fantasy – Page 4 – objet (a)

Laclau subject formation

if the subject were a mere subject position within the structure, the latter would be fully closed and there would be no contingency at all … [Radical contingency is possible only] if the structure is not fully reconciled with itself, if it is inhabited by an original lack, by a radical undecidability that needs to be constantly superseded by acts of decision. There acts are, precisely, what constitute the subject, who can only exist as a will transcending the structure. Because this will has no place of constitution external to the structure but is the result of the failure of the structure to constitute itself, it can be formed only through acts of identification. If I need to identify with something it is because I do not have a full identity in the first place. These acts of identification are thinkable only as a result of the lack within the structure and have the permanent trace of the latter. Contingency is shown in this way: as the inherent distance of the structure from itself.

Laclau, Emancipation(s) 1996: 92.

Taken from: Jason Glynos and David Howarth,
Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory.

Routledge, 2007 pp. 128-129.

real of woman

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 127-131

The production of the excluded ‘reality’ of women is evident in, for example, the case of sexual harassment.

Before feminist activism in this area, social discourses did not represent the ‘experience’ of sexual harassment. Sexual harassment existed as a social practice, but it was not possible to articulate that experience as such within the symbolic economy of existing social discourses. These experiences were literally ‘not spoken of’.

Yet at the same time, the sexual harassment of women is a social practice that is produced by gendered social relations. The social discourse produces both the practice and its disavowal. The exclusions of social fictions can be traced to the operation of a phallic Symbolic order that produces discourse as discourse and subject as subject.

In Lacanian terms, the production of the real of women as an excluded term of discourse is linked to the impossibility of symbolically rendering women in a phallocentric Symbolic order. The Lacanian position links the excluded real of women to the symbolically repudiated female body of the Mother in a phallic Symbolic order. In feminist terms, this symbolic economy renders ‘women’ as either the phantasy of The Woman or as an excluded term. In this formulation, feminist discourses articulate the founding symbolic repudiation of the excluded real of women.

Unlike social fictions, feminist discourses render the real of women not as lack but symbolize and reinscribe it into the signifying chain. This reinscription shifts the relation of symbolic elements within the chain, producing a new chain of signifiers. This reinscription produces a new discourse and thus a different representation of women.

Instead, the a should be understood as analogous to the Lacanian concept of the Real. This concept is one of Lacan’s most difficult and complex, as he uses it in many linked senses and its meaning changes over the course of his work. … Lacan posits the Real as excess, impossibility and lack. In Lacan’s earlier work, it is a material plenitude which exceeds the Symbolic order, and in which nothing is lacking … In Lacan’s later work, the real is impossible (‘le réel, c’est impossible’) (S17: 143). It is a logical obstacle that cannot be represented within the symbolic (S17: 143). For this reason, the Real is also lack in language, because it marks that which the Symbolic cannot symbolize. No signifying chain can represent it in its totality – hence its impossibility. Something must always fall out of discourse, which is its excluded a. 131

In this way, the Real can also be understood as the hole in the Symbolic order, the impossibility on which that order is predicated and the absence that it encircles. 131

It is not the matching of a signifier to its correlative signified, because there is no metalanguage able to tell the truth about truth and no transcendental signifier that can fix meaning as a correlate of reality (Lacan 1965: 16, Éc: 867– 868). Knowledge is a discourse of the Real, diffracting it through the prism of discursive structures. The production of a new signifying chain represents a different relation to the Real, and with it a new ‘real’.

My account of feminist knowledge does not understand the Real as a fixed entity that the act of knowing passively uncovers. Rather, it is the constitutive ‘outside’ of the existing limits of discourse. An effect of the excess plenitude of the Real is theoretical and political possibility.

If the Symbolic order does not represent the totality of being, then language can take a different form, can represent a different relationship to the Real, and can represent a different Real. It becomes possible to signify the Real differently. Such a conception grants a utopian dimension to knowledge, for if it is not immutable, then the world that it represents is not given, and it can describe a different Real.

Accordingly, knowledge exists in both a present and a future signifying relation to the Real. If the Real is an impossible plenitude, it becomes possible to accept that we can never fully know or represent it, while also accepting that it offers a multiplicity of possibilities.

There can be other symbolic exclusions from discourse, such that the operations of discourse are less costly to those excluded others of the Symbolic order.

We need not conflate the lack in the symbolic with a Symbolic that represents femininity as lack. To claim that it is possible to change a signifying relation to the Real (and with it the signifying relation to object, self and others) is not to claim that it is possible to obtain a mystical fusion with the plenitude of the Real, in which language is adequate to its all and the speaking being suffers no loss. My conception of feminist discourse assumes that there is no knowledge that can ever provide a full and adequate representation of the world. Rather, knowledge is necessarily incomplete, situated and partial, such that it cannot ever represent all, or be a transcendental Truth.

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology.
Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 132.
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/oculryerson/Doc?id=10098962&ppg=145

pluth for butler is the subject anything other than language

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

Butler does not, as far as I am aware, ever say anything like “the subject is language,” and I do not believe her theory ever suggests such an equation. In fact, at some points Butler seems to suggest that a subject is not identical to its identity. If identity is discursively constructed, then this might lead one to think that the subject is also something other than discourse. One could have an identity constituted by language and a subject who is not entirely absorbed by this identity (142).

I have been arguing that when Lacan makes the subject something separate from identity, he also means that the subject is not reducible to language or discourse. This is because he also takes the event of sexuality into account when describing the subject’s genesis. Lacan’s theory is an example of a nontranscendental view of the subject that does not reduce the subject to language or any other of its elements (the real, or jouissance). Neither transcendental to the field that constitutes it, nor immanent in that field, the subject according to Lacan is a function that results from language’s effects on the body.

Instead of understanding the subject in terms of a function or effect, Butler opts for an immanent view of the subject. 142

But equally essential to Lacan’s theory is the idea that the subject is neither reducible to nor immanent in language. This means that an outside of discourse, an outside found in the body, the real, or jouissance, is a necessary component of Lacan’s theory of the subject (143).

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

glynos on logic of desire logic of capital

Glynos, Jason. “‘There is no Other of the Other’ Symptoms of a Decline in Symbolic Faith, or, Žižek’s Anti-capitalism” Paragraph vol 24, no. 2, July 2001 (78-110).

The subject of capitalism is empty
The subject of desire is empty

Lacan’s logic of desire and the logic of capitalism share a deep homology in structuring contemporary subjectivity (87).

In both cases the logics are purely formal and independent of the particular concrete contexts wherein they function.
Fetishism of the new keeps desire alive
- Insatiable desire for new products
- In order to sustain itself it must prevent itself from satisfaction
Subject of desire constant never-ending desire after desire
Fantasy covers over the necessary dissatisfaction of the subject
- Dissatisfied are we? Blame immigrants, jews etc.

The depoliticized economy is the disavowed “fundamental fantasy” of postmodern politics

Slavoj Žižek The Ticklish Subject. 1999, 355.

The capitalists erosion of the big Other’s efficiency, therefore, throws the subject of desire into a panic. When symbolic authority qua prohibition gives way to a more permissive society, when object of desire are more readily available and less subject to social prohibition (you are free to invent your own marital and/or sexual arrangements, however perverse these might appear; others will tolerate your actions and opinions), the social subject comes that much closer to realizing its desire. But … this proximity to fulfilment simply arouses anxiety. Why? Because it threatens to extinguish the subject as a subject of desire: a subject of desire sustains itself only on condition that its ultimate object of desire remains inaccessible. Thus, the structural consequence of the growing collapse of symbolic efficiency is not a healthy burgeoning of pleasurable experiences and increased well-being. Instead, it is a desperate attempt to cling to this kind of subjectivity by making the big Other exist. And in a situation of generalized cynicism, in the absence of symbolic faith, we witness ‘the proliferation of different versions of a big Other that actually exists, in the Real, not merely as a symbolic fiction (90).

This is precisely the role that ethical committees, sex guides, and manuals of political correctness play; or the role that various moral, political and religious fundamentalisms play. They do not so much succeed in establishing some unitary empty prohibition characteristic of past subjectivities. Instead they are characterized more by a proliferation of rules and regulations that provide a whole host of imaginary ideals (about what to say, about what to eat, etc.). In the absence of symbolic faith, we attempt to recoup certainty with even greater urgency by means of the decentred sprouting of bureaucratic apparatuses (90).

What unites these otherwise disparate phenomena is our contemporary subjective stance. The disintegration of our faith in the big Other, then, creates anxiety in subjects of desire and it becomes imperative that new obstacles are introduced to regain a sense of balance. In other words, the logic of desire reproduces exactly the logic of capital which requires for its survival new frontiers, new enemies (91).

When symbolic Other doesn’t meet expectations, what comes to forefront is (void-) cause of our desire which is misperceived as an obstacle: soft permissive liberal, Jew, immigrant, paedophile
Making the Other exist
- Returning to basic morals in various fundamentalisms
- Complaining to the Other (complaint culture)
- Provoking the Other by cutting into the real of the body (body piercing, self-inflicted harm, suicde, s&m)
- Accusing the Other for allowing others to steal our way of life (discourses targeting immigrants)
- Bypassing the Other through direct reference to real of science (expert committees)
- Positing an Other of the Other (conspiracy theories) (91)

Fantasy provides a rationale that premists us to avoid confronting the Other’s inconsistency and incompleteness, thereby generating an Other of the Other, a real Other of the symbolic Other.

A properly authentic, ethical act, is one that manages to effect a traversing of the social fantasy, thereby exposing the lack in the big Other, the ultimate impotence of the dominant politico-economic discourse.

What sustains [capitalism] are the social subject’s disavowed social fantasies and their constitutive ‘threats – those, in other words, who take advantage of our present system, like single mothers, immigrants, … It is precisely there that the battle against capitalism should properly be fought (as opposed to engaging only in rational-deliberative political sarugument which is sustained by these social fantasies).

[W]hat is most traumatic is not that I am subject to the rule of the big Other, to the Master. Far more traumatic is the possibility that the big Other does not exist. This is ultimately what we cannot accept as subjects of desire and this is ultimately the reason for our ready recourse to fantasies of the ‘Other of the Other’ who ‘steal’ our enjoyment. This is why, for Žižek, the aim of ideological critique is to create the conditions in which we can ‘experience how there is nothing “behind” it, and how fantasy masks precisely this “nothing”. … this ‘crossing of the fantasy’ ushers in a distinctively novel ethical horizon and a corresponding mode of subjectivity (97).

Crossing [Traversing] the Fantasy

1. Devaluing the object of desire we think the Other has stolen (or threatens to steal) from us:

Deflate publicly supported imaginary ideals, our precious treasures that appear to be threatened by the intrusion of an evil menace
- Jew, Freud attempted just such a strategic move by portraying the Jew as someone who does not in fact possess the precious treasure that anti-Semites insist on imputing to him
Paedophiles by demonizing them and stressing the innocence of our children, no, do not exacerbate the problem by heightening the privileged status of the victim, “making their torture and rape all that harder to resist.
Instead the equivalent strategy would be to emphasise how children are in fact not as innocent as we might imagine them, to highlight their already polymorphously perverse sexuality, etc.

Of course this strategy (regarding both the Jew and the Paedophile) does not mean that their offences should go unpunished. The point, however, is that without intervening with an eye on the fantasy structuring the social symptoms, not only do we miss an opportunity to sap the jouissance invested in them, we often in fact simply reinforce it (note 75, 109).

2. Confronting the social subject with the obstacle qua cause of desire. This obstacle is often perceived in terms of a threat, as is the case in UFO conspiracy theories.

The crucial, hitherto underestimated ideological impact of the coming ecological crisis will be precisely to make the ‘collapse of the big Other’ part of our everyday experience, i.e., to sap this unconscious belief in the ‘big Other’ of power … exposing the power’s ultimate impotence. Our ‘spontaneous’ ideological reaction to it, of course, is to have recourse to the fake premodern forms of reliance on the ‘big Other’ (‘New Age consciousness’; the balanced circuit of Nature, etc.). Perhaps, however, our very physical survival hinges on our ability to consummate the act of assuming fully the ‘nonexistence of the Other,’ [of abandoning our attempts to find another Other behind the big Other] (99).

The passage from premodern subjectivity to modern subjectivity (and the accompanying shifts in socio-political arrangements) was made possible by the emergence of monotheistic religions; while the passage modern to postmodern (and the accompanying shifts in socio-political arrangements) was made possible by the scientific revolution and the birth of capitalism. In this view, monotheistic Prohibition marks the primordial repression that gives birth to a whole series of fantasies that support socio-political discourse; and the subsequent modern and postmodern eras presuppose a subjectivity that operations within this fantasmatic framework (100).

Žižek’s anti-capitalism, then, amounts to nothing short of a call to another fundamental mutation in human subjectivity corresponding to the passage through fantasy and entailing an ethical stance that is adequate to this task.

The prospect of a fundamental mutation, however, evokes horror. Just as the demand to replace polytheism with monotheism, or secularism with monotheism could not but be perceived as idealist, even terroristic, so too will the anti-capitalist demand to move beyond fantasy. Why? Because it implies a complete revamping of our economic, social, and political institutional arrangements, and the standards of evaluation they presuppose. This, ultimately, is why it is not possible to give concrete content to the new ethics of the drive. What will emerge on the Other side of fantasy cannot be predicted in advance, much less judged on the basis of contemporary standards of evaluation. Any such attempt to predict outcomes can only rely on current standards and ideals, reducing reformist cautionary projects to a consequentialist calculus that seeks foundational guarantees rooted in our current ethico-political horizon. It would simply reiterate through other means the thesis that there is an ‘Other of the Other’.

This, indeed, gives some rationale to Žižek’s ‘returns’ to the Stalinist terror, the Nazi horror, or the various ethnic wars. When he subjects these phenomena to analytical treatment, his aim is not directly to propose a new concrete socio-political framework which would prevent such atrocities in the future. He does not argue that we need more human rights, more political will, more sophisticated legal systems, etc. Instead, his aim is to show that what is responsible for such ‘extraordinary’ outbursts is nothing Other than the very ‘ordinary’ and normal contemporary subject, with all his or her foibles (i.e., the subject of desire) and that we must find a way out, a way through fantasy, a way to fully assume that ‘there is no Other of the Other’ and thus no longer to be ‘bothered’ by the lack in the Other. Žižek effectively implies that the modality of such outbursts is simply unavailable under the regime of an ethics of the drive; that the kind of subjectivity which makes them possible is absent. Thus, his aim is a purely negative one: he cannot offer up a concrete vision of what such a regime would look like, only what it would not look like. In this view, our passage through the fundamental fantasy of capitalism will await the spontaneous invention of new models of socio-political arrangement, just as the spontaneous formation of the Paris commune can be seen as a model for Marx’s communism. This is, perhaps, one way to read Žižek’s call to the ‘socialization of productive forces’. This empty signifier is one that has been foreclosed by current capitalist discourse. His recourse to it, therefore, invests it with a dimension of impossibility, a radical emptiness that new forms of post-capitalist socio-economic arrangements will attempt to fill with concrete meaning (102).

[C]rossing the fundamental fantasy would involve, in some sense, leaving behind the whole fantasy structure installed by the Prohibition of monotheistic religions. What is required here, is not so much an account of what will follow in concrete and predictive detail, but a precise, even if speculative, theoretical account of what the possible modalities of a subject of the drive might be a the social level. In Other words, what kind of community is (even theoretically) possible for subject s of the drive? What insights can Lacanian clinical theory offer us? Since a Lacanian conception of community eschews ideas of shared values or common symbolic identification; and since it suggests that our social bond should also not be based on a common fantasmatic transgression (which makes possible a community of subjects of desire), what others ways of there of thinking a community of subjects? Indeed, is a social subject of the drive possible? (103)

jodi dean politics without politics

Dean, Jodi. “Politics without Politics” Parallax, 2009, vol. 15, no. 3, 20–36.

In this concrete sense, Žižek is right to claim that attachment to democracy is the form our attachment to capital takes. In the consumption and entertainment-driven setting of the contemporary United States, one’s commitments to capitalism are expressed as commitments to democracy. They are the same way of life, the same daily practices of ‘aware-ing’ oneself and expressing one’s opinion, of choosing and voting and considering one’s choice a vote and one’s vote a choice.

… democracy names left castration (‘I know, but nevertheless’). Because the left presents itself as appealing to and supporting democracy, it fails to take a stand, to name an enemy. Instead of drawing a line and saying what it is against, what it excludes, left political theory in the contemporary United States advocates inclusion, universality, multiplicity, the plurality of modes of becoming, and ethical responsiveness (Dean 21).

Insofar as left political theory adopts democracy as its primary aspiration, it disavows the fundamental antagonism conditioning politics as such. For the left (in the United States and in parts of the European Union), democracy thus takes the form of a fantasy of politics without politics (like fascism is a form of capitalism without capitalism): everyone and everything is included, respected, valued, and entitled. No one is made to feel uncomfortable. Everyone is heard and seen and recognized and has a place at the table (George Lakoff identifies Barak Obama as a key figure in the new politics, which is precisely this ‘politics’ of unity, empathy, and understanding) (Dean 21).

There are at least three sites a theory of democracy might
designate:

a. democracy might designate a site of resistance, struggle or opposition;

b. democracy might designate a system of governance, order, or rule;

c. democracy might designate a society, culture, or spirit (ambient milieu).

Which of these three is correct? Derrideans would say the fourth one: democracy is always to come and hence necessarily exceeds the three aforementioned sites. But this answer is just another version of ‘I know but nevertheless’. Democracy remains an ideological fantasy covering the failures, excesses, and obscenities of real existing democracy. The Derridean response thus returns me back to where I started: democracy as the solution to the problems of democracy or the democratic capture of left aspirations to equitable and sustainable distributions of resources, labor, and its products.

Derridean democracy to come and the post-politics, post-democracy thesis are two sides of the same coin. They are two aspects of democratic time, past and future, but not now (Žižek might say that their relation is that of a parallax; we can see democracy from each perspective but not from the two perspectives simultaneously). Consider a chant repeated at hundreds and thousands of protests over the last decade: What do we want? Democracy! When do we want it? Now! This chant works as a protest because it is clearly impossible. What would happen if the response were ‘Okay, protestors, you’ve got your democracy. Now what are you going to do?’ Imagine the executive branch of the US government walking off the job, handing their codes and files and top-secret stamps to the throngs outside their gates, the protestors wondering what to do with their puppets, signs, and bongos as they fragment into affinity groups and try to decide what their goals and priorities are. The protestors are not really demanding democracy now. Their demand is not meant to be met. Democracy has already arrived – as language of right and left, governance and electoral politics, ambient milieu. This is what democracy looks like, real existing democracy. To avoid the trauma of the real, of getting what we wished for, leftists move from actuality to possibility (from what we have to what could be) … (Dean 25).

But this move from actual to possible democracy doesn’t quite work. It misses its own movement or moving, the torsion that the shift from actual to possible entails. Žižek’s description of the temporal anamorphosis (distortion) of objet petit a is appropriate here:

Spatially, a is an object whose proper contours are discernible only if we glimpse it askance; it is forever indiscernible to the straightforward look. Temporally, it is an object which exists only qua anticipated or lost, only in the modality of not-yet or not-anymore, never in the
‘now’ of a pure, undivided present.18

This description applies to democracy. Democracy is anticipated or lost, but never present. When one looks at the present, all one sees is a gap, perhaps manifested by multiple attempts to fill it, as in the various definitions of democracy as resistance, governance, or ambient milieu.

There can be past democratic ideals – nostalgic fantasies of Athens, town meetings, our days in the resistance – or there can be hope for the future, justification of present acts in terms of this future, but there isn’t responsibility now. So disavowing democracy’s arrival, democracy now, contemporary left fantasies of democracy animate its diagnoses of post-politics and inspire its rejections of law, regulation, and the state.

In the account I’ve offered thus far, democracy appears as an obscure object-cause of desire, something that can never be fully attained or reached without ending the desire for it. But this is only one aspect of objet a. The other is its status in drive, not as something lost but as a hole or gap, not as an impossible lost object but as loss itself.

DRIVE

Drawing from Lacan, Žižek construes drive as fixation, not as the thing onto which one is fixated. In drive, enjoyment comes from missing one’s goal, from the repeated yet ever failing efforts to reach it that start to become satisfying on their own. Drive circulates around an object, generating satisfaction through this very circulation. Perhaps paradoxically, then, drive is at the same time disruptive. Fixation cuts into and derails the regular course of things, what is taken for the conventional patterns of everyday life, assessments of benefit and risk, pragmatic realism, and the organic attempts to secure the conditions of life. It’s a traumatic kernel in the reality of the symbolic order itself.

This drive dimension better describes democracy for the left; it is our circling around, our missing of a goal, and the satisfaction we attain through this missing. It accounts for the attachments and repetitions to which we are stuck, even as this very stuckness undermines our possibilities for political efficacy. Democratic drive, then, is another way of conceiving democracy as ambient milieu, a way that highlights the circulation we can’t avoid, but which at the same time can’t be understood as giving us what we want even as it gives us something else instead, some kick of enjoyment. We protest. We talk.We complain.We undercut our every assertion, criticizing its exclusivity, partiality, and fallibility in advance as if some kind of purity were possible, as if we could avoid getting our hands dirty. We sign petitions and forward them to everyone in our mailbox, fetishizing communication technologies as the solution to our problems. We worry about conservatives even as we revel in our superiority – how can anyone be so stupid? We enjoy (Dean 26).

I’ve presented post-politics and democracy-to-come as two sides of the same coin. I’ve suggested that the gap separating and connecting them be thought in terms of the closed circuit of drive rather than the openness of desire. So understood, democracy is not what we seek but never reach, not a name for political desire as such, but instead a term for the capture of political aspiration in the circuit of drive. Democracy is a remnant from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries we have yet to escape. Differently put, if democracy names a political desire that is never fulfilled,
then it is accompanied by a political drive wherein democracy is what we fail to escape. In this dimension of drive, democracy designates our political stuckness (Dean 28).

My argument is that gaps emerge; they are political, and contemporary democracy organizes enjoyment as an effect of circling around these gaps. Rancie` re’s narrativization, then, is better understood an image of the capture of politics in the circuits of democratic drive. The contemporary setting is not one of simple opposition between post-political consensus and the eruption of irrational violence (and eruption Rancie`re views as a return of the archaic). Rather, it involves the satisfaction of the democratic drive as its aims remain inhibited (Dean 35).

Rather than achieving the goal of equality, then, disagreement produces satisfaction; I’ll call it a political satisfaction, by staging the lack of equality. Although it might seem paradoxical that one’s aim is not agreement to one’s demand – the demand for equality – the paradox occurs only in the register of desire. Understood in terms of drive, the bending or distortion or change in the aim such that the failure to reach it provides enjoyment makes sense. The aim of equality is sublimated in the drive to make one’s disagreement with inequality appear. One gets satisfaction by appearing in one’s disagreement. This provides its own partial enjoyment and in fact can only continue to provide it so long as there is inequality, so long as the ostensible aim in staging the disagreement isn’t reached (Dean 35).

Rancière’s account of the staging of disagreement, rather than figuring the political as such (the political confrontation between politics and the police) exemplifies the sublimation of politics in democratic drive. As drive, democracy organizes enjoyment via a multiplicity of stagings, of making oneself visible in one’s lack. Contemporary protests in the United States, whether as marches, vigils, Facebook pages, or internet petitions aim at visibility, awareness, being seen. They don’t aim at taking power. Our politics is one of endless attempts to make ourselves seen. It’s as if instead of looking at our opponents and working out ways to defeat them, we get off on imagining them looking at us. And since, as Lacan reminds us in Seminar XI, the object of the drive is of total indifference,46 the disagreement one imagines oneself being seen as staging is irrelevant. Egalitarian or elite, anarchist or communist, any political gap will provide a charge sublimated as it is within the democratic drive. We want to make ourselves seen as political without actually taking the risk of politics (Dean 35).

McGowan on prohibition and fantasy

McGowan, Todd. “Relocating Our Enjoyment of the 1950s: The Politics of Fantasy in Far From Heaven.” The Cinema of Todd Haynes ed. James Morrison, New York: Wallflower Press, 2007.

Faced with the absolute prohibition against miscegenation or gay sexuality, characters in Far From Heaven nonetheless explore these behaviours in violation of the prohibition. Formally, the film stresses that the enjoyment of these activities stems from the very prohibition that interdicts them. It is in this sense that prohibition authorises enjoyment. Prohibition, as Far From Heaven shows us, carves out a space in which subjects can experience enjoyment. It transforms a quotidian activity —interracial relationships, gay sex— into a sublime experience, an experience that lifts the subject outside the sphere of the quotidian.

In a contemporary world replete with images of enjoyment and with imperatives to enjoy ourselves, the demand for enjoyment grows as the possibilities for it shrink. Today, we suffocate from so many images of enjoyment while feeling ourselves increasingly deprived of it. As a result, we turn to nostalgic fantasies of the 1950s in order to envision the possibility of an enjoyment that the contemporary imperative to enjoy renders more inaccessible. We fantasize about an era of strict prohibition not because we want our enjoyment restricted in a contemporary world that places no limits o nit, but because we crave the enjoyment that we imagine strict limits enabling.

The point here is not that they (Frank Cathy Raymond) enjoy in spite of the widespread disapproval; it is instead that this disapproval enables and fuels their enjoyment. Their time together has the significance it does precisely because the social prohibition does not permit it. The prohibition has the effect of elevating their ordinary love relationship to the status of a sublime Thing.

The Law prohibits and thereby creates a barrier that the subject cannot go beyond. In so doing, it ‘raises an object … to the dignity of the Thing (Lacan cited in McGowan) In Far From Heaven, the relationship between Cathy and Raymond becomes a sublime thing, and we enjoy it as such. It achieves this status due to the powerful prohibition that prevents its ultimate fulfillment. This barrier at once prevents the relationship and makes it possible (119).

thiem passionate attachments

Thiem, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.

While Foucault rejected psychoanalysis and the notion of the unconscious, Butler draws on psychoanalysis for her critiques. She insists that understanding the formation of the unconscious and of passionate attachments to subjection plays an important role in offering an analysis of social life. In her arguments Butler sides with formulations, such as ones offered by Spinoza, Hegel, Nietzsche, and psychoanalysis, that understand the human being as a fundamentally desiring being.

Social regulation not only is a curbing of desire but orients and fuels desires. In fueling and forming desires, social regulation becomes the very site for desire and brings forth a passionate attachment to that regulation, insofar as this regulation becomes as well the condition that sustains the possibility of this desire. In other words, insofar as desires are not easily given up or willed away, social regulation becomes what makes the survival of this desire possible, albeit in an ambivalent, regulated, or even repressed and reoriented form.

To theorize the way in which these passionate attachments are nothing to which the subject could easily have access in conscious reflection, Butler holds to the notion of the unconscious. These attachments work in ways that remain unconscious, making up a part of the subject’s psychic life.

These unconscious attachments are neither simply the internalized version of the social norms in relation to which the attachments are formed nor are these unconscious attachments simply possible psychic resistances equivalent to deliberate opposition against normalization.

Crucial to Butler’s understanding of how our desires and passionate attachments are formed and reinforced is a combination of the notion of the unconscious, the formation of desires through regulations and prohibitions of certain desires, and the impossibility of fully rendering these psychic mechanisms conscious. (38)

censorship

The Force of Fantasy: Feminism, Mapplethorpe, and Discursive Excess. differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 2:2 (1990) pp. 105-25

Federal funds prohibited from being used to:

-promote, disseminate or produce obscene OR INDECENT materials, including but not limited to depictions of sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts

– or that denigrates, debases or reviles a person, group or class of citizens on the basis of race, creed, sex, handicap, age or national origin representation and action

————

fantasy constitutes a PSYCHIC ACTION, fantasy doesn’t directly transmute into ACTION
For Butler fantasy is the very scene that SUSPENDS action Dworkin establishes a direct causal relationship between: Fantasy-Representation-Action huh?
Pictures injure, you see a picture you will get hurt by looking at it. wounded passive, injured stance of viewer, passive recipients of this visual assault.
There is no INTERPRETIVE leeway between the representation and its meanings, and its effects. Butler’s view:
pornography is a textualized fantasy of dissimulated and unstable identifications “A question to raise here would be, is it even possible to do the kind of reading that Dworkin does, that involves a retelling and repetition of the pornographic scene without making use of precisely the variable identifications that the pornographic fantasy itself occasions? From what source does Dworkin’s reading draw its own strength and mastery if not through an identification and redeployment of the very representation of aggression that she abhors? In other words, does the identificatory process that her own reading requires effectively refute the theory of identification that she explicitly holds? (194 JB Reader)

Enjoyment

Enjoyment is not to be understood as a synonym for pleasure, if only because such enjoyment is often though by no means always consciously expereinced as suffering.

– accounts for a ‘symptom’s inertia’

The notion of enjoyment captures a subject’s mode of being, whether individual or collective

The guilt which may accompany the transgression of an officially affirmed ideal is a possible, indeed farily common, mode of experiencing enjoyment (107).

… the notion of enjoyment has been used to characterize and account for the resilience of a host of practices and rituals … In sum by invoking fantasmatic logics we suggest that one condition for subscribing to an existing or promised social practice concerns the extent to which it can tap into the subject’s exisitng mode of enjoyment and thus fantasmatic frame.

Thrown Subjects pt.2 Subject of Enjoyment

Practices of identity reproduction and new acts of identification also presuppose a subject of enjoyment that is structured around certain fantasies. Fantasy is a narrative that covers-over or conceals the subject’s lack by providing an image of fullness, wholeness, or harmony, on the one hand, while conjuring up threats and obstacles to its realization on the other. When successfully installed, a fantasmatic narrative hooks the subject ”via the enjoyment it procures” to a given practice or order, or a promised future practice or order, thus confering identity … the categories of enjoyment and fantasy are relevant for thinking about issues of ideology and ethics. (130)

2 key dimensions of ontological framework

2 key dimensions which centre on the notion of subjectivity

hermeneutic-structural: highlights the presumptive centrality of the self-interpretations of subjects in social science explanations. But it is also important to recognize in this regard that discursive practices exhibit varying degrees of sedimentation, ranging from regimes and institutions to social habits. While the social logics structuring them are literally buoyed up by subjects — they do not exist except through the activity of subjects— they are not necessarily cognitively accessible to subjects, at least not immediately and without some form of intervention. This means that logics can have significant explanatory and critical leverage independently of the consciously held self-interpretations of agents. Certainly, social logics are products of past understanding, interpretations and decisions, but they tend to secure a degree of autonomy and not insignificant force when sedimented into practices and regimes. This is one reason why the assent of agents is not conclusive or exhaustive of an explanation’s validity. (162)

poststructural dimension: highlights the way in which social structures are never complete in themselves by foregrounding the dislocatory nature of the symbolic order (the ‘real’ in Lacanian terms) and thus the possible emergence of political subjectivity as such. This means that the hermeneutical-structural dimension fails to exhaust our particular ontological framework. It is at this point that political and fantasmatic logics come into play, thus enabling us to generate critical accounts of the constitution and dissolution of social structures themselves. This is because they assist in the process of revealing and explaining the non-necessary character of social logics and the practices they sustain and animate. This enables us to generate critical explanations that are both sensitive to context and explicit about their ontological, ethical, normative, and sociological presuppositions. (162)