UC Davis

Abstract:

Social theory has attachment issues. But we’re not there yet and I need to explain. Over the last 25-30 years the widely read work of important scholars like Judith Butler and Lauren Berlant has installed attachment as a critical affective form and theoretical concept for social theory. Judith Butler places ‘passionate attachment’ at the heart of subject formation and Berlant has gone so far as to suggest that our social theory might be best derived from ‘scenes of attachment.’ Despite these valuable articulations around the importance of attachment, there has remained relatively little direct engagement with the empirical archive of attachment research itself.

Drawing on fieldwork, research training and footage of the Strange Situation Procedure, this dissertation offers the empirical archive of attachment as an affordance for social theory. The project is animated by my work as a practicing psychotherapist and intermedial artist. It is further configured by the fact of my being a parent, partner, lover, and former-infant. In light of all this, I locate us amidst an attachment milieu that is personal, political, and aesthetic all at once. The archive of developmental attachment research reveals pattern and form in the strategies infants use to navigate their primary relationships. And while we will come to recognize, understand, and think through these forms of attachment behavior as a kind of sensible data, my scope extends beyond questions about the epistemics and performativity of social scientific knowledge production. What I mean to say is that I am not only interested in what empirical research has to say about infant-(m)other relations, but in the aesthetic relationship between researchers and their objects.

This project approaches the Strange Situation Procedure as both an empirical artifact and an aesthetic object, locating the procedure alongside three other technological objects from the psychoanalytic hall-of-fame: Freud’s spool, Lacan’s mirror, and Winicott’s transitional object. Attachment theory and research is historically positioned as rematerializing the dematerialized (m)other of psychoanalytic object relations and recovering the importance of the environmental milieu and material care. After returning to the work of Butler and Berlant, I then go on to show that attachment is a scene of ongoing technological and aesthetic formation. I conclude with a discussion regarding our attachment relationship to the ‘algorythmic object’ and offer a treatment of the term ‘remediation’ as it may pertain to the psychodynamics of human functioning and aesthetic production.