In response to my recent diary on the public, Shahar of Perverse Egalitarianism writes:
the “pedagogic” comments are all too irritating, but then again, the hazard of the public is of course, nothing less than the perverse egalitarianism of the internet.
Recently, in an argument or line of reasoning that makes me suspicious or somewhat uncomfortable, I’ve been thinking that democracy is the one “true” form of the political. This line of reasoning arises in response to Socrates’ question in the Euthyphro where it is asked “is piety pious because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is pious?” Under the first option, we get the logic of sovereignity, where the sovereign is the first term (whether that sovereign be the gods, God, the emperor, the priest, or the leader) such that the sovereign makes the good what it is. That is, under this first option there is nothing intrinsic to the nature of the good, but rather it is the will of the sovereign that makes the good what it is. Thus, for example, it is impossible to claim that the actions of Caligula or Nero are wrong in themselves, for Caligula and Nero, as sovereigns, are those who decree and create the law. By contrast, under the second option– moral realism –there are transcendent standards by which sovereignity itself can be evaluated. If the actions of the Greek gods or the Christian God can be said to be wrong, if it is possible to claim that the caesar is a bad emperor, then this is because there is some standard that transcends the gods, God, and the caesar. All of this is bound up intimately with previous diaries I have written on Lacan’s graphs of sexuation and, in particular, the masculine side of the graph of sexuation.
Setting aside the possibility of moral realism (which is a position I reject due to it’s commitment to transcendence), what might lead to the conclusion that democracy– which I do not believe has ever existed or been realized despite certain configurations that call themselves democracy –is the one true form of politics? If democracy is the one true form of politics, then this is because it is that form of the political where relations of power and the social are least obfuscated or disguised. Here my inspiration is Feuerbachian. Feuerbach famously argued that God is nothing but alienated man. That is, we project our highest aspirations and desires onto another being, but then experience these qualities not as existing in and from us, but in something else. God is thus an alienated and distorted image of our own essence or nature.
Something similar seems to occur in the case of political systems. Let us take the example of a monarchial system. In a monarchial system I experience power as residing elsewhere in the figure of the monarch. The monarch possesses some enigmatic feature that grants the monarch a power that other subjects do not possess. However, just as the protagonist of Kafka’s Before the Law is the secret of the law, the source of the law’s power, so too can the monarch only be a monarch if his subjects recognize him as a monarch. In short, the source of the monarch’s power is the monarch’s subjects, yet the monarch’s subjects do not recognize themselves as the ones who give the monarch his power, but instead, like Feuerbach’s religious subjects, see the power of the monarch as a mysterious and enigmatic property that is “in the monarch more than himself”.
In light of this line of reasoning, democracy would be the “true” form of politics insofar as it is that form of politics where the social relations underlying power are no longer obfuscated, but are now encountered directly and immanently. Under democracy social subjects encounter themselves as both the source of power and the principle of their own constraint. Or to put the point a bit differently, every form of politics is democratic since every social organization only sustains itself through the consent of the demos, but only democracy reveals this truth in and for itself. In this connection, rather than claiming that democracy is the “true” politics, it could instead be said that democracy is the real of the political, or the truth of the political. The question would then become that of what would be required for democracy to be genuinely realized. Negri and Hardt have a great deal of interesting things to say, for example, about the problems of representation with regard to radical democracy in Multitudes. At any rate, perhaps others could explain to me why I’m suspicious of this argument or why I should be suspicious of this argument.
This line of reasoning arose out of anxiety in relation to the most recent article I wrote on Deleuze and individuation, where I was asked to discuss politics and individuation. What I discovered as I worked through a good deal of Deleuze, and those influenced by Deleuze, is that while there is a great deal that is of interest and significance to political theorists in Deleuze, there is not, I think (and I could be mistaken), a determinate or worked out conception of the political in the work of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari. Much of their work, I would say, is in fact sociological, describing the dynamics of the social, without being political. And if this is the case– Paul Patton’s treatment of Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche in Deleuze and the Political aside –then this is because we are left without any sort of decision procedure for choosing multiplicities, immanence, nomadic singularities, etc., over molarities and transcendence. Note, in saying this I am not suggesting that a Deleuzian politics is not possible, only that I am unable to find it directly in Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari’s work. Towards the end of Anti-Oedipus, for example, Deleuze and Guattari directly say that they have no political program. However, it is clear that there isn’t a single page of their collaborative work– and much of Deleuze’s own work –that isn’t political in nature.
At any rate, what does any of this have to do with Shahar’s off-hand, yet on-target comment about egalitarianism and the internet? Well, I think Shaher’s comment speaks to questions about the possibility of concretely realizing democracy. In many respects I think it could be said that academia is a sort of reaction formation or defense against democracy. Is it a mistake that Plato forms the academy following the murder of Socrates? Socrates, as it were, reveals a sort of real or impossibility or real at the heart of dialogue, or the manner in which it is always beset by the antagonism of the imaginary. The academy defends against this through the production of regulated encounters in the form of journals, discourse in the form of books, organized conferences with like minded or like conditioned (Bourdieu) individuals, credentializing institutions, the hierchialization between student and professor, and controlled encounters. The academy thus becomes a way of avoiding the repetition of Socrates’ fate. Everyone is happy. The social world need not put up with the irritation of having a gadfly like Socrates on the street corner, and the philosopher can continue on with his or her discussions.
Yet with internet the controlled nature of these encounters is undermined and we are faced, once again, with the question of the uncontrolled, an-archic encounter sans the protections of an academic habitus, ranking, credentialing, or the reassuring and pacifying mediating difference of discussion through articles and books as opposed to sloppy, real-time encounters, etc., by being confronted with a space where everyone can participate (that is, everyone that is who enjoys a rank within the system of capitalism that would allow them internet access… not a small thing). Yet the internet is not simply an an-archic space where one is unable to anticipate his or her interlocutors, where a shared academic habitus cannot be assumed. It is also a space in which one can no longer hide behind polished and delayed work that would allow for the presentation of oneself in the form of a simulacrum of completeness and mastery. Incidentally, the nature of the net as a democratic space would also be why the question of whether to moderate comments is an ethical and political question. The only real democratic solution here would be one of community moderation. This aside, the manner in which all of the nasty elements of the imaginary are released within the space of the an-archic, non-representational encounter raises the question of the possibility of the democratic, as this imaginary dimension seems to internally destroy the democratic, and calls for a renewed thinking of communicative action that would be very different from the idealized picture presented to us by Habermas. Where I’m going with this, I don’t know.
Larval Subjects . 
June 18, 2008 at 6:54 pm
I was just wondering about the claim that democracy is the “truth” and “real” of politics. My Knowledge of Lacan’s take on ‘truth’ isn’t that solid, but arn’t the two quite different?
As far as democracy as a “direct” and “immanent” form of politics, Zizek’s argument is that there’s no such possibility, that one is necessarily alienated and to posit a direct contact is to give in to the fantasy of a complete whole. (I think he says this even as early as the first chapter of SOI.) That’s why Zizek sees the “Party” as “analyst” and likens it to Hegel’s monarch – people need something to alienate themselves through. The difference between the Party as Z talks about it and Hegel’s monarch is that the latter stands for the ‘positive’ universal, while the former stands for the ’empty’ universal – I.e. proletariat.
That is, the Party’s there to help you realize what it is you need to do, but also there to cut through indecision and hysterical outbursts (acting out rather than acting) when the situation demands.
If you look at Trotsky’s _Terrorism and Communism_ (put out by Verso and Zizek recently) Trotsky talks about the party in almost Identical terms as Hegel does the monarch. I.e. Let the unions and other bodies do the work they know how to do, but the indecision that comes with crises needs to be cut through by someone with the authority (and knowledge) to do so…
Then again, you might not be happy to base a political philosophy on a book written about during war communism…but it did help stabilize Russia…
June 18, 2008 at 8:19 pm
Thanks for the comment, Battle. I think my argument is a bit different. My point is that all social systems are necessarily democratic in nature as any form of power acquires its efficacy from the relations of the demos, rather than a sovereign standing above or outside the demos. This would hold true of the Party as well, as the Party can only become efficacious through the consent of those it governs. It has no further substantial reality than this.
I think Zizek’s treatment of the Party in terms of the analyst reveals the weakness of his Lacanianism by virtue of not having a strong clinical background. Here Zizek treats the analyst as a sovereign. However, in actual clinical practice the entire aim of the analyst is to thoroughly undermine the sovereignity of the analyst as a sort of transcendental illusion. This is the essence of what it means to work through the transference. The analysand begins by believing that the analyst has a special esoteric knowledge that he would like to have, but ultimately discovers that the analyst is an idiot and a fool and that the only genuine truth lies in the unconscious, not the analyst. In other words, the aim is to break this tie itself and the way this tie repeats itself in the analysand’s other intersubjective relations. Lacan says, on occasion, that the analyst practices controlled suicide. This is because he aims at undermining his own exemplary position vis a vis the analysand. This is why the final Lacan will talk about the aims of analysis in terms of shifting from the masculine to the feminine side of sexuation, and will celebrate examples like Joyce where the logic of sovereignity is no longer operative.
I personally have a difficult time seeing how the notion of democracy relates to that of the idea of an organic or complete whole. In fact, I see democracy as precisely the opposite. The concept of a social, organic whole requires the concept of sovereignity as Plato and Hobbes both understood so well. The horror of democracy is precisely that is not such a whole, but a multiplicity without an extra-dimensional unity added from above or organic and internal relations among the parts.
June 18, 2008 at 8:42 pm
Just knocking off a chip from this, I like the point about the “simulacrum of completeness and mastery” in the ‘finished’ work (but is it ever really finished?). I’ve made a similar point about Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks; since his earlier work was mostly in the form of political journalism and letters, there’s a sense in which Gramsci never ‘finished’ anything.
Nothing gets intellectual historians excited like unfinished work, manuscripts, letters, Nachlasses. It’s not that we ignore the authorized texts, but they need a lot of processing in terms of context to become interesting. With the unfinished stuff there’s a more immediate sense of seeing behind the curtain as the ideas are roughed out and polished up. The layers of qualifying enamel have not been added and it looks like we’re much closer to the ‘true’ thought. Sometimes the traces of the enabling conversations with interlocutors who become invisible in the fully authorized version are there. The image of solitary genius in communion with the universe hasn’t been decoupaged onto such texts.
There’s even a sense in which the finishing is a LOSS.
This is something I like about bloggery and the internet. Although there still needs to be an ethic of consideration in what we write, it’s much closer to the situated, interactive roots of thinking.
June 19, 2008 at 5:36 pm
I always assumed (but maybe it’s wrong to do so) that Zizek held the same for the party – i.e. it has a knowledge as does the analyst (the S2 under the a of the analysts discourse) but it doesn’t know what ‘the people’ want. The problem with Zizek, as is often the case, is that he doesn’t give you any substantial historical background to help you think what he says – he’s just giving ideas.
In terms of ‘suicide’, though, that’s what I was trying to get at with the ’empty universal’ – that the party doesn’t have a substantial power (i.e. a ‘essential’ power of its own), but stands as a point through which people would alienate themselves to reach towards their freedom. I take it to mean that people would come to realize that ‘we are the party’, and that the party is there to primarily serve that function. To be political would be to become a party member, just as the end of analysis would be to self-authorize one’s ability to analyse…
And that’s what Z says of the ‘a’ in the analyst’s discourse – what prevents it from being the pervert’s discourse (and the satisfaction of the drive that might imply) is that the ‘a’ doesn’t have a content, isn’t filled by anything, but left open so the analysand can realize/experience that it is such.
In theory, I think that’s how Soviet Russia was supposed to be set up – i.e. the Party was to be separate from the Parliament, the trade unions, the judiciary, etc, and was supposed to be the ‘means of consciousness’ of the people. But that’s not how it played out, of course, based on historical circumstance (being surrounded by white armies, and threatened by elements in Russia as well – i’m thinking more Lenin than Stalin).
My initial question was about the ‘immanence’ stuff – do you mean that people would do away with the sovereign, that they would be in ‘direct’ contact with other people? That’s what I meant about the fantasy of wholeness – not one of an organic society (that’s what Z attributes to fascism), but the idea that social relations could become not-alienated or direct. That’s where Zizek departs from Marx in the first chapter of SOI. Hence the need for the party /analyst – there’s got to be some-one/thing there to make social reality work, AND to be decisive when something goes wrong (something akin to ‘analysis terminable and interminable’ – there will be times, even after you’re finished analysis, that you’ll have to return to it).
I’m still interested in the difference between “real” and “truth”. Can you maybe say more about that?
G
June 19, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Placing the real and truth in the same sentence together was an unfortunate word choice on my part as I was working from two distinct conceptual registers (the Lacanian and the Marxist). I was referencing the Lacanian real and the Marxist truth. By “truth” I had in mind something like Marx’s analysis of commodity-fetishism, where social relations are the “truth” of the commodity, yet where social relations become invisible in the commodity (we treat relations between people as relations between things).
My understanding of the position of truth in the discourse of the analyst is rather different. In my position the analyst does not have knowledge. Only the unconscious knows. The belief that the analyst does have knowledge is a transferential illusion on the part of the analysand that is to be overcome in the course of the analyst.
Yes, I am arguing that a genuine politics would be one that does away with sovereignity. Whether or not this is possible is another question. Hence the reason that it is the real of politics.
June 20, 2008 at 7:00 pm
[…] disgust with the blog medium, the frustration produced by rude and arrogant blog commenters, democracy and perverse internet egalitarianism, and upsetting mismatches between rhetorical effectiveness and the truth. As usual the reflections […]
June 20, 2008 at 11:41 pm
In terms of knowledge, I was thinking in terms of there being at least 3 kinds:
1) theoretical/’transmittable’ knowledge (the analyst knows about repression, slips of the tongue, transference, etc, has learned and can teach them to other would-be analysts). I thought this was the S2 in the analyst’s discourse: just as the master is split, (unbeknownst to the bondsman), the analyst possesses a wealth of theoretical knowledge, while the analysand thinks the analyst is either stupid or omnipotent…
2) know-how (when the aforementioned things arise in the analysand’s speech in the analytic situations the analyst can intervene on occasion to move analysis forward)
3) the supposed knowledge that occurs in the transference.
Without the first 2 kinds of knowledge, you don’t have an analyst, but a inter-subjective relation like many others (although, Lacan himself wonders in _the other side…_ if ‘there has even been an analyst’). The third, as you mentioned, is not a knowledge that the analyst possesses, but one that the analysand must come to learn/experience doesn’t exist (the analyst doesn’t know the analysand’s desire).
That’s what I meant when the Party has ‘knowledge’ – forms 1 and 2. That is, Party members know Marxist theory, have studied the state of the economy, history, etc., and are practiced revolutionaries; but they don’t have the answer to everything problem that might arise, and so it can’t be turned to to solve every problem that rears its head. But, you need a political horizon within which to pose problems – i.e. radical freedom in terms of the realization that nothing is guaranteed, only ventured. This space has to be guaranteed by a sovereign – one that is not a master (the ’empty’ universal).
Which brings me back to immanence – how ‘immanent’ can a relation be if it must be within a political horizon? For Z, if there’s a horizon of meaning then there’s by definition alienation, i.e. no direct relation between subjects. “Immanence” comes in the sense of “the image is the thing” – there’s nothing hidden behind the curtain.
But I assume you mean it in a Deleuzian sense, which I don’t totally understand, and I haven’t read any of your work….
Thanks for clearing up the truth thing. (and sorry for taking up so much space…)
G
June 21, 2008 at 12:17 am
As I understand it, the position of truth in the four discourses refers to what is excluded in the discourse, not a possession. In his ecrits, the “Direction of Treatment and the Principle of its Power”, Lacan says that the analyst heals more by what he is than what he does. It is the very exclusion of knowledge that allows the analyst to function as an analyst. This is in sharp contrast to psychotherapy and cognitive behavioral therapy, where the therapist knows (he categorizes, provides advice, proposes exercises, recommends books, etc). In the actual experience of undergoing analysis– especially in the initial sessions –this strange position of the analyst can be quite disturbing. I’ll never forget my opening sessions when I would ask my analyst how he was doing and there would be no response whatsoever.
For me immanence is a concept that I’m still working through, so I can’t say whether or not the immanence I’m referring to is Deleuzian or not. By “immanence” I minimally mean a relation in which there is no trascendent terms, whether these terms be unchanging legal and moral laws like inalienable rights, or whether the term be a sovereign as in Schmitt or Hobbes that stands above social relations. I personally see Zizek’s defense of the party as a betrayal of the logic of Marx’s argument, but do not find this move surprising given his Hegelianism (which I see as a betrayal of Lacan).
June 21, 2008 at 12:32 am
I’d also add that I think it’s important to be cautious in the use of the term “fantasy”. In my view Zizek often uses this strategy as proxy for a genuine argument. He claims that democracy is a fantasy because it’s impossible. This formulation immediately leads my ears to perk up, as the impossible is the real. Given this, there might be one form of democratic theory premised on fantasy insofar as it posits a sort of imaginary fullness. The question would be what would be a democratic theory premised on the democratic as the real of the social. Despite the lip-service that Zizek gives to the feminine side of the graph of sexuation and the logic of the not-all, he nonetheless seems to remain on the masculine side of the graph of sexuation, privileging the logic of totalization found there.
June 21, 2008 at 1:39 am
The more I think about it, the more perplexed I become by Zizek’s critique of democracy. The odd thing about this critique is that it seems to be premised on a very un-Lacanian understanding of the concept of fantasy. For Lacan, fantasy is not an image of illusory fullness and completeness that we must overcome so as to discover true reality. Rather, fantasy refers to the schema governing the intersubjective relations of a subject to the enigmatic Other. Fantasy responds to the question of the Other’s desire, surmounting the traumatic and enigmatic nature of that desire by giving the subject an answer to the question of what it is for the Other. Another way of putting this would be to say that fantasy converts the desire of the Other into a specific demand that the subject can then set about satisfying, thwarting, subverting, etc. It answers the question of the “che vuoi”: “you’re telling me this but what do you really want?” The fantasy frame thus constitutes the elementary scheme governing all of the subject’s intersubjective relations, such that it provides the sense of any statement others might be making (“they’re really out to get me”, “they think I’m funny”, “they want me to explain things to them”, etc), and also becomes a sort of grid that the analysand strives to situate others in so that it might enact the fantasy scenario underlying all the subject’s intersubjective relations. For example, the subject might perpetually try to situate others in such a way as to get himself rejected. Within this framework, it’s difficult to see how democracy functions as a fantasy or a response to the question of the che vuoi.
June 21, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Maybe Zizek’s critique of democracy is more a critique of what has been claimed to be democracy. In other words, Zizek critiques democracy just as you say it hasn’t ever really happened. I know he skirts around this kind of reading, but what you say about fantasy, particularly with the example of situating others so as to be thwarted, makes me want to try it again. In this sense, the democracy that Zizek critiques is that which defines itself all kinds of self-defeating ways. Maybe Zizek just doesn’t like the word “democracy” because of how consistently it has been used to effect something other than democracy.
The bit on television and elections I mentioned point to just this kind of critique. What is more self-defeating than a vision of democracy in which one can imagine phrases like, “he’s unelectable”? It gives The People the illusion of choice with comfort of the certainty that it’s either “us or them.” The “forced choice” of democracy as Zizek frames it seems to be the true object of his critique. So much so that I think Zizek just says he’s against democracy because so many already understand it to involve this forced choice, though no one admits it works like that. Rather than say “let’s see how we can make democracy work” he’s trying to create a (at least theoretical) space in which the compulsion to repeat the democratic failure can be held at bay long enough to work through it.
June 22, 2008 at 6:41 pm
“In short, the source of the monarch’s power is the monarch’s subjects, yet the monarch’s subjects do not recognize themselves as the ones who give the monarch his power, but instead, like Feuerbach’s religious subjects, see the power of the monarch as a mysterious and enigmatic property that is “in the monarch more than himself”.”
The problem with this argument is at least three-fold:
1. If all regimes are with the consent of the demos, then effectively all regimes are (more or less) the same. We would have few ways of distinguishing regimes from one another – the principle of rule of the Prince-Archbishop of Mainz is the same as the Monastic State of the Teutonic Knights is the same as the Manchu Empire is the same as the Third French Republic is the same as the Rule of the Argentine Generals, etc.
2. Effectively, every long-standing political regimes must then be endorsed by the people. If that’s the case, we wouldn’t see such political phenonmenon as successful revolutions occurring immediately after a regime’s armies have been defeated or the regime faces a severe financial crisis. I.E. the revolution has a chance of success precisely because instruments of oppression have been removed or weakened, not because the people heartily approved of the regime.
3. Feuerbach’s description is only valid if there is, in fact, no mystery or enigmatic property supporting the regime. In more concrete terms, what if the gods do in fact love the king (or Athena loves Athens or Adonai loves King David or the Mandate of Heaven being given to the Chinese Emperor)? But most people in most historical times (including such democracies as ancient Athens, the medieval city-states with their patron-saints, etc) did believe that their regimes were indeed so favored. The massive prevalence of this isn’t something to be ignored.
June 22, 2008 at 7:12 pm
Burritoboy, Many thanks for the comment. It seems to me that you’re ignoring a key point in my argument with your first point:
On the one hand, the monarch is only able to rule so long as his subjects recognize his authority. Those guards standing to either side of the monarch could demonstrate the monarch’s status as an ordinary person whenever they like with their swords. On the other hand, the difference between democracy and systems such as monarchy is that the subjects under monarchy do not experience the power of the monarch as coming from themselves, but as issuing from the monarch himself. In other words, just as Marx’s commodity is a relation where relations between people instead appear as relations between things, monarchy is a governmental system where relations among people instead appear as relations issuing from the monarch. That is, these relations are veiled.
This is why, in response to point 2, successful revolution is always preceded by a series revolutions in thought and the social sphere (revolutions in the symbolic), where the nature of how social relations are thought is itself transformed.
As for point 3, the whole point of Feuerbach’s critique is that our relationship to God does take on the nature of mystery and enigma, thereby veiling the real social relations that underly our conception of divinity. So too in our relationship to the monarch, the dictator, etc., where the sovereign is thought of as possessing some enigmatic and mysterious property over and above his being as a human being, veiling the manner in which our obedience to the sovereign is premised only on the power we attribute and give to the sovereign.
June 23, 2008 at 5:37 am
“So too in our relationship to the monarch, the dictator, etc., where the sovereign is thought of as possessing some enigmatic and mysterious property over and above his being as a human being, veiling the manner in which our obedience to the sovereign is premised only on the power we attribute and give to the sovereign.”
Again, what if the king is in reality especially beloved or favored by the gods? That the governed are not attributing power to him but are instead correctly understanding the desires of the gods?
June 23, 2008 at 8:00 pm
“This is why, in response to point 2, successful revolution is always preceded by a series revolutions in thought and the social sphere (revolutions in the symbolic), where the nature of how social relations are thought is itself transformed.”
Perhaps, but the converse is not always true – the revolution in thought can occur without a successful revolution. Look for example at the huge variances in time where European states became modern social contract democracies. The time variance goes from the Netherlands in the seventeenth century to some nations (Spain, Portugal, Hungary, etc) only becoming modern social contract democracies in the past 30 years. A period of time stretching to more than 300 years. Of course, the revolution in thought happened later in Hungary or Spain than it did in the Netherlands or the UK, but it still often takes 100+ years for that revolution in thought to become a revolution in fact. And regimes that last 100+ years in the face of popular opposition aren’t artifacts to be ignored or downplayed.
June 25, 2008 at 4:48 pm
I could be mis-representing the Z here, but by ‘fantasy of wholeness’ I meant that fantasy obfuscates the antagonism (the lack in the big social Other) at the heart of social relations, making it appear as if society is an organic whole. i.e. “Society doesn’t exist”.
His critique of democracy is also a critique of a particular democracy – liberal-democracy, which for all its talk of equality and rights bases it all on that one inalienable right that they refuse to cede on – that to property. Michael Ignatief (a Canadian intellectual who was at Harvard for a couple of decades, but has returned to the country to try to become PM) goes so far as to say that there is no significant redistribution of wealth because people haven’t voted on the issue, which is more or less just a way of distracting attention from the fact that he writes that the redistribution of wealth would violate people’s rights. I don’t think Z is against democracy all together – just this brand of it.
I was reading Bobbio’s book on Liberalism and Democracy the other day, and he notes that each of those terms comes from a different starting point – liberalism from economics and democracy from politics. Hence their relative incompatibility in Bobbio’s view. Marx’s breakthrough was of course to show that beginning with the economic, you get to the political. So instead of labouring on objects beginning as freeing and culminating as a justification for the unfreedom of others (i.e. Locke justifying slavery) you get the next step: the unfree liberating themselves for the benefit of all.
As for betrayal, don’t DG, somewhere in TP, say that one of the ways for the new to arrive is through betrayal? (the discussion of Aguirre:wrath of God). And isn’t Lenin in some sense a betrayal of Marx? The revolution didn’t play out the way Marx would have thought…
June 25, 2008 at 5:02 pm
BG, just a quick note. I fully concur with Z’s critique of liberal democracy. This is why I’m always careful to emphasize that democracy has never existed. What I am speaking of when I refer to democracy is something like the radical egalitarianism we find in Ranciere, Badiou’s political truth-procedures, or Negri and Hardt.
July 3, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Can you recommend a piece or two by Ranciere? I’ve never looked at his stuff before.
I was looking at Bobbio’s book again, and he notes that the notion that the people are the source of political power is enshrined in many of the founding documents of the American states (he cites Virginia, I think). That is, The founders of the American political system knew that it was the people who had the power. Bobbio goes on to argue that these people had no illusions of creating a Greek style demos, however, where each citizen represented themselves – this because the scale was far to large. You have to have representatives (a division of labour) because you just can’t organize that many people in that way.
He goes on to point out that ‘a representative’ doesn’t mean ‘of your specific interests’ either, but of the universal interests of the social body. Otherwise all you get are people fighting for their particular interests, rather than looking out for the social organization as a whole. These are the same limits imposed by trade-unionism: they’ll fight for the rights of the workers in their particular sector, but usually have little interest in universal questions.
In this way the Sovereign, representative democracy or the Party aim at universalism. Where the later represent the ‘positive’ universal of Feudalism and Capitalism, the Party represents those “in but not of” (Marx) civil society.
This same tension exists (according to Sherry Turkle) for the psychoanalytic movement. In her book on Lacan’s school in France (I think it’s chapter 5) she discusses how an institution is needed to ensure the life of the movement (The Freudian School, The IPA, whatever training institution), but for a movement centred on dissolving the transference this becomes a huge problem: you need a big Other (an institution) to stand as the shared space for the movement, but you also need to realize that ‘the Other doesn’t exist’, that there is no subject who knows your desire, in order to become an effective analyst. It is to this tension that Turkle attributes the vicissitudes of the Lacanian and Freudian movements. Perhaps it is also at the root of the constant fracturing of parties of the left: dealing directly with the antagonism at the heart of society (i.e. capitalism and exploitation) makes for a political contradiction over the praxis best suited to the problem…
Turkle writes that a psychoanalysis without an institution would be a highly tense environment where individuals relate directly with each other. She doesn’t go into detail (because such a ‘state of psychoanalytic nature’ has never really existed) but I imagine it to be hell: if you had to open yourself to the ‘complete otherness’ of every person you met, you would be drained all the time and never get anything done. One needs a shared social space where certain things can be assumed so you can act. Perhaps a study of cross-faction interactions between Jungians, Freudians, Lacanians, Kleinians, etc, would paint a picture resembling what Turkle hints at: with no shared space, they’d be forced to really open themselves up to what the others were about…
But isn’t this exactly what you were talking about re: posting’s to your site? You have to put up with people like me who think they know something, and you spend all your time in useless debates…
Turkle goes on to note that the ‘Confrontations’ forum was created to serve as a space where dissenting Lacanian analysts could gather and discuss competing theories of analytic practive. However, it served as a _supplelmentary_ space: it relied on other institutes to take care of training. While it was anti-hierarchical, it exists (existed?) only so long as there’s some other thing to take care of the other things that need to be done.
This is the argument that Z makes Re: Critchley/Negri (more so Critchley – he says he sees a lot of potential in Negri and Deleuze) in the seventh chapter of _Defense of Lost Causes_: the only way you can have self-organized bodies outside the state is when the state exists as the guarantor of that space. And so he argues that one need seize the state and transform it, rather than operate outside it and ‘let it do the dirty work’ of making the social world exist.
All this to say is that I’m not convinced that an ‘immanent’ politics is possible; Even an analyst is a split subject and dependent on a (more or less centralized) shared social space.
July 4, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Ranciere’s Disagreement would be the place to begin. Badiou’s account of being as multiplicity without one in Being and Event is also relevant here. The issue isn’t one of whether or not there can be movements as in the case of the psychoanalytic movement, but of whether these movements are organized in terms of a sovereign master or entity such as the party, or whether they’re egalitarian self-organizing movements. Another way of putting this would be in terms of the difference between movements organized according to the masculine side of the graphs of sexuation and movements organized around the feminine side of the graphs of sexuation. Everything in Lacan’s own work indicates the latter. Whether we’re speaking of Lacan’s break with the IPA earlier in his career, his critique of ego psychology and the role of the “analyst” as master, the manner in which he organized his own schools and perpetually dissolved them whenever he began to be placed in the position of master and the school became reified, what he tried (unsuccessfully) to accomplish with the structure of the pass, and so on. As I’ve argued elsewhere on this blog, Lacan was the first “anti-Oedipus” (I’m talking about Oedipal social structures here). Much of what I’mm vaguely trying to develop here is based on my experience of Lacanian psychoanalytic institutions and how they’ve attempted to organize themselves in a way that would stay true to the principle that the Other does not exist, that there is no metalanguage, that there is no Other of the Other, and that the Woman does not exist.
This is precisely why traversing the fantasy is so painful and anxiety provoking.
July 4, 2008 at 7:17 pm
Zizek, too, says that: somewhere towards the end of _Parallax View_ he calls Lacan’s dissolution of the various schools a “Leninist gesture.” Read back into the concept of a Leninst Party, the implication is that the nature of the sovereignty of the party is different than that of Hegel’s monarch and like that of the analyst: a master that’s no master at all.
For sure on the ‘anti-oedipus’ comment – even D and G in the latter chapters of Anti-Oedipus give Lacan some praise, writing that the imaginary, symbolic and Real “…are necessary – precisely in order to lead Oedipus to the point of its self critique. The task of Lacan is to lead Oedipus to such a point” (310).
If I remember correctly, in _The Other Side…_ Lacan writes that Oedipus is a defense mechanism, and “totally unworkable” because of it. That is, it hides the fact that jouissance isn’t forbidden, but impossible. I read the penultimate chapter of _Defense of Lost Causes_ last night, and Z makes a similar argument regarding democracy: formal democracy, (the act of voting) is merely a defense against the ‘truth’ of democracy – the explosion of ‘violence’ that restructures the social space in the interests of the internally-excluded. This leads him, of course, to the dictatorship of the proletariat: where liberal democracy is the dictatorship of the Bourgeois, hidden beneath formal democracy, a socialist revolution would transform the state in the interests of workers…
(Interestingly enough, He says Greek democracy was like this too: A group of people who were in the interstices of the existing political and social structure refused the rule of their own dictators… (I don’t know if that’s accurate or not – I really don’t know anything about Greek democracy…))
As regards fantasy, I assume analysts don’t walk around anxious all the time. I also assume identifying with one’s symptom means one is somehow able to still go about creating stuff, living, etc. If the end of analysis is to identify with, and not destroy, the symptom, what does this mean for a political theory based in Marxism? If the symptom IS in fact destroyed in a socialist revolution (i.e. the excluded proletariat cease to exist as a class because the mode of production is transformed) Zizek has to replace it with something else. It seems to me that this ‘something else’ is the destructive/ creative act itself. Anthony Johnston has a paper on IJZS called “The Disappearing Act,” and in it argues (if I remember rightly) that Lacan thought that the Act was necessarily repressed. Zizek, however, doesn’t want to give in to the idea of “the sober morning after”, the formalization and repression of the Act as a defense against it (i.e. formal democracy occluding the ‘explosion’ of democracy I was just talking about). This is part of the “Bartleby” shtick that Z develops a little at the end of Parallax: In place of an Antigone who is buried in a tomb, or a “Young Comrade” (Brecht) who is erased with lime so the struggle can continue, Bartleby as Act has to remain a visible, acknowledged fact. The trick, I imagine, is to figure out how to keep that from becoming a religious cult (like what Stalin did with Lenin).
…
July 6, 2008 at 9:12 pm
Of course analysts walk around anxious all the time. Zen masters and supermen do not become analysts, exactly the opposite.
The ‘something else’ of the creative/destructive act reminds me of Georges Sorel’s idea of violence and the ‘myth of the general strike’ as the continuous rupturing of settled institutionality. Gramsci critiqued this notion by pointing out that ultimately an ethic of pure spontaneity would itself become an iron determinism.
July 6, 2008 at 9:44 pm
There is also the problem of how to keep the party from becoming a hierarchical quasi-religious cult, as well. Sartre has a number of interesting things to say about this in his later work, The Critique of Dialectical Reason. Along these lines, you’ve raised a number of empirical problems with actually existing democracy (most of which I agree with), but you seem to ignore the similar problems that have haunted strong centralized party systems (the problems with the Soviet party system, of course, but also the sorts of problems that plagued the French Communist Party). Once again, when I refer to democracy I am not referring to any existing democratic systems (which I would argue are not truly democratic). This is why there can be a question of what a politics premised on democracy would look like (i.e., it wouldn’t be a question if democracy existed). In a Lacanian sense, it could be said that democracy is the real that always haunts any politics, rather than reality. When I refer to democracy I am referring to something closer to the pure multiplicities without one described by Ranciere or Badiou, or the radical egalitarianism Badiou and Zizek are referring to when they speak of universalism. The problem with party systems is that they start out for good utilitarian reasons (the reasons you’ve outlined), but quickly degenerate into hierarchical systems where the party becomes more important than the multiplicity, and where the aim becomes one of preserving the party against change or deviation. In other words, the party comes to betray the egalitarian impetus that first led to its formation. This trajectory can be traced in nearly every system where party has become the central organizing principle.
July 6, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Dr. Sinthome,
Isn’t the kinds of problems with party-based politics you suggest much like the problem of ego-psychology per Lacan’s view? If this is the starting point for Zizek’s appropriation of Lacan, then from that vantage the problem of party-politics is as much in the relationship between the party and the people as in something internal to the party.
In other words, Zizek’s ideas about The Party, if it truly attains an analytic status, don’t appeal to an old sense of replacing one Master with a new one (Lacan’s warning to student revolutionaries). It would be one thing if he came across as simply just (not) offering that, but I think Adrian Johnston’s figuring of Zizek’s cultural curiosities as a “psychopathology of everyday (21st Century) life” shows an important part of Zizek’s political agenda too, one which addresses and works with the position of “the people” as much as “the party.”
Ultimately I gather he wants to avoid not only a Party that positions itself as a Master, but one that can avoid being positioned by the people as one too.
July 7, 2008 at 1:17 am
Hi Joe,
I think this is right. The question is whether or not there are tendencies internal to the party system– let us call them “micro-fascisms” –that don’t already tend in a direction that betrays the egalitarian premise of these forms of social organization. I think Lacan struggled with this question over the course of his entire career. It is not by mistake that Lacan’s critique of ego-psychology was also accompanied by a critique of the institutional form that the IPA had taken and the position of the analyst vis-a-vis the analysand. When Lacan broke with the IPA and founded his own school he did not model it on the other psychoanalytic schools but, significantly, opened it to a general public where anyone could participate and make contributions regardless of whether they were analysts or analysands. Moreover, Lacan broke a number of psychoanalytic doxas in his willingness to work with homosexuals and the manner in which he put women on equal footing. Finally, the manner in which Lacan attempted to structure the ultimately unsuccessful pass (a miserable failure in my view), and his dissolution of his various schools can be read as responses to Oedipalized institutional formations that continuously came into being and as attempts to re-organize the school in a form that would be true to the principle that the Other does not exist, that there is no Other of the Other, that there is no meta-language, and that the Woman does not exist. The Lacanian schools continue to be more or less experimental to this day depending on whether or not Lacan’s teaching becomes a shibboleth or a sacred text. The history of the psychoanalytic schools as a whole can be read as a series of crises revolving around this contradiction and the question of what an egalitarian group would look like.
July 7, 2008 at 1:28 am
The manner in which Lacan transforms the meaning of the diagnostic categories and the concept of the symptom is also worth noting in this connection. The diagnostic categories are no longer understood as maladies or sicknesses to be cured by a return to some supposed normality, but instead become ways of relating to the Other and jouissance. Likewise, the symptom itself become the mark of the analysand’s singularity– as Lacan puts it in Seminar 22, “there is no subject without a symptom” –rather than being a tumor to be excised. Of course, there is a transformation of the symptom that takes place over the course of analysis. Where the symptom begins as a fixation where jouissance is repetitively drawn from a particular source, over the course of analysis the symptom becomes closer to a sort of mathematical function– f(x) = 2x + 4 –that becomes open to infinite variation and which is no longer fixated on a single source of jouissance.
July 7, 2008 at 2:42 am
Maybe Zizek’s critique of democracy is more a critique of what has been claimed to be democracy.
Joe, why do you automatically pre-suppose that Zizek didn’t mean what he said about fantasy and democracy and that there’s some meta-parodic level to his words, as though he is a guru (the Big Other) that knows ”the Truth”?
July 7, 2008 at 2:49 am
Dejan, I think you get at the fundamental point here. In what way is Zizek not occupying the position of the master? Here there is potentially a manifest contradiction between the letter of his theory (that the most traumatic truth is that the Other does not exist– as articulated in The Sublime Object of Ideology –and his theoretical practice. The issue is that Zizek gives the reader the impression that there is an interpretation for everything. This is equivalent to saying that the Woman does exist, insofar as it is premised on the position that there is a signifier for everything. Thus, while Zizek might espouse the position that the symbolic is radically fissured by the real, his theoretical practice seems to suggest the exact opposite. As a result, rather than working through the transference and leading the reader to a separation from belief in the idea of a subject that is supposed to know, Zizek’s practice can very well be read as reinforcing the idea in the supposition of a subject that knows. In Seminar 22 Lacan distinguishes between believing in the symptom and identifying with the symptom. The former position is premised on the idea that there is a final signifier that would complete the system of signifiers and establish a totality (masculine sexuality, basically). The latter is premised on an identification with the real itself or the fundamental fissure in the symbolic that cannot be recouped or sublated. It seems to me that much in Zizek’s thought can be read as a symptom of not acknowledging the real (as paradoxical as that may sound) or as believing that the Other does exist. This would be found not only in his endless interpretations, but in his identification with the party system, his reading of Hegel, as well as his constant flirtations with “the good terror”.
July 7, 2008 at 3:07 am
This would be found not only in his endless interpretations, but in his identification with the party system, his reading of Hegel, as well as his constant flirtations with “the good terror”.
For me it is easily identifiable as a ”remnant” of his Communist past and education in the self-managing system. The supreme irony is that he based his entire political project against Communism (that Laibach thing was supposed to have been a parody of Communist double-binds) on what is essentially the position of an ex-Yugoslav Commie aparatchik. My ex-Lacanian analyst in the early 90s knew him from local psychoanalytic congresses, before he became internationally famous, and always told me he was a logorrheic and a pompous ass.
But the interesting thing is that young lefty people who gather in the blawgosphere seem to take him on his terms, which probably means that dr. Zizek sensed the mechanics of simulacral capitalism, in which the media acquire magical properties. Ever since Hitchcock’s superficial and vulgar readings of Freud, the media have portrayed psychology as this arcane art where everything has a hidden deep meaning etc.
July 10, 2008 at 10:19 pm
I’d like to hear more on the idea that “The issue is that Zizek gives the reader the impression that there is an interpretation for everything. This is equivalent to saying that the Woman does exist, insofar as it is premised on the position that there is a signifier for everything.” It’s not clear to me how Zizek’s writing does that.
In one of his interviews with Daly, he writes that the reason he returns to the same examples and ‘gives endless interpretations’, as you put it, is because the interpretation is always a failure – that is, there is no substantial ‘thing’ to get at, all there is is its ‘appearance’. This is something that he introduces in SOI, and takes up again in his essay on Lukacs: First you get a naive reading of a text/situation, and assume that it is the truth. Then you see that others have also made interpretations. Rather than seeing them as all wrong or as all equally right, you have to take them all and use them to ‘refine your theory of the present’ – that is, you can only ever read the present and past from your engaged point of view. This differs from the second step – the myriad of different readings – in that there is a correct place from which to be engaged. In Marxist terms that is, of course, that of the proletariat, the internally-excluded ‘in but not of’.
It is also unclear to me how Zizek’s ‘identifying with the party system’ is an example of clinging to the big Other when he explicitly writes that the party as he envisions it would structurally work as does the analyst, and when he calls Lacan’s moves to break up his school (which you approve of above as anti-oedipal) a ‘Leninist move’. That is, he sees the problems of party politics as analogous to those of the solidification of the Lacanian school. To identify “The Party” with the Stalinist version of it is, I think, a mistake. Part of his work is to take the time to show that Lenin’s work doesn’t necessarily turn into Stalin’s version of things, and this goes for the Party too.
I would also argue that the problem you point out with Zizek’s theorizing is not a problem with his alone, but theorizing in general: that’s why you get Kantians, Hegelians, Lacanians, etc etc: people tend to fall into the “but Deleuze, Marx, Lenin say this, and you’re deviating from that! They knew what they were talking about!” This is a huge problem as a student for sure, but not limited to it. I don’t see it as any more pronounced for Zizek than for anyone else. If you read Zizek seriously (as with any theorist) you don’t just repeat what they say, but try to think through their arguments and see if they work, can be improved, should be rejected, etc, etc.
In his review of Parallax View, Jameson notes that Z had there formalized an idea; and when you go back and read SOI in light of Z’s writing about parallax you can totally see that it’s already there. Jameson’s laments this fact, however, saying that it would just become something people repeated, that it would become solidified. This, I think, is along the same lines of what you say above. But it seems to me that this is an inherent risk of letting ideas lose in the world. This shouldn’t be an argument against theorizing.
For example: Lacan’s attempts to make his writing (that is, his ecrits) unreadable (as he says in XX) so that people wouldn’t take them as rote failed. Instead of ‘returning to Freud’ and reading Freud’s work more closely, what happened was that people started cannonizing Lacan.
I haven’t read Z’s book on violence yet, but I don’t think it’s fair to call what he’s doing a ‘flirtation’. Is the assumption belie-ing that comment that violence is somehow morally wrong of itself, that there are no instances when violence is called for, that the issue shouldn’t be touched? Perhaps that’s not what you mean. But it seems to me you can differentiate between ‘terrors’: Z draws a line between Lenin’s Terror and Stalin’s in that the former was overt and the latter the hidden supplement to power. That is, Lenin’s terror was to root out those elements who were actively working against the revolution (though in practice this was not always the case…) while Stalin’s Terror created enemies where there were none because the Party had no political power rooted in ‘the people’ (Which Z gets in part from Getty’s book on the Stalinist Terror): under Stalin in the late Thirties absolutely no-one could consider themselves safe because it was impossible to be on the ‘right side’ of the revolution, which wasn’t the case under Lenin. Perhaps this is where you disagree.
…
July 11, 2008 at 1:52 pm
BG, Psychoanalytically we wouldn’t look to what Zizek says about his writing (ego-level discourse at the level of the imaginary), but would rather look at how his rhetoric unfolds in its actual deployment (where we can find the traces of the unconscious and the nature of his desire). On the one hand, from the standpoint of strict psychoanalytic practice, it is problematic that Zizek offers interpretations of the sort he does at all. In the analytic setting it is the analysand that does the analytic work. When the analyst does intervene, it is to ask a question, punctuate speech (through scansion, repeating a word or sentence, or through his repetitive “hmmms”). When the analyst does offer an interpretation, it is polyvocal and not reducible to one meaning. The strategy behind this technique is clear: to effect maximal separation between analyst who the analysand assumes has knowledge, and the analyst. The trajectory of analysis is one in which the analyst gradually dies and where the analysand comes to see that he is not a master and does not have the secret of the symptom.
Yet in Zizek we perpetually find univocal forms of interpretation, often accompanied by first elaborating and then dismissing the “standard interpretations” (his common choice of words), and then offering the “only possible interpretation” (again, his common choice of words). In all of this, Zizek gives the reader the impression that he has the final signifier (he invites the analysand to believe in the system or the existence of Woman, the possibility of a metalanguage). Take, for example, the way in which he evokes the “standard interpretation” when discussing a philosopher, philosophical problem, or cultural artifact. From a rhetorical standpoint, this enacts the discourse of the master by first situating the reader in the position of the slave (the reader perhaps thought he understood, but now discovers the facile nature of his interpretation) and then situates Zizek in the position of the master as the one who has the true interpretation. Far from aiding the reader in working through his Oedipal attachment to mastery, that attachment is further reinforced.
This Oedipal structure isn’t simply present in Zizek’s textual practices, but manifests itself in a variety of ways. Obviously it can be seen at the level of Zizek’s own unconditional attachment to Lacan and Hegel. Many of Zizek’s “arguments” proceed not by argument, but rather by argument from authority. For example, in the reprint of “The Lacanian Real– Television” in the most recent issue of The Symptom, he simply parses the various phases of Lacan’s account of the death drive, referring to them as “Lacan’s teaching”, thereby alluding to this teaching as an absolute authority. We don’t get an argument for the death drive, simply an assertion. In that same article Zizek gives a defense of democracy nearly to my own defense here. However, by the time of the reprint of For They Know Not What They Do, we find Zizek claiming, in the long preface, that he had made a “dangerous bourgeois error and beginning to defend the master-based structure of the party system (Zizek did not have the concept of “multitude” in his earlier work where he defended democracy, so he couldn’t think in any other terms than the category of the “people”. In his discussion of the demos as the real of the social he came very close to the concept of multitude without quite hitting it… Here Virno’s Grammar of Multitude is illuminating). Finally, in Zizek’s discussions of the subject as void, the act, and his critiques of historicism, he recapitulates the structure of the master insofar as he is effectively disavowing castration by valorizing an act and subject not divided by history and really existing conditions.
None of this is to say that Zizek should be thrown in the dustbin or that he is worthless, only that the discourse of the master can be found all over the place once you begin to look. Moreover, the presence of this discourse will have certain structural effects. It is not by mistake that party systems have repeatedly led to certain outcomes, regardless of how well intentioned their architects. I agree that transference to the text is common among all theorists– I’ve even argued, on this blog, that it’s a necessary condition for reading anything –however, there are certain rhetorical strategies that intensify these effects. Lacan tried heroically to minimize these effects through his elliptical style, only to discover that this elliptical style intensified these effects all the more by enacting the logic of the veil. Many of the post-structural thinkers encountered something similar as a result of their style, creating alienating discipleships that were the exact contrary of the avowed aim of their texts. The question, then, of how to avoid the discourse of the master is very much an open one.
July 12, 2008 at 4:05 am
Can one avoid the discourse of the master, which is to say not make use of it, and still “hystericize the (otherwise perverse, late-capitalist) subject”? Is the only good discourse of the master or the name-of-the-father a dead one?
July 12, 2008 at 1:04 pm
That’s the question, Joe… Or one of the questions. Zizek often speaks in absolutes that are really not absolutes and poses, as our only alternative, false alternatives. In his latest, In Defense of Lost Causes, for example, he gives us the alternative of embracing an anti-authoritarian democratic politics doomed to betray the cause of emancipation or a totalitarian authoritarianism committed to lost causes. Are these really the only two alternatives. Likewise, is the passage you quote really what we witness occurring today? Remarks like Zizek’s above are why many Marxists claim that psychoanalysis is a reactionary conservativism– it glumly claims that certain structures of subjectivity are absolute and insurpassable (in this case the Oedipus), and that therefore we must organize our politics accordingly. Here we’re told that our only alternative is to organize the social space around a master or sovereign, for if we do not we’ll fall into a destructive perversion. Of course, history and anthropology teach us something quite different about what social relations are possible. Do not forget that there aren’t four discourses, but rather twenty possible discourses. What Zizek discerns as the collapse of discourse could just as easily be characterized as the formation of a new matrices of discourse. Likewise, in his final teaching (especially in the work on Joyce), Lacan tells us that one can make do without the name-of-the-father so long as one makes use of it. Joyce is an example of one who found an alternative way of knotting the borromean knots– through the sinthome –without the name-of-the-father. Finally, it’s worthwhile to keep in mind Zizek’s own obsessional tendencies. When confronted with a form of subjectivity not organized around the transcendence of the Law the obsessional tendency is to describe it in privative terms as what it is not, reducing it to perversion… Hence the history of how masculine subjects have tended to describe feminine sexuality, as well as Zizek’s own tendency to describe Buddhism in these terms and any form of theory that does not fit the Oedipal model in these terms.
July 12, 2008 at 1:17 pm
All of this is to say that great care must be taken lest psychoanalysis be treated as an a priori system of categories like Kant’s so-called categories of the understanding. Psychoanalysis perpetually risks falling into this trap by virtue of the scale and context in which it works: with individuals in relatively homogeneous and stable cultural systems. This easily gives rise to a sort of transcendental illusion where categories valid within a particular context come to seem like transhistorical universals where no other alternatives are possible. The mathemes can be highly seductive, taking on the flavor of Platonic forms. It’s important to remember that these combinatories and structures are slices of history and context and that entirely different structures are both mathematically possible and have existed historically. Good psychoanalysis works from the material, treating each new case as containing the potential to transform all metapsychological concepts. It does not begin with the concepts as an a priori and then force the material into those categories. The difference between good psychoanalysis and bad psychoanalysis could thus be thought as the difference between Bourgeois political economy and Marxist political economy vis a vis how the two approach the analysis of history. The former begins with the myth of Robinson Crusoe and tells a story of a capitalist savage, the latter notices that there’s nothing capitalist about primitive modes of production at all and instead seeks to articulate the immanent principles of that mode of production. All too often Zizek proceeds like the bourgeois economist in his use of psychoanalytic categories.
July 21, 2008 at 3:10 pm
What twenty discourses are you referring to? Do you just mean 4! = 24 permutations of the matheme, or is there some other list?
July 21, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Hi Austin,
I’m referring to the possible permutations or relations between $, S1, S2, and a. Lacan only refers to one set of permutations which we know as the four discourses. On at least one other occasion he refers to the “discourse of the capitalist”, which has a structure that doesn’t fit any of these four discourses (unfortunately my memory fails me as to where he says this and what that structure is… Perhaps someone else can chime in here). I’ve worked out these permuations which I can’t post here as they come up as code (formatting issues). I’d be happy to send you the document if you’d like to have a look, although anyone can do it for themselves by simply playing with the order of the mathemes. For example, instead of beginning with the discourse of the master (S1 —-> S2/$ // a), you can reverse the initial cell (S2 —-> S1/a // $) and then carry out the structural rotations. The fact that Lacan refers to other possible permuations (the discourse of the capitalist), argues that the master has disappeared (in Seminar 17 I believe), and that other permutations are possible a) introduces the dimension of history into these structures (not unlike Rene Thom’s historically situated structures), b) implicitly allows a critique of contemporary Lacanian doxa that sees anything that doesn’t fit the model as a dangerous form of deviation rather than simply a different structure and organization of desire with both its own internal deadlocks and organization, and c) opens a rich space of fertile inquiry into how desire and jouissance is organized in these other matrices. Moreover, it begs the question of the conditions under which the leap from one matrix to another takes place.
July 21, 2008 at 3:54 pm
I want to say that reference to the discourse of the capitalist appears in Seminar 18 or 19. This discourse has the following structure:
$—>S2
— —
S1 // a
That is, the barred subject interrogating knowledge to produce an object to be consumed with the master (the market) in the position of truth. From this discourse we can infer the other three permutations:
S1—>$
— —
a // S2
a —>S1
— —
S2 // $
S2 —> a
— —
$ // S1
Given this matrix, and if this matrix is the form of social link we currently exist in, what form does desire and jouissance take in this structure? The discourse beginning with objet a in the position of agent is particularly interesting here, as we get an agent interrogating the master, producing a barred subject. Rather than an analyst, wouldn’t this be the appearance of the cultural critic– Marx, Adorno, Deleuze and Guattari, Zizek, etc. –who reveals the emperor has no clothes or the manner in which the sovereign itself is dependent on a social field and set of conditions not of its own making?
July 21, 2008 at 8:36 pm
I think what’s interesting is, do we take this algebra as “well-defined” or not? Does mathematical formalization aspire to the kind of (literally) no-nonsense logic discussed in the Tractatus? Then any formally possible permutation of the four elements should signify something coherent within the system. “Nonsense” would necessarily manifest itself in formal incoherence… Except there seem to be 2 ways of considering this formalization:
1) the revolution method. Anything formally possible by 90-degree rotation of the master’s discourse is not nonsense.
2) just plain permutation. The capitalist discourse, for example, cannot be obtained by 90 degree rotation.
I’m tempted to say that system #1 exhausts the possibility for social links within the algebra, and that the others, like the capitalist’s or the schizo’s, would not be social links. So there’d be 4 socially linked discourses, and 20 more asocial discourses. I haven’t read the Milano discourse so I’m not familiar with how he introduces the capitalist’s, but the fact that Lacan only comments on only 5 out of 24 permutations suggests that the 19 remaining weren’t particularly helpful. Still, I’ve seen attempts to write up a matheme for schizophrenia, so maybe it would be interesting to catalogue the remaining permutations, starting with, perhaps, 90-degree rotations of the capitalist’s…
July 21, 2008 at 8:39 pm
(I’ve read XVII and XX, incidentally, so I’m more or less familiar with the original four discourses, but not the capitalist and its 3 twists)
July 21, 2008 at 9:31 pm
One fun permutation is:
S2 a
— —
$ S1
Impartial knowledge (whose truth is the split, the schizia) which addresses itself to the object-cause of desire, producing a master.
(“What you revolutionaries aspire to is a master… and you will get one” — Lacan at Paris VIII)
July 21, 2008 at 10:36 pm
The idea of a discourse of the schizophrenic strikes me as an oxymoron as the Other is not present in psychosis and therefore there is no social link, only a link with the semblable. I prefer to take a more historically situated approach to the question of the other possible permutation sets. To say that they are not helpful is to simply say they are not historically present or actualized, not that the don’t form possible social links. The reference to the discourse of the capitalist indicates the emergence of a new form of social link that merits its own investigation. I think it’s important to avoid a sort of Platonism of the mathemes that sees certain structures as eternal and invariant. Often this Platonism leads to a strange sort of moralization where logical necessity gets converted into moral prohibition– “one must not do x as it violates structure!”
Part of the motivation here would be that a lot of ink– especially in clinically oriented psychoanalytic circles (not those dominated by the literary theory folk and the Zizekians –has been spilled on the consequences of the faltering of the paternal signifier that sees this faltering in extremely apocalyptic terms. That is, rather than seeing this faltering in terms of a shift from one sort of subjective and social organization to another, any deviation from the Oedipal structure is seen in purely negative terms as a disaster for any possible form of subjectivity. Often you’ll even here Lacanian analysts waxing the hysteric about lesbian couples and single parents as somehow this will inevitably lead to perverse or psychotic children (I take it this indicates an extremely poor understanding of the difference between the name-of-the-father as a signifying-function and the real father). At any rate, such analyses are strange as 1) they seem to ignore the role that ethnography plays in Lacan’s teach, where Oedipus is no longer treated as a universal but as a variant of a much broader set of kinship structures, and 2) it seems to ignore the way in which Lacan himself was the first anti-Oedipus. Rather than seeing these historical shifts as apocalypses, I find it instead more productive to ask not how a new form of structure is pure chaos by virtue of not conforming to structures we’re accustomed to (thereby engaging in the dogmatic activity of trying to force phenomena into pre-existent categories rather than tailoring categories to the phenomena), but rather to ask what new form of organization attendant with new symptoms, forms of desire, and jouissance are present in this system.
Quoting Deleuze’s critique of thinking in terms of the negative and how order arises out of chaos in his beautiful little essay Bergsonism:
Deleuze explains that this “more in the less” arises from us expecting something to be the case and then, when having this violation contradicted, projecting the lack into the existent itself and referring to it as disorder or lacking, rather than seeing it as a different order or a different existent. Clearly psychoanalysis understood the peril of confusing the more and the less. Freud, in his early work with hysterics, did not see them as lacking or as a “disordered chaos”, but rather saw a particular order in their symptoms. Likewise in the case of psychosis. On these grounds, there is an air of confusing the more and the less in the recent string of apocalyptic discourses surrounding the faltering paternal function. Rather than discerning the contours of a new emerging form of organization the conservative psychoanalytic theorist instead discerns pure chaos that can only spell disaster. “Healed by the spear that smote you” and all that.
July 29, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Can you give a page number for the ““dangerous bourgeois error and beginning to defend the master-based structure of the party system” quote? I flipped through the new preface to find that, but had no luck. I did, however, find Zizek (again) defending the seizure of state power by… the capital ‘p’ Party. Now, if he says that he’s against the ‘master-based structure of the party system’, he’s either contradicting himself or finding something that he thinks necessary in the party form. The latter seems more likely.
I’m not sure that zizek has or needs a theory of the multitude, either – in DoLC he rejects the notion of multitude. As for democracy, I tried to imply above that of Z’s description of 2 forms of democracy, maybe the first wasn’t far from your own. But I don’t think he rejects the notion that the party is necessary for this kind of democracy to occur.
Your comment that “Zizek’s discussions of the subject as void, the act, and his critiques of historicism, he recapitulates the structure of the master insofar as he is effectively disavowing castration by valourizing an act and subject not divided by history and really existing conditions” is very perplexing, considering that Zizek argues the Act comes from the real, which is ‘extimate’ to any historical situation; that the truth can only come from a subject engaged in history and struggle (the Lukacs essay, Lenin’s choice and elsewhere); and that the analyst and the party are only able to function because they, too, are split subjects embedded in a particular situation (Lenin’s choice). In the fourth chapter of “On Violence” he describes what a ‘properly political act’ would look like in the middle east, after describing what he thinks is the ideological situation belieing the problem. Where he sees the deadlock as between two parties who base their politics on seeing themselves as victims (The holocaust, the Israeli occupation), he argues that an ‘act’ under such circumstances would be to give up those attachments. If this isn’t an attempt to describe an act based on historical reality, I’m not sure what it is.
I think that your assertion that “It is not by mistake that party systems have repeatedly led to certain outcomes, regardless of how well intentioned their architects” makes the same mistake you accuse Zizek of making – not taking into account history; seeing structures as immutable. The implication of your statement is that a socialist party is a bad thing, irrespective of time, place, or circumstance. This follows the cold war doxa that Stalin’s version of the party necessarily follows from the party during Lenin’s time. There’s a long line of literature showing that the Bolsheviks of Lenin’s time were not a bunch of authoritarians, culminating in Lars Lih’s recent book on Lenin’s “What is to be done” – an attempt to show that given the historical circumstances in Russia the Bolsheviks were in fact a very democratic organization. Implying that Stalin (or Tito, or whoever) = Lenin forgets that in just the first 8 months of the civil war the US pumped 16 Million into the white armys (and France and Britain had their hands in there too) and completely destroyed Russia’s economy, opening the door to completely new political and economic challenges. Even then, to imply that Stalin was the product of only this or that party structures are inevitably Stalinist, would be to take a teleological notion of history. There were many things that could have happened.
I also disagree To your comment that Zizek just can’t see the possibilities of new forms of subjectivity. Z asserts that the left needs a party because he sees in the left an abandonment of universal projects, which is linked to the current incarnation of the subject and the depoliticization it has brought. In “Parallax” and elsewhere he Argues that under late capitalism the subject is in the ‘perverse’ position, caught up in a superego injunction to enjoy, trapped in transgression and resistance rather than attempting systemic change. This is why he takes on current thinkers (Critchley, Badiou, Negri) and ideologies (in “Parallax”, that of fear/elation over technological advancement and the proliferation of identities) – to point out what he thinks they miss in this regard. I would argue that this is also historical.
As for the Rhetoric of the Master, I can see what you’re saying. However, I think it also misses the context from which it comes. In the Z! documentary he twice makes fun of Butler and Derridians for refusing to directly make truth claims. This line of argument is evident even in SOI. And it’s in SOI that I took the argument above: You can’t assume that a naive interpretation is truth, or that truth is relative to a time and place – and irrelevant to any other (i.e, that it has no universal potential). He accuses Butler of the latter. The third step is, of course, to assert that truth exists when engaged in struggle and comes from the standpoint of the excluded – i.e. the proletariat (under capitalism, that is). What you’re effectively arguing is that, as an academic, Zizek shouldn’t try to assert truths. Or that if he does, he shouldn’t present them as truths, but instead as provisional statements. And that if he does, he shouldn’t be couch it in terms that make people think other ways of thinking are stupid. Marx would roll over in his grave at such an assertion – he was the king of this. Not only did he adamently assert that other people’s analyses were wrong, he had no problem calling the people who made such claims idiots, sycophants and apologists of Capital. Marx was, of course, interested in giving an accurate portrait of capitalism as it exists, just as Z wants to dissect the libidinal economy of late capitalism.
I think that it’s very interesting that the complaints aimed at Zizek (by LacLau and Butler, for example) are similar to those aimed at Marx: “Sure, you have a sophisticated theory of now, but you don’t have a sustained, detailed description of socialism!” Replace socialism with ‘a political program’ and you get what L and B say to Z. The implication is that they don’t want Zizek to have an open ended project, but one that is sown closed with prescriptions for action.
I think it’s significant that Z makes his argument about interpretation in regards to different readings of Antigone. In the new Preface to “They know Not..” he REJECTS his old take on Antigone. What is this but to show that even his own readings are subject to analysis, critique and refinement? I don’t think its necessary to constantly make truth claims in such a way that immediately points out that they might change. In Marx as for Zizek, truth is to be spoken, and will be refined as time and research progresses. Daring to assert truth in a polemical way is part of being engaged. Even if Z didn’t have those flourishes, I think the implication would be much the same: a truth asserted unabashedly, in the face of others that are implicitly taken to be wrong. It’s somewhat refreshing to have it right out front: “This is what I think. I’m not going to pretend that I don’t feel strongly about this.” Brecht takes the same line: “Don’t think we’re not objective just because we’re engaged”. Skirting around what one is saying, as you’ve pointed out re: Lacan, doesn’t necessarily make people realize that truth is a work in progress. Why not assert that truth as a form, if taken on its own terms, implies that truth grows and changes? This is of course Nietzsche. Couldn’t we argue that the best way to adhere to the value of truth is to assert it from an engaged, ‘master-like’ position? The end point of the master-slave dialectic is that the slave is given the power to overthrow the master by virtue of the abilities they have been given. The master-slave (feudal) relationship becomes the more democratic liberal-borgeious relationship… and for Marx, that relation gives birth to a proletariat who will birth a more democratic relationship after that. I’m trying to say that the truth, asserted as and engaged truth, will set the slaves free…
As for the “television” piece, Zizek clearly opens the paper by saying that his aim in that instance is to clarify some of the things that Lacan says by taking a look at television. Much of his other work is an attempt to develop a notion of the death drive, so to point out that in this piece he doesn’t really do that doesn’t do much for your point. Just because he claims to be orthodoxly Lacanian doesn’t mean he doesn’t ever disagree with Lacan. There are several places in Lenin’s Choice, for instance, where he writes that “against Lacan, we should assert..”. Same goes for Marx: his entire project is an attempt to eject teleological notions of history from Marx’s work. And his Hegel is obviously not simply “Hegel”, but a very particular version of him. I.e. the left side of his work. I doubt Zizek would take everything Hegel says wholesale – one thing he takes unabashedly is of course Method, as did Marx. And at certain points rejecting certain notions of Hegel’s – the the Bureaucracy is the ‘universal class’ for instance, arguing that Hegel Misses the negative universal (the proletariat).
And I think way your have been talking about the discourses also reproduces what you’ve accused Zizek of doing re: the death drive: failing to interrogate the structure in question, taking it as an immutable teaching. Although you say Lacan leaves the door open to describe new discourses, you don’t question the relevance of the formula he gives and within which you imply this work would happen. It’s just something Lacan made up, one of his “myths”, and It worked in describing the 4 discourses he gave. Who’s to say that it’s any good for making new discourses? Why does the structure take the form it does? Why did he only talk about it in terms of 1/4 rotations, and not in terms of the many different, random combinations that may are mathematically possible, but maybe socially/politically/psychoanalytically irrelevant?
These are just the things I’ve been mulling over about your comments for the last few days…
G
July 29, 2008 at 9:04 pm
You’ll find the passage in question on page xviii:
At the time of Sublime Object, Zizek comes exceedingly close to a concept of the multitude similar to what we find in Negri, Hardt, and Virno in his critique of the master. You are correct in asserting that Lenin et al are divided subjects, however it’s important to recall that the barred subject here appears in the position of truth in the discourse structure as that which is veiled or hidden from view, allowing them to function in their capacity of master. That is, it’s what must be excluded in order for the discourse to function. Critique, in this instance, consists in revealing that split. At any rate, there is a marked shift from Zizek’s earlier work where he’s advocating something like radical democracy and his later work where he comes to endorse the master and party. The issue to work out is why he believed that shift to be necessary.
July 30, 2008 at 10:34 pm
The issue to work out is why he believed that shift to be necessary.
I’ll work it out for ya, dr. Sinthome: in the early phase he was a bit younger and cockier, then he got the BMW and the Brazilian concubine and he became a LAME OLD FART.