Note on the middle ground

Complement to Seeking stability

We compulsively and constantly try to create meaning so to gather a proper context for action. As our paradoxical state is undermining the adhesion of cognition to sensorimotricity, we might often lose our sense of coordination and orientation. When we take a speech, the content might be secondary. What we value is how it situates us in action, how it engages our body’s image in time and space. Hence, this is the value of this action that is in question.

Trauma, as we saw, informs us of alterity. It is the elaboration of a topology around the formation of a contrast. Something touches me and I have to situate myself after this touch. The identification with the origin of the touch has failed. Beyond the momentary unity with my own physical reaction, there is the persistence of having to respond later on to some kinf of status quo, to find some balance out of this live and imprescriptible experience. Yet a response is always an elaboration to a context regulating interactions. We create meaning in order to remind us of how to situate ourselves to this context (that is most likely to crystallise social representations), then the event in itself is pushed back to a secondary space and time for action, pertaining to the hermeneutic or cognitive-semiotic field.

As Darian Leader justly reminded in a recent article on the coronavirus pandemic : ‘In infancy, we do not learn safety via trial and error, running into the street to learn that cars are dangerous.  Rather, we learn safety by learning to obey, so that the rules of safety are effectively the rules of obedience.  Now, if a child later runs across a busy road on its own, it may be more fearful of a parent finding out than of being hit by any vehicle.’¹ It thus becomes more urgent to remind oneself of the injunction to obey the prescribed conduct than to actually mind what is physically imminent to us.

It is interesting when we think of some practices and philosophies of meditation or martial arts that imply the central idea of a middle ground, for instance when we inspect the traditions of Madhyamaka or the history of Taoism and their implications through time to the creation of Zen philosophy in Japan and later on, of Aikido by ōsensei Morihei Ueshiba. The whole philosophy of the Middle Way is about finding a neutral ground. It takes on the situation of the body in its (cultural) context of co-interpretation and seeks the minimal possible response. It also brings out, in some of those philosophies, poetic representations of elementary forces that enable an imaginary to develop in projections relying less on social interactions than on natural ecosystems, seen as original free of moral debt and possession.

The purpose of those philosophies may help answer a few questions : If the conditions set for my response become primary to the physical situation that I am confronted to, what does it say about the value of my action when I make my response ? Is the latter really fit to the situation, or does try to comply first to external social imperatives that I internalised throughout my being taught to ? How can I use a middle ground to answer them both on an equal term of treatment ? Can I respond to the actual physical situation and its possible social interpretation the same way ? Where do sensorimotor experience and symbolic crystallisation come to meet that I could join, rather than swinging from one to another ?

As a dialogue would involve what we put in common in the intermediary space between ourselves and others, there might be a confusion whether what we actually engage in our action belongs to us or to someone else’s determination – even a symbolic entity holding authority over us, either transmitted from our parents or the authorities above them. Do we have the authorisation to engage this part in their name ? What is the scene that we try to recreate when we speak, and who do we really have at the back of our mind when we do that ? To whom do we situate ourselves when we respond to a situation ?

To acknowledge that there is a middle ground is precious, because this is the place where it all circulates, where we project our imagination and perpetually put forth our concern for the opinion of others and their state of mind before other concerns. Then the answer maybe is not to declare that ‘I should put myself first’, because saying that is still situating oneself against the domination of an outside force and authority. It is still putting oneself in a system of difference and thus, in the catching of trauma. They would never extract themselves from anticipating others’ reaction to their presence in shared space.

But situating oneself on this middle ground, understanding that is where meaning occurs, where it is all relative, with no absolute hierarchy between the living and the non-living but a variety of movement, that we are at the crossway between our physical experience and its constant submission to co-interpretation, we might be able to observe things more clearly.

What is of my part ? What is of others’ ? What is put in common and what should be reminded to ? Even trauma works out with pain, trying to resume movement that the latter stops. It may diffuse it with anxiety while trying to recreate meaning. But at a certain point, it is good to step out of the workings of trauma in its hold on the diffusing of pain. Trauma, as positive as it can be as an attempt to overcome its source, is nonetheless still defined by pain.
Finding a middle ground is then less an effort to give up on the resolution of trauma, than a place where to acknowledge its embedding of pain into our narrative. It may on the contrary allow us to care about how much we let pain absorb us and define our own situation in time and space toward others.

As long as we produce speech and meaning, we situate ourselves as being constantly and virtually interpreted by others and oneself as someone else. Therefore, being always entangled in that net, we should rather embody it and accompany the circle, as in Aikido’s central teaching, and from there going, pacify aggression.

1In Darian Leader, « Some thoughts on the pandemic », European Journal of Psychoanalysis, August 19^th 2020.

Credit : Cormorans, by La Fille Renne