I came across the following passage from Mark Twain’s Eve’s Diary: Translated from the Original MS in Roberto Harari’s brilliant How James Joyce Made His Name: A Reading of the Final Lacan.
Twain tells the story in Eve’s words. Having caught sight of the male creature, she thinks “it” must be a reptile, and tries to attract its attention by throwing clods of earth:
One of the clodes took it back of the ear, and it used language. It gave me a thrill, for it was the first time I had ever heard speech, except my own. I did not understand the words, but they seemed expressive. When I found it could talk, I felt a new interest in it, for I love to talk; I talk all day, and in my sleep, too, and I am very interesting, but if I had another to talk to I could be twice as interesting, and would never stop, if desired.
…She goes on: “I think it would be a he. I think so. IN that case, one would parse it thus: nominative he; dative him; possessive, his’n. Well, I will consider it a man and call it he until it turns out to be something else.”
Eve now goes on to the subject of nomination. “I have taken all the work of naming things off his hands, and this has been a great relief to him, for he has no gift in that line, and is evidently very grateful.” (41 – 42)
What a marvelous illustration of Lacan’s mysterious feminine jouissance… An enjoyment in language as such without the need for the phallic dimension of totality. At any rate, Harari’s book is well worth the read. He deftly navigates Lacan’s theory of the borromean knots, the sinthome, the different orders of jouissance, and proposes a new end of analysis beyond traversing the fantasy in identification with the sinthome, where the process of analysis is conceived as an untying and retying of the three orders and the formation of a purified symptom, an inexchangeable singularity, from which the subject draws its jouissance. This is a far more optimistic account of the end of analysis than that of traversing the fantasy where the subject undergoes subjective destitution and lives on in a sort of tragic and masochistic position with respect to the jouissance circumscribed by the fundamental fantasy. Compared to Harari’s book on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis and Seminar 10: Anxiety, both of which presuppose a strong background knowledge in Lacanian theory and which are replete with mathemes (a boon, I think), this text is very accessible… Though all the books of the Argentinian analyst are valuable and illuminating, and well worth the read.
December 3, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Dr Sinthome, during the end credits of Wall-E a short cartoon plays which shows two robots, versions of Adam and Eve, rewriting history i.e. it’s as if history is being replayed with two robots instead of Adam and Eve as protagonists. In case you missed the film, it’s a retro-futuristic narrative where the robot appears as a kind of a hauntologist – rediscovering old discarded objects from the 1980s. On the DVD commentary, at some point, the director (Andrew Stanton) explains that in the storyboarding process, he wondered what would happen if one was digging up dinosaur bones and found that one of the parts didn’t fit the projected image, so that when you made the assemblage you’d get a Stegosaurus instead of the expected T-rex. I feel that it’s at least theoretically possible to discover the same in psychogenesis.
December 3, 2008 at 5:55 pm
PC: “he wondered what would happen if one was digging up dinosaur bones and found that one of the parts didn’t fit the projected image, so that when you made the assemblage you’d get a Stegosaurus instead of the expected T-rex. I feel that it’s at least theoretically possible to discover the same in psychogenesis.”
Kvond: Retroactive, or one might say, pre-positing, Gouldian exaptation. Very likely how history is made.
December 3, 2008 at 6:01 pm
“I have taken all the work of naming things off his hands, and this has been a great relief to him, for he has no gift in that line, and is evidently very grateful.”
Harari’s book might well be great, but this bit of fractured mythology from Mark Twain sounds mostly like the traditional cultural stereotype of feminine jouissance: You know how those gals are, yak yak yak… Maybe you’ve seen this empirical study, in which 396 college students wore voice recorders for several days. It turned out that both men and women spoke about 16,000 words a day. Here’s the last sentence of the brief study summary:
“We therefore conclude, on the basis of available empirical evidence, that the widespread and highly publicized stereotype about female talkativeness is unfounded.”
In a related study (Newman, Groom, Handelman, & Pennebaker, Gender differences in language use: An analysis of 14,000 text samples. Discourse Processes 45:211-236, 2008 — an html version of the article can be found online), the first paragraph of the Discussion section says this:
“Comparing the language of men and women in a large, heterogeneous sample of
written and spoken text reveals small but consistent gender differences in language use. For the women who contributed 8,353 text files to the study, the English language was more likely to be used for discussing people and what they were doing, as well as communicating internal processes to others, including doubts. Thoughts, emotions, senses, other peoples, negations, and verbs in present and past tense figured high on the list of words that women used more than men. For the men who contributed 5,970 files, language was more likely to serve as a repository of labels for external events, objects, and processes. Along with discussion of occupation, money, and sports were technical linguistic features such as numbers, articles, prepositions, and long words. Swear words added emphasis to male language. Contrary to popular stereotypes, men and women were indistinguishable in their references to sexuality, anger, time, their use of first-person plural, the number of words and question marks employed, and the insertion of qualifiers in the form of exclusion words (e.g., but, although).”
It would seem, then, that men are slightly more prone than women to assign names to things. The gender difference, while statistically significant, are small in magnitude.
December 3, 2008 at 6:24 pm
yes kvond I think that was the idea, like maybe we’d discover that castration was some kind of a malfunctioning adaptation while the more adaptive one was female jouissance, and then we could correct the error, restore it to its proper level of functioning. I am just worried that if dr. Sinthome continues like this, tapping into nothing less than the origin of the species,he might end up like Nietzsche, too convinced of his Godliness.
December 3, 2008 at 6:55 pm
Ktismatics, don’t forget that where sexuation is concerned, the issue isn’t one of biology, but of structure. That is, biological males can occupy feminine side of the graph of sexuation. I see your point vis a vis Twain, but from the Lacanian standpoint, the sexuated difference in relating to language is not about the number of words the subject speaks, but about how the respective subjects relate to language and jouissance. On the masculine side of the graph of sexuation the orientation is phallic, which is to say that language is occupied in such a way that it aims at meaning, totality, and consistency. On the feminine side, there’s a jouissance of language as such, that doesn’t so much aim at meaning as at the jouissance of speaking and relating. This would be the logic of the “not-all”. In a portion of the passage I did not quote, Harari goes on to discuss Eve’s relationship to naming in Twain’s story:
Adam’s orientation is phallic in its pragmatism or its orientation toward purposiveness, use, completeness. On the masculine side of the graph of sexuation, this relation to language can be seen in the two proposition in contradiction to one another. The upper portion of the graph of sexuation reads “there is a being that is not subject to castration”. The lower proposition reads “All beings are subject to castration”. When these two graphs are read together we get a sort of phallic effect, where every castrated being encounters everything in the world in relation to the pursuit of completeness (the absence of any castration or lack). Consequently, what concerns Adam, above all, is how things can be used, i.e., a movement towards completeness or surmounting lack.
For Eve, by contrast the speech is enjoyed for its own sake and the things she names/creates aren’t “for” anything beyond their beauty. We might think here of the simple enjoyment or jouissance of just talking, where the aim isn’t about proving something, persuading someone, giving a command, exchanging information, but simply talking. We might also think of Kristeva’s semiotic or pre-symbolic where the emphasis is on the music of language, its rhythms, pauses, different pitches, etc. If language more or less takes this form on the feminine side, then this is because the feminine side is premised on the “not-all” of language or that the totality, the whole, does not exist. Moreover, it is premised on the castration of each entity or that every speaking-being is subject to castration. For this reason, the feminine side does not seek out the whole or totality in the way the masculine side does.
Along these lines it could be said that the late literature of Joyce as well as Lacan’s own style are feminine in character. Finnegan’s Wake does not aim at any final, total, or unified theme like Orwell’s 1984 seeking to make a case for a particular position, but is a sort of proliferation of meaning and sense where language is enjoyed in the dimension of the real for its own sake rather than as a tool for conveying information.
All this aside, I mostly just posted the passage because I was delighted by Eve wondering whether Adam was a Lizard and throwing clods of mud at “it” to find out what it was.
December 3, 2008 at 7:00 pm
PC: “I am just worried that if dr. Sinthome continues like this, tapping into nothing less than the origin of the species,he might end up like Nietzsche, too convinced of his Godliness.”
Kvond: Ha. Well, we would have to bathe once and again in the Nihilistic bath, as Nietzsche thought was good for him.
But really though, you have to give Sinthome a break. The Lacanian cannot help but play God a bit, for Lacan wrote a theory of How to Play God. And Sinthome readily admits this, I believe…the continual risk of a performative contradition for a Lacanian. It is only up to the practitioner to leave the “enjoyment” of playing God on the table. That makes one an interesting fellow.
(You realize though, as long as you continue to play his Lucifer, pointing out the hidden pleasures, you enforce the Yahweh in him – and others.)
I like though the idea of thinking Darwinian about the subject’s position in or about language. I’m not sure what a “malfunctioning adaptation” would be in a Neo-Darwinian perspective, but certainly the idea that another relation in language is historically possible, as normative, has to be determined I believe by history and not logic.
December 3, 2008 at 7:05 pm
On the feminine side, there’s a jouissance of language as such, that doesn’t so much aim at meaning as at the jouissance of speaking and relating.
Dr. Sinthome, since my cognitive-positive dad is so badly in need of empirical and CONCRETE evidence, we could name the oft-observed fact that women tend to touch, groom and fondle each other in day-to-day communications far more frequently than men.
This kind of body language is less utilitarian and more oriented towards pleasure. That men tend to ”instrumentalize” the fact in order to project lesb’an fantasies into this touching, speaks even more strongly in favor of Lacan’s explanation.
December 3, 2008 at 7:49 pm
“don’t forget that where sexuation is concerned, the issue isn’t one of biology, but of structure. That is, biological males can occupy feminine side of the graph of sexuation.”
I was going to anticipate this move but lost sight of it with all that cutting and pasting and linking. So the loquacious process-oriented males are occupying the female slot while the taciturn goal-oriented females are being structurally male. After awhile these caveats sound like Ptolemaic epicycles. Still, this sense of traditional sex roles does play into the interpretation of evidence suggesting that, in the U.S., gender role distinctions are becoming more androgynous for both males and females. One could argue that increasing androgyny demonstrates the decline in symbolic efficiency in our culture, but there’s evidence demonstrating that androgynous girls are more likely to be depressed and to experience low self-esteem than are more traditionally “feminine” girls. A consistent finding in all this sex-role research, including quantity and quality of language use, is that differences between individuals are much more pronounced than average differences between the sexes.
“All this aside…”
Oh I see — now I’ve made myself the fool for taking your post more seriously than you yourself did. Okay, I’ll concede: you know more about Lacan than I do. And I do find your posts enlightening, even the silly ones.
December 3, 2008 at 7:51 pm
Correction: androgynous girls are LESS likely to be depressed and to experience low self-esteem…
December 3, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Ktismatics, It’s unclear to me how that research could possibly be relevant given that Lacanian sexuation cannot be determined by the morphology of bodies. Presumably the research was conducted by studying bodies with vaginas and bodies with penises. But having a vagina or a penis is not what assigns a subject its position in the graph of sexuation. Psychotics, for example, are neither sexuated in a masculine or feminine fashion within the Lacanian framework as the name-of-the-father is foreclosed in their psychic economy.
And again, the issue is what sort of differences are being measured. It’s difficult for me to see how it would be possible to measure any of the sorts of differences I referred to in my prior response to your post. How does one go about measuring meaning? You gave the example of the number of words a person speaks a day which is entirely irrelevant to what’s at issue.
Finally, does it come as any surprise that biological female persons that are sexuated male (your androgenous women) are less prone to depression and have higher self-esteem? A subject sexuated female often suffers tremendously from their jouissance. On the one hand, there’s the feminine jouissance rendered possible by being “not-all”, that is outside of language and can be highly overwhelming. On the other hand, if the feminine subject’s jouissance is directed at the phallus, the subject gets caught in a taught and frustrating dialectic of trying to be the phallus (the object of desire) for those that have the phallus (various signifiers of power and mastery). Accompanying this is a sense of 1) an alienated desire by virtue of embodying someone else’s desire (the bearer of the phallus), and 2) always falling short of being the phallus (embodying those ideals of desirability). Hence a lot of depression and low self-esteem (also a symptom commonly associated with hysteria as well). On the other hand, if a biological female body is sexuated on the masculine side of the graph, such a subject has the opportunity to have the phallus (various signifiers of strength, power, esteem, prestige, etc) that are directly associated with issues of self-esteem and where the tendency is more towards various forms of anxiety of one sort or another than depression.
December 3, 2008 at 9:06 pm
“Lacanian sexuation cannot be determined by the morphology of bodies. Presumably the research was conducted by studying bodies with vaginas and bodies with penises.”
The Methods sections of these papers don’t specify how the researchers determined whether the subjects were male or female, but I suspect that self-report and cursory visual confirmation would have precluded the need to inspect more carefully. If it looks like a horse and walks like a horse…
“You gave the example of the number of words a person speaks a day which is entirely irrelevant to what’s at issue.”
If you’ll check the evidence in my first comment (#3) you’ll find a second, longer example. I even bolded the significant part. On average men used more names of objects, events, and processes, while women talked more about emotions, senses, and other people. I’d think these findings would confirm certain aspects of Lacanian sexuation even if they don’t support the Twainian Eve discourse. Still, even on the quantitative side, wouldn’t you expect those who enjoy talking to speak more than those who don’t enjoy it?
“It’s difficult for me to see how it would be possible to measure any of the sorts of differences I referred to in my prior response to your post.”
This of course is the complaint among many empiricists: advocates of analytical psychology position themselves beyond empirical investigation. It’s kind of like empirical attempts to study the efficacy of prayer: just the act of conducting the study demonstrates lack of faith, so of course God doesn’t answer…
“does it come as any surprise that biological female persons that are sexuated male (your androgenous women) are less prone to depression and have higher self-esteem?”
No it doesn’t, and you frame the results nicely in Lacanian terms, LS. Of course other explanations can be and have been proffered. So what about the males — or, more precisely, the subjects with penises: would you expect adolescents who occupy the traditionally masculine role to be doing better or worse psychologically than their androgynous brethren?
December 4, 2008 at 12:02 am
If you begin from this premise, then there’s not really any possible discussion here as you’re trying to place Lacan’s graphs of sexuation in a framework where they don’t belong and are comparing apples and oranges. In my three recent posts on sexuation I emphasized that what Lacan is discussing is two ways in which attempts to form totalities fail: inconsistency and incompleteness. Either type of biologically sexed subject can fall on either side. If it helps to dimension confusion over the issue, rather than referring to them as the masculine and feminine side, instead refer to them as the incomplete and the inconsistent side.
The question isn’t one of “enjoying more”, but rather one of how jouissance is being reached through language. It is different forms of jouissance that are being reached in and through language, that’s all.
I think this is an unfair analogy. Those who talk about prayer in a particular way are making a specific causal claim about the relationship between prayer and events. That should be measurable. By contrast, here we are talking about phenomena pertaining to meaning. Even the positivist empiricist concedes that sense or meaning cannot be measured. Here’s an analogy. The issue of pain is notoriously difficult in medicine as there’s no way to measure or see pain from the doctor’s perspective. As a result, all sorts of widely discussed problems surrounding patients and pain have occurred. My mother, for example, was chased around by insurance companies for years who tried to refuse paying for a series of surgeries she had for a condition known as “RSD” because they thought she was faking the conditions. At certain points during this whole process private investigators were even assigned to her to see if she was being active when she thought she was alone and away from the medical gaze. Fortunately they finally won the lawsuit. At any rate, this is only possible because pain is not the sort of thing that can be seen or measured (though some of its effects can be seen… but also feigned). Likewise in the case of meaning and language.
A subject that falls on the incompleteness side of the graph of sexuation is not synonymous with a subject that has a penis. If this point can’t be conceded or at least granted, it’s difficult for any discussion to continue. I am not, of course, saying that you have to accept the Lacanian theory. It’s likely that given your positivist leanings you’ll be hostile to any humanistic, hermeneutic, or qualitative approach to psychological issues (I’m not sure how one would go about measuring intersubjectivity or observing it, so it’s likely you’ll be hostile to anything psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic from the get go as you’re confusing it with a psychology and perhaps talk of the brain, rather than a theory of intersubjectivity). However, it’s impossible to discuss what the graphs are about if you keep trying to place them in a framework that they’re just not about. And if you can’t minimally accept that they’re about the sort of issue I’m discussing, you’ll keep citing statistics and whatnot about sex that are just apples and oranges.
I’m not sure I understand your question about doing better or worse. The point is that certain deadlocks emerge on both sides due to the manner in which desire is structured, the relationship to language, jouissance, and the real. It is also important in this connection not to treat the word “jouissance” as a synonym of “pleasure“. They are two very different things. Jouissance, for example, can be extremely painful and refers to an increase of tension rather than a decrease. I treat this in detail in my three recent sexuation posts.
December 4, 2008 at 12:58 am
I’m inclined to think of traditional psychology as being Ptolemaic insofar as it’s based on the topology of the sphere with an inside and an outside which is inadequate in accounting for a wide body of intersubjective phenomenon. I think part of the miscommunication here is that you’re beginning with the premise that Lacan is making claims about natural kinds (biologically sexed bodies). In this connection it’s important to recall that Lacan is an anti-essentialist and that the graphs of incompleteness and inconsistency can only be understood in terms of the body’s encounter with language.
An additional point about jouissance: In your most recent post you asked “wouldn’t one who enjoys language speak more?” This depends on the sort of jouissance that is at work in the subject’s economy (phallic jouissance, surplus-jouissance, Other jouissance, etc). The point to keep in mind is that jouissance is what is other than language. This comes out clearly in the discourse of the master, for example, where surplus-jouissance appears in the position of the product or that which escapes the signifier. Thus, while jouissance does not exist without language, jouissance is nonetheless, jouissance is what perpetually escapes language. Consequently, we can imagine– and indeed often encounter –instances where a subject is plunged into jouissance to such a degree that speech diminishes significantly or disappears altogether. The limit case would be the catatonic psychotic that has been entirely plunged into jouissance (and not of a pleasurable sort). The symptom can be understood as a kernel of jouissance which is part of why speech about the symptom can have the effect of dissipating the symptom.
December 4, 2008 at 5:38 am
The Lacanian cannot help but play God a bit, for Lacan wrote a theory of How to Play God.
Kvond, although I do have a theoretical training in clinical psych, which I abandoned a long time in favor of more creative pursuits, I base my conclusion here more on practical experiences as a client: I really think not only lacanian but psychoanalysis in general tends to avoid this trap much more successfully than other clinical methods. In his lesser-known writings on the practicalities of analysis, Freud underlined several times that if the analyst tries to be a God for the client, he’d just be repeating the mistakes of his or her parents, whose attempts to fulfill their desires through the client caused the neurosis in the first place. The reason people find this hard to understand is that the functioning of our psychic apparatus is such, we automatically pre-assume that the analyst is the Master with the solution to our problems *as dr. Sinthome amply explained. Just look at Clysmatics here, upset beyond words because dr. Sinthome persistently fails to alleviate his anxiety regarding the instability of cognitive theories and the horrible realization that he might need to change his MINDFRAME in order to understand analysis.
But in reality, my Lacanian analyst spent at least two years trying to show me that he won’t be playing my Master and did it very consistently so that there’s no way I could retroactively say that he was trying to play God for me. So in other words I think the suspicion (is the analyst playing God?) comes from our desperate hope that he or she would do this for us; there is nothing more terrifying, and liberating, than the realization that you’re on your own in life.
December 4, 2008 at 5:52 am
I’m not sure what a “malfunctioning adaptation” would be in a Neo-Darwinian perspective, but certainly the idea that another relation in language is historically possible, as normative, has to be determined I believe by history and not logic.
What intrigued me in the Wall-E material was the idea that it would be possible to discover another relation retroactively, by reinterpreting history as a consequence of realizing some mutation that was ignored, for whatever reason, at the time of its occurrence and is now put to proper use, or allowed to complete its trajectory. I suppose a kind of a positive hauntology. If we start from the premise that in this post-post modern time ”history” does not have to be viewed in linear terms, since parallel time dimensions may exist, then I think it also becomes more possible to approach the issue theoretically first, via mathematical models for example, which was Lacan’s idea when he started on the topological models. I am not sure how to express this in your brilliantly high-falluting agrammaticisms, but I noticed that for example if one starts thinking in Deleuzian language, observing organisms as desiring machines, one can come to quite different conclusions than say following a Freudian model. Then you also have the empirically observable fact that the Moebius strip, originally Lacan’s speculative proposal for a theoretical model, exerted enormous cultural influence in the past decade.
December 4, 2008 at 10:54 pm
parodycenter: “The reason people find this hard to understand is that the functioning of our psychic apparatus is such, we automatically pre-assume that the analyst is the Master with the solution to our problems *as dr. Sinthome amply explained.”
kvond: There seems to be some confusion over what I meant when I said that Lacan wrote a theory of How to play God. As I have qualified in the original statement in regards to “leaving enjoyment on the table”, and then further to LS elsewhere in terms of Spinoza’s concept of God, God is PLAYED by the analyst, im that the Analyst occupies the position of the Master, one PLAYS God (he who knows), but refuses to BE God (give answers). The position is vacated, though occupied. Nothing you say really contradicts this.
I”m very glad that you have had positive experiences in Lacanian analysis, and in no way do I imagine that such analysis is fruitless. What I do doubt is that just because such analysis might help, I am quite unsure if Lacan’s philosophical concepts of Being, Law, Subject are, BASED on that efficacy, the right ones for cultural critique. Perhaps they are, but it is not by virtue of clinical success or failure that Ontological critiques of society become valid.
PC: “Just look at Clysmatics here, upset beyond words because dr. Sinthome persistently fails to alleviate his anxiety regarding the instability of cognitive theories and the horrible realization that he might need to change his MINDFRAME in order to understand analysis.”
Kvond: Well, this does not seem to be the proper venue to express doubts about dr. Sinthome’s Lacanian methods of argumentation (despite the fact that dr. Sinthome cries foul anytime I identify him as a “Lacanian”). In addition to this, I do not know when you are playing the ironist, and when not. What I will say is when empirical evidence no longer can upset MINDFRAME, we have entered the realm of DOGMA. When MINDFRAME determines all interpretations of evidence, one is acting as a “true believer”. There is of course nothing wrong with being a “true believer”, but as such one loses recourse to an appeal to rationality…that is the ability to discuss things with others in other MINDFRAMES, which is usually done through shared criteria. But perhaps after all you are being humorous, and parodying a Lacanian, in suggesting that dr. Sinthome is somehow beneficently conducting analysis on Ktismatics, provoking his anxiety.
December 4, 2008 at 11:10 pm
PC: “What intrigued me in the Wall-E material was the idea that it would be possible to discover another relation retroactively, by reinterpreting history as a consequence of realizing some mutation that was ignored, for whatever reason, at the time of its occurrence and is now put to proper use, or allowed to complete its trajectory.”
Kvond: I like this idea myself quite a bit, as in a very similar way I see the thought of Spinoza to be a dormant branch in the evolution of our thinking, one that does not suffer from Cartesian splits:
http://kvond.wordpress.com/2008/09/20/why-spinoza/
PC: “I suppose a kind of a positive hauntology. If we start from the premise that in this post-post modern time ”history” does not have to be viewed in linear terms, since parallel time dimensions may exist, then I think it also becomes more possible to approach the issue theoretically first, via mathematical models for example, which was Lacan’s idea when he started on the topological models.”
Kvond: I like this as well, though I find most references to “hauntology” consternating. I think it worthwhile to think of our possibilities through some recovery of the morphologically possible, in past forms. I think of the “balancing rods” in fruitflies that immanently can become another set of wings, partly because in the past they may have been been a set of wings. I am unsure what this has to do with the kind of binaries that Lacan plays with, for binaries are not nearly as polyvalent of the possible as morphology can be, but I could see some overlap.
PC: “I am not sure how to express this in your brilliantly high-falluting agrammaticisms, but I noticed that for example if one starts thinking in Deleuzian language, observing organisms as desiring machines, one can come to quite different conclusions than say following a Freudian model.”
Kvond: Well, that is the thing. Yes, Deleuze makes such an approach quite foreseeable. His entire engagement with the biological almost forces it. I’m not sure how much Lacan needs to be dragged in, once Freud is let go of. Perhaps you may find my thoughts on Deleuze, the BwO and the binary of transgender, which touches on such an intersection:
http://kvond.wordpress.com/2008/05/15/23/
PC: “Then you also have the empirically observable fact that the Moebius strip, originally Lacan’s speculative proposal for a theoretical model, exerted enormous cultural influence in the past decade.”
Kvond: Quite a bit for the better, I presume. In no way am I against Lacan, or even Lacanian influence. I am against (if one has to use such a word), “reduction to”, or “nothing but” Lacan. You seem to have a creative relationship to Lacanian thinking, and I’m sure that I would find much of your use of the framework interesting.
December 5, 2008 at 4:07 am
“…God is PLAYED by the analyst, im that the Analyst occupies the position of the Master, one PLAYS God (he who knows), but refuses to BE God (give answers).”
I thought the analyst occupies the position of the objet a. That aside, what you’re saying about the analyst playing God implies that the analyst is doing something positive that creates (if fictitiously or pedagogically) the position they occupy. The position of the one supposed to know doesn’t arise until the analysand creates it. Of course, the analyst positions themselves in relation to the analysand, but as I understand it this is as if the analysand’s speech produced a field with spaces or regions into which the analyst stepped. If the analyst plays God, it is according to the analysand’s script.
December 5, 2008 at 4:09 am
Despite the fact that it’s not one of my best moments (I deleted the post), kvond over at Frames/Sing has a good take on just what he meant. He published my response riffing on it as well.
December 5, 2008 at 4:23 am
im that the Analyst occupies the position of the Master, one PLAYS God (he who knows), but refuses to BE God (give answers).
He doesn’t play God, he plays dead (le mort) in the sense that he doesn’t necessarily react to everything the client expects to hear, refusing to feed into the client’s fantasy that he is a God. For him to occupy the position of a Master objectively, outside of the client’s subjective perception, you’d have to posit the existence of such a position, and the whole point (of Lacan’s philosophy) is that this position doesn’t really exist, for every projected Master is by ontological necessity lacking.
Perhaps they are, but it is not by virtue of clinical success or failure that Ontological critiques of society become valid.
I hold the same view on this issue, and this is why I have an allergy to dr. Zizek’s attempt to psychoanalyze culture. I feel that his method is violent even as he may be, to follow dr. Sinthome’s conviction, shifting the terms of the debate. He implicitly sells the idea that everything under the sun has a meaning, usually related to privileged Western culture. This for me is third-rate psychoanalysis.
But perhaps after all you are being humorous, and parodying a Lacanian, in suggesting that dr. Sinthome is somehow beneficently conducting analysis on Ktismatics, provoking his anxiety.
Actually I am shifting the terms of the debate and getting dr. Sinthome into the impossible position of never knowing whether I’m joking or not. Isn’t that all meta- and clever?
December 5, 2008 at 4:30 am
Kvond, I am sorry it seems Joe already answered you with the same thought.
I cannot respond immediately to your articles, because I have to read them carefully first.
Re hauntology, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to notice that global culture is pretty much in a zombified state, obsessively returning to the past and unable to produce anything new. If hauntology can be used to develop certain potentials that weren’t put to proper use, then it’s a very good thing I would say. If it means drawing obscene jouissance from loss, and it does seem like that from time to time, then it’s a fashion accessory and it will fade away very quickly.
December 5, 2008 at 4:31 pm
PC: “He doesn’t play God, he plays dead (le mort) in the sense that he doesn’t necessarily react to everything the client expects to hear, refusing to feed into the client’s fantasy that he is a God.”
Kvond; And this is playing God, occupying the position, which is empty.
But if ever the analyst stops being “dead” and starts living (enjoying the position), this would be Being God, or really Being “a” god, acting as God. Try to think of God as an Ultimate limit, a suturing limit, in the sense of Spinoza’s God, whom you can love, but in loving, cannot expect to love you in return. We tend to think of God in anthropomorphic terms, of a subjectivity that enjoys things we cannot (omnipotence, omniscience, etc.). Spinoza warned us about this. This is not the God that the analyst plays. This, after all, is just my point of view.
PC: “Re hauntology, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to notice that global culture is pretty much in a zombified state, obsessively returning to the past and unable to produce anything new.
Kvond: Well, I suppose I am something less than not-even-a-rocket-scientist. This would be one way of looking at culture. One could say for one that culture is ALWAYS nothing but that, the deterritorializing of terriories, only to reterriotorialize them (The “Arch of Constantine” anyone, talk about the recycling of forms!), and that such zombie status is therefore proliferate through history. There is nothing “obsessive” about it. Obsession is just bodily recursion in assemblage building. Or, one could say that it is only retroactively that the past comes to be, as a pre-posit of the Next. And there is no “haunt” at all, other than the wake of our creation. And wakes are not a bad thing. They tell us where we have been, and they let us conclude something about the nature of the waters we travel in.
I do agree though that there can be a passive/re-active, or an active orientation to the past. What I resist in the rather intellectually sloppy (undefined), but rhetorically powerful use of the term (as if it is just obvious what it means or is pointing to, conflating everything from Derrida on the haunt of Marx to music sampling, in one big mash of a concept), is that it is a symptom, or a fundamentally passive relationship. Hauntology can be a project, but not necessarily a diagnosis.
(I say this about “hauntology” NOT as I have seen its use here, but as a general comment upon its ubiquity, under which every sort of sociological phenomena seems to fall.)
December 5, 2008 at 6:12 pm
Kvond I sense that you have a libidinal investment here in winning me over to the idea that Lacan’s God is in fact Spinoza’s – why? Specially since I personally subscribe to Spinoza’s/Greek Orthodox God of abundance and not the castrating Catholic one.
As for your remark, I side with dr. Sinthome who said in another place that Spinozists often underestimate the fact that although God’s Lack may be non-existent, the subjective perception of the Lack does exist, so we first need to figure out how and why before we can tap into the abundance directly.
But if ever the analyst stops being “dead” and starts living (enjoying the position), this would be Being God, or really Being “a” god, acting as God.
The position of Le Mort has nothing to do with pleasure or lack thereof, it has to do with the analyst not responding to the client’s desire – in order to help remove the illusion that it will be fulfilled. Conversely, a behavioral therapist would play the client’s dad or mom or guru. This is sometimes necessary, eg in crisis situations, but long term it just feeds into the client’s neurosis.
December 5, 2008 at 6:21 pm
One could say for one that culture is ALWAYS nothing but that, the deterritorializing of terriories, only to reterriotorialize them
absolutely, humanity’s always been telling the same stories over and over again, but there were also notable mutations which paved the way to new combinations. nowadays it seems this has become extremely rare. what i know for a fact is that 20-year old people at my media academy a few years back were making movies about other movies, or about the 1980s, and the screenplay teacher was constantly telling them to make movies about THEIR life, their experiences, their friends. in the end it turned out that their lives, their experiences, and their friends all exist in media images from the past. this is where i think the stasis comes from, it’s a constant retrograde movement.
December 5, 2008 at 11:10 pm
PC: “absolutely, humanity’s always been telling the same stories over and over again, but there were also notable mutations which paved the way to new combinations. nowadays it seems this has become extremely rare. what i know for a fact is that 20-year old people at my media academy a few years back were making movies about other movies, or about the 1980s, and the screenplay teacher was constantly telling them to make movies about THEIR life, their experiences, their friends. in the end it turned out that their lives, their experiences, and their friends all exist in media images from the past. this is where i think the stasis comes from, it’s a constant retrograde movement.”
Kvond: I don’t about this. There certainly is self-referentiality in film, but this does not totalize the creative field. In fact, it probably marks out the limit that film encountered when it no longer was the dominant or exclusive image form. It started to feed off itself out of a kind of denial of its ends.
If you want a “notable mutation” (and you probably won’t like it aesthetically, but the future is often refused by the past), in film there is the mutation of the video game. The aesthetics of video game imaging has invaded the frame and character developments of cinema in a way that is so NEW no one anticipated it 15 years ago. The image-structures of video first-person-shooters combine with docu-camera and editing to produce something quite different than a take on 1980’s film. Not only have there been films taken from actual games, the entire asthetic has cross-pollinated. The most recent Bond film (one I really enjoyed) is a brilliant achievement of a video game ethic, and its re-characterization. This is just one example of the kind “mutation” that occurs in a medium in relation to others.
I also see no reason to presume that autobiographical film is any more authentic than any other. Although I would say that your example perhaps says something more about the KINDS of people, and their influences, that attend film schools, than it necessarily says about culture as a whole. I’m very sure that by the time present day eight-year olds get to your media academy, having spent a childhood filled with lightweight video cameras and very powerful editing software, they will be making films quite different than homages to films in the 2000s.
If anything, due to technology proliferation, there are more mutations than ever, not a shortage.
December 6, 2008 at 11:55 am
Kvond in fact I abhor gaming due to the fact that it reduces everything to the binary choice ”win or die” and shoot em ups are especially perverse that way because they almost exclusively serve the militaristic-industrial complex. You can innovate all you want with the form, that underlying ideology will remain the same. You have yet to demonstrate exactly how this new Bond is different; Bond is traditionally a P.R. vehicle for the British intelligence.
That innovation is still possible though is demonstrated more by foreign movies (especially Russian ones and some stuff coming from China) than anything originating in the Western world. I imagine also that it’s within the realm of the possible one could draw some newness out of interactive formats, although I haven’t been awestruck by the results so far.
December 7, 2008 at 3:58 pm
PC: “You can innovate all you want with the form, that underlying ideology will remain the same. You have yet to demonstrate exactly how this new Bond is different; Bond is traditionally a P.R. vehicle for the British intelligence.”
Kvond: I guess we have different assumptions about form/content distinctions. If you mutate the form, the content (what you call its “ideology”) is also altered. I do not believe, philosophically or otherwise, in a Platonic Ideology (or even Superstructure) which then somehow radiates through all of its various apparitional forms without changing. Change the form, change the ideology (but you might not end up with the ideological…that is sociological…ends that you want, as is even or especially the case in political revolution).
To follow this up, the change in form of the Bond film, the what that the central figure is cast as a lone image set up against BOTH the backdrop of situational danger and governmental control, positions Bond as a prototype immanence. It is his attachments which really are up for grabs and always under negotiation. This is what is enabled through the videogame APPROPRIATION. (And, I did suspect that you wouldn’t like a primary asethetic from a generation after yours…this is often the case.)
My wife made an interesting point when talking about the satisfactory difference between this renegade Bond and let us say Jack Bauer. Both have an internal compass, but Bauer’s relationship to command, is soldierous, as he negotiates with a very specific subjectivity within a kind of military order, oscillating between Command and morality, enjoying the “I’m just following orders” brutality, and then taking personal action to correct misguided orders, back and forth. Bond though here enjoys in a very different way. He too is a renegade, but outperforms Command, never participating in the pleasure of his instrumentation. He invades the house of M, just as much as he invades the house of an assassin, in fact in very proximate scenes.
Now one can say that this is all a glorification of the Secret Service, perhaps. Or perhaps it is is a subversion of political order through the idealization of individualized negotion of power, segmented scene by scene. In fact you can never locate just where the ideological effect lies.
Also, if you are going to call for mutations, as with biology, you can never be sure what are the “right” ones (not opposed to the Left ones). A mutation in form which seems to read in a direction you do not perfer may be linked to a host of ideological possibilities which are not foreseeable, but which you would champion.
It is one thing to say, as you were saying, “Hey, there are no more mutations” and another thing to say, “Hey, there are a lot of mutations, but not of the RIGHT kind”. These are very different statements. I suppose though, if you really want to have the RIGHT ones, as an artist you have to make them yourself — never being assured that they will “come out” the way you want…having the RIGHT interpretation, or inspiration for other aesthetic acts.
December 7, 2008 at 6:22 pm
It is his attachments which really are up for grabs and always under negotiation. This is what is enabled through the videogame APPROPRIATION.
How exactly? I haven’t seen the film and don’t really have time this week, so you should quote a concrete example.
He too is a renegade, but outperforms Command, never participating in the pleasure of his instrumentation.
Well it’s always been in his marketing that he doesn’t really belong, a kind of a lone ranger / freelancer always in an ambiguous relation with authority, what’s special about this?
Now one can say that this is all a glorification of the Secret Service, perhaps
The series usually reflects the current political climate, e.g. the last Bond took place in Montenegro (ex-republic of Yugoslavia) which around that same period became a hotbed of political activity
“Hey, there are a lot of mutations, but not of the RIGHT kind”.
This might be referring to something else I said, what I said about games is that their underlying ideology, irrespective of the representational code, which changes through hypermediation (genres borrowing from each other), remains a binary, and I find that both boring and despiriting – a reflection of capitalism’s total dominance. I’m interested in other kinds of messages.
December 9, 2008 at 11:41 pm
Sorry I missed these replies.
PC: “Kvond I sense that you have a libidinal investment here in winning me over to the idea that Lacan’s God is in fact Spinoza’s – why? Specially since I personally subscribe to Spinoza’s/Greek Orthodox God of abundance and not the castrating Catholic one.”
Kvond: Public discussion is an interesting thing, one could always have such a debate over email. When discussing things publically, there is an “investment” (you can call it libidnal if you want, but there are other ways of describing it) in making things clear in the way that you see them. The other person is a stand in for a potental thought stream of a reader. I have very little conscious investment in you thinking or believe one way or another. You seem to have far too much pleasure in playing the trickster for anyone to have much investment in you “holding” any position.
In fact though, the way that Lacan frames his “God”, it has very little operative resemblance to Spinoza’s God, in my opinion. Lacan’s analyst plays the unanswering God of Spinoza, but at the intersubjective level. There is no such path at all in Spinoza, nor should their be, from his point of view.
PC: “As for your remark, I side with dr. Sinthome who said in another place that Spinozists often underestimate the fact that although God’s Lack may be non-existent, the subjective perception of the Lack does exist, so we first need to figure out how and why before we can tap into the abundance directly.”
Kvond: Sure. But Spinoza himself provides his own path. It involves affirmation of the body’s power to exist and act in view of the understanding of the illusion of lack and the causal nature of the world. One “taps into the abundance directly” because at any moment a considered move toward Joy and away from Sadness IS tapping into it.
This is not to say that Lacan’s insistance upon an intersubjective mediation is wrong. Only to say that it is not implied, or if you take Spinoza’s view as sufficient, necessary.
I thoroughly accept your desire/decision to find Bond boring.