#widdler

Author: Magda Wisniowska - Munich, May, 2020.

When he was at the station once (at three and three quarters) he saw some water being let out of an engine. ‘Oh, look,’ he said, ‘the engine’s widdling. Where’s it got its widdler?’

After a little he added in reflective tones: ‘A dog and a horse have widdlers, table and chair haven’t.’ He had thus got hold of an essential characteristic for differentiating between animate and inanimate objects.

Thirst for knowledge seems to be inseparable from sexual curiosity. Han’s curiosity was particularly directed towards his parents.

Hans (aged three and three-quarters): Daddy, have you got a widdler too?’

Father: ‘Yes, of course.’

Hans: ‘But I’ve never seen it when you were undressing.’

Another time he was looking on intently while his mother undressed before going to bed. ‘What are you staring like that for? She asked.

Hans: ‘I was only looking to see if you got a widdler too.’ (Freud, Two Case Histories, Little Hans and The Rat Man, 9)

In this way Freud introduces us to Herbert Graf, who in 1906 was a little boy (aged three and three quarters) obsessed with his penis. Through his father’s correspondence with Freud, we get to know the full extent of this obsession, as Freud believes it has a bearing on Little Hans’s subsequent phobia of horses, for which he was subsequently treated and declared to be cured. For Deleuze and Guattari however, it is indicative of one thing only: like all children, Little Hans is a Spinozist.

For us, the steam locomotive is a kind of vehicle we know mainly from history books and film, with great big chimneys bellowing smoke. We know the dog lifts its leg while urinating. The penis is a male organ that also serves as a urinary duct. But for a child, much the same way as for a Spinozist, a locomotive is not too different from a dog, which in turn is not too different from a parent. All exist on the same broad plane of being and on that plane one being could very easily become another, depending on the relation formed between them.

In Spinozian terms, the particular train that Hans saw at the station, the horse or the dog, are finite modes that depend on a prior being for their individual existence. This prior being would be God, with his infinite attributes, the infinite number of ways in which his essence can be perceived. God is the power to actualise, and the modes are one of the effects of this actualised power. But we need to remember that as God’s being is infinite, the number of modes that follow are also necessarily infinite, each attribute expressing an infinite mode. If God is perceived as extension, this extension is expressed in an infinite way as physicality, not physicality generally, in conceptual terms, but as one physical individual, a single infinite continuum of physicality. Physical things—train, animal, parent and so on—are only temporary and changeable expressions of this one continuum of physicality.

What children know is that our world is not necessarily one of distinct individual subjects, with their own thoughts, desires, and dreams. Instead, the whole of nature can be understood as one infinite individual composed of an infinite number of individuals. These can vary in an infinite number of ways, but their variations do not alter the whole that they belong to. As Deleuze and Guattari write,

Thus each individual is an infinite multiplicity, and the whole of Nature is a multiplicity of perfectly individuated multiplicities. The plane of consistency of Nature is like an immense Abstract Machine, abstract yet real and individual… (Thousand Plateaus, 254)