logocentric – Page 91

pluth desire demand

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Act. Albany: New York, 2007.

An identity politics usually makes a demand for recognition by appealing to notions of justice and equality, but there is often something more in its demands. For this reason, the recognition and victories obtained may be unsatisfying, because for many in the movement the movement was not just about the recognition of specific demands. … On Žižek’s account such scissions happen in political movements because there is always a desire lurking behind the demands that group makes: a desire that cannot be satisfied the way a demand can be (1999 Ticklish Subject, 266-268)

This desire is, as Žižek describes it, essentially negative. A movement that would respect the negative desire that constitutes it is one that might demand nothing in particular, yet would still protest. (140)

For Žižek and Badiou, a movement’s inability to articulate a specific demand, in contrast to movements that are quite specific and goal oriented, is an important marker of its political status (140).

Pluth acts do not make a demand on Other for recognition

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: New York, 2007.

True, an act does not produce a subject who is identified with any particular signifier, but it does not produce a subject separate from signifiers altogether either. How can signifiers be used such that they avoid making a demand on the Other for recognition? If an act uses signifiers in a punlike way, and if it does not make a demand on the Other, then what does it do? Is it simply incomprehensible? A meaningless blah blah blah? (139)

Signifiers must be employed in some way in an act, but this does not mean that an act has to fall on either side of an unsatisfactory division: on the one hand, a meaningless, onanistic blah blah blah, in which what is enjoyed is nothing but the sound of one’s own voice; or on the other hand, an either latent or manifest attempt to get recognized by the Other by means of what is being said. As Lacan puts it in one of his late seminars, what he is aiming at is a kind of signifying activity that can be found in “some artistic practices,” one that could be said to be “beyond the symbolic” (XXIV, Ornicar?, 15:12). This does not mean it would be preverbal or nonverbal, however. Lacan says instead that it should be seen as “hyper-verbal,” “a verbal to the second power” (XXIV, Ornicar?, 15:12) (139)

pluth on Žižek badiou the act

Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

Blog post first published May 14, 2009 at 12:04

The tendency in Lacan’s work to argue against identification is something about which Slavoj Žižek is keenly aware, but Zizek takes it too far by making any kind of signifying process apparently impossible for the subject of an act. As Žižek would have it, an act is a negation of any relation to signifiers whatsoever, and not just a negation of a specific configuration of signifiers, characterized by the Other as a guarantee of meaning and recogntion (the Other as subject-supposed-to-know).

If Lacan cannot theorize the positive consequences of an act without collapsing these consequences into merely another identification that seeks recognition from an established Other ( a repetition or reinstatement of some primordial law — the exclusion of the traumatic real), then Lacan’s theory is essentially conservative, and acts are basically similar to fundamental fantasies, despite their different use of signifiers, because both do the same thing with the real — they tame it (134).

The question that needs to be asked then is whether

Is there a theory of a “negative” signifying practice in Lacan’s work? Or

Are all signifying practices essentially conformist, necessarily seeking recognition from some big Other, thereby requiring us to say, with Žižek, that an act, and a subject, are only purely negative moments with no real consistency?

According to Pluth neither is the case. What Žižek does not consider is that an act must be A SIGNIFYING PROCESS, and must produce some sort of consistency, even if it is a consistency that is primarily NEGATIVE with respect to the Other as a “subject-supposed-to-know,” a consistency that can be called “NEGATIVE” because it brings an impasse into the Other (134).

ACCORDING TO LACAN ONE OF THE CONDITIONS FOR AN ACT IS THAT IT MUST TRANSFORM THE SUBJECT. (135)

… saying “no” is not enough for a transformation of the subject to come about. … for a transformation to occur, some kind of further signifying production would be necessary. Such an idea is worked out quite well in Badiou’s Théorie du sujet, as well as in his later work, Saint Paul, a work that plays a central role in Žižek’s critique of Badiou.

In these works Badiou shows us how an act does more than say “no” even though saying “no” is a crucial element of any act. As Badiou describes it, an act articulates a “no … but” (1997, 67-68).

In his reading of Paul’s letters, Badiou looks at how Paul effectively managed to operate a negation of the world of Roman law by profering new signifiers. Referring to St. Paul’s famous phrase, “You are no longer under the law, but under grace,”

If we conceive of an act in terms of a “no … but” structure, then it is easier to account for how an act would transform a subject. The transformation occurs not so much through the negation produced by an act but by the articulation of something else —by the production of a new signifier that negates. According to Badiou’s argument, this new signifier in Paul’s works is “grace,” a signifier that implied an entirely different subject-position from the ones recognized by the “Roman Other.”

In fact, maybe the negation can only be sustained as a negation if it is supplemented by a “but” supporting an alternative signifying practice. This is the point that needs to be retained, and it is a point made by both Badiou and Lacan (136).

Again, this reading of an act illustrates how a subject’s relation to signifiers is not always about identification. For there to be an identification, one has to add the further idea of an Other capable of bestowing recognition. If this idea is excluded from Badiou’s theory of the subject, as well as from Lacan’s theory of the subject in an act, then what we find in both is a subject produced by a signifying practice, a subject “attached” to signifiers, without this attachment involving an identification, or what Žižek called a, “subjectivization.” This is because the signifiers used rule out any recognition by the Other and do not depend upon a consistent Other for their meaning and validity. They are rather like puns, challenging the code that organizes a particular, suppsedly consistent Other —an Other who does not desire but is a subject-supposed-to-know.

pluth object a the act

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

By keeping object a separate from the ideal ego, the analyst emphasizes the originally separating role of object a itself. I take this to mean that another dimension of object a is brought to the fore — not its dimension as something that the Other is supposed to desire, and that I must therefore desire or identify myself with in order to get recognized by the Other. Rather what we see here is the dimension of object a as the Other’s desire as such, in its very inscrutability. This means that the object a refers one to the originally inscrutable and eventlike nature of the Other’s desire.

A subject can perhaps only be separated from its identity, from its ego-ideal, as well as from object a as something that is desired by the Other, when the eventlike nature of the Other’s desire is recalled. This shows that the other aspect of object a, it’s imaginary aspect as an object that the Other desires, is an invention. When the object a as the Other’s desire as such is recalled, the ego ideal loses its ground. The plane of identification would then be crossed. The subject would no longer have any motivation to identify with the analyst or with any particular signifier (131).

What crossing the plane of identification, traversing the fantasy, or an act amounts to is a return to an original position, one in which a subject is first subjected to a signifier. Does this not also mean to the moment at which a subject is first produced by a signifier?

WE KNOW THAT AN ACT IS SUPPOSED TO TRANSFORM AND ALSO RECREATE A SUBJECT.

There is a fundamental difference between fantasy and act, and what happens during an act is perhaps not simply the continuation of a fantasy structure. … An act entails an entirely different relation to the Other’s desire, and that, as a result, the relation to the Other entailed in an act is such that one cannot speak about an identification occurring in it (132).

In an act, there is a relation to the Other’s desire that does not consist of identifying with what that desire is supposed to be for — a quest for the signified of that desire. Rather, the signifying impasse characteristic of the Other’s desire is preserved and handled in a new way in an act, instead of being merely avoided or covered up, which is what an identification does, and this would be the “real” dimension of an act the way in which the real “excedes” in an act, as Badiou would put it.

If identification can still be spoken of here, then what we have is not an identification with a particular signifier that functions as an object of the Other’s desire but an “identification” with desire as such. The end of analysis can then be seen not as a mere repetition of the subject’s origin, but a repetition that recreates, bringing about a new way for the subject to be in relation to signifiers, the Other, and the real.

A distinction needs to be made between:

the Other as a site that can function to guarantee meanings and grant recognitions and
the Other’s desire, which ruins any such site.

pluth the act the other

Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

Blog post originally published May 13, 2009 at 13:30

The subject associated with Lacan’s theory of the act is a subject that is negative yet nevertheless consists in some way. It consists in a sustained signifying activity or process that is still not like the signifying practice that characterizes the subject-as-meaning. Žižek is right to see the Lacanian subject in negative terms, but the subject in an act is negative with respect to a particular configuration of the Other, to the Other as a subject-supposed-to-know. In this way it makes sense to speak of the subject in terms of a negative or destructive consistency or process (116).

An act does not make any demand on the Other, and is thus not about getting recognition from the Other.
Acts then, are ways of using signifiers in which identification is not at stake at all.

The problem with Žižek’s interpretation is that he does not allow for the subject of an act to consist of anything more than a “no!” — ultimately a “no” to signifiers as such. This makes the subject in Lacanian theory out to be more negative than it is (117).

The subject of an act is a product of a particular type of signifying process … a process that is not simply saying “no” to something, but a more nuanced “no … but.” (117)

The Other in Lacan’s later theory is not just the field of any signifying practice whatsoever but is a name for a particular organization within which some signifying practices are recognized as legitimate and others are not. This can be thought of as the Other who is a “subject-supposed-to-know.” An act’s use of signifiers, which is punlike insofar as the signifiers used are not immediately recognicable and able to be situated in the linguistic code, is not oriented toward obtaining recognition by the Other.

An act creates new signifiers and new significations, ones that do not involve getting recognized by the Other. But since acts, like puns, are not entirely nonsensical either, and since they are using signifiers and creating sense, something of the Other is used in them, without that Other being posited as a subject-supposed-to-know. This is the point that is overlooked in Badiou’s reading of Lacan. The very insistent or “ex-ceding” real that Badiou wishes to see taken into account in, and included in, a theory of the subject is present in Lacan’s theory of the act —precisely in the form of the creation of new signifiers, which is not simply a symbolic activity but includes the real in the symbolic (in the kind of exceeding Badiou is after, I believe) insofar as it brings about a signifying “tension.” (128)

pluth the act is not the result of a conscious decision

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007.

The act in Lacanian theory is not the result of a conscious decision, nor is it identical to a conscious deliberative process. (116)

Lacan’s theory of the act requires us to conceive of a freedom that is not a metaphysical attribute of a subject but rather a phenomenon that may sometime occur to people. In this respect, Lacan breaks with humanism: Freedom is not an essential or a definitive attribute of “man.”

While such a theory can hardly answer in precise terms questions such as “What should we do?” or “How can we effect change?” it does offer a way to describe the structures and processes at work in individual and social changes. In this respect, it is doing something rather unique on the contemporary theoretical scene (116).

Pluth the act part 2 subject as thing and not as agent

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007.

Lacan seems to have favored a certain kind of subject, one that is engaged in maintaining an inconsistency in the Other, one that signifies in such a way that the order of the Other itself gets scrambled. Instead of merely seeking a signification for an event in terms already available in the Other, an act puts a resistance to signification into words. … A pun creates a new signifier that resist signification without being completely nonsensical. It is a signifier that is not simply “the Other’s” but forces a new place for itself in the Other (115).

While it is fairly easy to see how acts use signifiers in a way that is different from other signifying practices, the position of the subject in an act, and whether this subject differs, structurally, from the subject as meaning, remains to be explored.

One attractive aspect of the subject-as-meaning was that such a subject seemed more or less thinglike and substantial: a knot of signifiers, if you will. This can be thought of as a “subject as substance”: not the thinking substance that characterized the Cartesian cogito but substancelike nonetheless. The view of the subject as a thing, however, and not as an agent, although it does insist and repeat.

pluth on the act

Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

Originally published on: May 12, 2009 @ 13:53

the act does not depend on gaining recognition from the Other

involves doing something with signifiers

not far from Austin’s performative speech act but Lacan is not interested on acts that change the situation of the world or the set of facts within it . Lacan focuses on acts that change the structure of the subject If Austinian speech acts change the state of affairs in the world —making meetings closed, bachelors married, and so on— then Lacanian speech acts change the subject (101).

The act means crossing a certain threshold

Pluth goes on, “Notice that Austinian speech acts, in contrast, are not at all transgressive but are in fact highly ritualized and codified. The conditions for the success of an Austinian speech act largely depend upon the existence of social guarantees and rituals. Marriages, for example, are only successfully accomplished when performed under very specfic circumstances, and by the proper authorities. According to Lacan’s conception, however, an act transforms a subject, and even though it occurs with signifiers, it does not happen by following a preestablished ritual or code. Also, of course, there is no authority that can ensure the legitimacy of such an act. 101

It is not the case that someone is simply changed by an act: he or she is reinaugurated as a subject. Where there was a certain structure or law operative for a subject prior to an act —imagine this to be an unconscious law, the kind of meaning and determination constructed by the fantasy— an act brings about a transformation in this structure and thereby inaugurates a new subject. In this way, an act situates one outside such a law, and for this reason it is appropriate to consider acts to be transgressive. 102

pluth puns and the act

Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

Blog post originally published May 13, 2009 at 13:10

A bicycle can’t stand alone because it is two-tired.
What’s the definition of a will? (It’s a dead giveaway).
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
A backward poet writes inverse.
In democracy it’s your vote that counts; in feudalism it’s your count that votes.
She had a boyfriend with a wooden leg, but broke it off.
A chicken crossing the road is poultry in motion.
If you don’t pay your exorcist you get repossessed.
With her marriage she got a new name and a dress.
Show me a piano falling down a mineshaft and I’ll show you A-flat minor.

While inventing a new signifier is hard, “It is not that one doesn’t try. This is just what a witticism is. It consists of making use of a word for another use than that for which it is made. One crumples it up a bit, and it is in this crumpling that its operative effect lies” (Lacan)

Puns distort words, crumpling them up and making them take on another function, thereby shaking up the linguistic meanings and values already present in the Other as a subject-supposed-to-know.

Should acts be seen in the same light? Perhaps they fail to invent totally new signifiers, signifiers that would not have any meaning at all (“like the real”), but they may at least distort a conventional use of signifiers, thereby marking the presence of the real in the symbolic. In this distortion acts would manifest a tendency toward non-meaning, and, because of the effect this has on the Other, acts might thus also go beyond fantasmatic attempts to get oneself recognized by the Other. Such a signifying distortion seems to be just what is found in the social movements Lacan mentions: Christianity and the Russian Revolution.

Christianity did not seek recogntion by what could be considered the Other of its time (Roman law), and the Russian Revolution of 1917 was not about seeking recognition for the Communist Party in the existing Russion state. Yet such social movements seem very unlike puns and witticisms. What do acts have to do with puns anyway? In what way, if at all, can puns be models for acts? Or are puns just to be seen as primitive acts, formally resembling them, without the resemblance going much farther? 107

It is as if a pun is saying to the Other, alright, what do you make of this? In this way puns emphasize a lack in the Other.

A pun creates a new signifier that resists signification without being completely nonsensical. It is a signifier that is not simply “the Other’s” but forces a new place for itself in the Other (115).

pluth fort-da

Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

This blog entry was originally published on May 10, 2009 14:17

Fort-Da game is a repeated, attempt to exorcise a traumatic event. Yet instead of leading to a simple release of libidinal tension, and perhaps a dissolution of the traumatic event, the Fort-Da game sublates that tension into a signifying activity —canceling the event out as an affective tension, yet preserving it as a signifying tension in the form of a compulsive linguistic repetition.

… in the Fort-Da game, where the traumatic event is also simply being said, or named, by being taken up into signifiers. Yet there is no production of meaning by these signifiers, and the game does not use signifiers as part of an attempt to obtain a recognition of the trauma from the Other.

In other words, the game is not making a demand on the mother to satisfy the child’s needs. It merely repeats a trauma or signifying impasse that causes the subject and is an act in which the subject is disjoined from an Other who can bestow and guarantee recognition. 104

The signifying activity involved in the act achieves something fundamentally different from what fantasy achieves.

In an act, a subject does not constitute itself as a satisfying object of the Other’s desire, and in it a subject is not demanding recognition of its own desire by the Other either. Rather, a subject is simply using signifiers autonomously, as it were, in a signifying repetition of a libidinal event. Perhaps this gives us a further hint as to why Lacan calls an act transgressive: an act uses the Other’s language against, despite, and without, the Other, in what could be called a profound indifference to the Other (104).

pluth subject as meaning junction disjunction

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007. Print.

I described the subject as meaning. What I am saying here adds an important supplement to this notion of a subject represent in and for the Other.

First, there is meaning: I am something for the Other, an object that satisfies the Other’s demands, or a significant, desirable object of the Other (like Xenophon). Then, either because of bodily experiences that cannot be signified or an encounter with the Other’s desire, or both, this position as a meaning is called into question. In the wake of these encounters, there are two major possibilities.

1. My position as a satisfying object or meaning for the Other can be reaffirmed. Fantasy is Lacan’s account of how this happens. In fantasy I try to reassert my position as the object of the Other’s desire, and my own desire is to remain such an object.

2. Another way is possible, and Lacan’s theory of the act discusses this. An act involves a different reaction to both the Other’s desire and the meaning constructed for us in the Other (78).

On my reading, Lacan does not come up with a unique and rigorous theory of the subject until his fourteenth and fifteenth seminars (79).

This subject can still be thought of as an “organized system of symbols,” but it is not something that gives this order meaning. Rather, the subject is identified with a meaning. This corresponds to what I spoke of in chapter 3 as the “subject-as-meaning,” a subject represented in the Other, and part of the Other’s discourse. But I have been claiming that Lacan was not satisfied with this version of the subject either. Again, the subject is always something like a consistency of signifiers in Lacan’s opinion, but this is actually only one aspect of the subject.

Lacan’s ultimate vision of the subject is achieved when the subject is portrayed as something between an organized system of symbols and what motivates that organization in the first place — events such as sexuality, jouissance, and the Other’s desire, all of which can be correlated with the real (79-80).

The definition of the subject that I want ot focus on now comes from Lacan’s fourteenth seminar.

A SUBJECT IS SITUATED AT THE JUNCTION AND DISJUNCTION OF THE BODY AND JOUISSANCE

It is not so much of a stretch then, to suggest that when Lacan says “body” here, we could also just as well say language. So not only does this definition reaffirm that a subject is neither language nor jouissance, it also tells us more about the structure of the subject. … in his ninth seminar Lacan was content with saying that the subject is between the two poles of language and the real. In this definition, the subject’s position is given more elaboration. The subject is situated at a junction and disjunction of the two with each other (80).

pluth jouissance

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007. Print.
excessive unbearable tension, a tension that does not go away a tension that cannot be “relieved” by means of signifiers, because there is no signifier for it

for which the language of pleasure and displeasure is not adequate.

There is thus a radical tension between this jouissance beyond the pleasure principle and the order of signifiers (75).

For this reason, jouissance should be thought of in terms of real2 — something that is not prior to and outside of signifiers but that appears within signifiers as an impasse in signification (77).

Jouissance is an impasse in the fabric of meaning, but in neurosis it is at least put into a relation with that fabric. In psychosis, this relation is missing, and there is a radical gulf between the symbolic and the real. In neurosis, there is also a gulf, but here is also a project to build a bridge across the gulf, an attempt to elaborate on a relation between the two.

This study has at least given an indication now of how the body plays a role in Lacan’s theory of the subject. The body is the site and origin of a signifying impasse. Now this is not what Lacan usually calls the body in his theory. As we have seen the body is usually for Lacan something “overwritten” with signifiers. For this reason, Lacan was not inclined to say that the “stirring” in Little Han’s genitals was something that involved his body. Little Hans already had a body image prior to this stirring. The emergence of genital sexuality introduced something that did not fit into this image — and so, Han’s penis, when it started acting up, was not something he experience as “his.” Nevertheless, from another point of view, this jouissance was indeed coming from Han’s body. What needs to be explained now is how this impasse originating in the body — an impasse that can be abbreviated under the heading of sexuality — plays a role in the production of the subject (78).