerge from the elusive nature of our material relations rather than their transpiration. While Kohn argues that every material encounter embeds a sign, I would add that it also embeds the absence of signification; silent questions echoing in and amongst the world’s noise. ‘An earthquake’ Laplanche states, ‘could be taken in as a message, not just something that is factual, but something that means something to you … something where you must ask a question – why this? why did this happen to me?’ (Caruth, 2014: 33). Feeling the world tremble beneath our feet is an event that poses practical problems (to be sure) but also existential ones: how do I exist in a world whose foundations are so fragile? How can I live in the midst of such fantastical, mysterious and overwhelming agencies? Thus, while self-awareness may indeed emerge from negotiating the practical obstacles of an earthquake, self-consciousness (i.e. the inclination to claim oneself) emerges from the enigmatic dimension of those obstacles: the recognition that the resources that the world provisions are not our own, that we cannot master the world or that which it gives; that we are in fact at its mercy. These questions are ones that cannot be answered. They recede from us, and in doing so, summon consciousness not simply as self-awareness but as something more desperate and grasping. They call the ego forth as a means to pull oneself together; as an attempt to master a world that interminably eludes us.

In conclusion, I want to acknowledge the broader disciplinary context that informs this paper, particularly the long-standing trend in geography towards exploring the non-representational dimensions of social life at the expense of the representational, as if the former can supplant the latter. My aim in developing the above argument is no doubt to say something about the nature of consciousness, but it is also to make a broader point about the potential touch points between representational and non-representational theories; touch points that I think can take geographers back to questions of signs and meaning without falling into a representational trap. The key, I would argue, lies in the above quote by Laplanche: ‘an earthquake could be taken in as a message’. Laplanche’s point here is not that the earthquake signifies – or at least not in the traditional sense of that term. Rather, the earthquake is a message that has nothing to say. It is a message that simply raises questions and points to limits. Throughout this project I have endeavoured to attend to the sign’s enigmatic dimension – i.e., that aspect that does not signal or denote, but on the contrary, frustrates all such determinations. Thus, while the enigmatic appears within the space of the sign – i.e., it is illuminated within the event of signification – it itself does not represent. Rather than appearing as a chrysalis of folded inter-textual significance, it appears as an impenetrable fossil, promising a message that cannot be cracked. This is where I see the overlap between representational and non-representational work. In illuminating the limits of representation, I have endeavoured to reinforce how we live in a representational world. Even if the origin of consciousness does not reside in representation, it arises through representation. In other words, representation still matters. Signs provide the means for subjects to be subjects – i.e., for them to make claims about themselves and their world within comprehensible terms. By framing consciousness as such, my hope is to provide a means for geographers to not only continue exploring the still unmade bed of human subjectivity, but return to questions of identity, landscape and representation anew – i.e., to consider the significance of claims (ours and others) and the political situations they engender.