Subjective Destitution (over and over and over again)

Steve engages K-punk on subjective destitution, with reference to its appearance in V for Vendetta and with regard to a certain "romanticism" in the Leninist moments in Zizek's politics, which I also discussed here and here.) So, I'm thinking about their discussion with an eye to picking up this thread again. 

Here are some of Steve's criticisms of subjective destitution as carried out by V on Evie:

What bothered me was the way in which V. himself administered the process of incarceration and torture that was the motor of Evey’s subjective destitution. In the rest of the movie, as k-punk notes, V. is a sort of populist fantasy figure, enlightening the masses so that they can revolt, with the hidden assumption, therefore, that they could never do so for themselves. But the scenes of Evey’s imprisonment seem to embody the reverse (and therefore entirely mirroring) situation: that of a Leninist party elite re-educating the masses in order to overcome their “false consciousness.”

And, with regard to certain problems in Zizek:

... when Zizek quotes Brecht’s line about the Party dissolving the people and creating another one — a line that Brecht meant ironically (if not entirely honestly), but that Zizek endorses provocatively, and (beneath the shock factor) quite seriously, it seems to me that Zizek is doing exactly what he accuses his opponents of doing: covering over an unbearable, traumatic antagonism in the Real with an imaginary solution. It’s dubious how well Leninism worked in 1917, if you consider what it led to in the later history of the USSR. And it is more than dubious to see how it would work today, either in terms of challenging the worldwide capitalist system or in terms of leading to a desirable alternative afterwards, considering how thorough the grip of capital is, and how different the class structure is, today in our post-Fordist society from pre-Fordist Russia in 1917. Hardt and Negri at least take account of the changes wrought by “late” or post-Fordist capitalism in their concept of the multitude, even if their vision of rebellion is absurdly optimistic. Zizek, to the contrary, sounds to me a bit too enamored of subjective destitution, a bit too “romantic” in his envisioning of what it means to “traverse the fantasy,” to become bereft of one’s own fantasies and conditioned desires, to emerge reborn (in the religious sense) as a sort of saint of the drive. He invests negativity with a magical power of transformation. Negativity — in the sense of rupture, or what k-punk calls “nihilation” (an active breaking, as opposed to the passive nihilism that ultimately accepts things as they are) — and subjective destitution may well be necessary conditions for radical change, but they are by no means sufficient ones. There is too much of a leap between subjective transformation and social transformation, and too much dissimilarity between individual subjectivity and social subjective formations.

 

And, on subjective destitution more generally:

In subjective destitution, one can willfully submit oneself beforehand, by choosing (in the ordinary way) to put oneself in a situation in which this destitution can occur, i.e. in which the ordinary mechanism of choice is no longer operative; and, afterwards, one can accept or affirm the destitution which, in a certain way, has already occurred. (Evey does the latter, but not the former). The destitution “itself,” however, still seems to me directly unwillable, since it involves precisely an emptying-out of the will.

SteveI want to start by saying something about the Leninist dimensions of re-education. It seems to me that Steve sets up his critique of the imaginary and romantic elements in Zizek's version of subjective destitution when he reads the scenes of Evey's imprisonment as reversing the populist terms K-punk suggests and "mirroring" the Leninist party re-educating the masses. If, however, there is not a reversal, then it may be that there is not a mirroring and so the initial move toward the imaginary doesn't quite work. (Or, Steve chose the word 'mirroring' for non-Lacanian reasons and I am a pedant.)

Anyway, I think that the split Steve posits between the Leninst party and the populist fantasy figure is too extreme. Why? Because what is crucial to K-punk's version (as I read it) is the fact that the people are split--they are duped; they aren't idiots; they are simply split, not transparent to themselves, not a unity. The assumption that the masses can't revolt for themselves isn't hidden at all--it's a basic fact of politics: there is not masses for themselves. There are various mediations and figurings of the masses, various eruptions and actions that can be attributed to masses, various demands issuing from masses.

It's fascinating to me the way that one often hears cries for leadership: the problem with the Democrats is the crummy leadership; the problem with the African American community is that we don't have leaders anymore etc... Are these cries of sheep for order? No. These are acknowledgements of the ways that groups are split and that 'leaders' or figures are objects enabling groups to acknowledge and grapple with the split. (Some will notice that my argument here is completely unoriginal, stemming instead from Zizek's afterward to Revolution at the Gates.) The end point here: the matter has nothing to do with false consciousness and everything to do with the fact that the people are never transparent to themselves, are always necessarily split.

To deny this split would be to provide an imaginary solution that would cover over the traumatic antagonism of the Real. To give body to it, to occupy it, is something else entirely--a move that is necessarily partisan, hence Lenin. And, here contra Steve I would say (again, pathetically repeating Zizek's arguments, not only because they are his but because I actually find them convincing) is that the later history of the USSR testifies to how well Leninism worked. There were total and dramatic changes in the country.

So there is a risk in giving body to an antagonism. The results may well be worse, yet of course the question here involves how one can even measure better worse insofar as precisely this changes in the course of upheaval. Yes--it is difficult to imagine what would happen today, but is that difficulty any stronger than what it was in, say, 1912 or 1914? I would say no--we just happen to know the outcomes; what we can't really know is what would have happened had 1917 not occurred.

(I like very much the term saint of the drive, by the way).  The next key point, in my view, is the gap between subjective transformation and social transformation. Here I think Steve is right--there is an enormous gap. But, the gap appears less gaping (gappy?) if we recognize that subjectivities are gaps in the structure or elements of the structure; that they are not specific instantiations of an essential uniqueness but possibilities and contingencies in the structure. If this is so, then possibilities of subjective transformation are already within the social and thus elements of social transformation--could we say elements in the becoming of such a transformation? Yes--they are not sufficient and hence again the importance of the Leninst figure or, better, Party.

And this leads, I think, to subjective destitution more generally. I agree with Steve when he says subjective destitution

It isn’t a mere matter of changing one’s mind the way one chooses items on a restaurant menu, or a computer menu.

Subjective destitution is more thorough, more devastating, something that cannot be chosen (as Steve says its 'unwillable') one can only be in the situation of having the will transformed, reformatted. (And if we can think of political will is the possibility of collective subjective destitution so odd?). So, one can put oneself in a position in which it may occur; after it has occured, one can affirm or disavow it. What I would add here is that there is a sense in which the process is not one of a singular event but of, well, a process or practice. It has to take place over and over and over again--and the has to, here, should be understood politically as a hypothetical imperative: subjective destitution is necessary for radical political change. So, it isn't simply that one is completely transformed end of story. This leads to a new subjectivity with its own investements and superego compulsions that would again, perhaps, need to be shed. And, there are our changed responses to the destitution--to wishing, say, that things were as they had been, that we had not become the person that became. So, avowal and disavowal are subsequent elements. This element of process, then, suggests to me the crucial role of the Party, or, for those unpersuaded by a capital P, perhaps of the movement, the movement that mediates between subjective and social changes.

(I should add that it could also be the case that in love subjective destitution is necessary over and over and over again--not simply in romantic love, but also in love for one's children: are not the horrifying sleepness nights of the parents of a newborn but an exquisite form of torture, changing naive self-centered people into the servile subjects of his majesty the baby?)

Finally, for now: I prefer the term 'subjective destitution' to 'desubjectivization.' It seems to me that the latter fits better with, say, torture designed completely to break a person with no regard to what comes after, no regard to joining in a common project. It also seems to me that subjective destitution retains the sense of an ongoing subject, one that persists in the form of the object that the subject has become.

Comments

[Steven Shaviro]

Hi, Jodi --

All this is really helpful to me, in terms of getting a better grip on what we are discussing (or arguing about or disageeing about or working through). And especially where you point out how the subject-as-split (non-transparent to itself) is quite different from, and far more convincing than, the old argument about "false consciousness" and simple mystification (though I don't think that I was really attributing that position to you or to k-punk. It is something I need to think about more, and how it relates to & differs from Deleuze's Spinozian formulation of the same issue (why do people desire fascism, etc).

I agree that we are talking about something that happens (has to happen) over and over again; including (especially) when you apply it to love, and to having children, as well as to political action.

I am far more wary than you seem to be, however, about the slippage between being-affected as the result of experiences participating in a movement, and being-affected by means of taking direction from a Party.

In terms of terminology, I prefer "desubjectification," which doesn't strike me as having the same bad connotations that it has for you. For me, it retains (better than "destitution") the Deleuzian sense of multiplicities and encounters, which I want to (at least to some degree) retain, counterposed to the more 'absolute' connotations of "destitution." But here the argument about terminology is only a displacement of the more substantive theoretical argument.

A lot of this discussion is very tentative for me. Since the parts of Marxist theory that have long been important for me are the parts about the logic of capital, the mechanisms of surplus value and exploitation, the importance of NOT reducing exploitation to domination, etc. And not so much anything that has to do with revolutionary strategy, class consciousness, etc.

[Jodi]

Thanks, Steve. I will keep thinking about your remarks on desubjectification--your point on multiplicities and encounters is a good one. Also, I think you are right to be wary of the slippage between being affected and the role of the Party. I often worry if I am too cavalier on this point--whether out of stupidity, naivete, or, romanticism (like, oh sure I can say this--precisely because the likelihood of it happening is so minute). And, I try to think about what these points would mean when it comes down to my kids, or yours. And, I think that if this were Cambodia then I would be one of the first ones shot. But, then, I think that precisely the horrors that imagine are unfortunately the reality for the majority of people in the world, that violence, destitution, the crushing of the possibility of imagining otherwise is so strong that maybe even my thought experiment is too much of a privilege. At any rate, I appreciate the exchange because I remain unsure and unsettled.

[Discard]

I'm coming in real late on this, and maybe Steve, this is what you are getting at with the Spinoza reference, but anyway...

Isn't a key issue here that of death, in the sense that the death at the heart of a splitting of subject in Spinoza/Deleuze is something bound up by a positivity of power? So that there is always death, but this death is conditioned by something impassioning the subject, such that an adequate idea of what impassions (or a raising of the passion to an affect) would be the potential for the life of the subject? Obviously, the subject would not be the same. But it seems that this is a key difference in paradigm. "The free man thinks of nothing less than death," etc., where death is extensive, but life is the potential intensity of substantive power. Not sure how to formulate the destitution paradigm, but it seems what it does not have is a relation between the death of the subject and the potential increase in power of a subject that becomes adequate to what kills it.

[Discard]

"life is the potential intensity of substantive power" -- that is, something which is common, at least as a practical or constructible potency, to both the subject that dies and that which kills it. I'm wondering if there's something in the destitution paradigm, which seems to be composed of the subject and the Real which destitutes it, which corresponds to this common. Maybe i've put this paradigm wrong, or maybe there's a reason why one doesn't want something that corresponds -- so these would be questions....

[The Constructivist]

Jodi, two probably simple-minded suggestions, but that's all I'm capable of with my second daughter here on her second night home from the hospital. One is to consider the upcoming Mamet TV series on "The Unit" (Delta Force) where the...uh...unit is tortured in Abu Ghraib-like conditions..and it turns out to be an exercise to prepare them for being captured by an enemy. Kinda V-for-Vendetta-like, eh? Worth exploring the "how far will you go to combat evil?" theme in V, The Unit, and even United 93...when looked at in this context, V is still about good guys and bad guys, say, in the mode of Frank Miller's second Batman mini-series. Seeing V in this kind of commando revolutionary role and as part of a cultural context in which comics like Watchmen and The Authority play out political and ethical debates is not to suggest that your more theoretically-intensified debates over V are "overreading" or anything, but I think it's worth keeping parallels and juxtapositions between "our" debates and "pop culture" debates and how both relate to post-9/11 political debates in focus somehow. I guess the larger question is what can "theory" contribute or change when both Islamist terror cells and Bush administration security policies are asking similar questions as we seem to be considering?

My second suggestion has to do with the two Ghost in the Shell movies and the two Stand Alone Complex TV series. The only academic I know of who's giving this anime franchise serious attention is Wendy Chun in Control and Freedom (and even her chapter looks only at the first movie in relation to US cyberpunk discourse). What I find fascinating about Stand Alone Complex, in particular, is how much theory its producers are conversant with. Do you know of anyone who's done serious work reading this series as a kind of media theorizing from within popular culture?

Couldn't figure out where to put this on your site, so I figured here is as good as any of the other V posts. And on cue the baby starts crying....