RELATED TERMS: Actantiality; User; User-Centred and User-Driven Design Practices
What is at stake in this post is whether it is valuable to explore a re-articulation of user-centred design and the notion of affordance through certain concepts borrowed from psychoanalysis. This may enable a conception of how designs intervene in the psycho-drama of the subject in its social operation and the formation or individuation of the self as person and persona. Through these means, the notions of ‘use’, ‘the user’ and utility can be transformed through a re-contextualisation in terms of actantiality.
One way of expressing this is to say that the ‘I-the-user’, the assumed identity of the pragmatic-utilitarian subject, has to be seen alongside other aspects of the contemporary 20th and 21st century Western subject which, according to Ragland-Sullivan (1987: 10), continues to be, “a mixture of the medieval ‘I’ believe; the Cartesian ‘I’ think; the Romantic ‘I’ feel; as well as the existential ‘I’ choose; the Freudian ‘I’ dream and so forth.” To these aspects, Luepnitz (2009) suggests we might add the Winnicottian ‘I’ relate and the Lacanian ‘I’/it speak(s).
It is especially the differences between the Winnicottian and the Lacanian approaches understanding the subject that are taken here to be most important for this re-articulation of the utilitarian ‘I’ use. Let us begin with Deborah Luepnitz’s portrayal of a major difference between the thought of Donald Winnicott and Jacques Lacan. Luepnitz (2009: 964) states that,
“For Winnicott, the central drama will turn around the infant’s loss or feared loss of maternal connection. For Lacan, while loss is obviously important, something even more profound is at stake – the lack built into subjectivity by the mere existence of the unconscious.”
The unconscious for Lacan is ‘the discourse of the Other’, the radical otherness through which the subject comes into existence.
One way of understanding the difference between lack and loss may be to conjecture that the Winnicottian approach emphasises the constitution of the subject through the formation of the body, the gradual assumption of a separate and distinct body that is one’s own, while Lacan’s focus is on the constitution of the subject in language, the gradual assumption of an ‘I’ who speaks.
Both the body and language, however, as Agamben (2016: 80-94) argues, are ‘inappropriable’: that which one assumes to be one’s own, ‘my body’ and ‘my speech’, is only accessed through the externality and commonality of ‘the (m)other’s body’ and the ‘(m)other tongue’. The relation to one’s body, for example in the case of need, as discussed by Levinas, cited by Agamben (2016: 85), reveals that the body,
“is a field of polar tensions whose extremes are defined by a ‘being consigned to’ and a ‘not being able to assume.’ My body is given to me originarily as the most proper thing, only to the extent to which it reveals itself to be absolutely inappropriable.”
(Agamben, 2016: 85)
Loss and lack, then, are important concepts for conceiving what it is that designs, whether as artefacts, services or systems, do for the subject and the self in being ‘used’. Through that interaction, they may, for example, be said to replace the ‘lost object’ of the self and/or to ‘fill’ the ‘hole’ at the centre of the subject. That may define the character of their ‘promise’, what they seek to provide as ‘gift’, that is, a supposedly restored but in fact inaugural and imaginary, ‘wholeness’. Designs, in being appropriated, seem to offer a way to resolve the inappropriability of the self-subject.
Both loss and lack, in different ways, highlight the self and subject, firstly, as processes and, secondly, as processes of exosomatisation: the bodily dependence of the self and the subject on the world with its other bodies, that into which the self and the subject have been thrown, from which they emerge, in which they seek to attain a degree of self-suffiency and agency. However, to be an agent, to have self-motivation and self-control, is, simultaneously, to be a subject in a symbolic-political order, to be subjected to that order, to be limited by the laws of that culture (Luepnitz, 2009: 963). This is to highlight both the impossibility of total self-sufficency and yet its persistence as an object of desire. This tension is one aspect of what marks and articulates actantiality as conditioned and conditional agency.
References
Luepnitz, D.A. (2009). Thinking in the space between Winnicott and Lacan. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 90 (5), 957–981. DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-8315.2009.00156.x.
Ragland-Sullivan, E. (1987) Jacques Lacan and the philosophy of psychoanalysis. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
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