resistance – Page 3

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

This is not to say that resistance is impossible. It is merely to imply that our dependence on the organized Other is not reproduced merely at the level of knowledge and conscious consent, and thus a shift in consciousness through knowledge transmission is not enough to effect change. What is much more important is the formal (symbolic) structure of power relations that social ordering presupposes. The subject very often prefers not to realize the performative function of the symbolic command — the fact that what promises to deal with subjective lack is what reproduces this lack perpetuating the subject’s desire for subjection. Most crucially, the reproduction of this formal structure relies on a libidinal, affective support that binds subjects to the conditions of their symbolic subordination. What makes the lack in the Other ‘invisible’ — and thus sustains the credibility of the organized Other — is a fantasmatic dialectic manipulating our relation to a lost/impossible enjoyment. It is impossible to unblock and displace identifications and passionate attachments without paying attention to this important dimension.

[A]ny analysis that purports to capture the complex relation between subject and structure cannot remain at the level of signification, although the role of the symbolic command remains extremely important. But, then, how exactly should one theorize the ‘material’ irreducible to signification?

The importance of this question appears to be elevated in a context in which passion and affect are given increasingly prominent roles in the study of society and politics. Here, contrary to what is widely believed, Lacan does not limit his insights within the level of representation and signification.

One needs to stress the productivity of the Lacanian distinction between the ‘subject of the signifier’ and the ‘subject of enjoyment/jouissance’ in addressing this question, and to develop its implications for how we can or should consider the relation between subject and organized Other.

… Lacanian theory accounts for the … lack in the Other, the lack that splits subjective and objective reality, as a lack of jouissance … This lack is always posited as something lost, as a lost fullness, the part of ourselves that is sacrificed — castrated — when we enter the symbolic system of language and social relations. As we have already seen, however, this lack of jouissance should not be viewed as a nihilistic conclusion. It is, rather, what constitutes and sustains human desire: the prohibition of jouissance — the nodal point of the Oedipal drama — is exactly what permits the emergence of desire, a desire structured around the unending quest for the lost, impossible jouissance.

Even after symbolic castration — or, rather, because of it — jouissance remains the catalyst of inter-subjective interaction, a potent political factor.

According to this schema, it is only by sacrificing her pre-symbolic enjoyment that the social subject can develop her desire (including the desire to identify with particular political projects, ideologies and discourses).

The fact, however, that this enjoyment is excised during the process of socialization does not mean that it stops affecting the politics of subjectivity and identification. On the contrary; first of all, it is the imaginary promise of recapturing our lost/impossible enjoyment which provides the fantasy support for many of our political projects and social choices. Almost all political discourse focuses on the delivery of the ‘good life’ or a ‘just society’, both fictions (imaginarizations) of a future state in which current limitations thwarting our enjoyment will be overcome.

… During this imaginary period, which we could call ‘original state’, the nation was prosperous and happy. However, this original state of innocence was somehow destroyed and national(ist) narratives are based on the assumption that the desire of each generation is to try and heal this (metaphoric) castration in order to give back to the nation its lost full enjoyment.

But this is not the full story. Apart from the promise of fantasy, what sustains desire, what drives our identification acts at the level of affectivity/jouissance, is also our ability to go through limit-experiences related to a jouissance of the body.

Otherwise, without any such experience, our faith in fantasmatic political projects — projects which never manage to deliver the fullness they promise — would gradually vanish. A national war victory or the successes of the national football team are examples of such experiences of enjoyment at the national level. However impressive, this jouissance remains partial:

That’s not it

‘“That’s not it” is the very cry by which the jouissance obtained is distinguished from the jouissance expected’ (Lacan 1998: 111); its momentary character, unable to fully satisfy desire, fuels dissatisfaction. It reinscribes lack in the subjective economy, the lack of another jouissance, of the sacrificed jouissance qua fullness, and thus reproduces the fantasmatic promise of its recapturing, the kernel of human desire.

Precisely because the partiality of this second type of enjoyment threatens to reveal the illusory character of our fantasies of fullness, the credibility and salience of any object of identification — and of the organized Other offering it — relies on the ability of providing a convincing explanation for the lack of total enjoyment.

It is here that the idea of a ‘theft of enjoyment’ is introduced (Zizek 1993). If we seem unable to access our lost/impossible enjoyment this is not because castration is constitutive of our symbolic reality, it is not because fullness is impossible, it is only because somebody else is obstructing our access; what we are lacking has been stolen by this satanic other. It may be a foreign occupier, the ‘national enemy’, those who ‘always plot to rule the world’, some dark powers and their local sympathizers ‘who want to enslave our proud nation’, immigrants ‘who steal our jobs’, etc.

The obstacle to full enjoyment shifts depending on the specificity of the fantasmatic narrative at stake, but the logic operating here remains the same.

Conclusion

I have tried in this paper to outline the ways in which Lacanian theory moves beyond subjectivism and objectivism in illuminating the dialectic between subject and organized Other. By understanding the subject as a subject of lack,

Lacan’s negative ontology provides a solution to the paradox of a desire for subjection. There is no desire without lack. And the Other — embodied in the symbolic command — is both what consolidates this lack in the symbolic and what promises to ‘manage’ this lack. At the same time, by understanding the Other as an equally lacking domain Lacan helps us to explain the failure of subjection, the possibility of escaping a full determination of the subject by the socio-symbolic structure.

Why is it then that this option only rarely enacts itself?

To the extent that the lack marking both subject and Other is always a lack of real jouissance, forms of identification offered by the organized Other are obliged to operate at this level also, adding the dimension of a positive incentive to the formal force of the symbolic command. We have thus seen how Lacanian theory illuminates the dialectic between subject and organized Other not only by focusing on the symbolic presuppositions of authority (the irresistibility of the Other’s command), but also by exploring the fantasmatic administration of real enjoyment and its lack, which sustains the credibility of the lacking Other and defers resistance.

Only by taking into account both these dimensions, lack and enjoyment, symbolic command and fantasy, can we start envisaging a comprehensive explanation of what drives identification acts sustaining structures of subjection and, simultaneously, allows a margin of freedom, which, however, can only be enacted with difficulty.

And, of course, the reason for this difficulty is that the symbolic and fantasmatic force of orders of subjection is so overwhelming that resistance or non-compliance itself (when it manages to occur) is usually guided by and ends up instituting a new order of subjection and rarely engages in attempts to encircle lack in a radically democratic ethico-political direction.

Lacan’s reaction to May 1968 is absolutely relevant here (and not only because of the 40th anniversary of the May events). I will very briefly refer to it by way of concluding this essay. During the May events, Lacan observed the French teachers’ strike and suspended his seminar; it seems that he even met Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the student leaders (Roudinesco 1997: 336). One way or the other, his name became linked to the events. However, the relation was not an easy one. In 1969, for instance, Lacan was invited to speak at Vincennes, but obviously he and the students operated at different wavelengths. The discussion ended as follows:

‘The aspiration to revolution has but one conceivable issue, always, the discourse of the master. That is what experience has proved. What you, as revolutionaries, aspire to is a Master. You will have one… for you fulfil the role of helots of this regime. You don’t know what that means either? This regime puts you on display; it says: “Watch them fuck”.’ (Lacan 1990: 126)

A similar experience marks his lecture at the Université Catholique de Louvain on 13 October 1973, when he is interrupted and eventually attacked by a student who seizes the opportunity to transmit his (situationist) revolutionary message. The episode, which has been filmed by Françoise Wolff, concludes with Lacan making the following comment:

‘As he was just saying, we should all be part of it, we should close ranks together to achieve, well, what exactly? What does organization mean if not a new order? A new order is the return of something which — if you remember the premise from which I started — it is the order of the discourse of the Master … It’s the one word which hasn’t been mentioned, but it’s the very term organization implies.’ A grim picture, but one that has to be seriously taken into account in reflecting our current theoretico-political predicament.

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).

stavrakakis subjective lack 5

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

Administering Subjective Lack: Symbolic Authority

I have already pointed out that subjective lack is what forces the subject to enter into a dynamic dialectic with the social world and the organized Other. Now, the resources available to the lacking subject in order to constitute her identity are, broadly speaking, of two distinct types: imaginary and, primarily, symbolic. Hence the distinction Lacan draws between imaginary and symbolic identification: 1. The imaginary register is first approached by Lacan in his work on the ‘mirror stage’.

This stage refers to a particular (early) period in the infant’s psychic development in which the fragmentation experienced by the infant is, for the first time, transformed into an affirmation of her bodily unity (through the assumption of her image in the mirror or through similar experiences). In that sense the mirror stage has to be understood as an identification: ‘We have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification, in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image’. This assumption of a spatial imaginary identity is, however, indicative of the ambivalence involved in ego formation. As Lacan observes, acquiring a first sense of identity is not only cause for jubilation but also of alienation. At first the infant appears jubilant due to her success in integrating her fragmentation into an imaginary totality and unity. Later on, however, jubilation is followed by alienation: By virtue of its inability to represent and control the turbulent real of the infant’s body and of its exteriority, imaginary identification ‘prefigures its alienating dimension’ (Lacan 1977: 2).

If the imaginary representation of ourselves, the mirror image — and imaginary relations in general, such as the one between mother and child — is ultimately incapable of providing us with a stable and functional identity, if it reproduces instead of resolving alienation, the only option left for acquiring one seems to be the field of linguistic representation, the symbolic register. After all, the symbolic is already presupposed in the functioning of the mirror stage since the infant, even before her birth, is inserted into a symbolic network constructed by her parents and family (her name is often discussed and decided in advance, inserting her into a pre-existing family mythology). In Lacan’s work it is clear that the symbolic has a far more important structuring role than the imaginary: ‘While the image equally plays a capital role in our domain, this role is completely taken up and caught up within, remoulded and reanimated by, the symbolic order’ (Lacan 1993: 9). By submitting to the laws of language the child becomes a subject in language, it inhabits and is inhabited by language, and hopes to gain an adequate representation through the world of words: ‘the symbolic provides a form into which the subject is inserted at the level of its being. It’s on this basis that the subject recognizes himself as being this or that’ (Lacan 1993: 179).

This, however, should not lead to the conclusion that entering the symbolic overcomes alienation by producing a solid identity. On the contrary, the subject constituted on the acceptance of the laws of language, of symbolic Law — a function embodied, within the Oedipal setting, by what Lacan calls ‘the Name-of-the-Father’, the agent of symbolic castration — is the subject of lack par excellence. Alienation is not resolved but displaced into another (symbolic) level, to the register of the signifier. On the one hand, due to the ‘universality’ of language, to the linguistic constitution of human reality, the signifier offers to the subject an almost ‘immortal’, ‘neutral’ representation; only this representation is incapable of capturing and communicating the real ‘singularity’ of the subject. In that sense, it is clear that something is always missing from the symbolic, the Other is a lacking Other.

The emergence of the subject in the socio-symbolic terrain presupposes a division between reality and the real, language and jouissance (a pre-symbolic, realenjoyment), a division that consolidates the alienation of the subject in the signifier and reveals the lack in the Other.

The Other, initially presented as a solution to subjective lack, is now revealed as what retroactively produces/consolidates this lack. It promises to offer the subject some symbolic consistency, but the price to be paid is the sacrifice of all access to pre-symbolic real enjoyment — which now becomes the object of fantasy. Fantasy, in this context, signifies a scenario promising to cover over lack or, at any rate, to domesticate its trauma.

stavrakakis lack in the Other 4

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

Indeed, as Laclau and Mouffe have put it, objectivism and subjectivism are symmetrical expressions of the desire for a fullness that is ultimately impossible. In Lacanian theory, moving beyond the Scylla of objectivism and the Charybdis of subjectivism entails the formulation of a novel conception of subjectivity; in fact, it is this new subject, the subject as lack that, through its continuous dialectic with the (equally lacking) Other, symbolic reality, signifies the collapse of subjectivism and objectivism.

Already from his Rome Discourse Lacan formulates his strong objection towards any reference to a closed totality both at the collective and the individual level. And he concludes: ‘it is the subject who introduces division into the individual, as well as into the collectivity that is his equivalent. Psychoanalysis is properly that which reveals both the one and the other to be no more than mirages’. Cederstrom and Willmott are correct to point out that this way in which Lacan intervenes in the agency/structure debate ‘holds out the promise of allowing us to deal with issues of desire and de-centring without falling prey to determinism’. And this applies both to subjective determinism and objective determinism: ‘By advancing a notion of the agent that is predicated on a negative ontology, we challenge the common assumption that the agent either is a free and self-reflexive entity or is a constrained and fully pre-determined category’.

Lacan’s theory of the subject emphasizes thus the notions of ‘desire’ and ‘lack’, the constitutive dialectic between lack and desire. This helps theorists avoid the usual traps of reductionism and essentialism when trying to consider the relationship between subjectivity, society and politics. This relationship is theorized as a function of political identification, leading to a picture of the socio-political field characterized by a complex play of (ultimately failed) identifications, disidentifications and renewed identifications.

Isn’t Ernesto Laclau pointing to the same necessary/impossible dialectic when he highlights the fact that the obstacle limiting my identity and showing its ultimate impossibility is also its condition of possibility insofar as there is no identity without difference and no desire without lack (Laclau 1990: 39)? True, ideological/discursive determination is unavoidable, even necessary. No social reality and subjective identity can emerge without it; and no management of subjective lack. At the same time it is ultimately impossible.

No ideological determination is ever complete. Social construction is always an imperfect exercise, and the social subject cannot transcend the ontological horizon of lack. Something always escapes from both orders — Lacan reserves a special name for that: the Real, an excessive quantum of enjoyment (jouissance) resisting representation and control. Something that the subject has been forced to sacrifice upon entering organized society, and which, although lost and inaccessible/unrepresentable for ever, does not stop causing all our attempts to encounter it through our identification acts.

Subjectivism posits a source of power external to the subject, immanentism posits a source of power internal, intimate to the subject, while what is needed is to conceptually grasp a form of external intimacy, what Lacan calls extimité. This is the realm of the real as extimate kernel of the subject, as the lost/impossible enjoyment that, through its constitutive lack, kicks off a whole socio-political dialectic of identifications aiming to recapture it.

In other words, the administration of this constitutive lack of enjoyment takes place in a field transcending simplistic dichotomies (individual vs. collective). How can we access this field? And what can Lacanian theory contribute to our understanding of its constitution and functioning? Of how subjects are constituted, human lives lived and social orders and institutions organized and sustained?

Where is power and authority exactly located in this play? And how are their symbolic and fantasmatic dimensions, language and enjoyment, interimplicated?

calum on Ž the Other part 5

Neill, Calum. “An Idiotic Act: On the Non-Example of Antigone.” The Letter , 34, 2005, 1-28.

The Symbolic order is necessarily experienced by the subject as Other, as an Other of which there is available no objective and totalising conception. That is to say, the Symbolic as Other figures only insofar as it figures in relation to the subject who would encounter it. The Symbolic order is a structural condition which, as it manifests for and in relation to the subject, can only be seen to exist insofar as it exists for that subject.

Conjoined with this, the Symbolic would be the field in which the subject would assume its constitution and, thus, from which it would retroactively posit its emergence. While, then, the Symbolic and the subject obviously cannot be reduced to (aspects of) one another, neither can they, in this context, be separated from one another.

The conception of the act as a reconfiguration of the Symbolic would then have to figure as a subjective undertaking. In terms of Antigone’s act, the act would not only be Antigone’s in the sense that she performs it but it would be hers in the sense that it is performed in relation to the Symbolic order as it manifests for her. This would be to acknowledge that the act can only be experienced by the subject. But even in order for the subject to be understood to have experienced the act or to have experienced itself as acting this would necessitate the act’s (re)inscription in the Symbolic.

The act, as coterminous with the assumption of subjectivity, is necessarily pulsational. One cannot (permanently) occupy the act.

We should perhaps remember here Lacan’s claim from Television that ‘Suicide is the only act which can succeed without misfiring’. Suicide would be such an act precisely because it is not, from the subjective perspective, reinscribed in the Symbolic.

There is in suicide no continuation, no possibility of recuperation by or to the Symbolic but also, quite clearly, no possibility of subjectivity either. That suicide is the only act which can succeed without misfiring is not to advocate suicide, it is, rather, to recognise the impossibility of other acts not misfiring. Suicide is the only act which would not entail a recuperation to the Symbolic by the subject who would have committed it.

The point remains here, however, even acknowledging this subjective relation to the Other , that any act at all, in Žižek’s understanding of it, might figure as ethical even if this means that it only figures as ethical for the particular subject who has acted. Which is precisely to say that there is available no means to differentiate the ethical from the unethical. To paraphrase Simon Critchley’s question concerning Badiou’s notion of the event, and there does appear to be some theoretical resemblance between Žižek’s ‘act’ and Badiou’s ‘event’, how and in virtue of what is one to distinguish an ethical act from a non-ethical act?

Invoking Kant, Žižek represents the ‘proper ethical act’ as ‘doubly
formal: not only does it obey the universal form of law, but this universal form is also its sole motive’. 45

Moreover, the proper ethical act is inherently transgressive. It is not merely a matter of allegiance to a universal duty without pathological motives but it is an allegiance to a form of action which will redefine the very form of the prior conception of what would constitute the good, the norm, the Symbolic order. Žižek’s ‘moral law does not follow the Good – it generates a new shape of what counts as ‘Good’’. The proper ethical act is then, for Žižek, not so much defined by its irrational nature but is that which would institute a new conception or criteria for what counts as rational at all. Nothing which precedes an act is adequate to the task of judging the act.

As Žižek himself makes clear, the act is radically distinguished from ‘a simple criminal violation’. This, not because the act is necessarily a violation without pathological intent or because the act is a violation in the name of a competing conception of right or justice but precisely because the act entails the assumption of cause by the subject without illusory appeal to some other (or Other) foundation for action. It is in this sense that the act would be properly described as a suspension of the Other.

The act is located at the limits of the authority of the Other, the act is the point of subjective intervention without appeal to an Other authority.

The Other, as we have seen, can be understood as coterminous with the Symbolic order insofar as it manifests as a subjective experience. The Other, that is, is the Symbolic order as it is, and with the specificity with which it is, encountered by the subject.

Das Ding is that which cannot be recuperated to either the Symbolic order or to the Imaginary order. It is that of the Real which would insist at the limits of subjective experience. It is, in the context of ‘intersubjectivity’, that of the other which cannot be accommodated to a point of recognition, that in the other which can neither form an aspect of identity nor be reduced to a point of signification. It is also, then, that in and of the subject which can neither be reduced to imaginary identification nor recuperated to a system of signification.

What Žižek characterises as the insistence of ‘the Other-Thing’ would be more accurately described as that in any encounter which cannot be recuperated to a totalising comprehension. It is the insistence of this Thing which cannot adequately be accommodated which would be indicative of the lack in both the other and the Other.

In the encounter with the Other, the Other is experienced as demanding of the subject. It is such a demand which would be indicative of das Ding, insofar as das Ding might be that which would satisfy this demand. In this sense, das Ding can be understood to be a name for that which the Other is experienced as lacking.

It is clear then that, as Žižek appears to acknowledge, there is no possible correlation between the (particular) insistence of the subject and das Ding. If there were, then this would be to simultaneously ‘solve’ the lack in the Other and the lack in the subject.

Which would be to say that there is no subject and no Other for the subject. There would be, that is, no Symbolic order in which the act could be (re)inscribed.

The act should rather be understood as the subject’s always inadequate response to the Other (and the other).

The act is the moment of production of something in response to the other and the Other, precisely in the sense that that something is not the Thing, is not adequate to das Ding. The act would be the moment of subjective assumption, the moment of the subject’s causing its desire to come forth.

But such desire is never something which would be ‘entirely given’, it is something which must be brought into the world anew. Insofar as the subject’s act is to be understood, it must be reinscribed in the Symbolic and, in being so inscribed, it does necessarily alter the Symbolic. It is in this sense that, as Žižek correctly notes, the act is a creatio ex nihilo.

It is in the act that ‘the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world’.

It must however by emphasised that it, the act, is commensurate with the moment of subjective assumption.

That is, that the act is the act for the subject who would have constituted itself in the act.

Or, phrased otherwise, the act is the subjective moment of assumption and is thus only experienced as such by the subject.

This is not to argue that Antigone is a non-ethical example.

It is rather to emphasise that the very concept of an ethical example is nonsensical.

The ethical consists in the moment of assumption of and as the cause of one’s existence as subject. It is availed of no exterior support or justification.

calum on Ž part 4

Neill, Calum. “An Idiotic Act: On the Non-Example of Antigone.” The Letter , 34, 2005, 1-28.

A ‘truth’ which is clearly, then, not ‘true’ in the Platonic sense of corresponding to some perpetual higher order but is rather ‘true’ in the sense of the moment of a pure creation which would ‘expose’ the conventions of knowledge to be inadequate and force their reconfiguration. For Žižek, the act would be such a truth insofar as the act
would be that which would resist and refuse recuperation to the preexistent symbolic matrix.

Where something like a speech act would, by definition, rely ‘for its performative power on the pre-established set of symbolic rules and/or norms’, the Žižekian act would signal a break with any preestablished or given order.

(quoting from The Ticklish Subject)… Žižek emphasises Antigone’s willingness to risk her ‘entire social existence’, her defiance of the ‘social-symbolic power of the City embodied in the ruler (Creon)’. Through so doing, Antigone could be understood to have entered the realm of ‘symbolic death’, that is to say, she can be understood to have situated herself outside the symbolic space of what was, previously, her society. For Žižek, such a moment of self-expulsion is tantamount to a ‘suspension of the big Other’, a radical break with and from the Symbolic order.

Žižek and Butler

In order to emphasise and clarify this radical character of the act, the fact that the act should be radically divorced from the Symbolic, that it should be envisaged as irrecuperable to the Symbolic, Žižek contrasts it with what he terms the performative ‘staging’ of revolt, or ‘performative reconfiguration’ 39 of the Symbolic order. Such performative reconfiguration would be exemplified in the position taken by Judith Butler in The Psychic Life of Power where she discusses the possibilities of subjective ‘resistance to given forms of social reality’. In The Ticklish Subject Žižek responds to Butler’s advocation of forms of resistance which would successfully reconfigure and thus, contingently at least, offer the potential of ameliorating one’s social condition(s), warning against the illusion of assuming to have successfully challenged from within that which is always already in a position to recuperate any such challenge. The distinction here, for Žižek, is that between a reconfiguration which would maintain the terms of the Symbolic and a reconfiguration which would transform the very contours of the Symbolic and thus the terms in which the reconfiguration might be understood.41

Žižek’s point can perhaps be illustrated in the common-place notion of reverse discrimination where the very points of discrimination are precisely upheld in the process of their supposedly politically correct reversal. Some negative aspects of discrimination against ‘the disabled’, for example, may be addressed through the implementation of quotas for the employment of a certain percentage of ‘disabled’ workers but such regulation cannot but uphold the demarcation of certain people as ‘disabled’ and potentially stigmatised and maintain the significance of factors otherwise deemed ‘irrelevant’ to the criteria of employment or ability to ‘do the job’.

A position like Butler’s entails, for Žižek, both an overestimation of the effectivity of ‘performative reconfiguration’ and an underestimation of the potential for the more thoroughgoing revolt which would be exemplified in the character and act of Antigone.

For Žižek, it seems, it is this thoroughgoing rupturing status of the act with regard to the Symbolic, the impossibility of situating the act in or recuperating the act to the Symbolic which renders it ethical.

What, however, are we to make of Žižek’s insistence on the act as irrecuperable to the Symbolic? In the distinction that he puts forward between performative reconfiguration and absolute reconfiguration, one might be justified in asking how the latter might be possible. Clearly here Žižek is not suggesting that everything of the Symbolic is razed. He is not suggesting, for example, that the Greek spoken in Thebes would cease to be spoken after Antigone’s act. He appears, rather, to be suggesting that the meaning of the symbolic or social edifice is unavoidably altered.

calum on Ž the act derrida part 3

Neill, Calum. “An Idiotic Act: On the Non-Example of Antigone.” The Letter , 34, 2005, 1-28.

Knowledge, for Derrida, is an indispensable prerequisite for the decision and, subsequently, for the assumption of responsibility but the decision cannot itself be reduced to knowledge without this rendering it ‘less’ than decisive, rendering it, that is, in the realm of pure calculation. On the other hand, without knowledge, there remains no possibility of responsibility insofar as responsibility would entail a context, a conception of that for and towards which one would be responsible and how.

Responsibility thus figures and can only arise between the closed automaticity of the system of knowledge and the ‘meaninglessness’ that would be beyond any systematisation.

Without exceeding knowledge, the decision is but a part of knowledge and thus not of the subject. Without returning to knowledge, the decision has no sense; it is purely arbitrary.

Is not this notion of the decision commensurate with the notion of the ethical in Lacan, with the notion of the ethical act as that which can appeal to no guarantor in the Other, as that which by definition takes place at the limits of the Symbolic order, as that which cannot be reduced to the law and yet, at the same time, must be inscribed in the Symbolic order? Is this not commensurate with the notion of the ethical as a pulsational moment which emerges from but must also assume a place in the Symbolic?

Neill’s Argument

Contra Žižek’s notion of the act which must be located absolutely beyond the Symbolic order, both Derrida’s ‘decision’ and Lacan’s ‘act’ are such that, in order to be understood as ethical, they must entail a moment of (re)inscription in the order of the comprehensible, or, for Derrida, knowledge, and for Lacan, the Symbolic.

That is to say, in insisting on the exclusivity of what he terms identification with the ‘Other-Thing’ as the defining moment of the act, Žižek might be understood to precisely
occlude the ethical potential from the act.

Returning to Antigone, if, in Žižek’s terms, her act is possible because of ‘the direct identification of her particular/determinate decision with the Other’s (Thing’s) injunction/call’, 26 then it is difficult to see in what sense such an act might be considered ethical.

It is, however, for Žižek, precisely this exclusivity, the radical suspension of the Other without recourse to a further moment of reinscription which does render the act ethical.

Antigone figures here, as we have noted, as the paramount example of the act as a moment of absolute suspension. Antigone, for Žižek, ‘does not merely relate to the Other-Thing, she – for a brief, passing moment of, precisely, decision – directly is the Thing, thus excluding herself from the community regulated by the intermediate agency of symbolic regulations’.27

It is in so excluding herself from the community, in situating herself beyond the regulations of the Symbolic order, that Antigone can be understood, for Žižek, to have engaged in a proper act, precisely because the act, for Žižek, is not simply ‘beyond the reality principle’ in the sense that it would be the engagement of a performative reconfiguration of reality, of, that is, the Symbolic.

Rather, the act is that which would ‘change the very co-ordinates of the “reality principle’’. This is not to suggest that for Žižek the act entails performing the impossible.

Žižek’s point concerns the very structuration of what would be considered (im)possible in the first place. The radical character of the act lies in the fact that it would be that which alters the very contours of what would be considered possible.

Or in moral terms, it would not be that which would challenge the received notion of the good but rather it would be that which would redefine what might be considered as good.

Badiou responds to Nancy

Alain Badiou responds to Jean-Luc Nancy’s Libération article “What the Arab peoples signify to us”:

Yes, dear Jean-Luc, the position you adopt in favour of ‘Western’ intervention in Libya was indeed a sorry surprise for me.

Didn’t you notice right from the start the palpable difference between what is happening in Libya and what is happening elsewhere? How in both Tunisia and Egypt we really did see massive popular gatherings, whereas in Libya there is nothing of the kind? An Arabist friend of mind has concentrated in the last few weeks on translating the placards, banners, posters and flags that were such a feature of the Tunisian and Egyptian demonstrations: he couldn’t find a single example of these in Libya, not even in Benghazi. One very striking fact about the Libyan ‘rebels’, which I’m surprised you didn’t note, is that you don’t see a single woman, whereas in Tunisia and Egypt women are very visible. Didn’t you know that the French and British secret services have been organising the fall of Gaddafi since last autumn? Aren’t you amazed that, in contrast to all the other Arab uprisings, weapons of unknown origin emerged in Libya? That bands of young people immediately began firing volleys in the air, something inconceivable elsewhere? Weren’t you struck by the emergence of a supposed ‘revolutionary council’ led by a former accomplice of Gaddafi, whereas nowhere else was there any question of the masses who had risen up appointing some people as a replacement government?

Don’t you realise how all these details, and many more, chime with the fact that here, and nowhere else, the great powers were called in to support? That such riffraff as Sarkozy and Cameron, whose aims are transparently sordid, were applauded and worshipped – and you suddenly give them support. Isn’t it self-evident that Libya provided an entry for these powers, in a situation that elsewhere totally escaped their control? And that their aim, completely clear and completely classic, was to transform a revolution into a war, by putting the people out of the running and making way for arms and armies – for the resources that these powers monopolise? This process is going on before your eyes each day, and you approve it? Don’t you see how after the terror from the air, heavy weapons are going to be supplied on the ground, along with instructors, armoured vehicles, strategists, advisers and blue helmets, and in this way the reconquest (hopefully a fitful one) of the Arab world by the despotism of capital and its state servants will recommence?

How can you of all people fall into this trap? How can you accept any kind of ‘rescue’ mission being entrusted to those very people for whom the old situation was the good one, and who absolutely want to get back into the game, by forcible means, from motivations of oil and hegemony? Can you simply accept the ‘humanitarian’ umbrella, the obscene blackmailing in the name of victims? But our armies kill more people in more countries than the local boss Gaddafi is capable of doing in his. What is this trust suddenly extended to the major butchers of contemporary humanity, to those in charge of the mutilated world that we are familiar with? Do you believe, can you believe, that they represent ‘civilisation’, that their monstrous armies can be armies of justice? I am stupefied, I must confess. I ask myself what good is philosophy if it is not immediately the radical critique of this kind of unreflecting opinion, moulded by the propaganda of regimes such as our own, which popular uprisings in regions strategic for them have put on the defensive, and which are seeking their revenge.

You say in your text that it will ‘later’ be up to ‘us’ (but who is this ‘us’, if today it includes Sarkozy, Bernard-Henri Lévy, our bombers and their supporters?) to make sure that oil and arms deals, and the like, don’t make their return. Why ‘later’? It is now that we have to make sure, by stopping the great powers as much as we can from interfering in the political processes under way in the Arab world. By doing all that is possible so that these powers, fortunately out of the picture for a number of weeks, cannot reintroduce – under the damaged name of ‘democracy’ and the moral and humanitarian pretexts that have been used ever since the first colonial conquests – oil and other deals, which are quite simply the only deals that these powers and their states are interested in.

Dear Jean-Luc, in circumstances of this kind it makes no sense for you or me to go with the grain of the Western consensus that says: ‘we absolutely have to remain in charge of everything happening’. We have to make a stand against the grain, and demonstrate that the real target of Western bombers and soldiers is in no way the wretched Gaddafi, a former client of those who are now getting rid of him as someone in the way of their higher interests. For the target of the bombers is definitely the popular uprising in Egypt and the revolution in Tunisia, it is their unexpected and intolerable character, their political autonomy, in a word: their independence. To oppose the destructive interventions of the powers means supporting the political independence and the future of these uprisings and revolutions. This is something we can do, and it is an unconditional imperative.

With friendly greetings,
Alain

antigone

“Ethics of Psychoanalysis – Lacan’s Antigone and the Ethics of Interpretation.” 123HelpMe.com

In 1959, Lacan presented Sophocles’ Antigone as a model of pure desire for his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis:

Antigone presents herself as autonomos, the pure and simple relationship of a human being to that which it miraculously finds itself carrying, that is the rupture of signification, that which grants a person the insuperable power of being—in spite of and against everything—what he [sic] is. . . . Antigone all but fulfills what can be called pure desire, the pure and simple desire of death as such [i.e., of that which is beyond the pleasure principle]. She incarnates this desire. (1986: 328-29)

Lacan notes that Antigone’s decision to defy Creon consciously seeks death. She makes no effort to defend Polynices’ actions (Lacan 1986: 290, 323-25).

Her choice takes her beyond the realm of rational discourse and the collective norms of human satisfaction it implies (Lacan 1986: 78, 281; Zizek 1991: 25).

Hers is a position that transcends the comfortable binary oppositions that structure our daily ethical and social lives. Because her choice of death cannot be understood according to strictly rational norms, she cannot be read as representing some simple antithesis of freedom to tyranny, or the individual to the state (Lacan 1986: 281; Zizek 1992: 77-78). In fact, as she acknowledges, she had chosen death before Creon’s decree against the burial of Polynices, and she defines herself to Ismene as one already belonging to the realm of the dead (ll. 559-60; Lacan 1986: 315, 326). Creon is not a tyrant who forces Antigone to make an impossible choice between life and freedom; rather, he embodies the civic norms that her pursuit of a desire beyond the bounds of those desires articulated within the realm of common life both requires as defining foil, and transcends.

Her choice thus represents a pure ethical act shaped neither by a self-interested selection among communally recognized goods nor the self-loathing of conforming to a code that is recognized and despised (Zizek 1992: 77).

Such an ethical choice, as Lacan acknowledges, is Kantian in its devotion to a pure concept of duty, but psychoanalytic in its predication on a highly individualized desire whose content cannot be generalized into a universal ethical maxim (Lacan 1986: 68, 365-66).

Antigone’s choice, her desire, is pure precisely to the degree that it rejects the claims of the Other. For Lacan, it is the beauty of Antigone’s choice of a Good beyond all recognized goods, beyond the pleasure principle, that gives her character its monumental status and makes her a model for an ethics of creation as opposed to conformity.

It is for this reason that he cites Antigone’s self-comparison to ever-weeping, petrified Niobe, another princess enclosed alive in stone—as the central axis around which the play turns (ll. 823-33). In this one image we see brought together the themes of beauty, monumentality, and death-in-life in a singular apotheosis of tragic transgression (Lacan 1986: 311, 315, 327). Beauty for Lacan represents the perfect moment between life and death, a moment both articulated by and beyond time and desire, a moment whose true achievement can only be imagined as the incarnation of a pure desire beyond any recognizable object.

In its beauty, Sophocles’ Antigone presents what Lacan defines as a “Sublime Object.” Our ethical obligation as readers and analysts is to be true to this object to the precise degree that it transcends all normative categories. As Antigone does not cede on her desire, neither can we assimilate her tragedy to a pre-existing set of critical categories, even psychoanalytic ones.

This is an obligation to the text, but it is simultaneously an obligation to our own desire as readers, critics, and subjects: for the encounter with the sublime object is one that must shake us to our very core if it is not to be a factitious or mechanical exercise in the application of reassuring truisms. To meet our obligation to the sublime text we must go beyond the dictates of the pleasure and reality principles, beyond good and evil to encounter pure desire: the moment in which the canons of meaning shudder before their own beyond.

Works Cited
Lacan, Jacques. 1986. Le séminaire livre VII: L’éthique de la psychanalyse. Paris.
Zizek, Slavoj. 1991. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge.
—. 1992. Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York.

on neoliberalism a foucaultian analysis

Read, Jason. “A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity.” Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 25-36, February 2009

People who have swimming pools don’t need state parks. If you buy your books at Borders you don’t need libraries. If your kids are in private school, you don’t need K-12. The people here, or at least those who vote, don’t see the need for government. Since a lot of the population are not citizens, the message is that government exists to help the undeserving, so we shouldn’t have it at all. People think it’s OK to cut spending, because ESL is about people who refuse to assimilate and health care pays for illegals.

From Tea party in the Sonora: For the future of G.O.P. governance, look to Arizona By Ken Silverstein Harper’s Magazine July 2010

As Thomas Lemke [“Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique.” Rethinking Marxism, 14, 3 (2002)], argues, neoliberalism is a political project that attempts to create a social reality that it suggests already exists, stating that competition is the basis of social relations while fostering those same relations. The contemporary trend away from long term labor contracts, towards temporary and part-time labor, is not only an effective economic strategy, freeing corporations from contracts and the expensive commitments of health care and other benefits, it is an effective strategy of subjectification as well.

It encourages workers to see themselves not as “workers” in a political sense, who have something to gain through solidarity and collective organization, but as “companies of one.” They become individuals for whom every action, from taking courses on a new computer software application to having their teeth whitened, can be considered an investment in human capital. As Eric Alliez and Michel Feher write: “Corporations’ massive recourse to subcontracting plays a fundamental role in this to the extent that it turns the workers’ desire for independence…into a ‘busi-ness spirit’ that meets capital’s growing need for satellites.”12

While Foucault’s analysis captures the particular “fear of the state” that underlies neoliberalism, its belief that any planning, any intervention against competition, is tantamount to totalitarianism. It however does not account for the dominance of neoliberalism in the present, specifically its dominance as a particular “technology of the self,” a particular mode of subjection.

At the same time, Foucault offers the possibility of a different understanding of the history of neoliberalism when he argues that neoliberalism, or the neo-liberal subject as homo economicus, or homo entrepreneur, emerges to address a particular lacunae in liberal economic thought, and that is labor. In this sense neoliberalism rushes to fill the same void, the same gap, that Marx attempted to fill, without reference to Marx, and with very different results.

Marx and neo-liberals agree that although classical economic theory examined the sphere of exchange, the market, it failed to enter the “hidden abode of production” examining how capital is produced. Of course the agreement ends there, because what Marx and neo-liberals find in labor is fundamentally different: for Marx labor is the sphere of exploitation

while for the neo-liberals, as we have seen, labor is no sooner introduced as a problem than the difference between labor and capital is effaced through the theory of “human capital.”

Neoliberalism scrambles and exchanges the terms of opposition between “worker” and “capitalist.” To quote Etienne Balibar, “The capitalist is defined as worker, as an ‘entrepreneur’; the worker, as the bearer of a capacity, of a human capital.” 31

Labor is no longer limited to the specific sites of the factory or the workplace, but is any activity that works towards desired ends. The terms “labor” and “human capital” intersect, overcoming in terminology their longstanding opposition; the former becomes the activity and the latter becomes the effects of the activity, its history. From this intersection the discourse of the economy becomes an entire way of life, a common sense in which every action — crime, marriage, higher education and so on — can be charted according to a calculus of maximum output for minimum expenditure; it can be seen as an investment.

Thus situating Marx and neoliberalism with respect to a similar problem makes it possible to grasp something of the politics of neoliberalism, which through a generalization of the idea of the “entrepreneur,” “investment” and “risk” beyond the realm of finance capital to every quotidian relation, effaces the very fact of ex-ploitation.

Neoliberalism can be considered a particular version of “capitalism without capitalism,” a way of maintaining not only private property but the existing distribution of wealth in capitalism while simultaneously doing away with the antagonism and social insecurity of capitalism, in this case paradoxically by extending capitalism, at least its symbols, terms, and logic, to all of society.

The opposition between capitalist and worker has been effaced not by a transformation of the mode of production, a new organization of the production and distribution of wealth, but by the mode of subjection, a new production of subjectivity. 32

Thus, neoliberalism entails a very specific extension of the economy across all of society; it is not, as Marx argued, because everything rests on an economic base (at least in the last instance) that the effects of the economy are extended across of all of society, rather it is an economic perspective, that of the market, that becomes coextensive with all of society. As Christian Laval argues, all actions are seen to conform to the fundamental economic ideas of self-interest, of greatest benefit for least possible cost. It is not the structure of the economy that is extended across society but the subject of economic thinking, its implicit anthropology.

Thus, the question remains, why now, or at least why over the last thirty years has capitalism taken this neo-liberal turn?

In the Grundrisse, Marx does not use the term “human capital,” but fixed capital, a term generally used to refer to machinery, factories, and other investments in the means of production to refer to the subjectivity, the subjective powers of the worker. In general Marx understood the progression of capital to be a process by which the skills, knowledge, and know-how of workers were gradually incorporated into machinery, into fixed capital, reducing the laborer to an unskilled and ultimate-ly replaceable cog in a machine. This is “proletarianization” the process by which capitalism produces its gravediggers in a class of impoverished workers who have nothing to lose but their chains. In the Grundrisse, however, Marx addresses a fundamentally different possibility, capital’s exploitation of not just the physical powers of the body, but the general social knowledge spread throughout society and embodied in each individual. This is what Marx refers to as the “general intellect”—the diffused social knowledge of society. This knowledge, the capacity to use various languages, protocols, and symbolic systems, is largely produced outside of work. As Marx writes: “The saving of labor time is equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the pro-ductive power of labor as itself the greatest productive power. From the standpoint of the direct production process it can be regarded as the production of fixed capital, this fixed capital being man himself.”17

Marx’s deviation from the standard terminology of his own corpus, terminology that designates the worker as labor power (or living labor), the machine or factory as fixed capital, and money as circulating capital, is ultimately revealing. It reveals something of a future that Marx could barely envision, a future that has become our present: the real subsumption of society by capital. This subsumption involves not only the formation of what Marx referred to as a specifically capitalist mode of production, but also the incorporation of all subjective potential, the capacity to communicate, to feel, to create, to think, into productive powers for capital. Capital no longer simply exploits labor, understood as the physical capacity to transform objects, but puts to work the capacities to create and communicate that traverse social relations.

It is possible to say that with real subsumption capital has no outside, there is no relationship that cannot be transformed into a commodity, but at the same time capital is nothing but outside, production takes place outside of the factory and the firm, in various social relationships. Because of this fundamental displacement subjectivity becomes paramount, subjectivity itself becomes productive and it is this same subjectivity that must be controlled. 33

Neoliberalism is a discourse and practice that is aimed to curtail the powers of labor that are distributed across all of society—at the exact moment in which all of social existence be-comes labor, or potential labor, neoliberalism constructs the image of a society of capitalists, of entrepreneurs.

As production moves from the closed space of the factory to become distributed across all of social space, encompassing all spheres of cultural and social existence, neoliberalism presents an image of society as a market, effacing production altogether.

This underscores the difference between neoliberalism as a form of power and the disciplinary power at work in the closed spaces of the factory. If disciplinary power worked by confining and fixing bodies to the production apparatuses, neoliberal power works by dispersing bodies and individuals through privatization and isolation.

Deregulation, the central term and political strategy of neo-liberalism, is not the absence of governing, or regulating, but a form of governing through isolation and dispersion. As more and more wealth is produced by the collective social powers of society, neoliberalism presents us with an image of society made up of self-interested individuals.

In Negri’s analysis, the relation between neoliberalism and real subsumption takes on the characteristics of a Manichean opposition. We are all workers or we are all capitalists: either view society as

an extension of labor across all social spheres, from the factory to the school to the home, and across all aspects of human existence, from the work of the hands to the mind, or

view society as a logic of competition and investment that encompasses all human relationships.

While Negri’s presentation has an advantage over Foucault’s lectures in that it grasps the historical formation of neoliberalism against the backdrop of a specific transformation of capital, in some sense following Foucault’s tendency to present disciplinary power and biopower against the back-drop of specific changes in the economic organization of society, it does so by almost casting neoliberalism as an ideology in the pejorative sense of the term.

It would appear that for Negri real subsumption is the truth of society, and neoliberalism is only a misrepresentation of that truth. … Foucault’s idea of governmentality, argues against such a division that posits actual material reality on one side and its ideological misrepresentation on the other. A governmentality is a particular mentality, a particular manner of governing, that is actualized in habits, perceptions, and subjectivity. Governmentality situates actions and conceptions on the same plane of immanence. 34

Which is to say, that any criticism of neoliberalism as governmentality must not focus on its errors, on its myopic conception of social existence, but on its particular production of truth.

For Foucault, we have to take seriously the manner in which the fundamental understanding of individuals as governed by interest and competition is not just an ideology that can be refused and debunked, but is an intimate part of how our lives and subjectivity are structured.

Despite Negri’s tendency to lapse back into an opposition between labor and ideology, his object raises important questions echoed by other critics of neoliberalism.

What is lost in neoliberalism is the critical distance opened up between different spheres and representations of subjectivity, not only the difference between work and the market, as in Marxism, but also the difference between the citizen and the economic subject, as in classical liberalism.

All of these differences are effaced as one relation; that of economic self-interest, or competition, replaces the multiple spaces and relations of worker, citizen, and economic subject of consumption.

To put the problem in Foucault’s terms, what has disappeared in neoliberalism is the tactical polyvalence of discourse; everything is framed in terms of interests, freedoms and risks.

As Wendy Brown argues, one can survey the quotidian effects or practices of governmentality in the manner in which individualized/market based solutions appear in lieu of collective political solutions: gated communities for concerns about security and safety; bottled water for concerns about water purity; and private schools (or vouchers) for failing public schools, all of which offer the opportunity for individuals to opt out rather than address political problems. Privatization is not just neoliberalism’s strategy for dealing with the public sector, what David Harvey calls accumulation by dispossession, but a consistent element of its particular form of governmentality, its ethos, everything becomes privatized, institutions, structures, issues, and problems that used to constitute the public.

It is privatization all the way down. For Brown, neoliberalism entails a massive de-democratization, as terms such as the public good, rights and debate, no longer have any meaning. “The model neoliberal citizen is one who strategizes for her or himself among various social, po-litical, and economic options, not one who strives with others to alter or organize these options.”

Thus, while it is possible to argue that neoliberalism is a more flexible, an open form of power as opposed to the closed spaces of disciplines, a form of power that operates on freedoms, on a constitutive multiplicity, it is in some sense all the more closed in that as a form of governmentality, as a political rationality, it is without an outside. It does not encounter any tension with a competing logic of worker or citizen, with a different articulation of subjectivity. States, corporations, individuals are all governed by the same logic, that of interest and competition.

Foucault’s development, albeit partial, of account of neoliberalism as governmentality has as its major advantage a clarification of the terrain on which neo-liberalism can be countered. It is not enough to simply oppose neoliberalism as ideology, revealing the truth of social existence that it misses, or to enumerate its various failings as policy.

Rather any opposition to neoliberalism must take seriously its effectiveness, the manner in which it has transformed work subjectivity and social relationships. As Foucault argues, neoliberalism operates less on actions, directly curtailing them, then on the condition and effects of actions, on the sense of possibility.

The reigning ideal of interest and the calculations of cost and benefit do not so much limit what one can do, neoliberal thinkers are famously indifferent to prescriptive ideals, examining the illegal drug trade as a more or less rational investment, but limit the sense of what is possible.

Specifically the ideal of the fundamentally self-interested individual curtails any collective transformation of the conditions of existence. It is not that such actions are not prohibited, restricted by the dictates of a sovereign or the structures of disciplinary power, they are not seen as possible, closed off by a society made up of self-interested individuals.

It is perhaps no accident that one of the most famous political implementers of neoliberal reforms, Margaret Thatcher, used the slogan, “there is no alternative,” legitimating neoliberalism based on the stark absence of possibilities. Similarly, and as part of a belated response to the former Prime Minister, it also perhaps no accident that the slogan of the famous Seattle protests against the IMF and World Bank was, “another world is possible,” and it is very often the sense of a possibility of not only another world, but of another way of organizing politics that is remembered, the image of turtles and teamsters marching hand and hand, when those protests are referred to.

It is also this sense of possibility that the present seems to be lacking; it is difficult to imagine let alone enact a future other than a future dominated by interest and the destructive vicissitudes of competition. A political response to neoliberalism must meet it on its terrain, that of the production of subjectivity, freedom and possibility.

***************************

Foucault develops in “Truth and Juridical Forms,” that Marx posited labor as the “concrete essence of man.”

“So I don’t think we can simply accept the traditional Marxist analysis, which assumes that, labor being man’s concrete essence, the capitalist system is what transforms labor into profit, into hyperprofit or surplus value. The fact is capitalism penetrates much more deeply into our existence. That system, as it was established in the nineteenth century, was obliged to elaborate a set of political techniques, techniques of power, by which man was tied to something like labor—a set of techniques by which people’s bodies and time would become labor power and labor time so as to be effectively used and thereby transformed into hyper profit”

(Michel Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” in Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984: Volume Three, trans. Robert Hurley et al. Ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), 86).

This idea, of “capillary power relations” that turn man into a subject of labor, is an idea which Foucault sometimes develops as a critique and at other times attributes to Marx, see for example “Les Mailles du pouvoir”, in Dits et Écrits Tome IV: 1980-198, ed. D. Defert and F. Ewald (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1994) and less explicitly Discipline and Punish.

primal father realtight

Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 1994.

The startling claim made by Lacan is that the structures he is diagraming are real. This claim can only have met with the same incomprehension that it continues to elicit today. For those schooled in structuralism, which teaches us to think of structure as nearly synonymous with symbolic, the proposition presents itself as a solecism, an abuse of language. Lacan was not, naturally, ignorant of the structuralist position, which he shared at the beginning of his teaching . Later, however, his work aimed at critiquing this position, and his argument to the students and to us could at this point be formulated thus : you are right to rebel against structuralism, to complain that it diagrams only moribund relations. You are therefore right to proclaim that structures don’t march in the streets but not for the reasons you think. For the point is not, by changing your analytical model, to make structures take to the streets, to understand them as embedded or immanent in social reality. The point is rather to heed the lesson the original model had to teach:

structures do not and should not-take to the streets. They are not to be located among the relations that constitute our everyday reality; they belong, instead, to the order of the real.

This argument may be too abstract, even still. What, you may wonder, would an analysis that proceeds from this assumption look like? What difference does it make to our understanding of the actual functioning of a society? In order to answer these questions , we ask you to contemplate two examples of just such an analysis. Each is drawn from the work of Freud, and, significantly, each is associated with an inglorious history of ridicule and incomprehension. Our suggestion is that it is the proposition that underwrites them-” structures are real, ” or “every phenomenal field occludes its cause” which causes them to be so radically unassimilable within, and such valuable antidotes against, everyday historicist thought. 11-12

The first example is taken from Totem and Taboo, where Freud provides an analysis of a society in which relations of equality and fraternity prevail among its citizens, no one is distinguished above the others , and power is shared rather than accumulated in one place. What strikes us as most remarkable about Freud’s analysis is that it does not limit itself to a description of these relations, does not attempt to make this “regime of brothers ” coincide simply with the relations that exist among them. Instead Freud insists on going beyond these relations to posit the existence of some preposterous being, a primal father who once possessed all the power the brothers now equally share and whose murder is supposed to have issued in the present regime. No wonder so many have taken this to be one of Freud’s most crackpot ideas … But to call it crackpot is to miss the point that if this father of the primal horde is indeed preposterous, then he is objectively so. That is to say, he is unbelievable within the regime in which his existence must be unthinkable if relations of equality are to take hold. That he is unthinkable within this regime of brothers does not gainsay [contradict] the fact that the institution of the regime is inexplicable without him.

For if we did not posit his existence, we would be incapable, without resorting to psychologism, of explaining how the brothers came together in this fashion.

What Freud accounts for in Totem and Taboo is the structure, the real structure, of a society of equals, which is thus shown to be irreducible to the labile [fluid changing] relations of equality that never obtain absolutely. The petty jealousies and feelings of powerlessness that threaten these relations, that block their permanent realization, betray their guilty origin, the cause that they must efface. 12
The second example is taken from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which Freud develops one of his other massively misunderstood notions: the death drive. The common interpretation of this text is that he develops this notion in order to counter the belief that humans are all too humanly ruled by a principle of pleasure. According to this reading, the death drive would be a second principle, co-present and at war with the pleasure principle; that is, the two principles would be seen to occupy the same space, the territory of their struggle with each other.

Yet this is not what Freud says . Rather than contesting the importance of the pleasure principle, he admits its centrality in psychical life; he then seeks, by means of the death drive, to account for this centrality, to state the principle by which the principle of pleasure is installed. 10

In other words, Freud’s positing of the death drive parallels his positing of the father of the primal horde in that both are meant to answer to the necessity of accounting aetiologically for an empirical field, where the pleasure principle reigns, in one case, and where a fraternal order obtains, in the other.

In each case the transcendental principle, or the principle of the principle of rule, is in conflict with the principle of rule itself, though this conflict cannot be conceived to take place on some common ground, since the first order principle and the second order principle are never co-present

Nor can either of these two “warring” principles ever ultimately win out over the other, since the very existence of the empirical field always presupposes the existence of its cause, and since no cause can ever exist abstractly, in the absence of that which it effects.

But we must also acknowledge that these two powerful modern discourses — psychoanalysis and historicism, represented here by Lacan and Foucault, respectively — have in common the conviction that it is dangerous to assume that the surface is the level of the superficial. Whenever we delve below this level, we are sure to come up empty. Yet the lessons each discourse draws from this conviction are strikingly divergent.

Psychoanalysis, via Lacan, maintains that the exclusivity of the surface or of appearance must be interpreted to mean that appearance always routs or supplants being, that appearance and being never coincide. It is this syncopated relation that is the condition of desire.

Historicism, on the other hand, wants to ground being in appearance and wants to have nothing to do with desire.

Thus, when Lacan insists that we must take desire literally, we can understand him to be instructing us about how to avoid the pitfall of historicist thinking. To say that desire must be taken literally is to say simultaneously that desire must be articulated … For if it is desire rather than words that we are to take literally, this must mean that desire may register itself negatively in speech, that the relation between speech and desire, or social surface and desire, may be a negative one. As Lacan puts it, a dream of punishment may express a desire for what that punishment represses. This is a truth that cannot be tolerated by historicism, which refuses to believe in repression and proudly professes to be illiterate in desire. The emergence of a neopopulism cannot be blamed on Foucault, but the historicism he cultivated is guilty of effacing the pockets of empty, inarticulable desire that bear the burden of proof of society’s externality to itself.

Disregarding desire, one constructs a reality that is realtight, that is no longer self external. One paves the way for the conception of a self enclosed society built on the repression of a named desire.

If this book may be said to have one intention, it is this: to urge analysts of culture to become literate in desire, to learn how to read what is inarticulable in cultural statements .

drive

Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real: Theorizing Cultural Criticism.

Freud insisted throughout his work on the organic life of his patients, but he also insisted that the symptoms which so commonly marked their bodies did not originate there. The drive, he affirmed, was the representative in the psyche of an instinct, and thus to be found ‘on the frontier between the mental and the physical’ (Freud 1977a: 83). 2

That instinct itself no longer exists as such in the speaking being, but its residue survives in the psyche to exert an influence on mind and body, or mind-and-body, since in this account the two interact in a way that renders them no longer so easily distinguishable. 37.

In consequence, the cultural script is never absolute. It plays a crucial role, of course: we cannot account for Anna O.’s behaviour without reference to the specificity of her cultural moment. At the same time, that cultural moment does not fully explain the ‘absences’ that made her unaware of her surroundings, the ‘bad self’ that threw cushions at her visitors and tore the buttons off her bedclothes, or the loss of her own culture in its inscription in her native language. For that we need to recognize what culture withholds, or the inability of the script to cover the lack that appears in culture itself. 37

The abolished particularity returns as resistance, marking the speaking being’s loss of the unnameable real, which is still there, but no longer there-for-a-subject. This resistance makes itself felt not only in individual experience, but also as incoherences in the apparent homogeneity of culture itself. A cultural criticism that takes this into account is able to acknowledge the silences that mark the inscriptions of culture, the complexity and the hesitations of the texts, as well as their noisier affirmations.