Adaptation Period

Abstract

This article sets the scene for a contemporary crisis of authority, orientation and shared symbolic anchors by moving between personal narrative, songs, contemporary intimate practices and the figure of Jessica from Lena Dunham’s series Too Much, who serves as a guiding thread throughout the text. Drawing on psychoanalysis and contemporary theory of affect it asks what happens to subjectivity when traditional structures – such as family, education, religion, institutions, social roles – shiver and no longer provide a shared stable framework. This crisis is not only understood historically or sociologically, but also through Lacan’s concept of lack as constitutive of the subject’s formation: the subject emerges through a separation from plenitude and the recognition of the impossibility of being a whole with the mother, through the mediation of language and the inscription/establishment of the symbolic order. In this sense, the “Adaptation Period” moves from the maternal to the paternal as a way of examining how the subject is formed through lack and loss, learning and prohibition, and most importantly through address and vocal mediation: from the first scene of feeding, to demand and dependency, to the structuring intervention of the Name/No-of-the-Father. Our first relationship to voice is both intimate and external, bodily and symbolic, affective and disciplinary: it is one of the initial scenes through which the subject encounters care, separation, authority and desire. The disruption of symbolic anchors can therefore also be read as a neoliberal effect in the perturbation of the subject’s formation through voice: a weakening, or even a rupture, in how lack is named, mediated or, to put it simply, made bearable.