Category: fantasy

Hamster ideology symptom fetish anti semitism chicken joke

Žižek, Slavoj. “Slavoj Žïžek in Kosova — Ideology Between Symptom and Fetish.” Online Video Clip. YouTube. YouTube, 29 May 2009. Web. 14 Feb. 2013.

Pfaller, Robert. “Where is Your Hamster The Concept of Ideology in Slavoj Žižek’s Cultural Theory.” Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Slavoj Žižek.  Eds.  Geoff Boucher , and Jason Glynos and Matthew Sharpe, 2005.

Hamster This is the famous hamster story

Interpassivity Not only inter-activity, where others can be active for us, what about inter-passivity, others who could be passive for us.

Fascist Populism Fetish: The lie is at the surface. the cause of this antagonism is the Jew.

In the first case is from appearance to what is hidden behind it. On the other hand, JEWS are responisble, you tell me but don’t you see that when you are attacking jews, you are really attacking financial exploitation, and you are targeting the wrong guy.

Although one thought it would be easy to UNDERMINE the anti-semite, don’t you see you are just projecting on the JEWS for all that is wrong for society. It seems evident for those who are not in it. BUT IT ISN’T THIS EASY.

A naive liberal, but can’t you see universal rights are a problem, then he might say a more social liberal, we should include woman. or cynicsm, “I know but we can’t afford true equality, that’s life.”

Fetishist Ironic disavowal: Kung Fu Panda, oriental mythology, at the same time the film makes fun of its own orientalist mythology. Even though it makes fun of it, it still functions.  Our beliefs still function even if we don’t believe in it.  Niels Bohr again.

open fundamentalist disavowal: anti-semitism

The moment you accept the debate at the level of facts. The true question are Jews really like that: Why does Nazi needs this figure of the Jew to sustain its ideological edifice. Even if a husband is jealous, with a suspicion of his wife, even if his wife is sleeping around, his jealousy is pathological fact.  Why did he need this pathological to sustain his psychic stability.

Here is the moment when Žižek distinguishes between being simply racist against Jews and true anti-semitism Jews is blah blah. This is racist. They are blah blah because they are jewish Being a jew is the mysterious X, that explains all of it. THE LOGIC OF FETISHISM AT ITS PUREST.

Here is the chicken joke Maybe Yugoslavia disappeared because Tito was not allowed to know.  1972 the economic situation had to be done, something big.  But they didn’t tell Tito.  The top nomenklatura decided if we make this public then Tito who is old will die unhappy.  Let’s postpone the crisis, throughout the 1970s the economy was artificially sustained, and by the 1990s it all exploded.  Yugoslavia had nothing to do with nationalist passions.   It was the structure of this joke, Tito was a chicken who should not know.  From everyday life: let’s say I have cancer, of course I would be strong enough, I would try not to tell this to my children, to NOT let them know.  Maintain appearance, the chicken should not know.  This chicken should not know logic, you find in Ptomekin villages, when it was know Tito would visit a village, in the end of the 1950s in China, when Mao ..

santner taxes

Eric L. Santner, the University of Chicago  The New Idolatry: Religious Thinking in the Un-Commonwealth of America     September 6, 2011

At a recent debate among Republican presidential candidates in Iowa, all participants raised their hand when asked whether they would oppose a deficit-reduction agreement that featured 10 dollars in budget cuts for every dollar in increased tax revenue. I think one misses something important if one dismisses this moment as a bit of cynical political theater. But it is equally insufficient to see in it a display of genuine political commitments and principles. Rather, this peculiar pledge of allegiance is symptomatic of the ways in which the Republican side of current debates has infused questions about economic policy with religious meanings and values. And as is often the case when religious energies come to be displaced into profane spheres of life, the results are bad—not only for those spheres of life but for religion as well.

For example, one might think about the similarities between the attitude of Republicans to taxes and that of anorexics to food. For both, less is always better, and nothing would be best of all. Republicans have a “taxation disorder” just as anorexics have an eating disorder.  Both groups treat what is essentially a practical matter—how much money is needed by the state given the current needs of the country and its people; how much food is needed given the demands of the body—as a matter of a quasi-sacred ethical stance concerning the purity of the body. In both cases, we find a demand for “starving the beast,” a personal or collective body felt to be disgustingly fleshy, to be always too much, to be in need of ever greater reduction, thinning, cutting, fasting. In both disorders we find a deeply pathological form of what Max Weber characterized as the “spirit of capitalism,” a fundamentally this-worldly asceticism fueled by a religious sense of duty and obligation aimed at assuring our place among the divinely elected. (There is surely much to say here about the meaning in all of this of debt, indebtedness, being in default, being in a state of guilt—the German word Schuld means both “debt” and “guilt”—but that is for another discussion.)

What is most bizarre in the current situation is the way in which the Republicans have fused this “Protestant ethic,” as Weber called it, with a sort of polytheistic worship of wealth and the wealthy—in short, with a rather blatant form of idolatry. Why does the beast need to be starved? Why does the “flesh” of the body politic need to be reduced, reduced, reduced? The answer we hear over and over again is: for the sake of the “Job Creators.” The one Creator God has effectively been dispersed into the pantheon of new idols, those to whom we must all sacrifice so that they may show favor on us and create new worlds of economic possibility. Job creation has become the new form of grace or gratuitousness otherwise reserved for divinity. Our duty is to make sacrifices and above all to be vigilant about not calling forth the wrath of the Job Creators lest they abandon us and elect others as their chosen people (other nations who make bigger and better sacrifices).

The old culture wars concerning hot-button social issues have simply assumed a new guise. Tax increases have come to be regarded as a sort of job abortion, the killing of unborn economic life. Republicans have, in a word, invested wealth with the same religious aura that radical anti-abortion groups have always invested in the cells of the fetus. Yesterday’s baby killer is today’s job killer: both are essentially infidels, non-believers. What is clear is that there is no room for debate here. If wealth has come to be regarded as sacred, if its movement into the bank accounts of individuals and corporations represents the moment of conception of (still unborn) economic life, then surely there can be no compromise.

If there is any truth to this analysis, then the real problem we face is not just the impossibility of engaging in real debates about our economic life but the impossibility of engaging with the demands and complexities of religious life as well. For by infusing money with the halo of the sacred, by transfiguring high earners into Job Creators to whom the rest of us owe pledges of covenantal allegiance, what we lose is not only the capacity to think about economic issues in a relatively rational way; we also lose our capacity to live lives informed by the values of our religious traditions. That is certainly one of the lessons of the biblical ban on idolatry.

A similar dynamic is at work on another front in the culture wars, the debate over creationism and so-called “intelligent design.” What is ultimately so disturbing about the case made for these alternatives to the theory of evolution is not that it represents bad science but rather that it demeans and degrades religion by essentially turning the Bible into a kind of science textbook competing with other science textbooks. Creationism is not bad science—it is not science at all—but rather a kind of blasphemy. It reduces the status of the holy books of the Judeo-Christian tradition to that of first-year biology textbooks. The ones who should be enraged are not scientists, but rather priests, pastors, rabbis, and all who care deeply about the moral and spiritual values at the heart of the biblical traditions.

As with evolutionary theory so with economic theory and policy: the infusion of religious values and meanings into debates about deficits, budgets, and taxes do not simply inhibit our capacity to steer our way toward a better economic future; it also represents a threat to the integrity of the life of faith and its difficult demands, demands that always, in the end, pertain to the urgent and needful presence of our neighbor. The hands raised by those Republican candidates at the Iowa debates some weeks ago do not signal strong principles about economic policy but rather a perverse infusion of religious attitudes into the sphere of economic life, a form of idolatry that does damage both to the economy and to religion.

object-cause of desire and object loss of drive

Taken from Žižek’s criticism of Lacanian Left by Yannis Stavrakakis.  Glynn Daly compares the politics of Žižek and Essex Lacanians

Modern society is defined by the lack of ultimate transcendent guarantee, or, in libidinal terms, of total jouissance. There are three main ways to cope with this negativity: utopian, democratic, and post-democratic.

The first one (totalitarianisms, fundamentalisms) tries to reoccupy the ground of absolute jouissance by attaining a utopian society of harmonious society which eliminates negativity.

The second, democratic, one enacts a political equivalent of “traversing the fantasy”: it institutionalizes the lack itself by creating the space for political antagonisms.

The third one, consumerist post-democracy, tries to neutralize negativity by transforming politics into apolitical administration: individuals pursue their consumerist fantasies in the space regulated by expert social administration.

Today, when democracy is gradually evolving into consumerist post-democracy, one should insist that democratic potentials are not exhausted – “democracy as an unfinished project” could have been Stavrakakis’ motto here. The key to the resuscitation of this democratic potential is to re-mobilize enjoyment: “What is needed, in other words, is an enjoyable democratic ethics of the political.”(269) The key question here is, of course, WHAT KIND OF enjoyment:

Libidinal investment and the mobilization of jouissance are the necessary prerequisite for any sustainable identification (from nationalism to consumerism). This also applies to the radical democratic ethics of the political. But the type of investment involved has still to be decided. (282)

Stavrakakis’ solution is: neither the phallic enjoyment of Power nor the utopia of the incestuous full enjoyment, but a non-phallic (non-all) partial enjoyment. In the last pages of his book, trying to demonstrate how “democratic subjectivity is capable of inspiring high passions”(278), Stavrakakis refers to the Lacanian other jouissance, “a jouissance beyond accumulation, domination and fantasy, an enjoyment of the not-all or not-whole”(279). How do we achieve this jouissance? By way of accomplishing “the sacrifice of the fantasmatic objet (a)” which can only “make this other jouissance attainable” (279):

The central task in psychoanalysis – and politics – is to detach the objet (a) from the signifier of the lack in the Other /…/, to detach (anti-democratic and post-democratic) fantasy from the democratic institutionalization of lack, making possible the access to a partial enjoyment beyond fantasy. /…/ Only thus shall we be able to really enjoy our partial enjoyment, without subordinating it to the cataclysmic desire of fantasy. Beyond its dialectics of disavowal, this is the concrete challenge the Lacanian Left addresses to us. (280-282)

The underlying idea is breathtakingly simplistic: in total contradiction to Lacan, Stavrakakis reduces objet (a) to its role in fantasy – objet (a) is that excessive X which magically transforms the partial objects which occupy the place of the lack in the Other into the utopian promise of the impossible fullness of jouissance.

What Stavrakakis proposes is thus the vision of a society in which desire functions without objet (a), without the destabilizing excess which transforms it into a “cataclysmic desire of fantasy” – as Stavrakakis puts it in a symptomatically tautological way, we should learn to “really enjoy our partial enjoyment.”

For Lacan, on the contrary, objet (a) is a(nother) name for the Freudian “partial object,” which is why it cannot be reduced to its role in fantasy which sustains desire; it is for this reason that, as Lacan emphasizes, one should distinguish its role in desire and in drive.

Following Jacques-Alain Miller, a distinction has to be introduced here between two types of lack, the lack proper and hole: lack is spatial, designating a void WITHIN a space, while hole is more radical, it designates the point at which this spatial order itself breaks down (as in the “black hole” in physics).

Therein resides the difference between desire and drive: desire is grounded in its constitutive lack, while drive circulates around a hole, a gap in the order of being.

In other words, the circular movement of drive obeys the weird logic of the curved space in which the shortest distance between the two points is not a straight line, but a curve: drive “knows” that the shortest way to attain its aim is to circulate around its goal-object. (One should bear in mind here Lacan’s well-known distinction between the aim and the goal of drive: while the goal is the object around which drive circulates, its (true) aim is the endless continuation of this circulation as such.)

Miller also proposed a Benjaminian distinction between “constituted anxiety” and “constituent anxiety,” which is crucial with regard to the shift from desire to drive: while the first one designates the standard notion of the terrifying and fascinating abyss of anxiety which haunts us, its infernal circle which threatens to draws us in, the second one stands for the “pure” confrontation with objet petit a as constituted in its very loss.

Miller is right to emphasize here two features: the difference which separates constituted from constituent anxiety concerns the status of the object with regard to fantasy. In a case of constituted anxiety, the object dwells within the confines of a fantasy, while we only get the constituent anxiety when the subject “traverses the fantasy” and confronts the void, the gap, filled up by the fantasmatic object.

However, clear and convincing as it is, this Miller’s formula misses the true paradox or, rather, ambiguity of objet (a): when he defines objet (a) as the object which overlaps with its loss, which emerges at the very moment of its loss (so that all its fantasmatic incarnations, from breasts to voice and gaze, are metonymic figurations of the void, of nothing), he remains within the horizon of desire – the true object-cause of desire is the void filled in by its fantasmatic incarnations.

While, as Lacan emphasizes, objet (a) is also the object of drive, the relationship is here thoroughly different: although, in both cases, the link between object and loss is crucial, in the case of objet (a) as the object-cause of desire, we have an object which is originally lost, which coincides with its own loss, which emerges as lost,

while, in the case of objet (a) as the object of drive, the “object” IS DIRECTLY THE LOSS ITSELF – in the shift from desire to drive, we pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object.

That is to say, the weird movement called “drive” is not driven by the “impossible” quest for the lost object; it is a push to directly enact the “loss” – the gap, cut, distance – itself.

There is thus a DOUBLE distinction to be drawn here: not only between objet (a) in its fantasmatic and post-fantasmatic status, but also, within this post-fantasmatic domain itself, between the lost object-cause of desire and the object-loss of drive.

The weird thing is that Stavrakakis’ idea of sustaining desire without objet (a) contradicts not only Lacan, but also Laclau, his notion of hegemony: Laclau is on the right track when he emphasizes the necessary role of objet (a) in rendering an ideological edifice operative. In hegemony, a particular empirical object is “elevated to the dignity of the Thing,” it start to function as the stand-in for, the embodiment of, the impossible fullness of Society.

Referring to Joan Copjec, Laclau compares hegemony to the “breast-value” attached to partial objects which stand-in for the incestuous maternal Thing (breast).

Laclau should effectively be criticized here for confounding desire (sustained by fantasy) which drive (one of whose definitions is also “that what remains of desire after its subject traverses the fantasy”): for him, we are condemned to searching for the impossible Fullness.

Drive – in which we directly enjoy lack itself – simply does not enter his horizon.

However, this in no way entails that, in drive, we “really enjoy our partial enjoyment,” without the disturbing excess: for Lacan, lack and excess are strictly correlative, the two sides of the same coin.

Precisely insofar as it circulates around a hole, drive is the name of the excess that pertains to human being, it is the “too-much-ness” of striving which insists beyond life and death (this is why Lacan sometimes even directly identifies drive with objet (a) as surplus-jouissance.)

Imaginary

Baron, Paula. “Enter the Imaginarium: The Mirror, the Object and the Feminist Project” Australian Feminist Law Journal 43 2011

In terms of individual development, the child is born into the Real, a brief period characterized by a lack of differentiation and therefore a lack of subjectivity. At arond 18 months of age, the child experiences the ‘mirror stage’ which provides entry into the Imaginary.

This mirror stage is the point at which the child recognizes his or her reflection in the mirror. The child’s entry into the Symbolic occurs later, as a result of the Oedipal process. In this latter stage, the intervention of a third party into the mother-child dyad ushers the child into the social world of law and language, the child sacrificing sensual need (the Real) and egotistical demand (the Imaginary) for the laws and values if its culture. This developmental path has been described as the subject’s passage from a ‘Being-in-Itself ‘(the Real) to a ‘Being-for-Itself’ (the Imaginary) to a ‘Being-for-Others’ (the Symbolic).

In Lacanian theory, the Symbolic is the privileged site for overcoming the disabling effects of the Imaginary and the disruptions of the Real.  “What we do as humans is structured by reflected images that lure our desire and reinforce our egos, but we remain grounded in a symbolic network that pervasively supports our speech, ritual and even our perception of the world, and we from time to time come to the edge and touch upon the nameless, the Real that is always there but usually mediated by language.”

The Imaginary is  thus inescapable  and necessary, yet for Lacan, it is  ‘always  trouble’: illusory, deceptive  and  inherently  seductive.  The Imaginary  ‘constantly  exercises  its  seductions  or temptations, inviting one to “fill in”  the unavoidable “gaps” in one’s self and world descriptions or conceptions through recourse to all manner of imaginary fullness’.

We have seen that mirroring is key to the individual’s entry into the Imaginary in Lacanian theory.  The child’s recognition  of her reflection is  at once her first experience of unity and wholeness and a fundamental alienation in her being.

The mirror stage, according to Lacan, gives rise to consciousness, the ego, illusions of coherence, self-sufficiency, unity and the idea of a body:

[In  the mirror stage]  the  child, who experiences  herself as a  fragmented,  incoherent  collection of desires and memories, happens upon an image of herself in a looking glass’ or reflective surface. This image  stimulates the  idea of an entity entirely independent  of others: the  Imago. As the  child grows older, the imago in  turn, becomes invested with all sorts of expectations from without….This primary identification  with the  mirror image  and the consequent imago is  a mistake….because …the subject is necessarily divided, split between the familiar Ego, which posits independence,  and the Id, the locus of unconscious desire.  (Lacan Book III The Psychoses, 1955-56 p. 43)

For Lacan, the ego is nothing in and of itself, but rather a ‘series  of identifications, equivalancies, and oppositions’. As noted in the quote above, there is a split between the chaos and vulnerability of the  individual’s embodied first-person experience and the ideal of the third-person surface perspective. This split can never be reconciled, leading to the individual’s frustration (which is turned upon the self or projected on to others). Because the Imaginary has an inherently  binary logic  (self and other), it functions  to create sameness and ‘a  struggle for recognition that requires the destruction or enslavement of others so as to maintain one’s own identity’.

The Imaginary is thus characterized by rivalry, jealousy, aggression and competition. It is the Symbolic which assures peace by imposing distributive justice: this is mine, that is yours.

The Imaginary in Lacanian theory is inherently narcissistic and isolating: Whereas in the symbolic we experience the power of the social order over us, in the Imaginary.. .we feel isolated within the shell that the ego seems to provide’.

This rise  of the  Imaginary  has  been theorized  by McGowan, following  Zizek, as  a symptom of the  transformation to the so-called  ‘Society  of Enjoyment’. This is  a complex notion that highlights the relationship between the Imaginary and the Symbolic in Lacan’s work. According to Lacan, entry to the  Symbolic takes  place through  the  exercise of the paternal function, sometimes called the Name-of-the-Father. This is the intervention of the third party in the mother-child dyad which, as was noted above, ushers the child into the Symbolic, subjecting his drives to the social order, law and language.

The paternal function was so named because, in Lacan’s time,  this  intervention  was commonly achieved by the  father in  a nuclear family structure, but the function can be successfully achieved by someone (indeed, something) else.

Lacan also theorized that, in the movement to the nuclear family, there was a conflation of the Symbolic father with the reality of the (often wanting) father.  The father was thus conceived as having a dual character: the  ‘good’  father, who prohibited enjoyment; and the  ‘obscene’  father who mandated enjoyment. In McGowan’s view, the transformation to the Society of Enjoyment is the result of the decline of the paternal function, that is, the loss of the ideal, prohibiting father and the concomitant rise  of the primal, obscene fathers.

 

Totem and Taboo Freud

Johnston, Adrian. Time driven : metapsychology and the splitting of the drive.  Stoney Brook Press: New York. 2000

In Totem and Taboo, Freud tells the story of an archaic human order in which a single alpha male (the “primal father”) tyrannically rules over the social group (the “primal horde”). This powerful, ferocious paternal figure monopolizes all the women of the horde, preventing the other males, this “band of brothers,” from indulging themselves in their sexual urges.

The subjugated male members of the group finally rise up in rebellion against the feared Urvater, slaughtering him and subsequently devouring his corpse.  On the one hand, the brothers hated the father because he hindered the exercise of their desires — and this hatred eventually be-came intense enough to drive the group to murder. On the other hand, insofar as the father was envied because he occupied the very position desired by each of the brothers, this paternal figure represents a point of identification for the other males—and the cannibalistic consumption of the dead father’s body is, in Freud’s mind, indicative of this identificatory rapport. Freud describes this oscillation between hatred and identification as “ambivalence.”

Like Oedipus, the brothers of the primal horde accomplish in act what most subjects merely entertain in (unconscious) fantasies. But, in Freud’s tale as opposed to Sophocles’ tragedy, the actors know full well what they are doing the entire time. The brothers deliberately cooperate with each other in murdering the primal father; no ignorance clouds their awareness of this forceful assertion of their drives.

However, just as Oedipus is incapable of embracing the actualization of his repressed desires, so is the primal horde profoundly disturbed by its deed. (The story of Electra resembles the Freudian myth of the horde to the extent that, although throughout the course of the play Electra wants nothing more than to avenge her dead father by killing her adulterous mother, she is nonetheless traumatized by her own murderous act once she commits it.)

What is the ultimate result of the elimination of the living primal father? Instead of the brothers finally savoring their newly-won freedom from the oppressive regime of the selfish paternal dictator (as one might reasonably expect them to do), they are so distressed by what they have accomplished that they subsequently establish laws prohibiting anyone from ever acting again as they did. The vanquished father’s ghost returns to haunt them in the form of a restrictive body of laws; just as the living father inhibits aggression and the free circulation of women, so too do the laws established between the band of brothers after-the-fact of their violent acts of revolt condemn these same acts.

Libidinal liberation, as the lifting of supposedly external impediments to Trieb, isn’t so easy to achieve. Whether as the traumatizing deferred comprehension of Oedipus or the spectral paternal remainder haunting the fraternal band, something more than just externally imposed repression (father, society, and so on) prevents subjects from experiencing pleasure in the release of their formerly stifled tendencies. In fact, the myth of the primal horde represents Freud’s displaced realization of the painful truth of the analytically appropriated myth of Oedipus, a truth with which he repeatedly fails to fully come to terms.

A hitch, obstacle, or impediment beyond the recognizable avatars of the Freudian reality principle interferes with the enjoyment of the libidinal economy. The foundational myths of psychoanalysis reveal more than just the existence of certain common desires dwelling within the unconscious lives of each and every individual. These tales of transgression, in which the actors realize the primordial versions of the drives in the field of concrete reality, demonstrate that the allure of such transgressions is sustained strictly insofar as these actions have yet to be accomplished.

Once committed, that is, once drive is transformed from repressed fantasy to actualized fact, the attractiveness of what ostensibly is desired by the unconscious is suddenly transubstantiated into something horrific and disgusting. If Oedipus Rex is indeed timelessly tragic, this is due to his representation of the foundational dilemma of the drives — a dilemma in which Trieb paradoxically “enjoys” what it desires exclusively to the extent that it never accomplishes the fulfillment of its desire.

The drives are not repressed simply because they are at odds with the reality of a socio-legal Umwelt. Even if every external impediment were eliminated, the drives would spontaneously fabricate their own repression in order to preserve their fantasmatic forms of jouissance. Obtaining this jouissance would be the ultimate trauma for Trieb.

Zupančič on comedy #3

Zupančič. The Odd One In: On Comedy click to download

In the contemporary ideological climate it has become imperative that we perceive all the terrible things that happen to us as ultimately something positive — say as a precious experience that will bear fruit in our future life. Negativity, lack, dissatisfaction, unhappiness, are perceived more and more as moral faults worse, as a corruption at the level of our very being or bare life.

There is a spectacular rise of what we might call a bio-morality (as well as morality of feelings and emotions), which promotes the following fundamental axiom: a person who feels good (and is happy) is a good person; a person who feels bad is a bad person.

It is this short circuit between the immediate feelings/sensations and the moral value that gives its specific color to the contemporary ideological rhetoric of happiness. This is very efficient, for who dares to raise her voice and say that as a matter of fact, she is not happy, and that she can’t manage to — or, worse, doesn’t even care to — transform all the disappointments of her life into a positive experience to be invested in the future?

There is an important difference between this and the classical entrepreneur formula according to which we are always broadly responsible for our failures and misfortunes. This classical formula still implies a certain interval between what we are and the symbolic value of our success. It implies that, at least in principle, we could have acted otherwise, but didn’t (and are hence responsible for our failures or lack of happiness).

The bio-morality mentioned above is replacing the classical notion of responsibility with the notion of a damaged, corrupt being: the unhappy and the unsuccessful are somehow corrupt already on the level of their bare life, and all their erroneous actions or nonactions follow from there with an inexorable necessity.

In other words, the problem is not simply that success and efficiency have become the supreme values of our late capitalist society (as we often hear from critics of this society) — there is nothing particularly new in this; social promotion of success (defined in different ways) has existed since time immemorial.

The problem is, rather, that success is becoming almost a biological notion, and thus the foundation of a genuine racism of successfulness. The poorest and the most miserable are no longer perceived as a socioeconomic class, but almost as a race of their own, as a special form of life. We are indeed witnessing a spectacular rise of racism or, more precisely, of “racization.”

This is to say that we are no longer simply dealing with racism in its traditional sense of hatred towards other races, but also and above all with a production of (new) races based on economic, political, and class differences and factors, as well as with the segregation based on these differences.

If traditional racism tended to socialize biological features—that is, directly translate them into cultural and symbolic points of a given social order — contemporary racism works in the opposite direction. It tends to “naturalize” the differences and features produced by the sociosymbolic order. This is also what can help us to understand the ideological rise of the theme of private life, as well as of lifestyles and habits.

To take a simple example: if a “successful artist” is invited as a guest on a TV show, the focus is practically never on her work, but instead on the way she lives, on her everyday habits, on what she enjoys, and so on. This is not simply a voyeuristic curiosity; it is a procedure that systematically presents us with two elements: “success” on the one side, and the life that corresponds to this success on the other — implying, of course, a strong and immediate equivalence between the two.

The objective surplus, the materialized work itself, is eliminated at the very outset. In other words, our ways of life, our habits, our feelings, our more or less idiosyncratic enjoyments — all these are no longer simply “private matters” exposed to scrutiny to satisfy our curiosity. They are one of the crucial cultural catalysts through which all kinds of socio-economic and ideological differences are being gradually transformed into “human differences,” differences at the very core of our being, which makes it possible for them to become the ground of a new racism. This is the process that aims at establishing an immediate connection between being (“bare life”) and a socioeconomic value.

We are thus witnessing a massive and forceful naturalization of economic, political, and other social differences, and this naturalization is itself a politico-ideological process par excellence.  As I said above,“naturalization” involves above all the promotion of a belief in an immediate character of these differences — that is to say, in their being organically related to life as such, or to existing reality in general.

I could also put this in the following way: the contemporary discourse which likes to promote and glorify the gesture of distancing oneself from all Ideologies and Projects (as the Ideologies of others, and because they are necessarily totalitarian or utopian) strives to promote its own reality as completely nonideological.  Our present socioeconomic reality is increasingly being presented as an immediate natural fact, or fact of nature, and thus a fact to which we can only try to adapt as successfully as possible.

If the imperative of happiness, positive thinking, and cheerfulness is one of the key means of expanding and solidifying this ideological hegemony, one cannot avoid the question of whether promoting comedy is not part of the same process. Is comedy not all about cheerfulness, satisfaction, and “positive feelings”?  And is this not why Hollywood is producing huge amounts of “comedy,” neatly packaged to suit different audiences: romantic comedies, black comedies, teen comedies, family comedies, blue-collar comedies, white-collar comedies . . . ?

Well, this compulsive entertainment has in fact very little to do with comedy, just as comedy has very little to do with nature (or naturalization), immediacy, and feelings. True, comedy does not view men as an exception to nature, as the point that breaks the very laws of nature — this is more the perspective of tragedy. Yet comedy’s frequent reduction of man to (his) nature makes a further comic point about nature itself: nature is far from being as “natural” as we might think, but is itself driven by countless contradictions and discrepancies. As for the question of immediacy: comedy thrives on all kinds of short circuits that establish an immediate connection between heterogeneous orders.

Yet again, the immediacy that comedy thus puts forward is not that of a smooth, imperceptible passing of one into another, but that of a material cut between them. If we think of the simplest examples of this procedure (like the one frequent in the Marx Brothers’ comedies when, say, A says “Give me a break!” and B pulls a brake out of his pocket), is it not that its fundamental lesson is always this: the only genuine immediate link between these two things is the very cut between them?

And as for the question of comedy’s nonaffinity with our subjective feelings and emotions — this point has been systematically made in literature on comedy, and is splendidly epitomized by Horace Walpole’s remark: “This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.” Yet this divorce of comedy and feelings is not simply comedy’s way of keeping a distance from feelings, but above all its way of introducing a distance (or nonimmediacy) into the feelings themselves.

This is especially interesting in the case of happiness: comedies have very ingenious ways of showing us that happiness can indeed be largely independent of how we feel….In other words: there has been some philosophical discussion lately about the difference between what people think they feel and what they really feel. One of the fundamental axioms of what is now officially called “happiness studies” is that there is no difference between the two. In this respect, comedy definitely aligns itself with the opposite camp, which insists that it often happens that we don’t know how we really feel, and that emotions (far from constituting a direct insight into the Real of the subject) can lie and be as deceptive as anything else.  6-8

Comedy is materialistic because it gives voice and body to the impasses and contradictions of this materiality itself. This is the true incarnation involved in comedy.

Comedy is materialistic because it sees the turning of materiality into pure spirit and of pure spirit into something material as one and the same movement, driven by a difficulty inherent to materiality itself. 47

Alenka does not like this theory of comedy

Comedy is a genre that strongly emphasizes our essential humanity, its joys and limitations. It invites—or even forces—us to recognize and accept
the fact that we are finite beings. It teaches us that we are only human,
with all our faults, imperfections, and weaknesses, and it helps us to deal affirmatively and joyfully with the burden of human finitude.

And this is why

The prizing of comedy as a porte-parole of human finitude (and of everything that is supposed to be related to it: acceptance of our weaknesses, limitations, and imperfections; reconciliation with the absence of the transcendent and acknowledgment of the equation “a human is [only] human,” “life is [only] life”) is conceptually highly problematic.

Is not the very existence of comedy and of the comical telling us most clearly that a man is never just a man, and that his finitude is very much corroded by a passion which is precisely not cut to the measure of man and of his finitude? Most comedies set up a configuration in which one or several characters depart violently from the moderate, balanced rationality and normality of their surroundings, and of other people in it.

“man,” a human being, interests comedy at the very point where the human coincides with the inhuman; where theinhuman “falls” into the human (into man), where the infinite falls into the finite, where the Essence falls into appearance and the Necessary into the contingent.

the true materialistic axiom, promoted by comedy, is, rather, “a man is not a man.” This is what the above-mentioned metaphysics of finitude fails to see when it encloses itself within a heart-stirring humanism of accepting human weaknesses and flaws. 50

A man comes home from work earlier than usual, and finds his wife in bed. She is visibly upset by his arrival, and claims to be in bed because she has a terrible headache. While he is expressing his concern for her, a phone starts to ring.

An example

The man reaches for his phone and answers, but the ringing continues. He is perplexed, and keeps looking at the phone in his hand; then the door of the bedroom closet opens and another man, wearing only his socks, comes out. He apologizes for the inconvenience and heads for the heap of clothes lying in the corner of the room, in search of the phone, which continues to ring. He finds it, answers it, and gets very seriously engaged in conversation. Meanwhile he is gesticulating to the (staring) husband and wife, to express his regret at intruding on them with his phone conversation. As if to minimize this impolite intrusion, he moves back towards the closet, climbs in, closes the door behind him, and calmly continues his conversation inside. . . . 57

What makes this irresistibly comical? Precisely the impossible sustained encounter between two excluding realities. Comedy stages this encounter in its very impossibility.

In “ordinary reality” this kind of intrusion of the other side would cause an immediate reaction and adjustment of both sides, enabling the linear continuation of the story.

The lover would be embarrassed, the husband humiliated, the wife embarrassed and perhaps scared; there would be a confrontation—that is to say, some kind of acknowledgment of what happened, and of its necessary consequences.

In our comic example, however, it is precisely this acknowledgment that is suspended, enabling the two mutually exclusive realities to continue to exist alongside each other, and, moreover, to be articulated within one and the same scene.

The actual link between them, the way the two realities meet and are articulated together (the lover politely apologizing to the couple for the disturbance caused by his phone, and considerately retreating back to his closet so that he does not disturb them with his talking) is, of course, highly illogical and “fantastic,” yet it works. In other words, it is not only that this comic procedure presents us with two mutually exclusive realities as visible in one and the same “shot,” it also has to find and offer us a form of their articulation which, in all its “absurdity,” somehow works.

Structural Dynamics and Temporality page 129

zupancic

2001 interview with Zupancic

Within reality as it is constituted via what Lacan calls the Imaginary and the Symbolic mechanisms, there is a “place of the lack of the Image,” which is symbolically designated as such. That is to say that the very mechanism of representation posits its own limits and designates a certain beyond which it refers to as “unrepresentable.” In this case, we can say that the place of something that has no image is designated symbolically; and it is this very designation that endows whatever finds itself in this place with the special power of fascination. Since this unrepresentable is usually associated with the transgression of the given limits of the Symbolic, it is spontaneously perceived as “evil,” or at least as disturbing.

In To Be or Not To Be, Lubitsch provides a very good example of “the image that occupies the very place of the lack of the Image.” At the beginning of the film, there is a brilliant scene in which a group of actors is rehearsing a play that features Hitler. The director is complaining about the appearance of the actor who plays Hitler, saying that his make-up is bad and that he doesn’t look like Hitler at all. He also says that what he sees in front of him is just an ordinary man. The scene continues, and the director is trying desperately to name the mysterious “something more” that distinguishes the appearance of Hitler from the appearance of the actor in front of him. One could say that he is trying to name the “evil” that distinguishes Hitler from this man who actually looks a lot like Hitler. He is searching and searching, and finally he notices a photograph of Hitler on the wall, and triumphantly cries out: “That’s it! This is what Hitler looks like!” “But sir,” replies the actor, “this picture was taken of me.” Needless to say, we as spectators were very much taken in by the enthusiasm of the director who saw in the picture something quite different from this poor actor. Now, I would say that there is probably no better “image” of the lack of the Image than this “thing” that the director (but also ourselves) has “seen” in the picture on the wall and that made all the difference between the photograph and the actor. One should stress, however, that this phenomenon is not linked exclusively to the question of evil, but to the question of the “unrepresentable” in general.

psychopedagogy

Cho, Daniel. Psychopedagogy. London: Ashgate, 2009.

The force that keeps the unconscious from being heard is the imaginary relation that the analysand constructs between their ego and the analyst’s. To state it differently, the analysand enters into a mirror-relation with the analyst’s ego. The analysand identifies with the analyst by grasping onto the ways they are similar. In a way, the analysand is saying to the analysts, “You are like me!” The analysand will even go so far as to be alienated by the analyst’s ego: “After all,” as the analysand seems to say, “the analyst is the trained professional, the expert.” By regarding the analyst as a mirror-image of one’s self results in attempts to master that image, the analyst. Returning for a moment to Dora – all of her resistance stems from her desire for mastery over Freud, which means the ego is at the bottom of the conflict. Dora is trying to maintain the integrity of her ego by mastering the image qua Freud.

For the unconscious to be heard, the ego must be muted. But one does not mute the ego by debasing, insulting, or shaming it; for indeed the ego will simply redouble itself against such efforts at traumatisation. Rather one disarms the ego by breaking the imaginary identification that alienates the analysand`s subjectivity in the analyst`s, that is, by causing separation. For this reason, Lacan says that the analyst must be ‘not a living mirror, but an empty mirror’ (SII 246). The analyst must be a mirror that reflects an empty image, that is, an image with which the patient cannot identify. The analyst does so by functioning as object a, that obscure object which sullies a perfect picture. And the analyst functions this way by speaking on behalf of the unconscious – the true subject of psychoanalysis. 42

Thus the lesson of the Ratman: we always possess more knowledge than we should like to admit – sometimes more than we ourselves are consciously aware. Learning therefore does not always mean acquiring absolutely new knowledge; it sometimes requires relearning the traumatic knowledge we do “not-want-to-know” but possess all the same. 81

Class consciousness is thus the knowledge of the mode of production contained, or as Lukacs has it, “imputed,” to a particular structural class position within the total system, its thrust is that it places knowledge on the side of the system itself. It no longer much matters what individuals actually think or know about the system. The system functions regardless; and by functioning, the system literally “thinks” the appropriate thoughts for the individuals. For example, the individual worker need not imagine extracting living labor power from the body in order to sell it as a commodity on the market in order for capitalism to function. This knowledge – that is, of classes and their particular functions – is possessed by the system of capital production itself, and as it operates, the system literally thinks about the extraction, sale, and consumption of labor power so that the individual does not have to. In other words, while empirical individuals may not care about the economy or politics, the economy and politics care about empirical individuals. Class consciousness, in other words, on Lukacs’s account, exists on a similar formal level as does the psychoanalytic unconscious. 84

But as suggestive and provocative Lukacs’s unadulterated Marxian variation on consciousness may be, even he does not take into account the various resistances, in the psychoanalytic sense of the word, individuals will produce in order not to know the traumatic knowledge yielded by certain standpoints. We must therefore follow through with the

Just as Lukacs correlates class consciousness to the system itself, effectively rubbing out the individual’s relevance, so Lacan and psychoanalysis also correlate the unconscious to a kind of nonindividual subject: “if there is an image which could represent for us the Freudian notion of the unconscious, it is indeed that of the acephalic subject, of a subject who no longer has an ego, who doesn’t belong to the ego” (S II: 167).

Lacan describes his notion of the subject as acephalic (that is, headless) because its thought is no longer tided to the consciousness of the ego but is now taken over by the unconscious itself. Because of its ties to the ego, consciousness is considered by Lacan as an obstacle or resistance to the knowledge of the unconscious. In dividing thought and being between the unconscious and the subject, Lacan introduces a fundamental division into his variation on the subject, that is to say, the Lacanian subject is a split-subject , which he conveys in his nomenclature: $. 87

Lukacs, similarly, introduces a split into the subject of the proletariat with class consciousness, as we saw, on the side of the system itself, separated from the individual’s being. In both Lukacs and Lacan, the acephalic subject becomes the image to which we must hold on.

The overcoming of the ego leaves a clearing in which the subject of the unconscious can emerge. This is why, for Lacan, the subject can only be described negatively. Only when conscious thought or positive identity (i.e., I am a man, I am a teacher, I am able-bodied, etc.) – in short, the ego – is subtracted from individuals, that is, only when they are transformed into the negativity that is the Lacanian subject, can they learn the unconscious. 87

If class consciousness corresponds to the unconscious in that they are both forms of repressed knowledge, then trauma would be the sign of class consciousness’s emergence. Therefore the criticism that Marx issues his political economist contemporaries on the basis of their not having learned the miserable truth of capitalist accumulation is a bit off the mark. For Marx grants them too much benefit of the doubt. More correct would have been to make the psychoanalytic critique, namely, that the bourgeois political economists knew this truth quite well but nonetheless did “not want to know” about it. They felt the trauma of capitalism and attempted to rationalize it away. 88

stavrakakis subject of enjoyment 7

Stavrakakis, Yannis. Subjectivity and the Organized Other: Between Symbolic Authority and Fantasmatic Enjoyment Organization Studies 2008 29: 1037

Beyond Identification,Yet Internal to It: The Subject of Enjoyment

If this structural and structuring role of the command provides the ontological nexus within which the subject learns to interact with their social environment — the symbolic preconditions of subjection and obedience — it cannot explain, however, why some commands produce obedient behaviour and others are ignored. It cannot account for the occurrence of disobedience and for instances of resistance. In fact, if we were to stay at this level, it would be impossible to account both for the failure of certain commands and for the complex ‘extrasymbolic’ means through which the organized Other supports and/or attempts to reinstitute its authority. Here, the Lacanian answer is simple. On the one hand, the real exceeds the subject and the lack this inscribes within subjective identity is what stimulates desire (for subjection to the Other).

On the other hand, the real also exceeds the Other and the lack this inscribes in the Other explains the ultimate failure of fully determining subjectivity. It is this second failure that makes resistance possible, at least in principle. It is in the traumatic fact that the Other cannot fully determine the subject that a space for freedom starts to emerge. But this is a freedom that the subject has learned to fear.

As Judith Butler has formulated it, this predicament of the subject is usually resolved with the adoption of the following stance: ‘I would rather exist in subordination than not exist’ (Butler 1997b: 7).

Both the Other and the subject prefer to repress or disavow, to defer this realization of the lack in the Other.

But in order to attempt that in a persuasive manner, the symbolic command is not enough. Something more positive is needed, given the fact that the lack marking subject and Other is a lack of jouissance. This is what fantasy attempts to offer. Let us examine in some more detail the basis of this argument. In order to sustain its hegemony, the performative, formal aspect of the command has to be supported by a fantasy scenario investing it with some supreme value at the level of enjoyment. We have seen in the previous section how Lacanian theory conceives of the different planes operating in identity formation at the intersection of subject and organized Other. We have also seen how Lacan’s negative ontology of lack leads to an attempt to encircle the real of enjoyment, a real which provides the (absent) cause of the dialectic of (failed) identifications partially constituting subjective and social reality.

Here is where Lacan’s originality — in relation to the general field of poststructuralism — is most clearly located. Why? Precisely because poststructuralism remains largely attached to what Harpham has described as ‘the critical fetish of modernity’: Language. … As a result of the linguistic turn … Language has become ‘the critical fetish of modernity’.

However, focusing on the symbolic aspects of identity … is not sufficient in order to reach a rigorous understanding of the drive behind identification acts, to explain why certain identifications prove to be more forceful and alluring than others, and to realize why none can be totally successful. In fact, poststructuralism has often employed models of subjectivity reducing it to a mere linguistic structure (reproducing a rationalist idea that control of talk and discourse means control of political belief) (Alcorn 2002: 97):

‘When poststructuralist theory imagines a subject structured by discourse, it has great difficulty making sense of subjects caught in patterns of repetition unresponsive to dialectic. To understand discourse fully is to understand the limitations of discourse … its inability to persuade the anorexic to eat, and its inability to intervene in those mechanisms of subjectivity that drive actions inaccessible to dialectic.’ (Alcorn 2002: 101)

‘Because of a kind of adhesive attachment that subjects have to certain instances of discourse, some discourse structures are characteristic of subjects and have a temporal stability. These modes of discourse serve as symptoms of subjectivity: they work repetitively and defensively to represent identity … some modes of discourse, because they are libidinally invested, repeatedly and predictably function to constitute the subject’s sense of identity.’ (Alcorn 2002: 17)

The libidinal, fantasmatic character of these attachments is also deeply implicated in processes of social change, which, under this light, can only be described in terms of a dialectic of dis-investment and re-investment … ‘to disinvest social constructions, one must do more than use language or be rational, one must do the work of withdrawing desire from representations.

This work is the work of mourning’ (Alcorn 2002: 117). Discursive shifts presuppose the ‘unbinding of libido’ and the re-investment of jouissance (Alcorn 2002: 118).

When Milgram perceptively writes that the experimenter fills a gap experienced by the subject, the association with Lacan’s formula of fantasy is unavoidable, since fantasy entails a link between the split (castrated) subject of the signifier and his objet-cause of desire, an object purporting to cover over its lack and ‘heal’ or, at least, domesticate castration.

The obvious question thus becomes: is there a fantasmatic frame that supports the symbolic command and binds the subject to the elementary structure of obedience revealed in Milgram’s experiment?

It is far from surprising that Milgram does isolate such a fantasmatic frame; he even highlights its ideological nature. This frame is science itself. What guarantees that the command of the experimenter will be taken seriously, what defers resistance, is that it is presented as part of a scientific experiment. Whatever happens in the experiment is commanded and justified by Science. As Milgram puts it, ‘the idea of science and its acceptance provide the overarching ideological justification for the experiment’ (Milgram 2005: 143).

Of course such a justification is always culturally specific: ‘if the experiment were carried out in a culture very different from our own — say, among Trobrianders — it would be necessary to find a functional equivalent of science in order to obtain psychologically comparable results’ (Milgram 2005: 144). It is also socially and politically specific: when the Yes Men, for example, make an outrageous WTO presentation to a group of students in New York they are met with hostility and not with acceptance (The Yes Men 2004: 146–7).

However, what is most important here is that this fantasmatic frame adds a positive support to the negative/formal character of the symbolic command since science is obviously invested with a positive value: ‘Ideological justification is vital in obtaining willing obedience, for it permits the person to see his behaviour as serving a desirable end’ (Milgram 2005: 144).

What seems to be implied is a particular form of attachment that can only be thought of in terms of positive investment. Thus, the experiment can function only because in the experimenter’s face the empty gesture of symbolic power and the fullness of its fantasmatic support seem to unite.

The other side of the negative force of castration implicit in the command is the fantasy channelling and sustaining in a much more positive and productive way the desire stimulated by this castration itself.

In Milgram’s words, ‘once people are brought into a social hierarchy, there must be some cementing mechanism to endow the structure with at least minimal stability’ (Milgram 2005: 149), and this mechanism involves a certain reward structure (Milgram 2005: 139), which can obviously be conceptualized in ways far more sophisticated than the ones Milgram himself could envisage. Only now can one begin to make real sense of the bond developed between experimenter and subject.

The subject of the experiment submits to the command not merely because it is a symbolic command but also because it is supported by an (imaginarized) supreme knowledge projected onto the person of the experimenter; in this case the experimenter is accepted as an agent of Science.

This projection, however, does not depend exclusively on the particular fantasy present here: it also reveals a more general condition relating to the nature of the bond between authority and subject. In Milgram’s own words, ‘Because the experimenter issues orders within a context he is presumed to know something about, his power is increased. Generally, authorities are felt to know more than the person they are commanding; whether they do or not, the occasion is defined as if they do’ (Milgram 2005: 143).

My reading may be guided by my Lacanian bias, but isn’t Milgram implying that the relation between experimenter and subject is a relation of transference? Isn’t he demonstrating that the experimenter functions as a subject supposed to know?

And, as we know from psychoanalysis, a transferential relation is never purely cognitive: it is primarily affective and libidinal; it also involves a certain enjoyment. Without such an emotional tie obedience would easily break down and disobedience would occur. Besides, how else can we explain the ‘curious’ feelings of compassion towards the experimenter, who issues the commands, and not so much towards the (supposedly) suffering person who receives the (fake) electric shocks, that Milgram detects in his subjects? The ‘unwillingness to “hurt” the experimenter’s feelings, are part of those binding forces inhibiting disobedience’ (Milgram 2005: 152).

In that sense, Milgram can contribute two major points to our inquiry.

1. obedience to authority has a lot to do with the symbolic source of the command and very little with its concrete (rational or irrational, factual or fictional) content.

2. our attachment to this symbolic source is, to a large extent, extimate to the symbolic itself.

Beyond the formal force of the symbolic command, Milgram reveals a lot about the more positive aspects of attachment and obedience to power structures. Not only are these formal structures supported by a fantasy frame manipulating our desire, but the nature of this attachment itself is also of a libidinal, transferential nature.

Symbolic power presupposes a particular type of relation between those who exercise power and those who are subjected to it, a relation of belief which results in complicity.

Such a belief cannot be cultivated and sustained without the mobilization and fantasmatic manipulation of affect and enjoyment; it is clearly located in an extimate position with regard to symbolic structure: ‘What creates the power of words and slogans, a power capable of maintaining or subverting the social order, is the belief in the legitimacy of words and of those who utter them. And words alone cannot create this belief’ (Bourdieu 1991: 170).

This is why it is so difficult — although, fortunately, not impossible — for subjects to withdraw from the experiment: ‘Though many subjects make the intellectual decision that they should not give any more shocks to the learner, they are frequently unable to transform this conviction into action’ (Milgram 2005: 150).

In other words, resistance cannot rely on a shift in consciousness and knowledge. Resistance is not an intellectual issue precisely because obedience is also not sustained at an intellectual level.

Even those who decide to ignore the command cannot do so without enormous emotional strain: ‘As the subject contemplates this break, anxiety is generated, signalling him to step back from the forbidden action and thereby creating an emotional barrier through which he must pass in order to defy authority’ (Milgram 2005: 154).

It is here, I believe, that one encounters the most disturbing aspect of Milgram’s experiment. It is clearly located in the difficulties in passing from acceptance to dissent and from dissent to disobedience. In other words, the subject has to overcome two emotional barriers in order to resist the violent command.

The first barrier leads to the expression of dissent. But dissent does not necessarily lead to disobedience: ‘Many dissenting individuals who are capable of expressing disagreement with authority still respect authority’s right to overrule their expressed opinion. While disagreeing, they are not prepared to act on this conviction’ (Milgram 2005: 163).

stavrakakis yes men 6

Stavrakakis, Yannis. Subjectivity and the Organized Other: Between Symbolic Authority and Fantasmatic Enjoyment Organization Studies 2008 29: 1037

Very often, however, experiencing such alienation is not enough to effect a lessening of the bonds attaching us to the socio-symbolic Other. In other words, subjects are willing to do whatever may be necessary in order to repress or disavow the lack in the Other.

This insight is crucial in understanding power relations. Moving beyond the banal level of raw coercion, which (although not unimportant) cannot form the basis of sustainable hegemony, everyone seeking to understand how certain power structures manage to institute themselves as objects of long-term identification and how people get attached to them is sooner or later led to a variety of phenomena associated with what, since de la Boetie, has been called ‘voluntary servitude’. The central question here is simple:

Why are people so willing and often enthusiastic — or at least relieved — to submit themselves to conditions of subordination, to the forces of hierarchical order? Why are they so keen to comply with the commands of authority often irrespective of their content?

The famous words of Rousseau from the second chapter of The Social Contract are heard echoing here: ‘A slave in fetters loses everything — even the desire to be freed from them. He grows to love his slavery …’   Obviously, the Oedipal structure implicit in the social ordering of our societies, the role of what Lacan calls ‘the Name-of-the-Father’ in structuring reality through the (castrating) imposition of the Law, predisposes social subjects to accept and obey what seems to be emanating from the big Other, from socially sedimented points of reference invested with the gloss of authority and presented as embodying and sustaining the symbolic order, organizing (subjective and objective) reality.  This central Freudian-Lacanian insight can indeed explain a lot. And this can be very well demonstrated through some empirical examples.

Consider, for instance, the story of The Yes Men, two anti-corporate activistpranksters who have set up a fake ‘World Trade Organisation’ website. Believing that the site is the official WTO site, many visitors have sent them speaking invitations addressed to the real WTO. Mike and Andy decided to accept some of the invitations and soon started attending business meetings and conferences throughout the world as WTO representatives. Although intending to shock and ridicule they soon discovered that their ludicrous interventions generated other types of reaction. This is how they describe their experience themselves:

Neither Andy nor Mike studied economics at school. We know very little about the subject, and we won’t attempt to convince you otherwise; if you are of sound mind, you would see through us immediately. Yet, to our surprise, at every meeting we addressed, we found we had absolutely no trouble fooling the experts — those same experts who are ramming the panaceas of ‘free trade’ and ‘globalization’ down the throats of the world’s population. Worse: we couldn’t get them to disbelieve us.

Some of our presentations were based on official theories and policies, but presented with far more candour than usual, making them look like the absurdities that they actually are. At other times we simply ranted nonsensically. Each time, we expected to be jailed, kicked out, silenced, or at the very least interrupted. But no one batted an eye. In fact, they applauded. (The Yes Men 2005)

Simply put, people seem to be ready to accept anything insofar as it is perceived to be transmitted from a source invested with authority: for businessmen and many academics the WTO is obviously such a source. In other words, the content of a message is not as important as the source from which it emanates. Likewise, the subject’s autonomy in filtering and consciously managing its beliefs seems to be undermined by a dependence on symbolic authority per se.

We saw in the activities staged by the Yes Men how easily people are prepared to accept whatever is perceived as coming from an authority. Obviously, what is at stake here is not only acceptance but also compliance and obedience.

Most people, as is shown in their activities, are indeed prepared to accept and obey anything coming from a source of authority irrespective of the actual content of the command. In fact, this structure of authority seems to be a frame presupposed in every social experience.

As Milgram points out, already before the experiment starts, ‘the subject enters the situation with the expectation that someone will be in charge’. Now, and this is the most crucial point, the role of this someone is structurally necessary, without him the identity of the subject itself remains suspended and no functional social interaction can take place: ‘the experimenter, upon first presenting himself, fills a gap experienced by the subject’.  This quasi-Lacanian formulation reveals something essential. First of all, it lends support to the Lacanian understanding of the Name-of-the-Father, the signifier representing authority and order, as instituting the reality of the subject. In his brief Lacanian analysis of the Milgram experiment, David Corfield is right to point out that it ‘reveals something of the super-egoical consequences of the establishment of the paternal metaphor in a clear, albeit brutal fashion’ (Corfield 2002: 200).

The founding moment of subjectivity proper, the moment linguistic/social subjects come to being, has to be associated with symbolic castration, with the prohibition of incest that resolves imaginary alienation and permits our functional insertion into the social world of language.

In other words, the command embodied in the Name-of-the-Father offers the prototype of symbolic power that structures our social reality in patriarchal societies. This is a power both negative and positive, both prohibitive and productive (à la Foucault). The performative prohibition of the paternal function is exactly what makes possible the development of (sexual) desire. Furthermore, it is a power that presupposes our complicity or rather our acceptance; only this acceptance is ‘forced’ since without it no social subject can emerge and psychosis seems to be the only alternative.

And this is a dialectic which is bound to affect our whole life: ‘A power exerted on a subject, subjection is nevertheless a power assumed by the subject, an assumption that constitutes the instrument of that subject’s becoming’ (Butler 1997b: 11).

Without the assumption of castration no desire can emerge. In that sense, if Giorgio Agamben links biopolitics (a characteristically modern phenomenon according to Foucault) with sovereignty per se (Agamben 1998), Lacan seems to be highlighting the inextricable bond between repressive and productive (symbolic) power. Hence, symbolic castration marks a point of no return for the subject.

It is the command of prohibition and our subjection to it that institutes our social world as a structured meaningful order. Without someone in command reality disintegrates.

What Lacan, in his ‘Agency of the Letter’, describes as the ‘elementary structures of culture’ (Lacan 1977: 148), meaning a linguistically determined sense of ordering, are now also revealed as elementary structures of obedience and symbolic power. The intersubjective effects of this logic are immense: ‘It is not only the subject, but the subjects, caught in their intersubjectivity, who line up … and who, more docile than sheep, model their very being on the moment of the signifying chain that runs through them’ (Lacan 2006: 21).

Without such an elementary structure of obedience — instituted and reproduced in what Milgram calls ‘antecedent conditions’: the individual’s familial experience, the general societal setting built on impersonal relations of authority — the experiment would collapse. And these antecedent conditions have to be understood in their proper Lacanian perspective: they refer primarily to the whole symbolic structure within which the subject is born: ‘the subject … if he can appear to be the slave of language is all the more so of a discourse in the universal movement of which his place is already inscribed at birth, if only by virtue of his proper name’ (Lacan 1977: 63–4).

fantasy glynos

Glynos, Jason. ” ” Carl Cederström and Casper Hoedemaekers (eds) Lacan and Organization London: MayFlyBooks, 2010 free download

The tendency of many poststructuralist approaches to highlight the importance of the political dimension of workplace practices signals a desire to eschew the idea that the economy is an extra-discursive force outside of, and acting upon, politics, culture, and society. On the contrary, such a poststructuralist perspective seeks to make explicit the idea that the economy is discursively constructed and thus contestable. The political dimension of workplace practices is thus theorized in a way that diverges from the way politics and power are often understood. The concept of the political is theorized not as a function of the way that power is distributed in the organization, where power is understood in terms of identifiable sovereign authority, capacities, resources, interests, structures, or a dispersed micro-physics of power. From the point of view of poststructuralist theory, the political dimension of a practice is understood in relation to a negative ontology, where to subscribe to a negative ontology means simply to affirm the absence of any positive ontological foundations for the subject (or, to put it differently, to affirm the radical contingency of social relations). Far from leading to a kind of free fall into relativism, such a perspective expands the scope and relevance of critical analysis because it emphasizes the situated, precarious, and thus potentially political, character of interests and structures themselves.

logic of fantasy

In a first approach we could say that the logic of fantasy names a narrative structure involving some reference to an idealized scenario promising an imaginary fullness or wholeness (the beatific side of fantasy) and, by implication, a disaster scenario (the horrific side of fantasy). This narrative structure will have a range of features, which will vary from context to context, of course, but one crucial element is the obstacle preventing the realization of one’s fantasmatic desire. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, realizing one’s fantasy is impossible because the subject (as a subject of desire) survives only insofar as its desire remains unsatisfied.

But the obstacle, which often comes in the form of a prohibition or a threatening Other, transforms this impossibility into a ‘mere difficulty’, thus creating the impression that its realization is at least potentially possible.

This gives rise to another important feature of fantasy, namely, its transgressive aspect: the subject secures a modicum of enjoyment by actively transgressing the ideals it officially affirms (see also Glynos, 2003a; 2008b), for example by trying to eliminate the identified obstacle through illicit means. In this view, there is a kind of complicity animating the relation between the official ideal and its transgressive enjoyment, since they rely on each other to sustain themselves. Fantasy, therefore, is not merely a narrative with its potentially infinite variations at the level of content, although it is of course this too. It also has a certain logic in which the subject’s very being is implicated: the disruption or dissolution of the logic leads to what Lacan calls the aphanisis, or vanishing, of the subject (as a subject of desire). In sum, the logic of a fantasmatic narrative is such that it structures the subject’s desire by presenting it with
an ideal,
an impediment to the realization of an ideal,
as well as the enjoyment linked to the transgression of an ideal.

This conception of fantasy can be readily linked to the literature in organizational studies. Several studies on employee cynicism, for example, suggest how transgressive acts can sometimes serve to stabilize an exploitative social practice, which they appear to subvert. Taking their cue from Michael Burawoy’s study of factory workers in Manufacturing Consent (1979), they draw the conclusion that informal games and cynical distance toward the control systems and company rules imposed by management often have the effect of sustaining the oppressive system which they ostensibly transgress. In a related vein, and referring to Gideon Kunda’s study of cynical workers in Engineering Culture (1992), Fleming and Spicer emphasise how ‘employees performed their roles flawlessly and were highly productive’
despite their recourse to ‘humour, the mocking of pompous official rituals and sneering cynicism’. They suggest how cynicism could help sustain employees’ belief that they are not mere cogs in a company machine, thereby allowing them to indulge in the fantasy that they are ‘special’ or ‘unique’ individuals (Fleming and Spicer, 2003: 164).

That such cynical-transgressive acts sustain the social practice being transgressed appears to be corroborated by studies, which show how personnel officers of many companies actually advise workers not to identify with corporate culture ideals too strongly, and to retain a healthy distance from the company script. These studies point to the normative and political significance of workplace fantasies. In fact recent developments in political discourse
theory bring into focus the critical potential of a Lacanian conception of fantasy by situating fantasmatic logics in relation to what have been called, following the work of Ernesto Laclau, social and political logics (Glynos and Howarth, 2007; see also Stavrakakis, 2007).

My claim here is that appeal to these logics helps make clearer the normative and ethical implications of the category of fantasy (see also Glynos, 2008a).

In general terms, the category of ‘logics’ seeks to capture the purposes, rules and self-understandings of a practice in a way that is sensitive to
the radical contingency of social relations, or what in Lacanian parlance is called ‘lack in the Other’. Logics thus furnish a language with which to characterize and critically explain the existence, maintenance, and transformation of practices, thus making the approach flexible enough to deal with the porous and shifting boundary of ‘work’ in a wide range of contemporary organizational practices. A practice is here understood in broad terms to comprise a network of activities and intersubjective relations, which is sufficiently individuated to allow us to talk about it meaningfully and which thus appears to cohere around a set of rules and/or other conditions of existence. In this view, a practice is always a discursive practice, which is meaningful and collectively sustained through the operation of three logics: social, political, and fantasmatic logics.

If social logics assist in the task of directly characterizing a practice along a synchronic axis, then political logics can be said to focus more on the
diachronic aspects of a practice, accounting for the way it has emerged or the way it is contested and/or transformed. And if political logics furnish us with the means to show how social practices come into being or are transformed, then fantasmatic logics disclose the way specific practices and regimes grip subjects ideologically (Glynos, 2001).

In the remainder of this section I continue to focus on the way the logic of fantasy sustains particular work relations and patterns. Fantasies supported by the prospect of big profits, generous pay packets, career advancement, consumption of prize commodities, and hobbies, are an obvious way to think about how patterns of work are affected and sustained by fantasies. But such fantasmatically-structured desires shape the nature and content of demands made by workers and by management, as well as the way they are responded to.

But in what way, more specifically, does fantasy sustain the existing political economy of work? One way of thinking about this is in relation to the political dimension of social relations. Insofar as fantasies prevent or make difficult the politicization of existing social relations, relations of subordination inclusive, one can say that fantasy helps reinforce the status quo. The logic of fantasy, then, can be construed as a narrative affirmed by workers, often unconsciously, preventing the contestation of suspect social norms, and making less visible possible counter-logics.

The claim here is that the more subjects are invested in fantasies, the more likely they are to read all aspects of their practice in terms of that fantasmatic narrative, and the less likely they are to ‘read for difference’. Counter-logics are precisely those potential alternative discursive patterns that inhere in the interstices of workplace practices that would provide a counterpoint to a dominant social logic. The subject tends to use fantasy as a way to protect itself from ambiguities, uncertainties, and other features which evoke intimations of anxiety. But it is precisely those ambiguities that open up possibilities for critical distance and alternative ‘becomings’. It thus becomes important to make explicit the normative framework that the researcher brings to the analysis and, through a process of articulation, to actively bring it into contact with those concrete alternatives residing in the practices themselves (Glynos and Howarth, 2007: 177-97).

The insights generated by such a Lacanian-inflected discursive approach to work and the organization may offer us a way to overcome some of the problems identified in approaches inspired by other psychoanalytic schools, and to generate a research programme intended to explore the links between ethics, fantasy, and normative critique in the study of organizations.17 Such a research programme would address
some fairly basic questions, which are important from the point of view of analysis and critique. For example: … how do the identified fantasies operate in such a way as to make less visible to the subjects themselves both the potential grievances and potential alternative ways of structuring workplace practice?

A specifically Lacanian critical political economy, then, would begin with the assumption that economic life is embedded in social and political relations, highlighting the complex and overdetermined character of economic relations and identities.

Here subjects are not only consumers, but ‘also citizens, students, workers, lovers, and parents, and the lives they live in each of these roles affects their involvement in the others’ (Best and Connolly, 1982: 39).

Noting that subjects are multiply affiliated is not uncommon in the literature of course. The observation, however, raises a question about how best to understand the ways in which multiple subject positions combine, separate, or dissolve. From this point of view it is possible to draw on the hermeneutical, post-marxist, post-structuralist work of Best and Connolly (1982), Resnick and Wolff (1987, 2005), Gibson-Graham (2006), Laclau and Mouffe (1985), Laclau (1990) and others, to articulate a connection to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory (see also Glynos and Howarth, 2007; Ozselcuk, 2006; Madra, 2006; Ozselcuk and Madra, 2005).

 

Such an exercise would help make a specifically Lacanian contribution to the critical political economy of work – a field which seeks to politicize dominant socio-economic arrangements, justifications of wealth and income inequality, as well as the various structures of accountability to stakeholders and the public at large (which secure and bolster the allegiance of those subject to such arrangements and structures).

[A] Lacanian-inflected political theory of discourse challenges the idea that such interests have a motivating force which is independent of the way they pass through the self-interpretations of subjects, thereby pointing to the fantasmatic and potentially political aspects of those interests.

Such an approach, therefore, shares an important affinity with those cultural economists who argue that ‘[t]he economy does not exist, out there, but is enacted and constituted through the practices, decisions, and conversations of everyday life’ (Deetz and Hegbloom)

Noting the central role that work plays in social life … A Lacanian-inflected approach would clearly focus on aspects of those practices that exhibit the presence of split subjectivity, the unconscious, and fantasy,

For a call to explore the relation between a radical democratic ethos and an ‘ethics of the real’, see Mouffe, C. (2000) The Democratic Paradox,(conclusion); on this, see also Glynos, J. (2003) ‘Radical democratic ethos, or, what is an authentic political act?’, Contemporary Political Theory, 2(2): 187-208.

lack in the other

Tutt, Daniel. The Object of Proximity: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis in Žižek and Santner via Lacan. American University Also available here danielp.tutt(at)gmail.com

For Lacan, symbolic identity inhabits an empty place, or the “point de capiton,” which occurs when the subject functions as a signifier embodying a function beyond its own concreteness. The subject is emptied of its particular signification in point de capiton, in order to represent fullness in general. Point de capiton operates in national, religious, political, or ethnic signifiers such as “the nation” or “communism” or even religious identity groupings such as “Christian” or “Muslim,” yet they function as pure negativity, and represent what has to be excluded or negated.

As Yannis Stavrakakis points out in the Lacanian Left, the Name of the Father functions as an insertion into point de capiton, as an operation tied to power relations in late capitalism. Lacan’s Seminar on the Four Discourses introduces the “university discourse” as arising in the wake of the chaotic revolutionary protests of May 1968 in France, and across Europe. The university discourse is a mode of discourse that incorporates scientific discourse to legitimize relations of power. The subject in university discourse becomes equivalent with the social totality, and is situated in the particular historical and late capitalist symbolic space, where the movement occurs, mainly apart from the Master’s discourse, and into university discourse.

An excellent example that reveals the procedure of Name of the Father filing in the point de capiton into empty symbolic identity are the popular “culture jamming” Yes Men. The Yes Men are a group of activists who inhabit false symbolic authority by assuming the identity of powerful businessmen, activists, and politicians. They deliver totally ludicrous presentations that are in actuality totally empty of legitimate content. What they have discovered through these presentations to power holders is that their audiences end up listening attentively to their presentations, and more importantly, they end up taking their statements for total fact without question and most often end up agreeing with their absurd findings.

What this indicates more than anything is that symbolic identity construction functions as an empty gesture of symbolic power supported by a fantasmatic supplement, and both unite to form reality. What the Yes Men and the case of Schreber both indicate is that the commands of identity, deployed from the level of fantasy will always be filled up as an empty vessel. The “crisis of investiture” for both Schreber and the Yes Men occur when “the kernel of invasiveness of too much reality” functions on the side of symbolic identity as an empty space that can be filled in with an inherent negativity. This crisis of identity problematizes attempts to adequately symbolize oneself in everyday reality. 🙂 His use of Yes Men here is confusing.

Lack and Desire in the real

In the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, the mediating force of the Other is desire. Desire is posited as universal,  “all desire is desire of the Other,” since all desire is structured around a missing jouissance, around a lack; it is important to understand the way that lack of the Other structures symbolic identities.

Lack … is always introduced through an act of exclusion, an exclusion in part responsible for the fundamental disequilibrium between integrating the Other into the symbolic realm, yet we find that there is something that does fill in the symbolic: fantasy

The imposition of fantasy arises precisely when the desire for filling in, or covering over lack arises. On a structural level, fantasy stimulates and promises to cover over the lack in the Other created by the loss of jouissance.

Since fantasy is also an effect of symbolic castration, it is also a defense mechanism against the fear of symbolic castration. Symbolic castration is defined by Lacan as, “a symbolic lack of an imaginary object,” and symbolic castration is the subject’s first perception of the Other, as not complete, but lacking.

Lacan argues that the subject can only maintain psychic normality by accepting this inherent lack of the other; hence symbolic castration plays a normalizing effect on the subject.

Fantasy then becomes crucial to understanding the role of the “I-Other” relationship and to determining how the Other serves as a support that fills in the void for the lack in the Other, in the realm of the symbolic. The illusory nature of fantasyserves as the central support for the desire to identify, which is inherently impossible in the real, as discussed above.

The Other of fantasy takes on the role of an object, or das Ding to sustains desire itself, and since the Other appears as a remainder, the Other is in an almost mythological status to the subject. The Other promises to provide what the subject lacks and thus unify both as subjects.

The other takes on the role of the object that can potentially unify both the split psyche (of the subject) and of unifying the split social field itself.