{"id":7860,"date":"2011-04-29T12:47:36","date_gmt":"2011-04-29T17:47:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=7860"},"modified":"2011-04-29T13:23:26","modified_gmt":"2011-04-29T18:23:26","slug":"stavrakakis-yes-men-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2011\/04\/29\/stavrakakis-yes-men-6\/","title":{"rendered":"stavrakakis yes men 6"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stavrakakis, Yannis. Subjectivity and the Organized Other: Between Symbolic Authority and Fantasmatic Enjoyment<\/em> Organization Studies 2008 29: 1037<\/p>\n

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<\/strong> lack in the Other<\/span>.<\/p>\n

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<\/strong>, has been called \u2018voluntary servitude\u2019<\/strong>. The central question here is simple:<\/p>\n

Why are people so willing and often enthusiastic \u2014 or at least relieved \u2014 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?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The famous words of Rousseau from the second chapter of The Social Contract are heard echoing here: \u2018A slave in fetters loses everything \u2014 even the desire to be freed from them. He grows to love his slavery \u2026\u2019\u00a0\u00a0 Obviously, the Oedipal structure implicit in the social ordering of our societies, the role of what Lacan calls \u2018the Name-of-the-Father<\/span>\u2019 in structuring reality through the (castrating) imposition of the Law<\/span>, predisposes social subjects to accept and obey<\/strong> what seems to be emanating from the big Other<\/span>, 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<\/span>.\u00a0 This central Freudian-Lacanian insight can indeed explain a lot. And this can be very well demonstrated through some empirical examples.<\/p>\n

Consider, for instance, the story of The Yes Men, two anti-corporate activistpranksters who have set up a fake \u2018World Trade Organisation\u2019 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:<\/p>\n

Neither Andy nor Mike studied economics at school. We know very little about the subject,<\/em> and we won\u2019t attempt to convince you otherwise; if you are of sound mind, you<\/em> would see through us immediately. Yet, to our surprise, at every meeting we addressed,<\/em> we found we had absolutely no trouble fooling the experts \u2014 those same experts who<\/em> are ramming the panaceas of \u2018free trade\u2019 and \u2018globalization\u2019 down the throats of the<\/em> world\u2019s population.<\/em> Worse: we couldn\u2019t get them to disbelieve us.<\/em><\/p>\n

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.<\/em> (The Yes Men 2005)<\/p>\n

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.<\/span> Likewise, the subject\u2019s autonomy in filtering and consciously managing its beliefs seems to be undermined by a dependence on symbolic authority per se.<\/span><\/p>\n

We saw in the activities staged by the Yes Men<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

As Milgram points out, already before the experiment starts, \u2018the subject enters the situation with the expectation that someone will be in charge\u2019.<\/strong> 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<\/span>: \u2018the experimenter, upon first presenting himself, fills a gap experienced by the subject\u2019.\u00a0 This quasi-Lacanian formulation reveals something essential. First of all, it lends support to the Lacanian understanding of the Name-of-the-Father<\/span>, 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 \u2018reveals something of the super-egoical consequences of the establishment of the paternal metaphor in a clear, albeit brutal fashion\u2019 (Corfield 2002: 200).<\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

In other words, the command embodied in the Name-of-the-Father<\/span> 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 (\u00e0 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 \u2018forced\u2019 since without it no social subject can emerge and psychosis seems to be the only alternative<\/span>.<\/p>\n

And this is a dialectic which is bound to affect our whole life: \u2018A power exerted on a subject, subjection is nevertheless a power assumed by the subject, an assumption that constitutes the instrument of that subject\u2019s becoming\u2019 (Butler 1997b: 11).<\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

What Lacan, in his \u2018Agency of the Letter\u2019, describes as the \u2018elementary structures of culture\u2019 (Lacan 1977: 148), meaning a linguistically determined sense of ordering, are now also revealed as elementary structures of obedience and symbolic power<\/span>. The intersubjective effects of this logic are immense: \u2018It is not only the subject, but the subjects, caught in their intersubjectivity, who line up \u2026 and who, more docile than sheep, model their very being on the moment of the signifying chain that runs through them\u2019 (Lacan 2006: 21).<\/p>\n

Without such an elementary structure of obedience<\/span> \u2014 instituted and reproduced in what Milgram calls \u2018antecedent conditions\u2019<\/strong>: the individual\u2019s familial experience, the general societal setting built on impersonal relations of authority \u2014 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<\/span> within which the subject is born<\/span>: \u2018the subject \u2026 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\u2019 (Lacan 1977: 63\u20134).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “stavrakakis yes men 6”<\/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":[83,78,111,12,99,24,40,119,90,15,118,41],"tags":[109],"class_list":["post-7860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agency","category-butler","category-desire","category-fantasy","category-interpellation","category-lacan","category-lack","category-language","category-resistance","category-subjectivity","category-symbolic","category-the-real","tag-whoa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7860","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=7860"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7860\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7872,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7860\/revisions\/7872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}