Atomic Subjects

What is a ‘subject’? Those with any recent academic training in the arts and humanities have probably had exposure to ideas regarding this concept that derive from twentieth century continental—mostly French—philosophy. Closer to psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, especially the Lacanian variety, is deeply concerned with the nature of the subject.

But if you don’t have this background, as is the case for most people, including most mental health professionals, then you probably don’t know that I am referring to something that relates to concepts such as ‘person’, ‘self’, ‘individual’, etc. The concept of the subject is a very useful version of all of the above because it is inherently systemic, and thus it is inherently complex. It is also inherently relational, making it, I believe, a fundamental concept for psychotherapy.

As previously indicated, the subject is the object of substantial philosophic and psychoanalytic literature.¹ I am not going to be engaging with that material directly here, though of course I am deeply indebted to it. And just to demonstrate how central I think the concept of the subject is for modern intellectual history, let me offer a brief chronology of this history by way of the concept:

• Descartes (1596 – 1650): the subject of Thought
• Hobbes (1588 – 1679): the subject of Power
• Spinoza (1632 – 1677): the subject of Reason
• Locke (1632 – 1704): the subject of Experience
• Leibniz (1646 – 1716): the monadic Subject
• Hume (1711 – 1776): the sympathetic subject
• Smith (1723 – 1790): the sympathetic (economic) subject
• Kant (1724 – 1804) : the subject of Knowledge
• Hegel (1770 – 1831): the subject of (spiritual) History
• Darwin (1809 – 1882): the evolutionary subject
• Marx (1818 – 1883): the subject of (material) History
• Nietzsche (1844 – 1900): the subject of the Will
• Freud (1856 – 1939): the unconscious subject
• Heidegger (1889 – 1976): the intentional subject
• Lacan (1901 – 1981): the subject of the Unconscious (structured as a language)
• Sartre (1905 – 1980): the authentic subject
• Bowlby (1907 – 1990): the attached subject
• de Beauvoir (1908 – 1986): the feminine subject
• Merleau-Ponty (1908 – 1961): the body as subject
• Deleuze (1925 – 1995): the subject of Difference and Repetition
• Fanon (1925 – 1961): the colonial subject
• Foucault (1926 –1984): the subject of Discourse
• Derrida (1930 – 2004): the de-centred subject
• Badiou (1937– current): the subject of Truth
• Dawkins (1941 – current): the genetic subject
• Stiegler (1952 – 5 August 2020): the subject of Technology
• Butler (1956 – current) – the gendered subject

In what follows, I intend to explain the concept of the subject through a critical reading of a poem. This means that I will be trying to teach you two things at once: how to understand the concept of the subject and how to undertake a critical reading of a poem. If you feel you have nothing to learn about either of these things you may want to stop reading now. If you choose to continue, please understand that my intentions here are pedagogical and expository, and that my style will, therefore, reflect this.

Now the poem I intend to use for these purposes is ‘The Nevada Glassworks’ by Joshua Clover.² Before going any further, I invite you to read that poem here. By reading the rest of this blog post you will essentially be re-reading the poem along with me, so it is important that you give yourself the chance to read the poem by yourself on your, and the poem’s, own terms before I subject you to mine.

Before diving into a reading of this poem and, thereby, a demonstration of what a subject is, I want to explain why I think this concept is such a crucial version of ideas or concepts like ‘person’, ‘self’, or ‘individual’. The word ‘subject’ takes these other concepts and makes them relational. A subject is always subject to or a subject of, some other thing or things. When I taught undergraduate students I would introduce the concept in precisely this way, and then provide examples such as being the subject of a political ruler (i.e. the subject of the king or queen); being subjects to the laws of a country, or being the subject of a (linguistic) sentence. What is important to recognise in general terms is that what a subject is, is not self-contained. A subject is subject to rules and relations beyond the boundaries of the body, or the person or the individual (especially as conceived in cultures dominated by liberal ideals of the individual as some kind of sovereign entity). The subject is, on the contrary, ‘ex-centric’. It is worth remarking that this quality of being subject to is not merely a kind of cause and effect determinism. Being subject to something is, in an important sense, to be constituted by and of that thing. So when Freud demonstrates that we are subjects of our unconscious³ and Lacan shows how the unconscious is structured like a language,⁴ there is, as consequence, an important sense in which we are subjects of language. A further consequence that follows on from this is that we are as much spoken as speaking—and much more the former most of the time.

I have stated that the concept of subjectivity is of importance to psychotherapy. This is because it helps us make sense of human experience. Given that poems, as well as other works of art, are the products of human experience, we can often learn a great deal about subjectivity and the concept of the subject by attending carefully to what poems say and how they say it.

So let’s take a closer look at Joshua Clover’s poem, ‘The Nevada Glassworks’—which you have of course read by now. To begin, I recommend you ask yourself the following questions about the poem:

1. What?

‘What is this poem about?’ is not quite the same as ‘What does this poem mean?’, but it is a related question. ‘What is this poem about?’ is a ballpark question—i.e., is ‘The Nevada Glassworks’ a poem about growing old or is this a poem about police violence?

2. When?
3. Where?

‘When?’ and ‘Where?’ are setting questions, and setting is about time and space. So, when and where is this poem set?

4. Who?

‘Who?’ is a question about persons or person-like features of the poem. There is always at least one ‘who’ in a poem—the ‘speaker’ or ‘poetic voice’. This is not the same as the author of the poem—the human being who composed it. The speaker, by contrast, is, in a way, composed by the poem. The speaker is the minimal point of enunciation created with every poem. To what extent this speaker resembles an actual person would need to be judged on a case-by-case basis. The least that can be said is that the speaker is a textual artifact, and an implied language-user. The speaker can, in turn, represent other persons or person-like entities in the poem—‘characters’. In each case there is a representation of mind through language. (This is one thing that connects poetry—and literature more generally—to the thinking and practice of psychotherapy.)

5. How?

‘How?’ is the preeminently literary question in the list. It is the question that will rapidly take us into the specialised terrain of poetics, rhetoric and literary criticism. This can be an invaluable site of enquiry, but it also rapidly becomes very technical. Better to set ‘How?’ aside for the time being.

(If you would like to amplify the pedagogical effects of reading this post then I suggest you try answering the above questions for yourself—actually commit your responses to writing—before reading any further.)

Let’s apply the above questions to ‘The Nevada Glassworks’ now.

1. What is this poem about?

The United States of America, popular culture, history, adolescence. . . . That’ll do for now.

2-3. When and where is the poem set?

The poem tells you in the first two lines: ‘Nevada! . . . /August, 1953’ (ll. 1-2). (That forward slash is used to indicates a line break in the poem, and the details in parenthesis indicate the line numbers where the quoted words can be found in the poem—one el (l.) indicates a single quoted line, whereas two els (ll.) indicate multiple quoted lines.)

4. Who? ‘Mom’ of course! She’s 13 years old (l. 3). Then there’s the speaker, the voice of the poem. But we will learn everything we need to know about the speaker by attending to the poem as a whole. The other ‘persons’ worth mentioning, are actual historical persons that help to set the scene. The poem uses them to teach us about mom and her world: Elvis (l. 6), The Beatles (l. 7) James Dean. . . . The historical scope of this poem’s range of references mean that it actually refers to millions of anonymous people. But we’ll get to that. You’ve got a foundation for making sense of the poem now.

Let’s hazard a first exploration of ‘How?’ Something about the poem that is worth remarking on from the outset is what can be referred to as ‘tone’—the literary equivalent of tone of voice. This poem’s tone appears to be very unserious. ‘Ka-Boom!’ (l. 1), ‘Ker-pow!’ (l. 5), ‘Ka-Blam!’ (l. 10), ‘Vroom!’ (l. 41), ‘Shazam!’ (l. 47). (We could call this ‘comic book onomatopoeia’—onomatopoeia being a technical literary term for those words or phrases that denote sounds while simultaneously resembling those same sounds when the word is pronounced. The word ‘hiss’ is a good example: pronouncing the word ‘hiss’ itself produces a hissing sound. Figure 1 offers an example of this.⁵) But this unseriousness is only apparent because this is a deeply, and darkly, serious poem.

‘Ka-Boom!’ obviously represents an explosion. An explosion of what? We’ll come to that. But for now, make a mental note that explosions are a kind of extended metaphor in this poem, forming a chain of semantic equations. At least one explosion referred to in the poem is a population explosion, the generation of a generation: the baby boomers. The cultural reference points of this generation are Elvis, The Beatles, James Dean. Notice how they are counterpointed with historico-political ones: ‘Elvis, ditto “Korean / conflict,” John Paul George Ringo Viet Nam’ (ll. 6-7). The references to these countries are, of course, also references to wars: the first war tends to be forgotten but demonstrated that 1945 did not mark the end of world war, only its transformation;⁶ the second war is well-remembered and came to define a generation.

Let’s offer a provisional statement about the subject of ‘The Nevada Glassworks’: mom is a cultural subject, and she is a geo-politico-historical subject; she is a subject of her culture and a subject of her geopolitical moment in history. (Notice how this is a demonstration of that idea of ‘ex-centricity’ I previously claimed as a defining quality of the subject: what she is is located somewhere outside of her; her place at the table has already been set before she arrives at the party.) The poem uses ‘mom’ as a focal point for her cultural and historical context.

Mom is also ‘innocent’ (l. 6). This could mean many things, but I am going to focus on innocence in terms of knowledge. Her innocence is a kind of ignorance. I say it is a kind of ignorance because it is an ‘unknown known’: it is an unconscious knowledge.⁷ She is a ‘pre-PostModern new teen, / innocent for Elvis, ditto “Korean / conflict,” John Paul George Ringo Viet Nam’ (ll. 5-7). The unconscious knowledge here is doubled in sexual (Elvis and the Beatles) and geopolitical (Korea and Vietnam) terms. (My reading of the poem won’t explore this much, but it may be worth remarking how all those explosions may have another, sexual, meaning too.) As we will come to see, this cultural-historical meaning is doubled yet again because this innocence in the form of a lack of knowledge is also a lack of self-knowledge. Remember that, being a subject, mum is subject to what constitutes her, and Clover’s poem shows how she is constituted by culture on the one hand and history on the other—whether she knows it (or likes it) or not.

In answer to the question ‘Where?’, I said Nevada, but that isn’t quite right, because the locus of the poem is split between Nevada and ‘Clover / Ranch in . . . Central Valley’ (ll. 16-17), California. So too is the action. What is the action of the poem? To answer this question it helps to ask another. What are the Nevada Glassworks of the poem’s title? What kind of work is performed at the Glassworks? What are its actions? Notice the relevant words: ‘making’ (ll. 1, 21, 33); ‘Transmutation’ (l. 4); ‘blowing’; ‘exhale’ (l. 30); ‘dropping’; ‘turns’. Creation words. Transformation words. Living words. Also, as we will come to see, annihilation words. These are words that the poem uses to describe something outside of it while also using them to constitute itself as an artistic object.

The Glassworks—euphemistically—represent something else. That something else did in fact produce glass, and a material artifact of the Cold War. The Glassworks of the poem are a reference to the Nevada Test Site, located about 100 km north of Las Vegas, where, between 1952 and 1991, over 900 explosive nuclear tests were conducted. The ‘glass’ being referred to is, or is something like, trinitite, which was first recorded after the Trinity nuclear bomb test of 1945: the intense heat of that explosion melted the sand of the desert floor leaving behind a substance with many glass-like qualities.⁸

‘When?’ is also an important part of the poem’s setting, and the year 1953 has significance beyond the Nevada Test Site:

• January 7 – Harry S. Truman announced the United States has developed a hydrogen bomb (which had been tested at Enewetak atoll on November 1, 1952.)
• August 8 – Georgi Malenkov announced that the Soviet Union has developed a hydrogen bomb.
• August 12 – RDS-6s, the first Soviet thermonuclear weapon test, is detonated at Semipalatinsk Test Site, Kazakh SSR.
• October 30 – Dwight D. Eisenhower approved NSC 162/2, which argued for the United States’ maintenance and expansion of an arsenal of nuclear weapons to counter the communist threat of the Soviet Union.
• December 8 – the ‘Atoms for Peace’ address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City delivered by U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower.⁹

Understanding this meaning behind the word ‘glassworks’ is the semantic key to the poem, and once turned, the wheels of meaning in this poem start turning. All of those creation and transformation words were referring—at one level—to the material production of a new substance on the desert floor at the Nevada Test Site. Who is responsible for this production? The ‘alchemists/& architects of mom’s duck-&-cover/ adolescence’ (ll. 12-14). Notice how there is a level shift here—as if the poem were changing gears. Alchemy and architecture are not activities confined to purely material production. Both involve the material, but they include spiritual and intellectual production as well. The poem signals this when it elaborates what exactly these producers do produce: ‘mom’s duck-&-cover adolescence’. In other words, what they produce is an entire generation of people. Mom symbolises this generation: the baby-boomers. You ought to know that the reference to ‘duck-&-cover’ has a very specific historical meaning: ‘Duck and Cover’ was a 1952 United States civil defense film that educated children about self-protection in the event of a nuclear explosion: you ‘duck [your head] and cover’. So a ‘duck-&-cover adolescence’ is an adolescence spent under the shadow of nuclear annihilation. So what is being (re)produced here, according to the poem, is not merely glass, but also people—‘persons’—whose self-hood is not so enclosed, not so individual, but which is subject to the world-changing ramifications of nuclear technology. What the poem reveals is the production of what we might call ‘atomic subjects’. . . .

The alchemists and architects are also, apparently, transforming cities: ‘they’re making Las Vegas/ turn to gold—real neon gold’ (ll. 14-15). Notice the outstandingly compressed version of this doubling of material and immaterial meanings with ‘real neon gold’—an oxymoron (a verbal contradiction in terms) since ‘neon gold’ is precisely not ‘real’ gold. At the same time, it is real because Las Vegas is a place of illusion, a place of fantasy where the lines between what is real and what is not get blurred. The flashing neon lights of Vegas’ casinos are the material instantiation of all this.

There is a kind of dialectic between the material and immaterial throughout this poem. ‘[R]eal neon gold’ is one useful marker of this because a few lines later we read that ‘they’re making crazy ground-zero shapes / of radiant see-through geography’ (ll. 21-22). The quintessential materiality of the earth, its geography, is being dematerialised, being made transparent. And notice how this is experienced by the character—the subject—of the poem: mom is feverish (l. 23), and like the earth before her, ‘feels transparent, gone’ (l. 27). She even forgets ‘to breathe’ (l. 28). Meanwhile ‘the factory glassblowers exhale’. . . . The system of production doesn’t forget to breathe. We might even venture to say that the system of production has more vitality that the entities it produces.

But what is also produced, the poem asserts, is ‘a philosopher’s stone, a crystal ball, / a spectacular machine’ (ll.31-32). The philosopher’s stone was an alchemical idea: an imagined substance that could transform base metals into precious metals such as gold. The pursuit of this substance, never obtained, generated various by-products—one of which was the modern discipline of chemistry. In a similar way, the development of nuclear weapons has generated various by-products: trinitite is one, but what I have called ‘atomic subjects’, occupying an atomic future, is another. This helps us make sense of the ‘New World glass’ from line 11 of the poem. It is not simply that this glass is produced in what was once known as the new world—the Americas—but that the production of glass is simultaneously the production of a new, atomic, world. The poem spells it out for us: ‘It’s the Future’ (l. 42). This atomic future is mom’s land, her geography, the ground beneath her feet—the foundation of her being. ‘This land is your land/This land Amnesia’. There are a range of references here that deserve unpacking,¹⁰ but I want to draw your attention to that word ‘Amnesia’—capitalised, because where one would expect ‘America’, one instead has ‘Amnesia’. As another great literary chronicler of American culture has put it:¹¹

There’s only four things we [Americans] do better than anyone else

music

movies

microcode (software)

high-speed pizza delivery

Clover’s poem registers this with its reference to popular culture: comic books, music, movies (and digital media today) all function as de-historicising amnegens. This too is a matter of production, though. Recall how the factory glassblowers produced a ‘spectacular machine’ (l. 32)? We might understand this to mean that the machine itself is a kind of spectacle. And the mushroom cloud has most certainly always functioned in this way.¹² But ‘spectacular machine’ could also mean a machine that produces spectacle. Could the geopolitical and the cultural be a part of the same ‘complex’. Could the ‘Glassworks’, be a cipher for a complex of what Eisenhower called the ‘military-industrial complex’¹³ AND what Horkheimer and Adorno called the ‘culture industry’¹⁴—something that conceals its transformation of reality through spectacular cultural (re)productions of that same reality: ‘a picture-window where/ the bomb-dead kids are burned & burn & burn’ (ll. 48-49)?

I have spoken about ‘atomic subjects’, but the phrase is a kind of contradiction in terms because the ex-centric nature of the subject (which Clover’s poem amply demonstrates) does not cohere with the meaning of a-tom (‘un-cuttable’ from the original Greek) as something that cannot be further decomposed. The subject is already fissured through the network of discursive and historical relations with which it is fused.

I said at the outset of this blog post that the concept of the subject was an important one for counselling and psychotherapy, and that it is not adequately appreciated outside of psychoanalytic circles. Some of you may still be wondering why. It’s because it’s a crucial concept for good formulation in mental health, and because good formulation remains the most daunting task for all professionals in the field of mental health.¹⁵ Formulation is essentially a response to the following question: ‘Why does this patient suffer from this (these) problem(s) at this point in time?’¹⁶ Or, as Tra-ill Dowie likes to phrase it, ‘Why is this patient presenting in this place and this time in this way?’ This question is difficult to answer because the answer, finally, lies outside the compass of psychotherapy—to believe otherwise is to banalise the question with professional interests. This is because, as Dowie puts it, the question is properly speaking a ‘cosmological’ one—one whose answer takes us back to the beginning of the universe—or perhaps beyond.

This is why a psychotherapist, if they are to practice well, must formulate well. It is also why any psychotherapist worthy of the name doesn’t have any choice in the matter: they must—kicking and screaming all the way if necessary—dare wisdom.

References

1. 
   Nick Mansfield, Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway (New York: NYU Press, 2000); Kim Atkins, ed., Self and Subjectivity, 1st edition (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005). ↩︎
2. 
   Joshua Clover, ‘The Nevada Glassworks, 4cc’, The Iowa Review 22, no. 2 (1 April 1992), https://doi.org/10.17077/0021-065X.4149. ↩︎
3. 
   Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (First Part), vol. 4, 24 vols, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1953). ↩︎
4. 
   Jacques Lacan, ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’, in Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, by Jacques Lacan, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), 197–268. ↩︎
5. 
   Sol Harrison, ed., Shazam! (New York: National Periodical Publishers, 1973). ↩︎
6. 
   Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles (London: Penguin Books, 2003). ↩︎
7. 
   Slavoj Žižek, ‘What Donald Rumsfeld Doesn’t Know That He Knows About Torture and the Iraq War’, In These Times, 21 May 2004, https://inthesetimes.com/article/what-rumsfeld-doesn-know-that-he-knows-about-abu-ghraib. ↩︎
8. 
   ‘Trinitite’, in Wikipedia, 8 March 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php? ↩︎
9. 
   ‘1953’, in Wikipedia, 13 March 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php? ↩︎
10. 
    Woody Guthrie’s song, ‘This Land Is Your Land’, a response to Irving Berlin’s ‘God Bless America’. The latter contains the lines ‘God bless America, land that I love/Stand beside her and guide her/Through the night with a light from above’ that appear to reference the lines from Exodus 13:21: ‘And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night.’ Pillars of cloud and fire are a vivid evocation of the mushroom cloud, and so the reference to Guthrie appears to accomplish a kind of elaborate poetic self-reference, whether intended by Clover or not. ↩︎
11. 
    Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (London: Penguin Books, 2011). ↩︎
12. 
    Andrius, ‘Nuclear Tourism In 1950s Las Vegas’, Demilked, 2 June 2016, https://www.demilked.com/nuclear-tourism-1950s-atomic-bomb-las-vegas/; Laurence Topham et al., ‘Building the Atom Bomb: The Full Story of the Nevada Test Site’, the Guardian, accessed 22 October 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/sep/21/building-the-atom-bomb-the-full-story-of-the-nevada-test-site. ↩︎
13. 
    Eisenhower’s ‘Military-Industrial Complex’ Speech Origins and Significance, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg-jvHynP9Y. ↩︎
14. 
    Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 1st edition (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2007). ↩︎
15. 
    G.C. Smith, ‘Revisiting Formulation: Part 1. The Tasks of Formulation: Their Rationale and Philosophic Basis’, AUSTRALASIAN PSYCHIATRY, 2014. ↩︎
16. 
    The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists. Formulation Guidelines for Candidates. Melbourne: The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, 2012. ↩︎