A heated discussion has begun to emerge surrounding the validity of arguments from experience. The entire tussle began with an interesting post by K-Punk on the relationship between class-relations and intersubjective attitudes. In the course of this post, K-punk made reference to his own experience, which prompted Daniel from Antigram to present a critique of arguments from experience based on the Lacanian theory of fantasy. In my view, K-Punk was not basing his position on his own personal experience, but rather illustrating his point through a representative example. In many respects, K-Punk’s thesis reminds me of Bourdieu’s discussions of taste, where Badiou, in Distinction, shows how the milieu of individuation in which an agent emerges within a particular social field gives form to the affects and percepts that populate the agent. That is, it seemed to me that K-Punk was raising questions of individuation. Unless we are to treat affects as innate or as fictions, it is necessary to raise questions such as those of why one agent is filled with rage when seeing an American flag burn, another joy, and yet another indifference. If this point is conceded, if this variability is acknowledged, then there must be some process of individuation agents undergo that produces a system of affects, a system of how the world is affectively encountered, that gives form to ones affective space. It seems to me that this is what K-Punk was getting at, what he was trying to draw attention to. Is one’s affective and perceptual space simply a private affair, an individual and impersonal idiosyncracy, or does it point towards a more collective affectivity produced as a result of processes of morphogenesis, speaking to all sorts of things ranging from economic structures, to class relations, to gender relations, etc? A similar point could be made in relation to Lacan’s theory of affect as presented in Seminar 10: L’angoisse, where Lacan outlines the manner in which affect is structured around the signifier. Nonetheless, Antigram makes an interesting point in drawing attention to the way in which experience is imbricated in fantasy. In Seminar 6: Desire and Its Interpretation, Lacan argues that fantasy is the frame of reality. Reality, for Lacan, is not on the other side of fantasy, but rather the two form a mobius loop, such that fantasy provides the window through which reality is encountered. As Lacan will say in Television, “reality is the grimace of the real.” Fantasy is that which renders the real tolerable, allowing the subject to encounter it. It seems that Antigram treats the term “fantasy” in pejorative terms in a way that is foreign to the psychoanalytic clinic.
In response to Antigram’s analysis, both Jodi Dean and Shaviro jump in, the former surprisingly drawing attention to the way in which fantasy and arguments from experience has played a disturbing role in certain forms of identity politics (this is surprising given the predominence of arguments from experience on I Cite… Recall the discussions about pedestrian traffic in London), the latter offering a critique of Antigram’s position. Of particular importance is Shaviro’s reminder that for Lacan “there is no metalanguage”. This is one of the key features of the Lacanian understanding of transference as it operates in the clinic and is of central importance in differentiating the Lacanian clinic from other psychotherapeutic clinics. Apart from the impossibility of imagining any psychoanalytic clinic that doesn’t focus on the analysand’s experiences, one of the central features of the Lacanian clinic is that the analyst abdicates the position of master or the master’s discourse. To say there is no metalanguage is to say that the analyst too is caught up in the relations of transference, that he or she is not immune from the effects of the unconscious. I suspect that appropriations of psychoanalysis outside the clinic often function not as instances of the discourse of the analyst, but rather as discourses of the master, where the theorist deploying psychoanalytic discourse occupies a position of mastery with regard to the cultural artifacts they analyze and comment on. In this connection, Shaviro’s comments strike me as valuable. It does not seem to me that Shaviro is so much rejecting Antigram’s point as problematizing it. The point seems to be that while experience may indeed be perpetually bound up with fantasy, we are nonetheless unable to escape experience. Consequently, it cannot be a question of escaping or rejecting experience altogether– as Shaviro makes clear in relation to his comments about Althusser’s theses about the inescapability of ideology and the nature of science –but of encountering the problematic status of experience (in the Kantian sense of a regulative ideal or a problem that persists in its solution). To this Antigram responds in a rather heated manner.
In connection to Antigram’s response, I will only say that one of the crucial features of “taking responsibility for one’s subjective position” consists in the affirmation of one’s experience without searching for authorization from the big Other. An analysand who has traversed the fantasy is also an analysand that no longer looks to the Other– as embodied in the analyst but also in the social world as well –as a norm that would tell the analysand what he ought to be or whether or not he is living up to some set of standards. The post-analyzed subject no longer believes that there is a master that contains knowledge of “how to get ahead in the world”, “how to have a successful romantic or sexual life”, “how to make it in academia”, etc. This is because such an analysand has come to recognize that the Other does not exist, or that the Other itself is lacking, incomplete, riven by desire and does not itself know what it desires. It becomes clear that there is no one road to Rome, and that, in any event, perhaps Rome doesn’t even exist. This would include how that analysand understands the sense of their experiences, their meaning, their signification. More fundamental than the discovery of ones own status as a split subject, is the discovery of the Other as split, as not-existing. In this regard, an analysis does not so much divest an analysand of experience, so much as affirm the experience of that analysand. If the analyst respects and honors anything, it is the speech of the analysand for that speech is the site of truth. To be sure, the analyst is always listening for that “Other discourse” in the analysand’s speech– in slips of the tongue, double entendres, dreams, jokes, omissions, contradictions, etc –but the analyst certainly is not in the business of discounting the analysand’s experience or disregarding it. How could he? Not only would the analyst here set himself up as an authority, thereby inviting various conflictual relations, but he would also be adopting the position of the ego-therapist, presuming to be capable of arbitrating between truth and falsity.
Here it is important to recall that for Lacan, fantasy is not so much fantasy pertaining to the subject and the subject’s wants, as it is fantasy of what the Other desires, what the Other wants, with regard to the subject. In this connection, it could be said that the analysand’s entire life, prior to traversing the fantasy, has been structured as a lure for the Other, striving to satisfy or thwart what it believes the Other’s desire to be. The analysand has lived his entire life as the equivalent of fishing tackle, organizing his actions and desires as lures for the Other’s desire so that he might capture that desire. It is in this regard that the analysand is often led to betray his own desire, to renounce it, so as to be the object of the Other’s desire, thereby generating the symptom as the mute witness of that betrayed desire, as the trace that persists and continues to insist. This is precisely why traversing the fantasy can have an effect on the real of the symptom, as the symptom is always addressed to the Other as framed by the fantasy of the Other’s desire. Returning to K-Punk’s original post, it could be said that here traversing the fantasy would not so much entail the worker recognizing that his position is his own subjective responsibility (i.e., blaming the victim), so much as it would consist in the worker being able to posit himself as his own value, as his own condition, rather than measuring himself relative to those who enjoy a position of privilege. That is, it would be a surrender of differentially defined, oppositionally defined, identity. This, for instance, seems to be what Badiou is getting at with his subjects of a truth procedure. In a manner that sometimes echoes Nietzsche’s conception of master-morality, the subject of a truth procedure, as subtracted from the situation, no longer defines itself oppositionally in relation to a set of social and class identities, but is, rather, engaged in the project of producing its own values and truth.
UPDATE Infinite Thought weighs in on the discussion:
Anecdote and reflections upon one’s upbringing in the light of the revelation that not everybody had the same experience as me are frequently of great value: how else do we get to an understanding of class than by comparing the gap between how class is experienced (falsely or otherwise) and the economic and social structures that perpetuate this division? A Year Zero approach to class in which one should simultaneously possess a strict Marxist conception of class combined with an acceptance of responsibility for one’s own position as a subject seems unnecessarily punitive and not necessarily useful for attempting to change entrenched (but crucially not unshakeable) class divisions. (Incidentally, the odd ahistoricism of psychoanalytic categories frequently seems to me to be a major problem for any historical materialist analysis – as does the absence of any notion of a collective subject. But this is rather old-fashioned quibbling, perhaps.)
Why education, then? Education seems to me to be a good way of analysing some of the more concrete elements of class division, the way in which class perpetuates itself ideologically. Here we have a structure (schooling), legally imposed, which creates different kinds of social groups. It is neither based on academic capacity (although it sometimes claims to be via the entrance exam), nor equality at the level of the teaching, curriculum or opportunities provided. It is based on economic differentiation, and the perpetuation of that difference by any means necessary – convincing otherwise not-very-bright children that they are the best thing since primitive accumulation is one of the products that Private schools sell, along with a system of social networks, increased cultural expectation that you will go to university, etc.
Read the rest here. It would be interesting to do a similar analysis of how different tiered universities function in the United States at the level of the sort of subjectivities they produce and the networks of opportunity they engender. Once again, in all of these discussions, Bourdieu– specifically Homo Academicus seems especially relevant. As IT points out, education is one of the ways in which ideological class divisions reproduce themselves. To put it differently, education is one of the conditions for the reproduction of the conditions of production. As I reflect on this discussion, I find myself wondering whether the tools of psychoanalysis are particularly relevant.
UPDATE II Antigram elaborates more.
Let me make myself clear: The social problem of class cannot be understood so long remains understood as a relation between identities. Between the Emperor and a beggar, one cannot see society. Class is nothing to do with individuals; rather, it is a problem contained in the relations persisting between structural forces. The task of critique, the task of argument in general, is to demonstrate the workings of those forces by pulverizing the integral experiences they conjure into their constituent aspects and parts. Arguments from experience are bad and reactionary because argument as such is pitted against experience.
I have to confess that I’m nervous about these claims about structure. A good deal of what I’ve been thinking about lately is the ontological status of structure. What, exactly, is a structure? It is not that I’m here opposing Daniel and siding with the individual. Rather, what I’m wondering if structure is something other than its enactment in and through individuals. Class has a good deal to do with individuals insofar as these structures couldn’t exist without individuals to enact them. Clearly the intuition underlying claims about structure is well founded in that everything is not up to the sovereign individual as the individual finds herself enmeshed in a web that exceeds her control, understanding, and intentions. However, wouldn’t it be more productive to think the relationship between individuals and structure as a feedback relation where structure is perpetually being (re)produced through the activities of individuals and where individuals are being individuated through the effects of structure? When we side with structure or the individual, we end up in a relation that could be described in Hegelian terms as abstract insofar as it fails to think the interdependence of relations in a system. The thesis of interdependence– or, more properly, inter-determination –allows for a much more fluid and dynamic conception of social relations, that might also open other spaces of structure-transforming political engagements. It also loosens, a bit, the iron grip of structure, it’s tendency to be treated as eternal and solid, by opening the possibility of collective relations introducing new forms of structuration in much the same way that Deleuze and Guattari describe the aberrant connections produced through the orchid and the wasp. My worry is that a number of difficulties emerge if structure is reified and treated as something existing in its own right. Perhaps a part of the meaning behind the thesis “the Other does not exist” is the thesis that structure does not exist, i.e., structure would here be an effect of the subject’s belief in Zizek’s sense of the term. Not only does such a thesis open alternatives of engagement, but it also explains the possibility of structural shifts and changes in a way that reified conceptions of structure seem to render impossible. As an added aside… Damn it Daniel, you messed up the link to my blog! :-)
UPDATE III Dominic weighs in:
This leads me to think that some additional mechanism is involved, that the moment of collapse is – again, reaching for the sniper rifle – triggered, and is caused less by the failure by schools to instill the proper level of self-belief and more by their success – or that of society at large – in installing something else. Here I must confront Daniel’s skepticism concerning the social production of affect, which he seems to regard as spontaneously and indifferently woven by the subject of fantasy out of whatever experiential material happens to come to hand. In the first instance, I wonder how it is that corporations ever get to see a return on the millions of dollars they put into advertising if it is literally absurd to suggest that the affective lives of individuals can be prompted, moulded, manipulated and operationalised by outside forces. (Clearly there is something a bit rum about fantasizing that my emotional life is constantly being manipulated by evil corporations, but that is because in the fantasy I am aware of the manipulation but can do nothing about it).
Let us consider the nature of insult. I insult you; you take offense. If I have insulted you effectively, you will take offense in spite of your determination to rise above my petty jibes: the insult is effective to the extent that it causes its target to feel offended in spite of himself. Later you will curse yourself for responding so hastily and angrily to what were, after all, only words. You will, if you are exceptionally disciplined, own that your response was unworthy, that you should not have allowed yourself to become besides yourself with fury. I will then insult you again, making artful use of the humiliation I have already inflicted, and if my aim is true you will again fly into a rage. I enjoy a power over you that you do not wish to grant me, and would withhold from me if you could.
Read the rest here.
Larval Subjects . 
July 16, 2007 at 3:28 pm
Excellent dr. Sinthome. I always tell people that this is the fantastic thing I got from lacanalysis, and why they should take the extra trouble of undergoing it, instead of quick behavioral fixes, and which makes psychoanalysis a subversive science – I learned there to pursue my dreams against any ”ought to” !
I also think this one is a good demonstration of the kind of distortion that takes place when concepts migrate from the couch to politics, courtesy of the Slovenlian pop Lacan school, and into the murky waters of moralizing, but I think you’re startin’ to notice that yourself…
July 16, 2007 at 5:50 pm
I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with “applied psychoanalysis” or “using” psychoanalysis to interpret cultural artifacts because, simply, the texts cannot talk back. In the clinic, at least, each intervention on the part of the analyst is a risk that will only redeem itself retroactively through the way in which the analysand’s symptoms shift and the subsequent material that emerges in the analysand’s discourse. The analyst does not occupy a position of mastery, nor is the analyst clear as to what is taking place. Moreover, it cannot be said that one is an analyst. Rather, it might be better to speak of a perpetual “becoming-analyst”. Being-an-analyst functions like a Kantian regulative ideal or something the subject in position of the analyst is always striving towards without ever reaching. As Freud liked to say, “analysis is an impossible profession”, and Lacan echoed this, constantly emphasizing that we do not yet know what an analyst is and that it is not clear that an analyst has ever existed.
This is one of the things that makes me uncomfortable with Miller’s World Association of Psychoanalysis (WAP). So far two Americans have been granted membership to the association. This strikes me as being deeply at odds with Lacan’s own practice, where, following Seminar 10, his seminars were open to the public and non-analysts and analysands could participate in the ECF. In short, the WAP seems to be instituting criteria for mastery or “being-an-analyst”, similar to those Lacan railed against with the IPA before his excommunication. As such, it creates the impression that there is an Other that knows. Lacan, by contrast, emphasized that the only authorization for an analyst comes from the analyst himself and the analysand that relates to him or her as an analyst.
All too often it seems to me that the interpretation of cultural artifacts instead functions as a form of mastery, where the artifact is filtered through a set of categories– Shaviro points this out when he remarks that no argument is given for the proposition about fantasy, Lacan is simply quoted as an authority –and made to conform to these categories. By contrast, in his engagement with cultural artifacts, Lacan always used these works as transformers of psychoanalysis (psychoanalysis becomes something different when it encounters Poe, Kant, Descartes, Hamlet, Antigone, Sade, etc), rather than gentrifying the cultural artifact through a set of pre-established categories. That is, it is the artifact that speaks, not the analyst. In this regard, there’s a question as to whether there are any categories of Lacanian analysis at all. Lacan was constantly reinventing psychoanalysis, and significantly transformed the co-ordinates of his practice from year to year.
It could be said that Deleuze and Guattari come closer to what a post-analyzed subject looks like than many Lacanians, as their practice isn’t premised on repeating the master or looking to the master as a subject-supposed-to-know and absolute source of authority. If anything, the analyst, by the end of analysis, occupies the position of the dunce, for if the transference has been worked through, the subject-supposed-to-know has disappeared. As Lacan liked to say, the analyst practices a controlled suicide… Analysis begins with the analysand attributing knowledge to the analyst and therefore treating the analyst as non-split. By the end of the analysis this fullness has disappeared. Not only must the completion of analysis be accompanied by the traversal of the fantasy that the Other is a subject-supposed-to-know, but there is a way in which the analysand must even sacrifice its belief in analytic theory as knowledge.
In this regard, Lacan’s constant theoretical shifts could be understood as a strategy designed to undermine his audience’s belief in him as a subject supposed to know. In his later seminars, Lacan often complained about people continuing to attend his seminar, as if he was disappointed that they had not traversed their fantasy, that they continued to treat him as a subject-supposed-to-know. No matter how outlandish his seminar became– as he made forays into number theory, set theory, knot theory, topology, etc –the audience kept coming back, assuming that behind these creations there was a genuine knowledge. Even Lacan’s sentence structure– in the unpublished transcripts, not the cleaned up authorized transcripts –are filled with long sentences, punctuated by commas, semi-colons, dashes, etc., and qualifications (“what I am trying to get you to see”, “the point to which I’m trying to bring you”, and so on) as if to enact the metonymy of the desire or the endless displacement of objet a, creating the impression that there is a final interpretant or truth of psychoanalysis that Lacan is just about to give his audience. Yet the seminar went on year after year, without ever getting to that final point… As the final point would entail that analysis exists, that the Other exists, that the Other is not split.
Rather than looking at the content of Lacan’s teaching (though clearly I believe this is important), we should also look at the manner or how of Lacan’s teaching, and how this manner enacts a theoretical point about the analytic situation. Of course, all of this comes back around to what the public position of the analyst might be. Lacan used to say “the style is the man”, and we must above all look at Lacan’s style. If Lacan were simply to present psychoanalytic theory he would occupy the position of the master. Yet in his public teaching, Lacan plays on all sorts of elusive linguistic structure, often contradicts himself, and insures that his conception of analysis is never tied down. In this way, he hystericized his audience. Like listeners of Socrates before him, the audience, it seems, believed Lacan to contain some precious knowledge, an agalma, which he simply refused to believe, rather than seeing Lacan as empty and barren of knowledge, instead functioning as a catalyst of truth. It seems to me that many public engagements with Lacanian psychoanalysis, (“applied psychoanalysis”, those who “use” psychoanalysis), do precisely the opposite. Rather than setting up those conditions where the public, the analysand, might generate some truth, instead the interpreter gives “knowledge” or a “key”, giving the sense that the Other exists. In a charitable moment I have tried to argue that Zizek does indeed occupy the position of analyst with regard to his readers through his textual practice: (cf my article “Symptomal Knots and Evental Ruptures” here: http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/issue/current)
However, I am not fully convinced that this is the case. Then again, as often happens with the Socratic position, those who occupy this position are treated as being subjects-supposed-to-know rather than problematizing the very idea of the existence of the Other.
July 16, 2007 at 7:27 pm
Yes to all of that, and even worse, the cultural theory seems to produce people who are dead convinced that Lacan was a Master (someone in my mail just used the word ”paternal” position to which I had to tell him that Lacan’s position in analysis is the precise opposite). Warszawa keeps coming back sending me links to books with titles like ”Deconstructing the Master”, not realizing that it was Wilhelm Reich who wanted to be a Master of our orgasm. Because of dr. Zizek’s funny speeches, which to my mind are the equivalent of Hitchockian pop psychoanalysis from the 50s, where everything has a hidden (deep and sexual) meaning, a kind of a mystical aura is created around this burgeois ideology of naughty titillation, but this is only an entertainment show!
But dr. Sinthome since this is also a political issue as I explained abundantly, I have known for 15 years now that dr. Zizek isn’t what he is in the West, because at the Serbian academia, which has close ties to the French one, they’ve diagnosed him a long long time ago as a pop charlatan, the sort of stuff that you see on Eurovision. In fact if one was to write a Master’s on Zizek in Belgrade, one would really have to persuade the commission that one seriously purports to become a clinical psychologist.
July 16, 2007 at 9:30 pm
I think the above account of Lacan’s “perfectly self-conscious charlatanism”, to borrow Chomsky’s phrase (not a bad description, if you void it of its pejorative overtones), very usefully captures the ethical content, analytic direction and theoretical point of Lacan’s style. I learned next to nothing about how to read Lacan from reading Zizek’s “How to read Lacan”, and a great deal more from watching Zizek, in “Zizek!”, watching Lacan on television…
July 16, 2007 at 11:10 pm
Sinthome–my stuff on pedestrian traffic was not an argument from experience–it was an account of my experience, a reflection on my experience. I made no claims to any sort of politics based on that experience.
July 16, 2007 at 11:47 pm
It seems to me that there’s an entire genre of posts on your blog in this vein– that strongly resemble K-Punk’s particular post –but I could be mistaken about the intent of your observations in this connection. I have sometimes felt that your discussions of your own experience function in a very normative fashion without taking seriously the way in which institutional structure effects subjects (graduate students people on the market, etc) struggling for position within that structure; for instance in your discussions of college politics and hiring practices and the way you describe your own hard work with respect to these institutions treating these things as if they are completely personal affairs based on the hard work of individuals. This argument is identical to the sorts of arguments conservatives give to discount class struggle, treating position of a person in the social sphere as a matter of personal diligence, sweat, and inspiration, and having nothing to do with social forces. I think Infinite Thought makes this point very well in her recent post. This, in a sense, is the inverse of what K-Punk was doing. Nonetheless, I think the issue is neither here nor there. Generally I very much appreciated your observations about identity politics, fantasy, and the role that testimony has played in these movements (having spent a good deal of time with the enigma of the politics of dissociative disorder and repressed memory therapy myself), I just thought the knife cut too deep in rejecting testimony tout court. This, however, seemed more Daniel’s axe to grind than yours.
July 17, 2007 at 12:47 am
I understand my posts about my experience to be just that. Sometimes I use them to jump off to another point, that is, I use them as rhetorical devices like I would an example from a movie or something. But I don’t use them to ground political claims–not to mention ontologies.
July 17, 2007 at 12:58 am
I don’t think K-Punk was grounding an ontology in his examples either, though I’m not clear that one can so easily separate experiential claims from of any sort from political claims. Zizek’s analysis to toilets comes to mind as an instance of how extensive ideology extends. Why should casual remarks about experience be “just that” and not themselves indicative of an entire ideology?
July 17, 2007 at 1:14 am
The discussion of toilets isn’t a discussion of experience. It’s a description coupled with an interpretation. He doesn’t say how he feels about any of the toilets or how different one made him feel. For me, the question is not whether K-Punk does or does not. I am more interested in the status of claims to experience and hold the view that such claims can’t ground claims to ontology. I would add that claims to experience cannot ground political claims and attempts to do so end up in error and confusion. As I said in my post, I think experiential claims can be rhetorically and tactically deployed to good effect–as well as bad.
July 17, 2007 at 1:20 am
Read carefully, Jodi. I did not say that the discussion of toilets was about experience, I said that experience is structured according to the same principles. This is a variation of the thesis that you and Antigram were developing. I’m sympathetic to Shaviro’s position that we cannot escape claims of experience whether in ontology or politics, which isn’t to say that experience isn’t problematic.
It’s very curious for a Zizekian or a Lacanian (I’m not clear they’re at all the same) to suggest that anything in language can be “just that”. It’s almost as if you think you can say what you mean and mean what you say… Or that you’re master of your speech! I suppose that the principle of experience pervaded by fantasy only applies when it’s other people’s experiences that are being discussed.
July 17, 2007 at 1:22 am
I’ll let your condescension pass (read carefully?). What are you referencing with ‘just that’?
July 17, 2007 at 1:26 am
Oh –I see. My casual remarks. They may well be and of course are filled with ideology. When I said ‘just that’ I mean that I don’t make any political claims for them. So, I’m not disagreeing with how far ideology extends. As I’ve said a couple of times, the issue is what a claim to experience can do.
July 17, 2007 at 1:26 am
You had written:
This suggests that you believe that your particular genre of speech can be exactly what you intend it to be, or that your speech isn’t caught up in a play and unconscious desires that exceed those intentions.
July 17, 2007 at 1:27 am
So, I’m not ruling out the unconscious at all. I’m saying that I don’t use experiential claims to ground political ones.
July 17, 2007 at 1:30 am
As I stated in my initial response, I don’t disagree with your observations about the problematic status of how testimony has functioned in founding of particular versions of identity politics. I am deeply hesitant about the strong break you’re drawing between experience and some other sort of grounding. I just don’t think we can escape from experience in this way. For instance, analytic theory never escapes from the experience of the clinic (though some of the topologically inclined try to reduce it all to meditations about topology, with amusing results).
July 17, 2007 at 2:15 am
Or maybe a better way of putting the point about experience would be to say that rather than discounting experience as a way of grounding politics and ontology a priori, one should instead critique the particular way in which experience is mobilized in the forms of politics you describe in your post. It seems to me that you’ve already done a good deal of this work. It seems in the case of the instances of identity politics you refer to, what is occurring is that the subjects reporting this experience treat themselves as having an immediate relationship to the sense and significance of the experience. You write:
And then go on to say:
I think the reference to repressed memory syndrome is especially to the point. In the first cited passage you point to how the experience was treated as valid in and of itself. It’s as if those reporting the experience supposed they had an immediate relationship to the experience… As if it were “just that”. What is missing here is any dimension of a split in experience itself ($) or a lack of immediacy between the experience and its sense. I’m not sure how this would be classified psychoanalytically. In certain respects this resembles psychosis, in others it resembles perversion. Certainly the way in which the these narratives spiral off into conspiracy (the multiple personality disorder camp arriving at the idea of well organized and massive satanic cults throughout the United States, the alien abduction folk spinning more and more elaborate narratives about what’s going on) tend in the direction of paranoia or psychosis, suggesting that the split constitutive of the subject has been effaced. In this connection, it wouldn’t so much be a question of rejecting experience tout court, but rather looking at a particular structure that experience takes under certain conditions. Maybe then it could be asked why experience (and politics) takes this particular form in a set of given conditions.
July 17, 2007 at 11:01 am
Jodi, of course you were arguing from experience in your ‘British Spatial Incapacity’ post, you even replied to one objector by saying that you’d given several examples in support of your thesis (“examples spread over a period of years”). In fact, your post was an excellent illustration of Daniel’s point, hence the irony of you agreeing with it. I think the point her is just that people often don’t recognise that an argument from experience is indeed an argument.
July 17, 2007 at 12:48 pm
Have now fixed link to your blog, so all well and good.
I want to respond to this point about individuals and structures.
My position is that individuals have nothing to do with class, because individuals do not exist. I think the idea of the individual is an ideological illusion. I want to radically excise the individual from philosophy; I believe that the individual has no ontological status whatsoever.
I precisely reject the conjecture that we could talk about structure as lying between individuals, in the sense “the individual finds herself enmeshed in a web that exceeds her control, understanding, and intentions.” No – I think (the mirage of) the individual is itself a product of that web, and there is no feedback relation between the individual and that web.
I think if we want to talk about feedback vis-a-vis structure, we need to talk about agents, objects, subjects, not individuals. To my mind, the concept of the individual is utterly compromised, and, since Freud, redundant.
I do not believe that Lacan’s maxim that the “Big Other doesn’t exist” can be taken as meaning structure doesn’t exist. To my knowledge, Lacan very much affirmed the existence of structure – as Zizek notes, after ’68, his essential position against the Situ graffitti “Structures do not walk on streets” was that they very much do!
July 17, 2007 at 1:43 pm
I think the questions and analysis of experience, the inquiry into its conditions and form, that you describe is crucial. As I see it, this element got dropped out of much feminist politics and theory and the element of affirming, validating the experience of the speaker as ‘just that’ rose to the fore.
I’ve been doing some small posts on Eva Illouz who is very interesting on what we might call (in shorthand) the techniques of power imbricated in rendering the emotions as objects to be communicated (communication becoming an element of the firm in human relations approaches to managing employees and increasing productivity).
July 17, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Daniel writes:
My position is that individuals have nothing to do with class, because individuals do not exist. I think the idea of the individual is an ideological illusion. I want to radically excise the individual from philosophy; I believe that the individual has no ontological status whatsoever.
I precisely reject the conjecture that we could talk about structure as lying between individuals, in the sense “the individual finds herself enmeshed in a web that exceeds her control, understanding, and intentions.” No – I think (the mirage of) the individual is itself a product of that web, and there is no feedback relation between the individual and that web.
I think if we want to talk about feedback vis-a-vis structure, we need to talk about agents, objects, subjects, not individuals. To my mind, the concept of the individual is utterly compromised, and, since Freud, redundant.
As I said in my initial remarks, I share your concerns about the political category of the individual or specifically the Lockean individual, but I think the suggestion that bodies don’t exist causes more problems than it solves. Would structures continue to exist if all bodies were somehow eradicated from the world? In what way do structures replicate or reproduce themselves in time? Where are structures? How do structures change? Why are structures always breaking down or failing to function in precisely the way posited by their idealisations? None of these questions can be answered without thinking structures as process that must be produced and in a relation of reciprocal determination with bodies. This is one thing that Bourdieu’s concept of habitus explains very well.
Lacan came to deny the closure of structure and the idea that they could be exhaustively mapped around the time of Seminar 6, arguing at the end of that seminar that this presupposes that the Other exists. Hence we get Lacan’s introduction of lalangue in Seminar 20.
July 17, 2007 at 4:55 pm
Since you seem to be collecting – I love the way these blog-rhizomes bring out the spontaneous curator in people – here are a couple of links you may have missed:
Whorecull on the cultural confidence of “southern parasites”: http://www.cinestatic.com/whorecull/music/2007_07_01_archive.asp#223236083307452790
Kim Dot Dammit on class and alienation: http://kdotdammit.livejournal.com/1031383.html
July 18, 2007 at 12:10 pm
dr Sinthome, Anthony Paul Smith told me to ask your professional opinion about why I am fantasizing him as an angellic choir boy in a girlie dress, so maybe you could help?
July 18, 2007 at 3:44 pm
From the point of view of the system, I could understand the idea that individuals don’t exist. They are residents, or party members, or militants, or taxpayers, or householders – they are variables, in other words. If they continue to function properly – pay their bills, vote the right way, form the right demographic for the tv shows made for them, etc. – the system will function smoothly. But when the variable stops functioning smoothly – stops paying the bill, or the taxes, makes an unexpected motion at the party congress, refuses to march, stops painting the house and doing upkeep – something happens, an upsurge that I think deserves the name experience. Experience is what is repressed from the system point of view – system as embodied in institutions like corporations, governments, schools, etc. – and is handled by first line defenders – complaints departments, p.r. people, etc. – usually with a tone of exasperation. Because almost always, when the bill isn’t paid or the wrong motion is introduced at the party congress, some tiresome personal story goes along with it. Some old geezer will talk of having learned to hate war in WWII at a Labour conference convened to praise the war leadership of the Prime Minister; some tearful housewife will tell a tale of job loss and alcoholism. And the point of the first line defenders is to remind these people that it doesn’t matter. Whatever their experience is, it is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand. That irrelevance, from the top down p.o.v., is just what fantasy is.
July 18, 2007 at 5:28 pm
I think this is right. I take it that part of the value of Deleuze’s account of individuation is that it provides an ontology proper to how this works. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze treats the multiplicities belonging to the virtual as structure, such that the individuals actualized are functions of structure. In this way, structure shouldn’t be taken as something that abolishes the category of individual, but rather individual and structure must be thought in their relation to one another.
This point is very good. I think we can ask, in a somewhat Derridean fashion, what are the conditions for the possibility of distinguishing structure at all? If structure always functioned smoothly and completely without remainder, then it’s likely that we would likely be without a concept of structure at all. It is precisely because structure breaks down that structure can be identified.
July 19, 2007 at 7:15 am
[…] you can read here – k-punk’s trackbacks don’t seem to work but the page is there). Larval Subjects has a kind of round-up and commentary and there’s some other stuff over at various other […]
August 15, 2007 at 7:28 pm
Thanks for this summary Synth. What, in your view, are supposed to be the stakes of the arguments here? Like, what will be entailed by this or that side being proven correct? And can you say more about your suspicions about the individual that you share with Daniel? Because those don’t speak to me in the slightest. Clearly any human individual is implicated in, a product of, and productive of various collectivities of all sorts of types, but that doesn’t mean the individual is not. More to the point, that does not mean that all humans who have aspired to something they have thought of as individuality or expressions of their individuality are victims of ideology or otherwise wrong.
take care,
Nate
ps- I’m happy to hear about your reservations about psychoanalysis applied beyond the clinical setting, though I think my own views on the matter are much stronger than yours.
August 16, 2007 at 10:50 pm
[…] a fight with K-Punk (that eventually produced excellent responses at I Cite, Rough Theory, and Larval Subjects). Blogging hurts people; more so, and more obliquely, than most face-to-face conversations. […]