subjectivity – Page 19

chicken joke and surplus-jouissance

Vighi, Fabio. On Žižek’s Dialectics. New York: Continuum, 2010.

Here is the famous CHICKEN JOKE on Nov 5, 2010

A man who believes he is a piece of grain is taken to the mental institution where the doctors do their best to finally convince him that he is not a piece of grain but a man; however, when he is cured and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back trembling and insisting that there is a chicken outside the door and that he is afraid that it will eat him. “But wait a minute,” says his doctor, “you know very well that you are not a piece of grain but a man”. “Of course I know that,” replies the patient, “but does the chicken know that?” (34)

The insight of the patient is correct: no matter how wise and knowledgeable we become, the chicken-commodity will still get us. … we cannot avoid fetishizing the commodity, regardless of how much knowledge we have acquired.

Knowledge itself is not enough. Consequently, ‘the real task is to convince not the subject, but the chicken-commodities: not to change the way we talk about commodities, but to change the way commodities talk among themseves. (Žižek “The Parallax View” 352).

The key ideological battle is fought not on what we consciously believe in (or do not believe in), but on the plane of disavowed beliefs. What has to change is the substance of our “belief by proxy”: the way in which we unconsciously displace belief onto the other qua commodity, thereby ignoring that this other has always-already colonized our unconscious, and thus it has become the cause of what we are.

The task ahead, then, is to invent a new relation to the disavowed substance of our belief, which, of course, must follow our subtraction from or disengagement with commodity fetishism. For the paradoxical statment that commodities “do the believing for us” means that they have hooked us at the level of surplus-jouissance,

hence my argument that there is a crucial gap between our conscious enjoyment of the commodity (which falls under the jurisdiction of the pleasure principle) and the way the commodity enjoys us (commodity fetishism proper).

Only the latter can be said to represent our lack towards enjoyment, namely surplus jouissance, and therefore the only point from which we can subtract and begin anew. It is the traumatic encounter with our passive objectification vis-à-vis the circulation of commodities that, alone, can provide for us an image of salvation.

We are fetishists in practice not in theory: our reliance on common sense masks the fact that we are constantly duped by the commodities. Marx was therefore fully entitled to speak of “commodity metaphysics“. Our condition is one where instead of idealizing through knowledge, we idealize through fetishism — literally, without knowing what we are doing. More than ever before, belief today is externalized, embodied in our blind practices of consumption.

surplus jouissance is always at least minimally traumatic, and only as such liberating. The question is how to locate this jouissance and, most importantly, bring it about. (37)

Bartleby and violence 2006

The CJLC conducted this interview with Žižek over e-mail from December 2005-January 2006.

In every authentic revolutionary explosion, there is an element of “pure” violence, i.e., an authentic political revolution cannot be measured by the standard of servicing the goods (to what extent “life got better for the majority” afterwards) – it is a goal-in-itself, an act which changes the very standards of what “good life” is, and a different (higher, eventually) standard of living is a by-product of a revolutionary process, not its goal.

Usually, revolutionary violence is defended by way of evoking proverb platitudes like “you cannot make an omelet without breaking some eggs” – a “wisdom” which, of course, can easily be rendered problematic through boring “ethical” considerations about how even the noblest goals cannot justify murderous means to achieve them. Against such compromising attitudes, one should directly admit revolutionary violence as a liberating end-in-itself, so that the proverb should rather be turned around: “You cannot break the eggs (and what is revolutionary politics if not an activity in the course of which many eggs are broken), especially if you are doing it in big heat (of a revolutionary passion), without making some omelets!” … This, of course, in no way implies that we should dismiss violence as such. Violence is needed – but which violence? There is violence and violence: there are violent passages a l’acte which merely bear witness to the agent’s impotence; there is a violence the true aim of which is to prevent that something will effectively change – in a Fascist display of violence, something spectacular should happen all the time so that, precisely, nothing would really happen; and there is the violent act of effectively changing the basic coordinates of a constellation. In order for the last kind of violence to take place, this very place should be opened up through a gesture which is thoroughly violent in its impassive refusal itself, through a gesture of pure withdrawal in which, to quote Mallarme, rien n’aura eu lieu que le lieu, nothing takes place but the place itself.

And this brings us to Melville’s Bartleby. His “I would prefer not to” is to be taken literally: it says “I would prefer not to” and not “I don’t prefer (or care) to do it.” We are thereby back at Kant’s distinction between negative and infinite judgment. In his refusal of the Master’s order, Bartleby does not negate the predicate. He rather affirms a non-predicate: what he says is not that he doesn’t want to do it; he says that he prefers (wants) not to do it. This is how we pass from the politics of “resistance” or “protestation” which parasitizes upon what it negates, to a politics which opens up a new space outside the hegemonic position and its negation. We can imagine the varieties of such a gesture in today’s public space: not only the obvious “There are great changes for a new career here! Join us!” – “I would prefer not to”; but also “Discover the depth of your true self, find inner peace!” – “I would prefer not to”; or “Are you aware how our environment is endangered! Do something for ecology!” – “I would prefer not to”; or “What about all the racial and sexual injustices that we witness all around us? Isn’t it time to do more?” – “I would prefer not to.”

This is the gesture of subtraction at its purest, the reduction of all qualitative differences to a purely formal minimal difference. There is no violent quality in it; violence pertains to its very immobile, inert, insistent, impassive being. Bartleby couldn’t even hurt a fly – that’s what makes his presence so unbearable.

CJLC: So we must all then become so unbearable?
SŽ: Precisely.

the real

Zupancic, Alenka. “Psychoanalysis” Columbia Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophies. Ed. Constantin V.Boundas, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. 457-468. Print

the Real is not the truth of reality, or the reality without distortion, a ‘naked reality’; the Real is not beyond the reality

the Real is nothing else but a fundamental, structural impasse to which reality gives this or that form. It is not a realm — Lacan defines it as a register.’

If we take away the reality, no Real will be left. The fact that reality as we experience it is always-already distorted (in the sense in which the great twentieth-century theme of ideology conceptualized this distortion, or else in the sense in which Lacan proclaimed that all reality is fantasmatic) does not mean that reality is a distortion of the Real.

The distortions of reality (that is, different narratives that structure our symbolic universe and define the ‘roles’ that we are expected to assume, starting with ‘child,’ ‘woman,’ ‘man,’ ‘mother,’ ‘father’) are different forms built to deal with the impasse of the real that constantly haunts us from within.

To say that this impasse is structural is to say that it ‘ex-sists’ as an irreducible surplus element of reality: as its inherent contradiction that may disappear from one place, yet only to reappear in the other. 463

freud lacan

Zupancic, Alenka. “Psychoanalysis” Columbia Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophies. Ed. Constantin V.Boundas, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. 457-468. Print

The central themes of structural linguistics are the arbitrariness of the sign and the emphasis on differentiality (signifiers only ‘make sense,’ or produce meaning, as parts of a differential network of places, binary oppositions and so on; the signifying chain is strictly separated from the signified), as well as on the fact that there are no positive entities in language. Lacan concluded that there was an important characteristic of every spoken language that was left out from this account, or was only considered on its margins, … It is not only according to the laws of differentiality that signifiers produce sense, but also according to the two already mentioned mechanisms: sonorous similarities or homonyms and associations that exist in the speaker’s memory. Here we are dealing with something like positive entities, with words functioning strangely similarly to objects. 459

In more general terms we could say that signifiers are not simply used to refer to reality, they are part of the same reality they refer to; hence ‘there is no such thing as a metalanguage’

Lacan transposed the bar separating the signifier from the signified (S/s) into the bar inherent to the register of the signifier itself. Signifiers are never pure signifiers. They are riddled, from within, by unexpected surpluses that tend to ruin the logic of their pure differentiality. On the one side … they are separated from the signified in the sense that there is no inherent connection leading from the signifier to its meaning. Yet, if this were all, the signifying field would be a consistent system and, as the structuralist motto goes, a structure without subject. Lacan subscribes to this view to the extent to which it convincingly does away with the notion of ‘psychological subject,’ of intentional subjectivity using the language for its purposes, mastering the field of speech or being its Cause and Source.

Yet he goes a step further. If we focus on the signifying chain, precisely in its independence and autonomy, we are bound to notice that it constantly produces, from itself, quite unexpected effects of meaning, a meaning which is strictly speaking, a surplus meaning that stains signifers from within. This surplus meaning is also a carrier of certain quotas of affect or enjoyment, ‘jouissance’ … It is precisely through this surplus meaning as enjoyment that signifiers are intrinsically bound to reality to which they refer. Incidentally, this is also the kernel of Lacan’s insistence on the truth being not-all: the effect of the signifier cannot be fully reduced back to the signifier as its cause. 460

The subject of the unconscious is not some deeply hidden subject that makes its presence known through, say, dreams or the slips of the tongue; it only exists with, and within, these very slips of the tongue. 460

What, precisely, it the unconscious? There is no such thing as a direct perception of the unconscious thoughts. dreams (and other formations of unconscious) are not the place where one can get an unobstructed view in the unconscious, beyond the censorship and repression that otherwise ‘hide’ them from consciousness. On the contrary, these formations are nothing but the censorship and distortions at work. … the unconscious is this very distortion, and not some untarnished content lying beyond these distortions, and contained in the coherent narrative of the latent thoughts reconstructed in the process of analysis.

Something is added to the latent thoughts and this surplus, constitutive of a dream, is the unconscious desire. In this perspective the unconscious desire is but this excess of form over content. The unconscious desire is not what is articulated in the latent thoughts, for instance — in the case of Freud’s own famous dream of ‘Irma’s injection’ — the wish to be absolved of the responsibility for a patient not getting better. The same applies to some other cases discussed by Freud, wishes related to professional ambitions or aggressive wishes towards our supposedly beloved ones, or ‘inappropriate’ sexual wishes. All these wishes are not all that unconscious; they are closer to the register of thoughts that we (more or less consciously) have, but wouldn’t admit to.

subject*

social change is irremediably fantasmatic (206)

The excess (*) attending the subject, to repeat, is therefore both the medium of its connection to other subjects and the obstacle to that connection. This dual function comprises the “relation of nonrelation” that undergirds the social field, a relation predicated on an obstacle to relationality.

… because the Möbius subject encompasses both its symbolic properties (elements of the set) and its formal properties (set-ness, empty set), de-personalization doesn’t rid the subject of its ontic properties but it sets them off, revealing them as contingent (rather than necessary) bearers of meaning. By making visible the relation of nonrelation through symbolic divestiture the subject situates itself as the source of the non-orientability of the social field, without however being able to account for its own effects within that field in any predictive or comprehensive sense.

In this way, the subject takes ethical responsibility for its parallax oscillation, exposing the excess that sticks to itself (as if it were being seen from the perspective of others) and establishing distance from it, which is a prerequisite to tolerating it nondefensively (207).

As far as I can see, the suspension of the defense against excess — or the neutralization of the more destructive defenses — is the only way that the subject’s transformation of its relation to its own jouissance can affect others. This suspension means that the subject accepts the relation of nonrelation, giving up its fruitless but often destructive efforts to locate the excess outside itself or to eradicate it. By refusing to defend itself (or by refusing to deploy destructive defenses such as narcissism, aggression, projection, and scapegoating), the subject decreases its contribution to the affective storm in a social field that circulates excess like a hot potato. The potentiation of affect decreases, however temporarily, when the subject absorbs some of the affective energy without releasing it back in a destructive form (207).

… in general the absorption of affect by one member of the group provides an opening for others to change their own affective posture.

In any case, no matter what the specific defense aroused, the encounter with the neosubject will make apparent the dominant identifications and defenses of others. This display of the dominant tendencies in a particular social universe permits reflection on what works and what doesn’t, helping to aggregate and focus social energies. These may be actions that put the brakes on violence, stymie bullies, alleviate suffering, secure privacy, promote stability and so on. That is, the encounter with the neosubject forces into the open the rationalizations for the status-quo, and in so doing can foster the conditions under which people will have a choice to make at the level of practices — individual, familial, institutional.

The setting-off of the subject’s substantive traits — through, for example, self-deprecating humor — both exposes the contingent meaning of those traits and reflects back to others the way those traits get used as explanations for social discord. In this way, the subject brings something new into the social field — not only a de-emphasis on ontic properties and a revelation of a dimension of universality independent of such properties, but also a new way of being in the social field that nondefensively accepts the relation of nonrelation. What is more, unlike the immanent cause or the exceptional cause, the effects of the deployment of the extimate cause, as it generates new behavior and new relations, can be tracked, studied, and analyzed (208).

relation of nonrelation

Although every subject in the field is a Möbius subject, all subjects are marked by their own history and mobilize different defenses against the experience of excess. The individuals within the social space are diverse, even though they share the common characteristic of excess. put another way, the fact that they are subjects of excess makes it possible for them to be individuated differently and still seek out and maintain connections to one another, even as some of those connections are heavily imbued with aggression and hatred (204).

… by placing the relation of nonrelation front and center, the formal properties of the subject clearly emerge as the route to its universalization and the link to its political potential. In order for social change to come about, something new has to enter the situation, something that is not simply a funciton of that situation’s determinates (204).

Möbius subject and the relation of nonrelation

The Möbius subject has two driving motivations, that is, motivations at the level of the drive:

1. The first is to maintain the extimacy that is the ground of its existence: as we know, the drive circulates around objet a, the missing object, established by way of the encounter with the formal negation, the Non/Nom-du-Père.

2. The second is to defend itself against the anxiety generated by its excessive status. This anxiety, understood in Lacanian terms, is simply affect itself, a function of the Möbius condition of subjectivity.

The motivations may be at odds, but they derive necessarily from the subject’s founding. Taken together, they provide the means by which the social space itself is propagated and sustained.

Because, at the level of the drive, the subject comes into existence only if it seems as though objet a is possible, prohibited rather than impossible, the subject has a stake in the very condition that produces anxiety — its status as a signifier depends upon the impossibility of objet a and its status as a signifier makes its ultimate stability, its final meaning or self-consistency, unreachable. In this dynamic, seen from the level of Symbolic relations, it can seem that the other’s failure to stabilize the subject’s meaning is willfully aggressive (or negligent) rather than a function of impossibility.

As a result, the Möbius subject relates to the other both as the solution and the obstacle to its own inconsistency — a relation of nonrelation. That is, thanks to the excess that sticks to each subject, and thanks to the fantasy that the other is consistent in a way that the subject is not, the social relation necessarily emerges as a relation of nonrelation (202).

In the Levinasian version the subject seeks to overcome the radical alterity that, in this view, properly belongs to the other. In the extimate version, the subject must perpetually seek a response from the others because, in fact the subject will never be sure of the meaning of the response it gets, yet the subject has nowhere else to go to get it. The other is not radically other — it is close enough to the subject in kind to warrant the desire tor the relationship while distant enough in its ability to fulfill the subject’s deepest desire to maintain its otherness.

At the same time, the “other” to whom the subject relates does not truly exist in the way the subject believes: the other is a fantasmatic projection of a wish. So the subject has a relation of nonrelation to the actual others in the social space. It is in this relation of nonrelation that we find the sustaining of the duality of subject and other that Levinas requires for ethics but fails to provide.

The hatred and envy that can arise from the subject’s frustration at the other’s inability to repair the subject’s self-inconsistency could easily galvanize the destruction of the very space of the social … (203). The destruction of that space, however, would spell the demise of the subject qua subject. Subjects mobilize a number of (necessarily inadequate) defenses — including perversion and hysteria — to avoid that result. … We don’t want to feel that “we’re all in this together” if that means everyone is subject to excess. We want to feel that someone can solve this problem or be targeted as its source. But because these wishes do not actually resolve the excess, the best we can do is to try to send it on its rounds, even though it inevitably “returns” to us — since, of course, in reality it never left. We are stuck with and to excess. From this point of view, it appears that the motivation for the social relation is not the preservation of the other’s distinct existence, as Levinas and Critichley would have it, but rather the need to preserve the social field itself — the field without which the subject (all subjects) as such cannot exist — from a threat of dissolution.

That is, the subject fantasizes that the continual dissolution and reassemblage of the social field made possible and necessary by excess is a threat to the field rather than the very condition of its perpetuation (203).

subject of the drive and the universal

Rothenberg, Molly. The Excessive Subject. Malden, M.A. : Politiy Press, 2010.

As long as we are fixated — as happens in multiculturalism and identity politics — on the symbolic identifiers of our personal identities, we obscure the link between the subject and the drive as the true engine of the subject’s existence.

Molly isn’t big on ‘subject of desire’
For when we focus on the symbolic dimension of identity, we are conceiving of the subject as a subject of desire, perpetually seeking to overcome its lack by finding its object of desire. Any political action founded on this premise dooms the actors to a futile search for a utopia which, of necessity, must always be deferred (176).

In Žižek’s view, the political meaning of one’s acts has nothing to do with one’s “sincerity or hypocrisy” — that is, one’s “subjective self-experience” is irrelevant to the objective truth of one’s actions. Rather, the subject of the drive institutes a gap between itself and its symbolic subjective dimension.

The subject’s identification with objet a re-casts it, not as a set of symbolic properties, but as connected directly to the order of objectivity. Introducing a distance towards one’s own symbolic identity puts one in a position to act in an “objective-ethical” way (OWB 182).

Presumably, it is this link to the objective that makes solidarity possible. The manifold differences or symbolic properties of individuals move to the background, while each subject, as identified with the object of the drive, finds its way to the objective order, the only terrain on which meaningful change can occur. Solidarity, then, emerges not from intersubjective relations but rather from the relations of subjects purified of their symbolic identities, subjects who meet on the ground of objectivity, as objects (177).

subject of desire

Žižek proposes as the properly political subject an “acephalous subject who assumes the position of the object” (Organs Without Bodies `76).

In this move from desire to drive, he fundamentally alters the picture of a political subject as one who calculates an intervention to bring about the future it desires.

The “acephalous subject” does not function in this intentionalized mode of traditional political discourse: “the subject who acts is no longer a person but, precisely, an object.” That is, in his view, we must give up, once and for all, our sense of the political — the political act, the political domain, and the political collectivity — as based on promise or calculation.

The objet a, the excessive part of the subject, is “the subject’s stand-in within the order of objectivity” (Organs w/o Bodies 175). When the subject identifies directly with this excess, it becomes genuinely rebolutionary because it gains access to the register of the Real, the object. How?

According to Žižek, the identification with the object de-personalizes the subject, instituting a gap between its subjectivated individuation (all the little preferences and properties that make up our social identities) and its subject-ness, the “pure” subject that emerges as a function of the drive. (176).

Non/Nom-du-Père

Rothenberg, Molly Ann. The Excessive Subject. Malden M.A. : Polity Press, 2010.

the Non/Nom-du-Père has no content, much less normative content. the addition of the negation, the Non/Nom-du-Père, makes the subject a signifier, which means that the subject does not control what s/he means to others any more than s/he can know for certain what others mean. In effect, the “paternal metaphor” places a “minus sign,” so to speak, on the immediacy of the presence f the individual, raising the question as to the meaning of the individual, and in this way makes of the individual a signifier, bringing the individual into the realm of signification from the realm of the Real. That is, the Non/Nom-du-Père is a metaphor for the process by which anything, including the child, ceases to simply be and comes to mean, which is to say that it enters into the defiles of linguistic mediation and social appropriation. No object simply means what it is; every object becomes a site of excessive meaning. To be a signifier —and a subject— is to be stuck to an irreducible excess of meaning. In other words, … at its core is the social dimension of language, an unsymbolizable excess (not an unsymbolizable exclusion) produced by the conditions in which meaning arises as perpetually ungovernable (Rothenberg, 111).

tuhkanen critique of butler

Tuhkanen, Mikko. “Performativity and Becoming” Cultural Critique. 72, Spring (2009): 1-35.

For example, her description of Antigone as “the limit without which the symbolic cannot be thought” or the “unthinkable within the symbolic” might seem to be referring to the real, yet she goes on to identify Antigone’s position as possibly embodying an “alternative symbolic or imaginary” (Antigone’s Claim, 40) and, immediately afterward, turns to Lacan’s second seminar to criticize his totalizing theory of the symbolic law (41–42; see also 47). Arguably, this conflation of different stages in Lacan’s work forces (or allows) her to ignore Lacan’s divergence from a structuralist understanding of a system (see also Penney, 19).

Relevant here is Shepherdson’s suggestion that “the ‘real’ can be understood as a concept that was developed in order to define in a clear way how there is always an element that ‘does not belong’ within the structure, an ‘excluded’ element which escapes the law, but which can nevertheless be approached in a precise theoretical fashion.” Consequently, “psychoanalysis is not in fact committed to the ‘law’ in the manner of classical structuralist thought” (“Intimate Alterity,” paras. 13, 24).

In No Future, Lee Edelman argues that, rather than making good on its claim to conjure up from the tragic heroine’s tomb a radical challenge to the protocols of symbolic legitimation, Butler’s rendering of Antigone “returns us, instead, to familiar forms of a durable liberal humanism whose rallying cry has always been, and here remains,‘the future’” (105–6). For Edelman, such seamless domestication of the real to symbolic meaning is symptomatic of the inherent failure of futurity to be evoked in terms of anything but what he calls “reproductive futurism” (2 and passim). In the figure of the Child, politics premised on futurism “generates generational succession, temporality, and narrative sequence, not toward the end of enabling change, but, instead, of perpetuating sameness, of turning back time to assure repetition” (60). In this schema of enabling the future to unfold as a reassuringly recognizable continuation of the present, queers are “stigmatized as threatening an end to the future itself” (113). Given the unquestioned reflex of seeing “every political vision as a vision of futurity” (13), Edelman’s exhilaratingly counterintuitive argument that queer respond to its stigmatization with a kind of an answer of the real, with an embrace of its status as an embodiment of “the arbitrary, future-negating force of a brutal and mindless drive” (127), has a strong appeal. If there are reasons to resist this appeal, they must come from the fact that queer theory may not yet have come to grips with the specificity of the consequences of its paradigmatic groundings.

I would propose that, because of the Butlerian paradigm on which much of queer theory has developed, the question of becoming, of futurity’s claim on our thinking, may not yet have been adequately posed.

With Deleuze, for example, we must ask whether futurity as becoming is reducible to breeding, in the sense in which fag slang uses the term to signal the mindless, mechanic, and (in Foucault’s terms) docile reproduction of the same. Edelman writes:

“the true oppositional politics implicit in the practice of queer sexualities lies not in the liberal discourse and patient negotiation of tolerances and rights, important as these undoubtedly are to all of us still denied them, but in the capacity of queer sexualities to figure the radical dissolution of the contract, in every sense social and Symbolic, on which the future as putative assurance against the jouissance of the Real depends” (16).

While not precisely disagreeing with Edelman, I would ask whether we have quite exhausted the question of futurity before we abandon it. To do this, we may want to shift our paradigmatic perspective such that our grounding assumptions are defamiliarized and our concepts—here the question of becoming—are necessarily rethought. Such a shift, I propose, would allow us to see that the futurity of performative politics may constitute only a partial understanding of what Deleuze, for example, sees as becoming.

honneth

Honneth, Alex. “From desire to recogntion: Hegel’s account of human sociality” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Eds. Moyar, Dean and Michael Quante, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2008. 76-90. Print.

A subject can arrive at “consciousness” of its own “self” only if it enters into a relationship of “recognition” with another subject. 76

It is unclear why the disappointment over the independence of the object should lead to an encounter with the other and to recogntion (84).
… this subject strives, through the need-driven consumption of its environment, to acquire the individual certainty that the reality it faces is on the whole a product of its own mental activity. In the course of this striving, however, it is confronted with the fact that, as Hegel put it, the world retains its “independence” since its existence is not dependent on the survival of its individual elements.