{"id":7034,"date":"2011-02-24T20:33:28","date_gmt":"2011-02-25T01:33:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=7034"},"modified":"2011-02-27T12:37:06","modified_gmt":"2011-02-27T17:37:06","slug":"post-oedipal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2011\/02\/24\/post-oedipal\/","title":{"rendered":"post oedipal traverse the fantasy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u017di\u017eek, Slavoj. “Cyberspace, or, How to Traverse the Fantasy in the Age of the Retreat of the Big Other<\/em>” Public Culture<\/a> 10:3. (1998) 483-513.<\/p>\n

This constellation also provides the key for the problem of the historicity of psychoanalysis. From the early days of his Complexes familiaux ([1938] 1984), Lacan was fully aware of the historicity of the Oedipal complex itself, as well as of its discovery by Freud.<\/p>\n

In the modern bourgeois nuclear family, the two functions of the father that were previously separated, or embodied in different persons<\/p>\n

(the pacifying Ego-Ideal, the point of ideal identification<\/strong>, and<\/p>\n

the ferocious superego, the agent of cruel prohibition<\/strong>; the symbolic function of totem and the horror of taboo), are united in one and the same person.<\/p>\n

The previous separate personification of the two functions accounts for the apparent \u201cstupidity\u201d of some aborigines, who thought that the true father of a child was a stone or an animal or a spirit. The aborigines were well aware that the mother was inseminated by the \u201creal\u201d father; they merely separated the real father from its symbolic function.<\/p>\n

The unification of the two functions in the bourgeois nuclear family, by giving birth to the ambiguous rivalry with the father figure, created the psychic conditions for the modern, Western, dynamic, creative individualism and, at the same time, sowed the seeds of the forthcoming \u201ccrisis of Oedipus<\/strong>\u201d (or, more generally, with regard to figures of authority as such, of the \u201ccrisis of investiture\u201d that erupted in the late nineteenth century [Santner 1996). Symbolic authority was more and more smeared over by the mark of obscenity and thus, as it were, undermined from within.<\/p>\n

In his early theory of the historicity of the Oedipus complex, Lacan thus already establishes the connection between the psychoanalytic problematic of the Oedipus as the elementary form of \u201csocialization,\u201d of the subject\u2019s integration into the symbolic order, and the standard sociopsychological topoi on how modernity is characterized by individualist competitivity -on how, in modern societies, subjects are no longer fully immersed into and identified with the particular social place into which they were born, but can, in principle at least, freely move between different \u201croles.\u201d The emergence of the modern \u201cabstract\u201d individual who relates to his or her particular \u201cway of life\u201d as to something with which he or she is not directly identified, but rather which depends on a set of contingent circumstances (the feeling that the particularities of one\u2019s birth, social status, sex, and religion do not determine one fully, do not concern one\u2019s innermost identity) relies on the mutation in the functioning of the Oedipus complex, on the above-described unification of the two aspects of symbolic authority (Ego Ideal and the prohibitive superego) in one and the same person of the \u201creal father.\u201d490<\/p>\n

The key question here is: What is going on today when this very modern form of Oedipus is disintegrating<\/strong>– when so-called pathological Narcissism is asserting itself more and more as the predominant form of subjectivity? On the one hand, symbolic prohibitive norms are increasingly replaced with imaginary ideals (of social success, of bodily fitness); on the other hand, this lack of symbolic prohibition is supplemented with the reemergence of the ferocious superego figures. So we have a subject who is extremely narcissistic, who perceives everything as a potential threat to his or her precarious imaginary balance. (See the universalization of the logic of victim: Every contact with another human being is experienced as a potential threat. If the other smokes, if he or she casts a covetous glance at me, he or she already hurts me.) However, far from allowing the subject to float freely in undisturbed balance, this narcissistic self-enclosure leaves him or her to the (not so) tender mercies of the superego injunction to enjoy. One is thus tempted to propose a hypothesis according to which \u201cpostmodern\u201d subjectivity involves a kind of direct \u201csuperegoization \u201d of the imaginary Ideal, caused by the lack of the proper symbolic Prohibition: It is the Ideal itself that gives rise to guilty feelings when we fail to reach it, since the (imaginary) Ego-Ideal is no longer supported by the symbolic Ideal-Ego, but directly by the superego.<\/p>\n

So, to recapitulate. There is only one consistent answer to the question \u201cWhy does the superfluous prohibition emerge, which merely prohibits the impossible?\u201d That is: It obfuscates this inherent impossibility in order to sustain the illusion that, were it not for the externally imposed prohibition, the full (\u201cincestuous\u201d) gratification would be possible. Far from acting as a \u201crepressive\u201d agency that prevents us access to the ultimate object of desire, the paternal figure functions instead to relieve us from the debilitating deadlock of desire, to \u201cmaintain hope.\u201d What is missing in \u201cOedipus on-line\u201d is precisely this \u201cpacifying\u201d function of the paternal figure that enables us to obfuscate the debilitating deadlock of desire<\/strong>. Hence, the strange mixture of \u201ceverything is possible\u201d (since there is no positive prohibiting figure) and an all-pervasive frustration and deadlock that characterizes the subject\u2019s experience of cyberspace.<\/p>\n

The ontological paradox, scandal even, of fantasy resides in the fact that it subverts the standard opposition of \u201csubjective\u201d and \u201cobjective.\u201d Of course, fantasy is by definition not \u201cobjective\u201d (in the naive sense of existing independently of the subject\u2019s perceptions); however, it is also not \u201csubjective\u201d (in the sense of being reducible to the subject\u2019s consciously experienced intuitions). Rather, fantasy belongs to the \u201cbizarre category of the objectively subjective-the way things actually, objectively, seem to you even if they don\u2019t seem that way to you\u201d (Dennett 1991, 132).8 When, for example, the subject actually experiences a series of fantasmatic formations which interrelate as so many permutations of each other, this series is never complete-it is always as if the actually experienced series presents so many variations of some underlying \u201cfundamental\u201d fantasy that is never actually experienced by the subject. 507<\/p>\n

This brings us back to the mystery of \u201ccommodity fetishism.\u201d When a critical Marxist encounters a bourgeois subject immersed in commodity fetishism, the Marxist\u2019s reproach to him or her is not, \u201cCommodity may seem to you a magical object endowed with special powers, but it really is just a reified expression of relations between people\u201d; rather, the actual Marxist\u2019s reproach is, \u201cYou may think that the commodity appears to you as a simple embodiment of social relations (that, for example, money is just a kind of voucher entitling you to a part of the social product), but this is not how things really seem to you. In your social reality, by means of your participation in social exchange, you bear witness to the uncanny fact that a commodity really appears to you as a magical object endowed with special powers.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is also one of the ways in which to specify the meaning of Lacan\u2019s assertion of the subject\u2019s constitutive \u201cdecenterment.\u201d Its point is not that my subjective experience is regulated by objective, unconscious, mechanisms that are \u201cdecentered\u201d with regard to my self-experience and, as such, beyond my control (a point asserted by every materialist), but rather something much more unsettling \u2014 I am deprived of even my most intimate \u201csubjective\u201d experience, the way things \u201creally seem to me,\u201d the fundamental fantasy <\/em>that constitutes and guarantees the kernel of my being, since I can never consciously experience it and assume it.<\/span><\/p>\n

According to the standard view, the dimension that is constitutive of subjectivity is that of the phenomenal (self-)experience. I am a subject the moment I can say to myself \u201cNo matter what unknown mechanism governs my acts, perceptions, and thoughts, nobody can take from me what I see and feel now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lacan turns this standard view around: The \u201csubject of the signifier\u201d<\/span> emerges only when a key aspect of the subject\u2019s phenomenal (self-)experience (the \u201cfundamental fantasy\u201d<\/strong>) becomes inaccessible to him or her, is \u201cprimordially repressed.\u201d<\/strong> At its most radical, the Unconscious is the inaccessible phenomenon, not the objective mechanism that regulates my phenomenal experience. So, in contrast to the commonplace according to which we are dealing with a subject the moment an entity displays signs of \u201cinner life\u201d\u2014 of a fantasmatic self-experience which cannot be reduced to external behavior \u2014 one should claim that what characterizes human subjectivity proper is rather the gap that separates the two \u2014 the fact that fantasy, at its most elementary, becomes inaccessible to the subject. This inaccessibility makes the subject \u201cempty.\u201d<\/strong> We thus obtain a relationship that totally subverts the standard notion of the subject who directly experiences herself, her \u201cinner states\u201d\u2014 an \u201cimpossible\u201d relationship between the empty, nonphenomenal subject and the phenomena that remain inaccessible to the subject. <\/strong><\/em>509 <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Geneticists predict that in about ten to fifteen years they will be able to identify and manipulate each individual\u2019s exact genome<\/strong> (approximately six billion genetic markers comprising the complete inherited \u201cknowledge\u201d). Potentially, at least, individuals will thus have at their disposal the complete formula of what they \u201cobjectively\u201d are. How will this \u201cknowledge in the real,\u201d the fact that I will be able to locate and identify myself completely as an object in reality, affect the status of subjectivity?<\/strong> Will it lead to the end of human subjectivity? Lacan\u2019s answer is negative:<\/p>\n

What will continue to elude the geneticist is not<\/span> my phenomenal self-experience (say, the experience of a love passion that no knowledge of the genetic and other material mechanisms which determine it can take from me), but the \u201cobjectively subjective\u201d fundamental fantasy, the fantasmatic kernel inaccessible to my conscious experience<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Even if science formulates the genetic formula of what I objectively am, it will still be unable to formulate my \u201cobjectively subjective\u2019\u2019 fantasmatic identity<\/strong>, this objectal counterpoint to my subjectivity, which is neither subjective (experienced) nor objective.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Traversing the Fantasy<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

A recent English publicity spot for a brand of beer enables us to further clarify this crucial point. Its first part stages a well-known fairytale anecdote: A girl walks along a stream, sees a frog, takes it gently onto her lap, and kisses it; of course, the ugly frog miraculously turns into a beautiful young man. However, the story isn\u2019t over yet: The young man casts a covetous glance at the girl, draws her toward him, kisses her-and she turns into a bottle of beer, which the man holds triumphantly in his hand. For the woman, the point is that her love and affection (signaled by the kiss) turn a frog into a beautiful man, a full phallic presence (in Lacan\u2019s mathems, the big Phi); for the man, the point is to reduce the woman to a partial object, the cause of his desire (in Lacan\u2019s mathems, the object small a). On account of this asymmetry, there is no sexual relationship.<\/p>\n

We have either a woman with a frog or a man with a bottle of beer. What we can never obtain is the \u201cnatural\u201d couple of the beautiful woman and man. Why not? Because fantasmatic support of this \u201cideal couple\u201d would have been the inconsistent figure of a frog embracing a bottle of beer. …<\/p>\n

This, then, opens up the possibility of undermining the hold a fantasy exerts over us through our very over-identification with it-that is, by way of embracing simultaneously, within the same space, the multitude of inconsistent fantasmatic elements. Each of the two subjects is involved in his or her own subjective fantasizing: The girl fantasizes about the frog who is really a young man, the man about the girl who is really a bottle of beer. What modern art and writing oppose to this is not objective reality but the \u201cobjectively subjective\u201d underlying fantasy that the two subjects are never able to assume, something similar to a Magrittesque painting of a frog embracing a bottle of beer, with the title \u201cA man and a woman\u201d or \u201cThe ideal couple.\u201d … And is this not the ethical duty of today\u2019s artist-to confront us with the frog embracing the bottle of beer when we are daydreaming of embracing our beloved? Does the artist need to stage fantasies that are radically desubjectivized and which can never be assumed by the subject?<\/p>\n

This, then, is the point we were aiming at all along. Perhaps cyberspace, with its capacity to externalize our innermost fantasies in all their inconsistency, opens up to the artistic practice a unique possibility to stage, to \u201cact out,\u201d the fantasmatic support of our existence, up to the fundamental \u201csadomasochistic\u201d fantasy that cannot ever be subjectivized. We are thus invited to risk the most radical experience imaginable: the encounter with our \u201cnoumenal Self,\u201d with the Other Scene which stages the foreclosed hard core of the subject\u2019s Being. Far from enslaving us to these fantasies and thus turning us into desubjectivized, blind puppets, it enables us to treat them in a playful way and thus to adopt toward them a minimum of distance-in short, to achieve what Lacan calls la traversee du fantasme, \u201cgoing-through, traversing the fantasy.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

So let us conclude with a reference to the (in)famous last proposition of Wittgenstein\u2019s Tractatus: \u201cWovon man nicht sprechen kann<\/strong>, davon muss man schweigen\u201d [Whereof one cannot speak,<\/strong> thereof must one be silent] (87). This proposition renders in the most succinct way possible the paradox of the Oedipal law that prohibits something (incestuous fusion) which is already in itself impossible (and thereby gives rise to the hope that, if we remove or overcome the prohibition, the \u201cimpossible\u201d incest will become possible). If we are effectively to move to a region \u201cbeyond Oedipus,\u201d Wittgenstein\u2019s proposition is to be rephrased into: \u201cWovon man nicht sprechen kann, davon muss man schreiben\u201d [Whereof one cannot speak, thereof must one write<\/strong>].<\/p>\n

There is, of course, a long tradition of conceiving art as a mode or practice of writing which augurs that which \u201cone cannot speak about\u201d- the utopian potential \u201crepressed\u201d by the exis ting sociosymbolic network of prohibitions. There is also a long tradition of using writing as a means to communicate a declaration of love too intimate and\/or too painful to be directly asserted in a face-to-face speech act.<\/p>\n

The Internet is widely used as a space for the amorous encounters of shy people, and, significantly, one of the anecdotes about Edison, the inventor of the telegraph, is that he himself used it to declare love and ask the hand of his secretary (being too shy to do it directly, by the spoken word). However, what we are aiming at is not this standard economy of using cyberspace as a place in which, since we are not directly engaged in it (since we maintain a distance toward it), we feel free to externalize and stage our innermost private fantasies. What we have in mind is a more radical level, the level that concerns our very fundamental fantasy<\/strong> as that \u201cwovon man nicht sprechen kann.\u201d<\/p>\n

The subject is never able to assume his or her fundamental fantasy, to recognize him- or herself in it, in a performance of a speech act.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Perhaps cyberspace opens up a domain in which the subject can nonetheless externalize or stage his or her fundamental fantasy and thus gain a minimum of distance toward it.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

T<\/span>his, however, in no way suggests that inducing us to \u201ctraverse the fantasy\u201d is an automatic effect of our immersion into cyberspace. What one should do here is, rather, accomplish a Hegelian reversal of epistemological obstacle into ontological deadlock.<\/p>\n

What if it is wrong and misleading to ask which of the four versions of the libidinal or symbolic economy of cyberspace that we outlined (the psychotic suspension of Oedipus, the continuation of Oedipus with other means, the perverse staging of the law, and traversing the fantasy) is the \u201ccorrect\u201d one? What if these four versions are the four possibilities opened up by the cyberspace technology, so that, ultimately, the choice is ours? How will cyberspace affect us is not directly inscribed into its technological properties; it rather hinges on the network of sociosymbolic relations (e.g., of power and domination) which always and already overdetermine the way cyberspace affects us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u017di\u017eek, Slavoj. “Cyberspace, or, How to Traverse the Fantasy in the Age of the Retreat of the Big Other” Public Culture 10:3. (1998) 483-513. This constellation also provides the key for the problem of the historicity of psychoanalysis. From the early days of his Complexes familiaux ([1938] 1984), Lacan was fully aware of the historicity … Continue reading “post oedipal traverse the fantasy”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125,12,24,72,15,118,41,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drive","category-fantasy","category-lacan","category-objet-a","category-subjectivity","category-symbolic","category-the-real","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7034"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7034\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7036,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7034\/revisions\/7036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}