I am the ambulance that never comes, the antidote you spill

I will be the razor, baby, I will be the pill
I am the ambulance that never comes, the antidote you spill
And in the accident, I'll be the failure in your brakes
I am the truth you couldn't take, I am the mistake
Worst you ever made

The ancient Greek notion of the pharmakon refers to something which is both poison and remedy. It captures a sense that what can heal in the right amount and under the right circumstances might harm in the wrong amount and under the wrong circumstances. I understand Derrida’s interest in the concept to be a matter of the instability of categorisations of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (‘healing’ or ‘harmful’) such that we can’t sustain a clear boundary between them. For a critical realist there’s a weaker version of the same point which stresses how much of the substance of these outcomes depends on the circumstances in which the object is drawn upon and what for what purpose.

When I first heard these lyrics I thought ‘pharmakon’. The person who resolves to be both razor and pill certainly has this status but the next lines refer to something quite different. These are about a failed promise, a thwarted rescue, an expected salvation interrupted at the last moment. There’s something of cruel optimism about this in the sense of an object that impedes or refuses exactly the hope underpinning the attachment. I don’t think this is quite right either, in the sense that I understand Berlant’s notion to pertain to a more diffuse sense of flourishing i.e. the thing that I hope will expand the parameters of my existence actually prevents that expansion. That’s more like a failure of Bollas’s transformational object. The point when we realise we have to let go of the thing we thought would make life better precisely because we still believe can and should be better.

So what is ambulance that never comes? The antidote you spill? It’s the moment of imagined rescue that fails to arrive at the last moment. The sense that “all will be well, all manner of things will be will” thanks to this impending intervention. But then… it doesn’t arrive. Or you spill it. It fails. It’s not that it couldn’t do what you hoped it would do. But that something about the circumstances or the timing meant that potential couldn’t be realised. It’s not that it was false, as much as that it was a truth that couldn’t be taken at that minute. This is far more tragic I think because it’s the unrealised potential. Tracy Chapman’s fast car is an object that once worked but now doesn’t whereas this is an object that could have worked but didn’t. The temporal structure of the experience is different because there’s nothing from the past to hold onto that can condense into the present. It’s more like smoke you tried too hard to hold, to use one of my favourite Brian Fallon lyrics. It’s harder to metabolise a counterfactual.

I wonder if we need a taxonomy of failed transformational objects. From the transformational object which no longer sustains transformation through to the conservative object misidentified as a transformational object (cruel optimism) and the missed transformational object which only exists in the future anterior.