Abstract
Anna Secor’s ‘Spacetimeunconscious’ offers a groundbreaking intervention into the fields of material and psychoanalytic geographies. Following Karen Barad and Jacques Lacan, she develops a concept of the unconscious that takes place within matter itself. In this commentary, I add some questions, loose ends, and fragments to the theory-building patchwork of Secor's paper.
With her recent paper, ‘Spacetimeunconscious’, Anna Secor (2025) has published a groundbreaking intervention into both material and psychoanalytic geographies. Joining a series of excellent and thought-provoking publications, Secor now challenges us to take a fresh look at what surrounds us, constitutes us, and yet lies beyond us. I can hardly find better words to describe the quality of this text than Karen Barad's words on one of her own essays: ‘[t]his article is a patchwork’ (2015: 406). ‘Spacetimeunconscious’ is a patchwork, a montage, consisting of disparate parts that ‘arise from divisions or cuts’, but this does not mean that these parts are ‘spatially or temporally’ separated (Barad, 2015: 406). What we are dealing with are not ‘individual bits and pieces but a phenomenon that always already holds together, whose pattern of differentiating-entangling may not be recognized but is indeed re-membered’ (Barad, 2015: 406).
Form and content of ‘Spacetimeunconscious’ speak to each other in an extraordinarily harmonious way. This is almost ironic because Secor's whole argument renounces any kind of harmony, and yet there is something pleasurably coherent and almost symbiotic about how the writing and its content are woven together. Just as the enigmatic figure of the spacetimeunconscious cuts through various kinds of matter, sporadically appearing and disappearing in the fractures and gaps of different seemingly unrelated events, the argument in the paper unfolds through the cuts between the sections, thereby turning the experience of reading itself into an event of some sort. Just as the spacetimeunconscious transcends the realm of meaning and representation and ultimately cannot be fully understood, so too the paper remains partially incomprehensible, thereby making it impossible to seamlessly follow its reasoning. Just as the spacetimeunconscious rejects any notion of wholeness and completeness, so too the paper remains a fragment. So, how to comment on this paper without making the mistake of trying to ‘fully’ get it? In what follows, I will not attempt to capture Secor's argument ‘as a whole’ but rather to patch together some loose thoughts that came up during my reading.
With the discovery of the unconscious, Freud unsettled the space of the social in its very foundations. If people had previously thought that they would have some sort of control over themselves and their environment, it was now clear that they were not ‘masters in their own house’. Secor's intervention reads as an attempt to radicalize this very starting point of psychoanalysis by stating that it is not only ‘us’ who are not masters of our own house, but the house itself that is unable to master itself. It is not only humans who are unable to control themselves and their environment, but something about matter (understood as ‘spacetimematter’) itself that prevents it from reaching equilibrium. Reversing a famous phrase from Hegel, one might say that the unconscious no longer holds true ‘only as subject, but equally as substance’.
In the abundance of rich examples sprinkled throughout the paper, it is Secor's introductory reference to water forgetting how to turn into ice that already impressively succeeds in situating her argument. When water cools down, the molecules do not quite ‘know’ how to join together in order to create a stable structure, which is why it needs a nucleator with a solid texture, often a piece of ice itself, which allows them to ‘remember’ how to become ice. What we are dealing with here is, according to Secor, a ‘knowledge that does not know itself’. The water is not certain how to become ice, so it takes a degree of communication to get there. An implication underlying this argument is that the environment, in this case water, is just as full of errors as human beings. Nature is not the harmonious background that stands apart from the chaotic hustle and bustle of society, nor is it in balance following its inner laws; rather, nature is just as contingent, incomplete, and fragile as culture and society are. Secor captures this ‘lack in nature’ when she highlights that even water is not ‘supposed to know’, and thus lacks a firm and stable instinctual foundation, or that lightning knows ‘nothing of the ground’ before it hits the earth. In Lacanian terms, I read this part of Secor's argument as a powerful statement that ‘the big Other does not exist’ – neither in culture (Kingsbury, 2017) nor in nature (Pohl, 2020). The big Other would indicate that there is an indissoluble and consistent ‘ground’ that constitutes a firm ontological basis for both knowledge and action. The absence of such a foundation is precisely what ‘Spacetimeunconscious’ allows us to take into account.
While I completely subscribe to the idea of recognizing material reality as just as inconsistent as psychic realities, I see a certain risk in ‘substantializing’ the unconscious qua ‘Real unconscious’ (Secor, 2025). A problem that arises from essentializing the unconscious is that we risk falling behind one of the key moments where Lacan passes beyond Freud, namely, his withdrawal from any biological or phylogenetic roots of the unconscious to the primacy of the signifier. To assume that there is an ‘unconscious knowledge in the ongoing articulation of the world’, an ‘unknown knowledge outside the symbolic [that] hooks directly into the matter of what happens’ (Secor, 2025), means somehow losing the Lacanian Real in its classic sense, understood as the cut, deadlock, or impossibility at the heart of the symbolic itself. I wonder whether the Real at stake in Secor's spacetimeunconscious rather resembles a Deleuzian–Guattarian inflection of the Lacanian Real, in the sense that we are here dealing with the pulsing material intensity of becoming. While Lacan treats the Real as a form of radical negativity and impossibility, Deleuze and Guattari rather treat it as a realm of pure positivity, a single plane of creation and endless possibility. I wonder how Secor's argument relates to this. While she insists that the unconscious is not subject to any notion of wholeness, which is also expressed through her ‘method of the cut’, I wonder if there is still a notion of ‘pure’ materiality taking place in this approach. In other words, if it is true that ‘the fundamental axiom of materialism [for Lacan] is not “matter is all” or “matter is primary,” but relates rather to the primacy of a cut’ (Zupančič, 2017: 78), would Secor advocate for such an ‘ontology of the cut’ as the basis of her method?
This leads me to the question of relationality. New materialisms are often addressed as radical relationists who do not know anything but relations. One of the consequences of this relational ontology is the renunciation of any ‘outside’. As Barad (2011: 150) puts it, ‘[t]here is no outside of nature from which to act; there are only “acts of nature”’. If everything comes down to nature, however, we may lose track of both the unnatural aspects of nature and the inhuman aspects of human life. How is it possible to bring together the dreaming in Auschwitz with the forgetfulness of water, if not by implicitly assuming that both are situated on the same structural level, as ‘acts of nature’? How can we maintain a (political) position in this thinking that enables us not to ‘naturalize’ things? Is the spacetimeunconscious leading to such a ‘naturalization’ of the unconscious? Or does it still rest on a notion of the (constitutive) outside?
More generally, what is the difference between the not-knowing of water, electrons, and other non-human matters and the not-knowing of humans? Secor seems to suggest that there is no difference. At this point, I would take a different route. While I fully appreciate the idea that not-knowing is a kind of unifying factor that connects humans with all other matters, it seems at the same time crucial that humans know about their lack of knowledge in a different way than others. As Slavoj Žižek (2020: 151–152) puts it with regard to the difference between animals and humans, ‘animals simply don’t know, i.e. they don’t know that they don’t know…while humans know they don’t know, they register their not-knowing and are in search of knowing…This registration is precisely the unconscious’. How does this assertion relate to Secor's spacetimeunconscious? Does the spacetimeunconscious imply a kind of ‘registration’ of matter's own not-knowing and its search for knowledge? Or does it neglect this moment of ‘registration’ as being immanent to the (human) unconscious?
While I agree with Secor that psychoanalysis always contains ‘more’ or ‘less-than-more-than-human’ elements, I would still insist that a psychoanalytic approach allows us to rely on the distinctive features of human beings. The psychoanalytic notion of becoming-humans stands in clear contrast to the cliché of the modern image of humans as superior beings, placed above and beyond (non-human) others. Human beings are special not because they are in a position superior to inorganic matter, or because they are marked by divine purpose, or because they are able, by means of their spirit, to control and master the world around them. Rather, psychoanalysis allows us to argue that compared to other animals (as well as other non-human beings), humans are more radically marked by failure. Human exceptionalism, the ontological distinction between human and other-than-human matters, derives from lack: The human subject is exceptional not through its mastery over the rest of the natural world but through its monopoly on failure. Though other animals fail all the time – deer are eaten by lions, polar bears don’t catch enough fish to survive, dogs slip on the wet ground, and so on – these failures are empirical. No other animal has failure written into its structure in the way that the human subject does (Eisenstein and McGowan, 2012: 196).
This brings me to a final question: what kind of subjectivity is doing the (patch)work in Secor's account? Who speaks here and ‘(re)distributes the human and the nonhuman as fragments: unfolds them, flays them, stuffs and stitches them, rearranges them’ (Secor, 2025)? My wild guess would be that it is the Cartesian subject (in Lacan's ‘subverted’ form, of course) quietly walking in through the back door here. Who else could so smoothly navigate ‘between the tense sky and the interested earth, between ice and Auschwitz’ (Secor, 2025)? If such ‘an “inhuman” standpoint…already implies a pure (Cartesian) subject, the only one able to occupy this position’ (Žižek, 2020: 362), is it this particular ‘inhuman’ standpoint that enables us to position ourselves as the agents who (re)assemble all kinds of human and non-human matter, thereby following their patterns of differentiating-entangling in order to approach the spacetimeunconscious?
