not-all Žižek
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter. Routledge. 1993
The paradox of subjectivation (assujetissement) is precisely that the subject who would resist such norms is itself enabled, if not produced, by such norms. Although this constitutive constraint does not foreclose the possibility of agency, it does locate agency as a reiterative or rearticulatory practice, immanent to power, and not a relation of external opposition to power (15).
So instead of prioritizing totalised and determining social structures on the one hand, or fully constituted subjects on the other, we begin by accepting that social agents always find themselves ’thrown’ into a system of meaningful practices. an immersion that both shapes their identity and structures their practices. However, we also add the critical rider that these structures are ontologically incomplete. Indeed, it is in the ’space’ or ‘gap’ of social structures, as they are rendered visible in moments of crisis and dislocation, that a political subject can emerge through particular ‘acts of identification’. Moreover, as these identifications are understood to take place across a range of possible ideologies or discourses – some of which are excluded or repressed – and as these are always incomplete, then any form of identification is doomed to fall short of its promise
In sum, social structures and forms of life are not only composed of relations of hierarchy and domination; even more pertinently, they are marked by gaps and fissures, and forged by political exclusions. And the making visible of these gaps in the structures through dislocatory experiences makes it possible for subjects to identify anew, and thus to act differently (79).
free decisions and actions are likened to miracles, which are characterized as an ability ‘to begin something new’, that is, to set in motion events and practices that cannot be controlled and whose consequences cannot be foretold. Indeed, echoing her once-mentor Heidegger, freedom involves the ‘abyss of nothingness that opens up before any deed than cannot be accounted for by a reliable chain of cause and effect and is inexplicable in Aristotelian categories of potentiality and actuality’ (Arendt cited in Zizek 2001:113) (79).
In short, following Heidegger, subjects are ‘thrown’ into a world not of their choosing, but have the capacity under certain conditions to act differently. But more than this we need also to be able to explain the constitution and reproduction of the social relations into which they have been thrown, and we need also to account for the way in which subjects are gripped by certain discourses and ideologies. Our poststructuralist approach strives to unfold a social ontology adequate to these tasks.
Methodologically we argue that the development of an explanation must start with intentions and self-interpretations, not only as part of the process of problematization, but also to arrive at an understanding of the character of social logics, as well as political and fantasmatic logics. In conceptual terms, logics are aligned with self-interpretations against causal mechanisms, because it is through self-interpretations and thick descriptions that hte ontic is connected to the ontological, and social logics connected with political and fantasmatic logics (161).
Enjoyment is not to be understood as a synonym for pleasure, if only because such enjoyment is often though by no means always consciously expereinced as suffering.
– accounts for a ‘symptom’s inertia’
The notion of enjoyment captures a subject’s mode of being, whether individual or collective
The guilt which may accompany the transgression of an officially affirmed ideal is a possible, indeed farily common, mode of experiencing enjoyment (107).
… the notion of enjoyment has been used to characterize and account for the resilience of a host of practices and rituals … In sum by invoking fantasmatic logics we suggest that one condition for subscribing to an existing or promised social practice concerns the extent to which it can tap into the subject’s exisitng mode of enjoyment and thus fantasmatic frame.
Practices of identity reproduction and new acts of identification also presuppose a subject of enjoyment that is structured around certain fantasies. Fantasy is a narrative that covers-over or conceals the subject’s lack by providing an image of fullness, wholeness, or harmony, on the one hand, while conjuring up threats and obstacles to its realization on the other. When successfully installed, a fantasmatic narrative hooks the subject ”via the enjoyment it procures” to a given practice or order, or a promised future practice or order, thus confering identity … the categories of enjoyment and fantasy are relevant for thinking about issues of ideology and ethics. (130)
…the experience of dislocation, in which the inherent contingency of social relations becomes visible, is an important condition for the possibility of political practices. The latter involves the public contestation of norms in the name of something new. Significantly, the centrality we accord to the political dimension of practices already implies a normative point of view, which regards certain norms or social logics as worthy of public contestation. Reactivating the political dimension thus presupposes the intrinsic contingency and unevenness of power underlying any decision from the point of view of an alternative vision, however implicit this might be. The ethical aspect of our critical explanation is also linked to radical contingency, though this time in a more direct fashion because it concerns the way in which a subject confronts it in its various ontical manifestations, whether political or social. We examine the normative and ethical aspects of critique in turn.(192)
2 key dimensions which centre on the notion of subjectivity
hermeneutic-structural: highlights the presumptive centrality of the self-interpretations of subjects in social science explanations. But it is also important to recognize in this regard that discursive practices exhibit varying degrees of sedimentation, ranging from regimes and institutions to social habits. While the social logics structuring them are literally buoyed up by subjects — they do not exist except through the activity of subjects— they are not necessarily cognitively accessible to subjects, at least not immediately and without some form of intervention. This means that logics can have significant explanatory and critical leverage independently of the consciously held self-interpretations of agents. Certainly, social logics are products of past understanding, interpretations and decisions, but they tend to secure a degree of autonomy and not insignificant force when sedimented into practices and regimes. This is one reason why the assent of agents is not conclusive or exhaustive of an explanation’s validity. (162)
poststructural dimension: highlights the way in which social structures are never complete in themselves by foregrounding the dislocatory nature of the symbolic order (the ‘real’ in Lacanian terms) and thus the possible emergence of political subjectivity as such. This means that the hermeneutical-structural dimension fails to exhaust our particular ontological framework. It is at this point that political and fantasmatic logics come into play, thus enabling us to generate critical accounts of the constitution and dissolution of social structures themselves. This is because they assist in the process of revealing and explaining the non-necessary character of social logics and the practices they sustain and animate. This enables us to generate critical explanations that are both sensitive to context and explicit about their ontological, ethical, normative, and sociological presuppositions. (162)
Jason Glynos, Self-Transgressive Enjoyment as a Freedom Fetter. Political Studies 56 (3), 2008
– jouissance pleasure as pain, jouissance is fantasy of one-ness with mother
– loss of jouissance = loss of one-ness with mother (lost object)
– lost object is primordial = something we never had (impossible) thus its this that structures our desire
– Jouissance linked to an impossibility and fantasied overcoming
– impossibility is translated into a prohibition
– once jouissance is turned into a prohibition, this gives man the illusion that it can be transgressed
– we now have a prohibition of jouissance, a Law qua prohibition
– plus-de-jouir happens through a transgression of the Law qua prohibition
– the subject derives its being and identity via this transgressive enjoyment
– representative of the Law — the Other — is the one who steals enjoyment, as thief of subject’s enjoyment
– the subject’s enjoyment is constitutively ‘stolen’, always already taken, by the Other
– thus the most intimate part of the subject, the subject’s own mode of enjoyment is structured by the Other
How, then, is the subject’s own enjoyment structured? Precisely by acting in such a way as to ‘steal back’ the enjoyment that the Other has supposedly stolen from him or her. His or her enjoyment is supported by the thought that he or she is transgressing the Other’s laws and ideals, enjoying behind the Other’s back’. The neurotic subject sustains itself as a subject of desire through transgressive thoughts and activities (i.e. by doing things it is not supposed to do: by stealing a covetous glance, by secretly wishing the downfall of a successful colleague, etc.)
The very prohibition creates the desire to transgress it, and jouissance is therefore fundamentally transgressive.
What the law prohibits, desire seeks. It seeks only transgression, and that makes desire entirely dependent on the law (that is, the Other) which brings it into being. Thus, desire can never free itself completely from the Other, as the Other is responsible for desire’s very being (cited in Fink, 1997 A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 207)
We enjoy our symptoms
We resist cure, because we unconsciously take jouissance from our symptoms. “subjects enjoy their symptoms as a means of escaping deeper psychical tensions … However painful the symptom may be, its aim is to free the subject form sometimes even more painful conflicts.”
Why do we procrastinate? We set ourselves stringent ideals (perfectionism) and then get a kick out of transgressing them.
Jouissance and the GRIP of ideology, or Jouissance and transgression of an ideal
Ideological critque is meant to weaken the grip of ideology and enhance freedom of subject. What holds the community together is a specific form of transgression of an ideal, of the Law.
– KKK lynchings, Nazi pogroms (these remain hidden from public view), these transgressions provoke a form of collective enjoyment and a kind of solidarity in guilt thus reaffirming the cohesion of the group.
Self-Transgressive Enjoyment
What is responsible for ‘extraordinary’ outbursts is nothing other than the very ‘ordinary’, neurotic contemporary subject, with all his or her foibles. Zizek implies that the modality of our contemporary neurotic subjectivity can and ought to be made unavailable under an alternative regime.
The subject procures a modicum of (unconscious) enjoyment in transgressing his or her own self-affirmed ideal.
– Health ideal I affirm, while secretly smoking in the back room with my friends.
Taylor treats self-understanding as a function of rational understanding … While self-understanding certainly plays an important role here, overcoming unfreedom qua self-transgressive enjoyment is not reducible to the abandonment of a particular mis-understanding and simultaneous adoption of a particular (rational) self-understanding, even though the practice of interpretation may of course function as an essential first step in this process. Rather, overcoming unfreedom from a psychoanalytic point of view resides essentially in the act of abandoning ones self-transgressively enjoyed attachment to a concrete ideal, not simply in abandoning or substituting a particular understanding of the subject’s relation to it. In other words, while a passage through, and reinterpretation of, the subject’s self-interpretation might be necessary, it is not necessarily sufficient to overcome self-transgressive enjoyment qua freedom fetter.
A psychoanalytic perspective thus explains an otherwise counter-intuitive phenomenon in which the ‘pull’ or ‘desirability’ of a concrete ideal resides in the self-transgressive enjoyment it makes possible rather than simply in a mis-understanding (i.e. a false, misguided or irrational understanding).
It is thus able to explain the resilience of an ideal’s attractiveness for a subject in the face of ‘corrective’ measures deployed at the level of rational understanding. It suggests that detachment from self-transgressive enjoyment may diminish a concrete ideal’s desirability, thereby allowing other reasons to defeat (or better support) its apparent worth.
In Foucault’s formulation, the social sciences are strongly marked by the modern episteme’s empirical-transcendental doublet, which for him stems from the epistemologically ambiguous figure of ‘Man’, who is both the subject and object of knowledge.
While political logics can be resolved into two main components — the logics of equivalence and difference — the logic of fantasy is defined solely by the function of closure. Moreover, in concealing — suturing or closing off — the contingency of social relations, fantasy structures the subject’s mode of enjoyment in a particular way: let us call it an ‘enjoyment of closure’. Thus, ethics is directly linked to the logic of fantasy because, whatever its ontical instantiation, the latter (fantasy) has closure as its principle of intelligibility, whereas ethics is related to the ‘traversal’ of fantasy in the name of an openness to contingency corresponding to an ‘enjoyment of openness’. For us, then, fantasy and ethics pick out the subject as a subject of enjoyment. though social practices are capacious enough from our point of view to enable us to capture those aspects in which subjects are attentive to the radical contingency of social relations, it should be clear that fantasmatic logics are operative in social practices where the ideological dimension is foregrounded. however, we have also seen that fantasmatic logics are equally operative in political practices. But whereas political logics are used to explain the discursive shifts in the wake of a dislocatory moment, fantasmatic logics describe and account for the vector and modality of those discursive shifts, capturing the way in which the subject deals with the radical contingency of social relations as a subject of enjoyment (151-2).
Given a dislocation, and the status of ‘floating signifiers’ — signifiers that for relevant subjects are no longer fixed to a particular meaning. Once detached, they begin to ‘float’, and their identity is only (partially) stabilized when they are successfully hegemonized by groups that endeavour to naturalize meaning in one way rather than another (177).
By criticizing universities for failing the economy throughout the 1980s, accusing academics of being snobbishly out of touch with the real world, and by painting a general picture of higher education as overly bureaucratic and inefficient in the face of an imminent and threateningly aggressive global market, ‘modernizers’ facilitate the process by which certain key signifiers are detached from their signifieds and rearticulated to reinforce market-friendly equivalences (177).
Here is the only slightly bewildering part of the whole book:
However it does not follow that the subject will engage with contingency in a more authentic way because of this confrontation (with contingency of social relations). In using the term authenticity we simply aim to capture a subject’s generalized sensitivity or attentiveness to the always-already dislocated character of existing social relations, wherein creativity and surprise are accorded prominent roles. But this implies that an inauthentic response to a dislocation is also possible. We call the authentic response ethical, and the inauthentic response ideological… the radical contingency of social reality and identity can be acknowledged and tarried with, or it can be denied and concealed. To what extent do subjects engage authentically with the radical contingency of social relations (where the ethical dimension is foregrounded)? 111
Dislocation serves as a device for articulating their fundamental ontological postulate — the radical contingency of social relations. And Dislocation allows GH to develop 2 dimensions ethical/ideological in which to characterize aspects of a practice or regime. 111