Noticing the proliferation of neologisms in my thought lately– “phallusophy”, “Diotimatics”, “spectralogy”, etc. –I naturally found myself worrying whether or not there’s a structural psychosis at work in my theory. This takes a little explaining. The core of my thought is ontologically anarchistic. Indeed, The Democracy of Objects probably should have been entitled The Anarchy of Objects (there will be a book or chapter entitled The Anarchy of Machines in the future). Now what is an anarchic ontology? It is an ontology that forecloses transcendent terms such as God, Platonic forms, a-historical essences, sovereigns, fathers, a-historical structures, transcendent subjects, etc. All of these beings are treated as naturalistic, social, nation, and psychological transcendental illusions (cf. Difference and Givenness). Within an anarchistic ontology, everything unfolds within immanence, without anything standing outside of history, becoming, time, etc. An anarchic ontology is an ontology without fathers; or rather, it is an ontology where the name-of-the-father is foreclosed or banished both ontologically and socially as a necessary term. It is a queer ontology.
The formal matrix of any anarchic theory– whether ontological or political –consists in the rejection of the masculine side of Lacan’s graph of sexuation (to the left, above). The left-hand side of the graph of sexuation is the masculine side. If we read the two propositions in the upper left-hand quadrant together we get “there exists an entity that is not subject to withdrawal” and “all entities are subject to withdrawal”. Why does Lacan association this side of the graph with masculine sexuation? Because what he has presented here is a highly formalized version of the Oedipus complex and the myth of the primordial father in Totem and Taboo. Within this framework, the primordial father is not subject to “castration” in that he has free reign over all women, including his own mother and daughters. The incest prohibition is not yet in effect, yet all of his subjects are subject to a limitation on their enjoyment: the primordial father enjoys all the women, whereas the “band of brothers” is forbidden to do so. By contrast, in the Oedipus, the father is the origin of the Law and therefore not himself subject to it. Rather, it is the child that is subject to the Law and the limitations it imposes on jouissance. I deal with all of this in much more detail in the 6th chapter of The Democracy of Objects.
read on!
It is because of the key role that the father plays in the Oedipus and the myth of the primal father that Lacan associates the left-hand side of his graph with masculinity. What Lacan here formalizes is the elementary structure of patriarchy and phallocentricism (and incidentally, throughout all of his work Lacan never ceased to criticize the Oedipus, the phallus, the father, etc. He was the first “anti-oedipus”). So why does Lacan torture us with all this formalization rather than simply talking about the myth of the primal father and the Oedipus? Because of the Imaginary. The danger of images is that we become over literal, failing to see the structure for the trees. Because we think of the “father”– the top proposition in the masculine side of the graph of sexuation –we end up saying and wondering about stupid things like whether or not a child with two mothers can be an ordinary neurotic because a dick isn’t present. Moreover, we fail to see structural isomorphisms between things that are phenomenologically different yet structurally identical. For example, we might think that Sarah Palin is a victory for feminism, despite the fact that she occupies the structural position of a masculine sovereign (likewise with Thatcher). Or we fail to recognize that centralized management around a boss, theism with a transcendent God, societies organized around Nation, etc., are all structurally identical forms of organization… They’re all Oedipal or patriarchal. Formalization helps us to see beyond the image to a shared structure or set of isomorphisms. This is the genius of the Lacanian matheme; it allows us to see the structure for the different types of trees, and thereby allows us to pursue a more generalized a-theism (one need not believe in a divine, supernatural God to remain a theist, the Pope and Laplanche’s demon will do), a more thorough anti-patriarchy, and a consistent anarchism. Anarchism is anti-Oedipal, anti-Sovereign, and anti-Patriarchal thought and practice. This is why I propose a feminine ontology in chapter 6 of The Democracy of Objects. And that feminine, anarchic ontology, that flat ontology, of course, entails an anarchic politics… A posthuman, anti-sovereign, anti-patriarchal, flat politics without fathers or sovereigns.
Yet the burning question of all anarchic orientations of thought in politics and ontology is whether or not they’re doomed to psychosis. In Lacan’s earlier work, he argues that psychosis arises from the foreclosure of the name-of-the-father. Because the name-of-the-father is foreclosed in the symbolic, the psychotic subject is incapable of metaphoric operations (insofar as the placement of the name-of-the-father over the desire of the mother is the originary metaphoric operation allowing substitution in desire to take place). On the one hand, you thus get endless metonymy in psychosis (celebrated by Deleuze and Guattari in their desiring machine), while on the other you get a proliferation of neologisms. Finally, you get words treated as things.
You can see why I’m a bit uncomfortable here. I have endlessly proposed that texts/signifiers aren’t simply about things, they are things. In other words, I treat them– like Laruelle –as a sort of matter or thing upon which operations are carried out; a key feature of psychosis. Likewise, I am endlessly proliferating neologisms, taking great delight in their invention (it’s at the core of my theoretical jouissance). Here it’s important to proceed with caution. As an individual subject, I’m a pretty ordinary neurotic. Indeed, I’m a “good” hysteric. I endlessly worry and think about what the other desires of me. I defend against jouissance. I protest and find ways to maintain unsatisfied desire. I continuously challenge masters/fathers, etc. I am not making a claim about my own individual psycho-pathology, but about the structure of my discourse. They’re different.
The key question for anarchist politics/ontology is whether it leads necessarily to psychosis (my orientation here is anarcho-communist). Putting the issue in more positive terms, is it possible to form a social relation that isn’t premised on masculine sexuality or Oedipus/Sovereignty/Theism and the discourse of the master? My friends Ellie Ragland and Ken Reinhard and I went 20 rounds about this years ago at the Lacan and Theology conference hosted by University of Texas at Arlington and organized by Timothy Richardson. They insisted that the Lacanian structures uncovered by the matheme are Real and historically invariant, while I insisted that they’re Real, but historically variant. I based my argument on first on Lacan’s Family Complexes, where he analyzes a shift from totemic cultures where the symbolic and imaginary name-of-the-father are different to our current bourgeois cultures. There he argues that neurosis is a unique and new historical configuration that arises when the name-of-the-father is no longer the totem served by the maternal uncle, but where the biological/imaginary father stands in the place of the name-in-the-father (my ancient article on this issue is forthcoming in the next issue of Speculations). This, Lacan argues, generates a new topology of subjectivity. I further based my argument on the fact that Lacan introduces a 5th discourse, the discourse of the capitalist, that no longer fits with the discourse of the master. A few years ago, I demonstrated that there are not 4 discourses, but actually 24; though 16 of them might remain virtual or unactualized. Additionally, Lacan argues that despite the name-of-the-father being foreclosed in Joyce’s art, he manages to form a sinthome that allows him to link the three orders together through his art (he’s not a traditional psychotic). Finally, the very fact that the feminine side of the graph sexuation exists– and is presumably neither phallocentric nor psychotic –suggests the possibility of an anarchic alternative not organized around patriarchy, the phallus, or the name-of-the-father. The feminine side of the graph of sexuation is an ontology without transcendent deity or sovereign, nor without masters. This is the option I’m trying to take: can we form a society without masters? In this connection, I argued in The Democracy of Objects that it’s actually the masculine side of the graph of sexuation that’s semblance, masquerade, and fiction (which Lacan himself clearly suggests in placing the barred subject beneath the S1 of the discourse of the master). So my ultimate question, perhaps, is what a queer society/politics would look like; or a society without masters/fathers/sovereigns… Even human sovereigns.
Larval Subjects . 
July 11, 2012 at 7:12 am
It seems to me that this is what Deleuze and Guattari are trying to do in Anti-Oedipus. They follow the transformation of the structural position of the superego/despot/sovereign from the primitive to the despotic to the civilized and suggest that capitalism is the end point of all society, beyond it society cannot exist. This is why Anti-Oedipus is an ‘anti-social’ book, in that it moves towards the destruction of society, as society is always based upon a norm that is validated by the position of the sovereign (I find Lyotard’s normative phrase helpful here: It is a norm decreed by y for x to perform action a). What becomes apparent, though, is that to even think this schizophrenia as a process, rather than an experience, the body without organs has to take the place of the superego/despot/sovereign. I think that this was immediately recognised by Deleuze and Guattari and led to some of their qualifications of deterritorialisation in A Thousand Plateaus and leads Deleuze to talk about belief, specifically ‘belief in this world’, in Cinema 2.
My point is, that the position of the superego/despot/sovereign seems to be structurally essential. So the question then becomes not ‘what would a society without masters/fathers/sovereigns’ look like? but what should be the master/father/sovereign? I think this is exactly the problem that SR and OOO are trying to deal with. By looking at objects beyond correlationism is a means to find this legitimate master.
Great post by the way.
July 11, 2012 at 9:25 am
“society without masters/fathers/sovereigns”, is that possible? This question has also been haunting me for quite a while, if you ask Freud (of Civilization and Discontents), I guess he would say “no it is not possible”. Power cannot be erased but only distributed, but the paradox is if you distribute it too uniformly, the power by definition cannot function, right? I mean, some kinda difference should be inherited by neighboring individuals for the existence of power – how?
it seems to me self-organization is one of the answers that also “capitalistic discourse” offers in our era: fractals (in math), brain connectivity (in neurosciences), cooperations (in production forms), social networks (internet), collective composition of music through evolutionary algorithms etc. are conspiciously gaining hegemony… anyways, there is disturbing and horrifying psychotic element in losing “the master” – the loss of self proper. Being an ant sounds bizarre and scary to my “semitic-atheistic” ears to be frank but I dunno the way out.
July 11, 2012 at 9:37 am
“So my ultimate question, perhaps, is what a queer society/politics would look like; or a society without masters/fathers/sovereigns… Even human sovereigns.”
This is a difficult question for at least two reasons. First of all, since our world is dominated by this sovereign it takes a lot of imagination to think beyond it. Secondly, it’s not clear to me, despite this undoubted domination, precisely what a rejection of this sovereign would necessarily exclude.
For instance, could there be states? Is the state, in its various forms, historically and presently, essentially defined by this masculine/transcendent/sovereign? What then about representative democracy? Can there be large scale representation by professional representatives without the mythology of a pre-existing sovereign standing outside history and endowing the holders of office with authority?
I’ve no idea but it’d certainly help the definition of the question to ask exactly what would be stripped away and, consequently, what would have to be replaced. What would be missing (if anything)? Before we ask what that world would be it might help to ask, first of all, what it would not be.
July 11, 2012 at 2:17 pm
i’m wondering how anything can even be queer when hierarchy is eliminated. queerness is completely bound up “straightness”. how can one be oriented to improper objects of desire without a hierarchical power structure determining which objects are proper and improper? queer is such a slippery word; i think you’ll need to nail down your personal understanding/use of the term.
i’m also wondering about the abject in all of this. does the very existence of the abject create hierarchy in terms of subjectivity? or because it must be radically excluded, is it not even part of the system in question?
very interesting post.
July 11, 2012 at 4:19 pm
Re: CFT
I think the nomadology plateau is a pretty definitive answer.
In the Anti-Oedipus papers, Guattari wrote that D identified this question quickly, and wrote the nomadology plateau almost immediately after the publication to answer this question. The most relevant concept in that plateau is “nomos,” as in the post-Homeric sense of pasturing, which spekas to the appropriation/distribution of space according to relatively self-organizing principles. This all follows from their Spinozist ontology which is anti-hylomorphic (which they get also from Simondon), and therefore does not require the top-down imposition of order to organize. In other places, D calls this organizing principle “crowned anarchy.”
July 11, 2012 at 4:34 pm
That doesn’t really address the specific issues raised in this post, anarchist. Having written a book on Deleuze, countless articles, and given countless talks on their work, I am, of course, intimately familiar with the nomadology plateau and the crowned anarchy D discusses in the first chapter of DR.
July 11, 2012 at 4:38 pm
Re: LS
Sorry for the confusion, I was responding only to criticalfilmtheory [“Re:CFT”].
Your post obviously opens up a much wider set of problematics that aren’t answered through a simple application of the nomos concept.
July 11, 2012 at 4:48 pm
Er, more correctly, I should have direct my comments at “togliatti.”
To clarify the distinction between sovereignty (and the Despotic Master Signifier) and capitalism, sovereignty is a becoming-transcendent while capitalism is a becoming-immanent.
In that sense, the things that make an anarcho-communist project incommensurable with neo-liberalism is less the anarchist part, and more the communist part. Communism would require a transformation in the way connections are made, whereas anarchism may simply fall into the ‘debunking’ that LS is wary of.
Additionally, tempering the liberal impulse of anarchism with communism appears to be one of the ways to heed D&G’s warning against thinking that a smooth space (or ‘more complexity,’ ‘more difference,’ ‘more immanence,’ ‘more democracy,’ and any other member of the Deleuzian family) is enough to save you.
Therefore, I think LS’s introduction of Lacan into the question is not only important, but decisive. Though I agree with his qualification that the useful Lacan (the late Lacan, possibly?) must include not only the relations topology, but time and space of _physics_.
July 12, 2012 at 7:40 am
I have a problem with you use of the term anarchy. Specially in the anarchic ontology. The removal of a dominating element need not make it anarchic.
On the contrary if we take anarchy for rendering the implicit explicit and hence making the elements and relationships open to debate and scrutiny.
This enables the determination of their role. So removing the dominant element is the contrary of an anarchic approach, the relationship remains implicitly, if you have a son there has to be a father. But the father figure is not part of the ontology. Making it inconsistent at best, not explicit hence not anarchic at worse.
A truly anarchic approach would be to keep the element which may be perceive as dominant and to analyse what is the nature of the domination.
Is the father a dominant figure because of an argument of authority or because of a material dependency. In this respect the matheism of Lacan can been seen as anarchic because the relationship is preserved without any assumptions. It is just the relationship, and as part of that, I agree with you, it opens up for the scrutiny of it.
I may have a different view on anarchy, perhaps a more subtle one, but the no lords no masters that anarchy proclaims is just a rally call. Behind it lies the need to explore and to render explicit the implicit. Just the decapitation of the hierarchy is not enough. I recommend the debate between Chomsky and Foucault for a good illustration of this, its readily available on youtube.
July 12, 2012 at 12:11 pm
That’s a rather curious conception of anarchism. It’s even more curious that you assume that somehow I would be opposed to making things explicit! I’ll leave you to your “subtleties”.
July 18, 2012 at 7:05 pm
For the female side (for her) words ARE things in a however non-psychotic way. The master signifier is only unconsciously operative in her as lack or gaze, since it is not pointing to itself, it establishes a decentered MS. The other sexual possibility lies in obtaining status of being a master signifier herself however Nobody believes in such contingent occurrences anymore.
Now regard A.Kiarina Kordela’s discovery of 2 not-Alls in Lacan (see her book) by way of the impossibility of a set of all sets. Russell’s Paradox effectively establishes a classful boundary and is it this boundary which is consumed ? Nobody knows.
October 27, 2012 at 4:00 am
I’m a 29-year-old white male who has asked myself much the same questions about my own work, having followed similar paths — Lacan, D&G et al. In Myers-Briggs typology I am an INTJ (in the extreme) which is linked to narcissism, obsessional neurosis, obsessive compulsive personality disorder (OCPD), psychosis, psychopathy. Of course the discussions of identity (Butler), pathologization/medicalization (Foucault) and so on might indicate that such clinical diagnoses are passé. Indeed, perhaps it is due to the decline of the paternal metaphor that such labels have fallen into disrepute. My only point is, having produced copious amounts of writing, I myself have wondered about whether or not I have the clinical structure of psychosis, and if the writing is a sinthome which gives me some “stupid pleasure” so to speak, and allows me to organize my libido effectively. I have also asked myself whether it is an escape from the overproximity of the mother’s desire, i.e. escaping containment of the mother by going somewhere she can’t follow, into esoteric writing or other areas like electronic music, computer programming etc — giving me a place where I can escape her engulfing omniscient presence in my life, having grown up very close to my mother in a single-parent household. Further backstory: she homeschooled me, we lived in the secluded forests of Northern California, she practiced attachment parenting. You know the story. My tentative conclusion is that I am probably hysteric with perverted features, because I have a certain amount of doubt. Although my reluctance to ever get therapy would put me on the side of the pervert, for perverts are notorious for never seeking help. (Why would they? The pervert refuses to relinquish pleasure, forever living with one foot in childhood and one foot in adulthood).
But I have wondered at times if my neuroses are defense mechanisms for a latent psychosis, which appears, for instance, in the throes of love. Yet, as Zizek puts it, if psychoanalysis teaches us one thing it’s that we want to suffer. In other words, even if it is clinically psychosis, is there a non-psychotic love, one which doesn’t involve the psychotic belief that you need to be with someone? So, I have sometimes pondered if my normalcy is a façade, a persona which deceives not only others but myself — the False Self of Winnicott. Then I begin to wonder: what if these neuroses are merely my defense mechanisms staving off latent psychosis?
Indeed, Miller’s Ordinary Psychosis is such a condition, where the analysand presents with standard neurotic features but upon introducing the question of paternity, of being a father (symbolically speaking) oneself, being unable to cope. In such a case, analysis seeks to encourage construction of a sinthome which would act in lieu of the Name-of-the-Father. Late Lacan seems to endorse the idea that the Name-of-the-Father is but one particularly ubiquitous sinthomatic form, of which any number could be developed.
As far as the discussion of whether the paternal metaphor is a good or bad thing: I am not opposed to the paternal metaphor. Indeed, I would almost claim that both of our stances — centered as they are around fatherhood — express Fatersehnsucht, a “father-longing” which Lacan found to be the primal constituent of religion (i.e. longing for God the Father). Yet, regardless of whether we oppose or endorse the paternal metaphor, it seems there is something going on akin to a cultural shift or move in the Weltgeist away from patriarchy. Richard Tarnas’ COSMOS & PSYCHE (2006) offers the most impartial explanation I have found yet. Authors such as Howard Schwartz offer more biased perspectives linking the decline in the paternal function with the shift from a libidinal economy based on respect to one based on love. In such a shift, the “love” one gives to another is the only thing valued, and economies based on achievement and reputation are suddenly rendered obsolete. In such a case, Schwartz argues that what is highly valued in the paternal economy can even be seen as symbols of privilege and oppression in the economy of the maternal imago. But, I think this is only true in extreme cases. Schwartz particularly documents the self-implosion of capitalism via what he calls ‘corporate’ or institutional narcissism. The only problem I have with it is that it borders on scapegoating. I much prefer Tarnas’ perspective which draws on Jungian depth psychology and Whitehead’s process philosophy. It is quite Deleuzian, actually, by way of the Jung-Deleuze connection as discussed in the wonderful book, Kerslake – DELEUZE AND THE UNCONSCIOUS (2007).
Richard Tarnas proposes something he calls archetypal astrology. Before you dismiss it offhand as New Age obscurantism (or worse, as perpetuating the phallogocentric bias etc), bear with me: this is a way of understanding things in which the collective unconscious presents myths of a time which permeate everything about that time. These myths represent certain archetypal structures (or even sinthomes, we might say) — certain ways of organizing libido. Myths “teach one how to desire,” to paraphrase Zizek. Myths organize not only personal but collective drives, constituting culture as such.
If the term ‘myth’ is problematic we can talk about any other number of fields of study, from Jung’s alchemical or mystical dimension and so on. I imagine you might find these terms problematic given your rejection of “transcendent terms such as God, Platonic forms, a-historical essences, sovereigns, fathers, a-historical structures, transcendent subjects”. So, I totally get it if this is just more phallogocentric bullshit to you. But bear with me, maybe there is a way we can think about ahistoricity which takes into account the changeability, the utter contingency of it all, and the possibilities of creative freedom at every moment to reinvent the horizons of existence — stuff like that.
So, mythic-archetypal-alchemical-mystical blah blah, these are all words for some mystical Platonic bullshit, right? Well, we need some way to talk about it, some word to describe mystery. As Chesteron puts it, morbid logicians leave no room for mystery but cast all into obscurity while mystics leave one mystery unsolved and illuminate all, or something like that. Maybe this is just the big Other, God, the Unconscious etc which functions even though it doesn’t exist. What about saying that the archetypes insist rather than exist? That there is a kind of Weltgeist or collective world-soul which expresses itself through us?
But in another materialist reading it is no more than the ontological (rather than psychological) unconscious. The distinction here is that the ontological unconscious is Deleuze’s idea from Bergson that the past _is_. That we should never speak the word “was,” because it is a deception: in actuality, all of the descriptions of “isness” throughout history have actually been descriptions of the ontological past, memory, unconscious, whatever you want to call it. The present moment is pure becoming. As Bucky Fuller puts it, “I seem to be a verb.”
So in some way, all the big Other is, whether we talk about some God or mystery, numinous etc, or rather the sum total of history which is to say the ontological memory or unconscious of humanity — we are using many different signifiers for the same signified: the thing which cannot be signified, which is no longer existing or actual (in the sense of acting — it no longer performs) but is still functional because we act as if it exists. The big Other continues to function as long as we believe in it (or believe that someone believes in it, etc).
Back to the discussion of the archetypal: There is an interesting point in BERGSONISM (1966) by Deleuze which says basically that when we hear a piece of music for the first time, we feel something. And we imagine that we are pre-existing and the feeling is novel. But what if the feeling has been around before, and it’s “feeling us” somehow? What if we are the new ones, the novelty? In other words, we are the new humans and the feeling itself is some ahistorical eternal, or timeless time, which nevertheless is constantly being changed? But each time it’s changed, every trace of its change is erased so it paradoxically “has always been that way” — this gets into Meillassoux’s idea of hyperchaos, which is a degree of flexibility as such that not only can the rules change, but the rules can have always-already been different, at any moment. But I digress.
Instead of archetypal or numinous, maybe we can just talk about spirituality (don’t roll your eyes…). Zizek prefers the term “the sacred” when he says things like “I don’t buy the usual historicist bullshit which goes into how, ‘yeah but [it] came from another era, it’s from a different culture,’ no! all great spiritual edifices have this magical ability to survive from one to another cultural context. For example, I’m very traditional here. Why is Shakespeare so great? Precisely because he is not limited to his era. The really great works of art, you can decontextualize them and they work even better, shockingly new.”
I guess, in response to your anti-Platonism, I would say, you probably have great reasons to reject Plato, but let’s try to reimagine the archetypal in a non-Platonic way, then. Or in some way that is palatable to your sensibility. As Meillassoux puts it, thought is capable of thinking the absolute. Now, whether or not thoughts are “real” is a somewhat pedantic question — we must admit that although they have no physical substance, thoughts nevertheless have some reality or they would not be able to effectively change things. So, I don’t think it’s psychotic to say thoughts are “real.” To have utmost confidence that you alone know what a word really means, or possess a truth of truths, that would be psychotic. Or, to be confronted with a repressed word which returns in the real, such as someone who psychotically acts out in response to loss of imaginary fantasy-supplement. Stuff like that. So, rather than being psychotic, I think looking at the reality of words — the “reality of the virtual” even, drawing from Zizek — is crucial here. Is not the virtual another name for this Other, which, lacking consistency or existence as such, nevertheless functions somehow?
Back to Tarnas: Archetypal astrology might seem like a red herring in this discussion, but I do think it offers a compelling account of the shifts in cultural consciousness. Tarnas also offers a sophisticated method of analyzing texts akin to a historicist reading except for one point, which is to constantly reference ahistorical archetypes. (or sum-historical, if you prefer — taking into account all-of-history’s myth-making, the collective unconscious as sum total of all human memory or ontological unconscious) But it reads like a historicist reading in that it is all about the mileu, the context, what led up to it, what were the forerunners … Tarnas writes a history book from an archetypal perspective, as if a Weltgeist is expressing different aspects of its one multi-faceted personality. So we get these amazing synchronicities like Spring of ’68 where the astrological conditions aligned perfectly for revolution, and we get these huge protests, even a mutiny at the same time of precise conjunctions of the stars. Tarnas doesn’t believe the stars cause anything. Rather, he proposes Jung’s acausal orderedness. Marie-Louise von Franz also explored this in her work ON DIVINATION AND SYNCHRONICITY (1980).
We could roughly break this discussion into two levels: the macro level of the shifting milieu and contemporary conditions of human life as expression of archetypal or “sacred” dimension — and whether that results in something akin to psychosis at the collective level; and the personal individuation process, which itself is something like a controlled psychosis.
First, on the macro level of Zeitgeist, the spirit of the moment: There is certainly a breakdown of the Name-of-the-Father (read: the Oedipus) as leading sinthome. It seems we have a vast proliferation of sinthomes. All sorts of different solutions to deal with the void left by God’s death, so to speak. (See, I’m not psychotic, I can metaphorize…. :/). I think this proliferation is good. We are seeing a lot of differentiation. Yet it’s always a struggle. Differentiation at one level may remain unindividuated, in which case it is different at the level of content (“I’m special”) without really being unique (everyone thinks they’re special). I’m kind of with Adam Phillips as to the problems faced today, which have to do with a dearth of imagination, more specifically, a lack of enticing fictions for adulthood. Adam Phillips claims we don’t need ideals, but ideas: ideas are non-diminishing, creative, open-ended. With ideals, we can only embrace or reject them, fight or flight, or struggle with them somehow. But with ideas, we can come up with flexible guidelines, aims and so on. This is a challenge of imagination, adult imagination, which re-imagines adulthood as something desirable. Phillips says it’s a real symptom of despair in society when children are idolized. Von Franz writes something similar in PUER AETERNUS (1970). Essentially, we are all faced with more creative freedom to imagine alternative lifestyles (or alternative micro-modernities) to our hearts’ content, but the ensuing challenges are that we have lost this ground of mediation, this normalizing function or whatever. Thus, if we can imagine creative fictions to take the place of heteronormativity et al, we will succeed, but barring our ability to do so, we fall into regressive tendencies. One way or another, each of us must separate from the narcissistic maternal imago bonds of the unconscious.
I’m with Jung here: individuation is tantamount to ‘successful living’ although I’m sure even the metaphor of life as something you can win or lose is problematic. How about, instead of such a competitive phallogocentric metaphor: individuation is tantamount to listening to your soul’s desire to reach the highest expression of blah blah blah … you get my point, whatever metaphor we use for “goodness,” we need some kind of ethics, some kind of ability to talk about the reasons why we think something is good. So, I think individuation is ethical, basically, because the lack of individuation results in a collectivist mass-consciousness which is quite regressive. Now you might accuse me of falling prey to the myth of progress. I suppose in some ways that is true — is this not just one more masculine, male-centered myth of “fighting off the regressive feminine” and so on? Indeed, Tarnas identifies two especially pernicious myths — _the_ two myths of our time, if you ask him — as the myth of the fall and the myth of progress. It seems that the idea of individuation falls into the myth of progress. But to that, I respond, can’t we imagine individuation in a way which does not merely use it as a metaphor for the myth of progress? Or, can’t we redeem the myth of progress somehow? Even though Lacan rejected the notion of progress, he still admitted (as noted in Dylan Evans’ dictionary) that there is something akin to progress when the analysis is still moving, when it hasn’t reached a deadlock.
Tarnas proposes that the two most pernicious myths of our time are the myth of the fall, typified by the Biblical loss of paradise and fall from grace, eco-conservativism, Timothy Morton’s Beautiful Soul Syndrome, sentimental yearning for a past which never was, puer aeternus etc; and the 2nd major theme being the myth of progress: the scientific revolution, the masculine phallogocentric cultural hegemony, man vs nature, we might even include philosophies of individualism in this lot.
So, I think it is important to come up with a way of understanding individuation at both collective and personal level which is not merely individualism — individuation which speaks to both the primarily-unconscious/regressive myth of the fall (well, only regressive as seen from the perspective of the other myth!) and the primarily conscious, ego-driven myth of progress.
In a way, we get back to problems of asymmetrical difference. I’m sure you’re familiar with Lacan’s formula of sexuation, which Zizek makes use of in describing the difference between the Right and leftists. The distinction is the same as between Man and women. The reason one is capitalized and singular and the other is lowercase and plural is to show the asymmetry, and also to show that the uppercase one is the belief in some totality or key signifier and so on. There are other reasons. Anyway, my only point here is that asymmetrical difference is this strange idea where the account one side gives of the difference between two sides is at odds with the account the other side gives of that same difference. In other words, if you ask a Right-winger to give an account of the difference in right/left politically, the Right-winger says “We have a harmonious society except for some x which is disturbing us. If we could get rid of that antagonism, society would be fine.” The leftist on the other hand says, “no, that x which you exclude is actually part of society — there is no society without social antagonism, we need the space of antagonism” and so on. So the way one describes the difference between one and the other is quite different from the way the other describes that same difference.
Deleuze explores the idea of asymmetrical difference in BERGSONISM (1966) with the idea of quantity and quality. All metaphors of intensity, hierarchy and so on are quantitative. Quantitative metaphors, for instance, would view the male gender as having something which the female gender lacks — that is, the male gender has a quantity of 1 and the female gender is 0. Such a quantitative metaphor is deplorable from the perspective of many postmodernists. So, it seems that qualitative metaphors are better. But then we get into all sorts of difficulties. Quality requires thinking in duration, taking into account the changeability of things — thinking in verbs rather than nouns, perhaps, or accepting changeable identity, or the fact that identity is a function and not an unchanging attribute. The quantitative metaphor is definitively the one to be rejected, according to Deleuze, because it is the one which homogenizes, which puts chaos before order, which puts nothing before something and so on. In such metaphors, one imagines, e.g. “chaos” as the lack of order, or “nothing” as lack of something. But what these conceptions fail to grasp is the fact that you require something to imagine nothing, you require order to imagine chaos: the formula for chaos is “order + generalized function of negation” (and perhaps the reason for that negation). In this way, we first imagined chaos to be less than order, but have discovered the opposite to be true. Similarly, something is less than nothing. I know it sounds strange, but nothing is actually “more” than something because it requires something-plus-negation. We can only ever “add” — even the operation of subtraction is “adding the subtraction” so to speak. From this perspective, asking which is a priori, order or chaos, is a false problem. We shouldn’t even ask such a question, because conceiving of chaos as the opposition of order is already thinking-in-quantity, failing to grasp the qualitative composition of the signifier “chaos.” As long as we think of chaos as opposed to order in some sort of metaphor of intensity or extensity, hierarchy/amount/quantity/etc then we fail to grasp that chaos is actually comprised of a quality of general negation applied to a quality of order, which must have a certain “givenness” …
So, at the level of the collective, we are confronted with the two myths, the fall from grace and the myth of progress. It would seem that almost every argument could be subsumed by these two myths. Even my appeal to quality, my attestation to the virtues of thinking in duration — perhaps my rejection of quantity is really an attack on the myth of progress, for what is more quantitative than the scientific edifice, or the collective of “experts”? I suppose it is best to say that we can never be free from these two myths, but we can point out over-identification. I can’t be free from the fall from grace myth, but I can point out when someone takes it a little too seriously. (“remaining serious is successful repression” -Ferenczi). For instance, Zizek refers to certain sentimental yearnings to return to equilibrium with nature (if such a thing were possible) as eco-conservativism. I would say that this eco-conservativism is the same as the fall from grace myth, and I would probably group in a lot of the Rianne Eisler – CHALICE AND THE BLADE (1998) stuff too. But this is not to say I reject it. Again, we have to struggle with these myths — we can’t reject them outright. There is something paradoxical about myth, in that it is almost this sacred dimension, this appearance of the Absolute. But as Zizek warns in LESS THAN NOTHING (2012), the history of religion is a history of mistaking the appearance of the absolute with the absolute itself. I think that it is something everyone grapples with at a collective level — being almost crucified, as it were, between these two myths, pulling at us — the maternal imago myth of the fall which yearns to return to pre-Oedipal, pre-linguistic ignorance and the myth of progress (aka the myth of neurosis) in which we endlessly defer pleasure, develop ever-more-effeicient ways of exploiting the world etc. Are these really our only two options? My depiction isn’t really fair though, and it’s semi-facetious. But one way or another, we all struggle with these collective problems.
On the personal level: you mention that there’s a clear delineation between your writing and your otherwise-neurotic personal subjective experience of yourself. Are you familiar with the work of Jung at all? He proposes the idea of a persona, something like Lacan’s ego-ideal, which is really not all that different from the ego. Or at least, it’s how the ego sees itself. Maybe this is Winnicott’s False Self as well. In any case, with the psychotic, the imaginary False Self is presented for extraction of jouissance (or Narcissistic Supply, which I actually think of as “semiotic-juice” or “meaning-juice,” in that without it, the narcissist feels empty, nihilistic etc). In non-psychotic structures like perversion and neurosis, there is lack, but there is no emptiness. One distinction I read said that the hallmark of neurosis is lack but the crucial shift to psychosis is emptiness: the feeling of having an unfillable void, a lack, an empty place which nothing can ever satisfy. This gets into the idea of anorexia not as perversion, which Kaplan proposed in her excellent FEMALE PERVERSIONS (1994), but as psychosis: the anorectic wants to “eat the nothing” itself.
October 27, 2012 at 5:12 am
Regarding the idea of becoming post-human, or what’s next beyond anthropocentrism: The work of, e.g. Jung, might be seen as anthropocentric because it could be accused of projecting human emotions onto non-human things. But which is more anthropocentric, the accused projection of human emotions, or the claim itself that these emotions are human?
See what I’m saying? One could level the claim of anthropocentrism against saying that emotions tout court are human. To claim that a feeling, for instance, is human, would be to neglect the extimacy or alien dimension, the fact that our deepest, most subjective, personal experiences (e.g. “true love”) are themselves universal experiences.
My question is, if we go ‘beyond’ anthropocentrism, shouldn’t we do this by first relinquishing our claim to so much of experience as distinctly human?
Right now, so much of experience is considered ‘human experience’ but wouldn’t going beyond anthropocentrism be giving up this claim, acknowledging that, e.g., feelings don’t have to be human?
Jung actually seems non-anthropocentric here. Archetypal feelings are not necessarily human. Anthropocentrism could be taken as a metaphor for egocentrism, even, in which case Jung’s individuation would necessitate a giving up of anthropocentric ideas.
The purpose of individuation is much the same as Lacanian analysis: subjective destitution, loss or impoverishment of one’s “good intentions” and fantasy supplement about who one is (i.e. one’s subjective narrative), symbolic castration. Von Franz describes individuation — which is roughly equivalent to ‘maturation’, I know, a problematic term, dependent on the normatization of the paternal function — as a progressive disillusionment.
But don’t think that Jung, von Franz et al merely want to disillusion. There is almost a “disillusion and re-enchant” motif, similar to Lacan’s idea of the third phase of the Oedipal complex, the “yes” of the father. You may be familiar with the first two phases (pre-Oedipal and the “No” or prohibition of the father, respectively) but the third phase is lesser known. Often happening in adolescence (though it could happen any time, really), the third phase is when a symbolic father (i.e. one who plays the role of being respected, admired etc) endorses a libidinal investment of the subject, gives blessing. If the key phrase of the 2nd phase is “I prohibit,” the 3rd is “I bless.” A story from Lacanian practice mentions a teenage boy who wanted to be a musician. His father prohibited it, and the boy fell into depression and started using drugs. Later, he met an older boy who was in a band. At this point, the older boy played the role of symbolic father to the younger boy, who blessed his choice to be a musician. The younger boy stopped using drugs and committed himself to music. This could be seen as a successful outcome of Oedipalization: normal ability to defer pleasure towards a goal, to invest in future outcomes. Of course, this is completely at odds to the immanent.
This might seem an attestation to the paternal function, that we need some sort of Oedipalization. But the individuation process is really about something quite different. If it were merely ego psychology with its Master-Slave positioning, where the “disordered” client reports with an ostensibly unhealthy ego, and learns to model the supposedly healthy ego of the therapist — then we would be right to criticize Jungian individuation on the grounds of perpetuating some Oedipalization. But I think you’ll find Jung is quite anti-Oedipal! On a personal level, Jung experienced what is known as emotional incest with his mother, almost a shared psychosis, following the complete breakdown of the paternal function in his family (his father was a religious man who lost faith, or something of the sort). Jung’s individuation work is very much about exploring what’s beyond the dark night of the soul.
In this way, I wonder if everyone has a certain propensity for experiencing what might be deemed psychosis, if only they go far enough into the individuation process (or with the help of psychedelics). I would think Jung would consider psychosis to be a failure of individuation, but at the same time, he himself experienced what would be clinically described as psychosis — his notorious conversations with his “daimon” who he called Philemon on his walks, for instance. It remains problematic to me, and perhaps that’s the point: to individuate, one must struggle with psychosis.
I found a blog which describes ” a transformative experience that in this culture and setting would be identified as psychosis or schizophrenic. Other cultures and settings have other names for the same experience: kundalini awakening, shamanism, mysticism, gnosis, the psychotic-visionary episode, the dark night of the soul, ego death, the alchemical process, positive disintegration, post traumatic stress disorder with psychotic features, spiritual emergency, etc.”
Julian Jaynes’ theory of the breakdown of the bicameral mind as espoused in his book of the same name is relevant here. Jaynes says that the unconscious is basically psychotic, and as the conscious evolved out of unconsciousness (i.e. developed ground of mediation, a ‘meta-level’ of self-awareness) we developed the ability to not be psychotic. So he claims psychosis is the 0-level. Jaynes has all these great anecdotes about ancient cultures where one didn’t realize the voice in one’s head wasn’t real — it was God talking to you! So the voice said to get water, and you said, “thanks, God, for leading me to water!” Or whatever. I’m making fun of it a little bit, but there are some really interesting anecdotes. Apparently people in ancient times would hesitate to bury the dead, Jaynes claims, because it was possible to hallucinate a conversation with the corpse — something along those lines. Perhaps even Hamlet speaking to the skull is an example of something like this. Well, in any case, Jaynes’ THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1976) offers quite the account of early human evolution. Rather than a normative neurotic Oedipal structure being a priori given, one might say that psychosis is the a priori. This perspective says that the rise of the Oedipal out of a primordial psychosis was a way of preventing psychosis, a hallmark of consciousness, even, and that psychosis is somewhat of a fall back to unconsciousness. But is this the only way?
Again, Zizek reminds us not to mistake the appearance of the absolute for the absolute itself. This is relevant because we are apt to mistake Oedipalization (one concrete appearance of the archetypal/absolute sinthome) for the absolute itself, the end-all be-all. We are apt to make the mistake that says “Oedipalization is necessary” because we don’t know any alternate sinthomes. I think Jung is in agreement with the idea of not mistaking the appearance of the absolute for the absolute itself. One could rephrase this in the language of Jungian depth psychology by saying “don’t mistake one concrete expression of the archetypal for the archetypal itself.” Really, the archetypal is just another name for the absolute, but it doesn’t have to be thought of as transcendent. It can be as immanent as you prefer, even pure immanence.
Maybe Jung’s archetypal can be understood to have some affinity with Deleuze’s virtual. Here is an excerpt about the virtual from plato.stanford.edu: ‘When we think of the possible as somehow “pre-existing” the real, we think of the real, then we add to it the negation of its existence, and then we project the “image” of the possible into the past. We then reverse the procedure and think of the real as something more than possible, that is, as the possible with existence added to it. We then say that the possible has been “realized” in the real. By contrast, Deleuze will reject the notion of the possible in favor of that of the virtual. Rather than awaiting realization, the virtual is fully real; what happens in genesis is that the virtual is actualized.’
Meillassoux also kind of thinks about this virtual with his “absolute,” in that he says things like “nothing which exists is necessary.” It’s the idea that everything which currently exists could be destroyed but reality would persist. The question then becomes, if everything which existed were destroyed, and reality began forming again, would it form in the same patterns? Or are these merely historically-contingent? And I think, some patterns like the Golden Ratio belong to this ‘virtual’ which means that they are something like archetypal forms just waiting to be actualized. I know this sounds just like Plato but maybe you can find a way for this archetypal to be purely immanent, rather than as an a priori condition of possibility (because Deleuze rejects the entire metaphor of the possible, remember) but instead as a virtual which is fully real, merely waiting to be concretized. (to use Jung’s term — brought into concrete being).
Zizek’s virtual — which is the way he sometimes talks about the Symbolic, basically — is also somewhat homeomorphic to Jung’s archetypal. Zizek describes the virtual using the metaphor of mathematical attractors: “All positive lines or points in its sphere of attraction only approach it in an endless fashion, never reaching its form – the existence of this form is purely virtual, being nothing more than the shape towards which lines and points tend. However, precisely as such, the virtual is the Real of this field: the immovable focal point around which all elements circulate. Is not this Virtual ultimately the Symbolic as such?”
On a personal level, Jung’s work on alchemy, such as his magnum opus MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS (1977) are among the most intriguing to me, in terms of Jungian thought. The concepts explored in Jung’s work on alchemy, along with synchronicity or “acausal orderedness” really appeal to me personally. Incidentally, I got a lot more out of Jung after reading just about everything Marie-Louise von Franz has written. Von Franz is a much better writer than Jung, and her books are a joy to read. I highly recommend checking out all of her work, but especially the work on alchemy and also her interpretation of the mystical text AURORA CONSURGENS (1966).
October 27, 2012 at 6:05 am
I especially like what you wrote here about structural isomorphisms:
“[Imaginary (mis)recognition means] we fail to see structural isomorphisms between things that are phenomenologically different yet structurally identical. For example, we might think that Sarah Palin is a victory for feminism, despite the fact that she occupies the structural position of a masculine sovereign (likewise with Thatcher). Or we fail to recognize that centralized management around a boss, theism with a transcendent God, societies organized around Nation, etc., are all structurally identical forms of organization… They’re all Oedipal or patriarchal. Formalization helps us to see beyond the image to a shared structure or set of isomorphisms. This is the genius of the Lacanian matheme; it allows us to see the structure for the different types of trees […]”
What about thinking of these structures as Bergson’s “articulations of the real,” or Proust’s “psychological laws” picked up by, e.g. Girard in his analysis of a sort of universal consensus of agreement on the inbound rules of libidinal economy among acclaimed authors, compared to vast disagreement or falsifications of these libidinal rules among less-acclaimed authors?
Indeed, isn’t this structural dimension really the Symbolic-Virtual-archetypal, or whichever word you prefer for it?
Let’s find a way to talk about this structural dimension as separate from phenomena without losing the immanent, without giving in to the transcendent. Let’s describe the structural not as conditions of possibility which come before the actual, but, following Deleuze, the structural is the virtual which is real but not yet actualized.
Then we can get into Badiou’s Event, or even, Zizek’s discussion in LESS THAN NOTHING (2012) of free will, which is really the freedom to choose to accept or reject that we are chosen. (read: to see ourselves in the call). The Event occurs and we can either see ourselves in its call or not. This might be a way of saying the archetypal or virtual insists upon us via products of the unconscious which rise to consciousness, either at the personal or transpersonal level. How else to explain cultural movements? They have a tipping point and then snowball effect, wherein more and more people “see themselves in the Event” or see the message addressed to them.
February 21, 2013 at 11:48 pm
[…] on Bryant’s blog that I read (with interest and bewilderment, in equal parts) over the summer: Lacan, Anarchy, Masculinity, and Psychosis. Although I was entirely unfamiliar with Lacan’s graph of sexuation at the time (and am only […]
April 8, 2013 at 2:55 pm
[…] which, lacking consistency or existence as such, nevertheless functions somehow?”. See < https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/07/11/lacan-anarchy-masculinity-and-psychosis/ […]
August 20, 2013 at 7:23 pm
[…] ixCf., Levi Bryant (2012) “Lacan, Anarchy, Masculinity, and Psychosis,” As Retrieved on August 20th, 2013 from <https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/07/11/lacan-anarchy-masculinity-and-psychosis/> […]