I cite

Beyond drive

In Ticklish Subject, Zizek considers that happens after the fantasy is traversed, after the subject is destitute, after the subject has moved beyond the dialectic of law and desire. This, he remarks, is a central problem in the later Lacan. Zizek observes that Lacan is ambiguous on the point. And he offers the following explanation.

First, he considers Jacques-Alain Miller's suggestion that after the fantasy is traversed there is a kind of jouissance in language, a kind of pleasure in meaningless, empty speech. Yet, this fails as a move beyond drive:

In so far as, in l'apparole, we are thus dealing with an idiotic-happy circuit of an apparatus which produces jouissance, is this not the very definition of drive? How, then, does interpretation limit this self-enclosed circuit by introducing the dimension of the Real? The Real here is the impossible...

but the happy babble doesn't involve any experience of the Real qua impossible. So, the problem with Miller's solution is that it identifies l'apparole with the unconstrained reign of the pleasure principle which precludes the dimension of the Real. And this can't be drive because drive is beyond the pleasure principle.

I haven't read the Miller piece (and I don't know if it has been translated). As I've understood Zizek's point here, it's not convincing. That is, it strikes me that Miller's point makes sense read as a description of a condition of the decline of symbolic efficiency or as a society of drive, a society after the law has lost its place and role. So this isn't a nice analytic cure, remedy, or conclusion. But it is what happens in the circuits of drive. What about the Real? Perhaps the Real is the impossibility of breaking out of the circuits, the very self-enclosure that forecloses any beyond? We might think of nightmare images of door, after door, after door, repeating ad infinitum.

But Zizek offers a different solution. He says that the only consistent solution is that l'apparole is not primordial. Something precedes it: the pre-synthetic imagination, which is not the blissful circuit of self-satisfied drive. It's not the lips kissing themselves or the making oneself seen. Rather it

stands for a kind of ontological Big Bang, for the primordial 'violence' of breaking out of the immersion and enclosure, exploding the closed circuit, tearing apart any unity of Life into the free-floating multiplicity of spectral and monstrous partial objects.

This is of course the theme of TS, the break, gap, cut, that establishes the subject, that underlies Being. What isn't clear to me, though, is whether this makes sense as an account of drive. Or, differently put, thinking drive in terms of a cut or intervention or disruption makes sense with respect to the pleasure principle, the organic cycles of life, or even the Symbolic. But I'm less convinced (or more confused) that it provides a way to understand the functioning of drive in the present, from within our conjuncture.

I can put this as a question: isn't it possible that, in the wake of the decline of symbolic efficiency, the circling of drive, drive's movement from partial object to partial object, becomes the structure of a socio-economic-political formation that has already captured the subject's fixation? So stuckness isn't a break with conventional reality but rather its form?

At any rate, Zizek then moves to the desire of the analyst as what comes after the drive. The subject is in the position of the analyst (this is tricky, though, insofar as this is indistinguishable from the way a perverse discourse would be structured). The implications are the possibility of  "'a communal big Other' that avoids the transferential effect of the subject supposed to know, believe, enjoy" (or, consume, blog, text, confess...). The desire of the analyst (and we should keep in mind the structure of the discourse of the analyst) is a way to consider a new form of the big Other that makes collectivity possible.

Or, the new form of the big Other, of collectivity, doesn't involve law and relations of transference to an idealized symbolic other but a constant thrust of transference through networks of imaginary others.

Drive and the decline of symbolic efficiency

It is possible that I've made a little progress toward thinking about drive and politics. It has taken me to a problem I've had with Zizek for some time, a problem I've tried to repress or overlook. The problem involves the combination of the thesis of the decline of symbolic efficiency with other aspects of his thinking. So, as is well known, Zizek emphasizes Lacan's rethinking of the Freudian death drive as 'the elementary form of the ethical act, the act that is irreducible to a 'speech act' which relies for its performative power on the pre-established set of symbolic rules and/or norms.' Zizek's example is Antigone. The Ticklish Subject:

For Lacan, there is no ethical act proper without taking the risk of such a momentary 'suspension of the big Other,' of the socio-symbolic network that guarantees the subject's identity: an authentic act occurs only when the subject risks a gesture that is no longer covered up by the big Other.

But if the setting is one where the symbolic is in decline, then no act is fully covered by the big Other. The big Other is already suspended. The subject's identity is fragile, unstable, without guarantee. To this extent, either every thing the subject does is an ethical act or there is no such thing as an act in the terms established thus far.

More from the occupation

Download Ns_occupation

Yesterday received this second document regarding the New School occupation.

Who you talking to?

A common refrain in popular media and among some sectors of academia involves ordinary language. The problem with academics, we are told, is that we speak in a specialized jargon that is alienating to everyone else.

The accusation of jargon is a weapon capable of inflicting at least two kinds of blows.

Pointless: what academics say is incomprehensible and thus pointless (useless, irrelevant). A version of this argument appears when people say they are against specific kinds of theory (say, psychoanalytic or post-structuralist) because it is navel-gazing.

Elitist: what academics say is incomprehensible and thus elitist, the code language of an inner circle of high priests who uses this language as a means of guarding the gates.

Notice, the two blows or attacks are incompatible. The first says that academic language has no use. The second says that academic language has a use and that this is use is discriminatory and hierarchical (in other words, that navel-gazing is a marker of privilege).

There are problems when the two lines of attack merge: instead of teaching students to understand academic language and so combat elitism, the effort turns into ignoring or excluding academics. With respect to theory (and from here on I have political theory in mind), this often involves a turn to practice, real life, or feelings, as if these were accessible from a non-theoretical point of view, as if any practice of access did not already rest on and within a set of theoretical commitments.

Consequently, students are not taught to examine or consider these commitments. Rather, they are taught that the claim that there are such commitments (say, to an idea of the rational subject or true self or autonomous person) is nonsense. This is a good way to produce non-questioning subjects or subjects incapable of criticism (although they may well be critical of resistance).

There is nothing new to what I've said so far. It's another version of the Frankfurt school argument for a language that could not easily be coopted into a totalized, flattened view of the world. Differently put, it rests on the assumption that the reduction of language into commodifiable sound-bites is more dangerous than the specialized languages of the disciplines. What I think that the Frankfurt view leaves out (and this is not a criticism but an observation) is what would happen over the next 40-60 years in an academy with members who think of themselves as radicals. We use these accusations of jargon against each other in the second sense, as an attack on our own elitism and on the elitism of others in our midst. It's a weapon for us in the academy, a weapon used in various settings often quite far-removed from the political situation of democratic equality that is its proper home (for example, a criticism of a job candidate--'too many big words'; a criticism of an academic talk--'I don't know any of the texts you mention; these examples indicate not an attempt to equalize but to exclude and/or scold/penalize).

The injunction becomes: speak to a broad audience. The question arises: what would disadvantaged group X say if they were to hear your talk. How does what you are saying speak to them?

Part of the problem is the elision from the injunction to the question and specification. The broad audience presumably is constituted out of 'people likely to attend your talk, read your book, be in your class.' Publishers might call this group 'bookstore browsers' (as opposed to folks who never buy or read books).  Universities might call them 'an undergraduate audience.' The injunction seems to mean not to presuppose a great deal of prior specialist knowledge and, if complex terms are necessary, to explain them. This sort of advice is often given in connection with speaking invitations (or campus visits for job candidates) so that the speaker does not presume that she is giving an academic paper to a group of specialists (like at a regular academic meeting or workshop) but understands that there will be people attending who are interested but maybe lack specialist knowledge.

The disadvantaged group typically consists of people not likely to be in the audience, precisely because they are disadvantaged. So what does it mean to raise this question? What would it mean to answer it?

On the one hand, to speak as if that were your audience is to deny the position of power one occupies, to deny the fact that the split between privileged and non-privileged produces and reinforces the very possibility of expertise. Specialist knowledge and language--high theory--is the result of specific kinds of relations of power; that's what enables it. But, if one denies this, one is speaking as someone one is not, one is speaking as a kind of fraud or fake, one is in effect erasing the grounds for the invitation that one was extended from the outset. One is engaging in a kind of faux-political radical imaginary that proceeds as if one can adopt a cloak of disadvantage and perhaps even that disadvantage is nothing but this cloak. The better response may be to consider the conditions under which the 'disadvantaged' would have any interest in what one was doing anyway and one would do way better to listen to them than to lecture them on objet petit a.

On the other hand, the instruction to formulate one's speech so as to be accessible to the disadvantaged proceeds as if 'ordinary language' were the language of the disadvantaged rather than the language of hegemony. A kind of sweeping, massifying of language occurs that eliminates the multiplicity of discourses within the field of language and this in the name of a democracy inseparable from consumerism. Rather than demonstrating the fact and workings of another way of speaking and thinking, the speaker is supposed to hide this fact, not to make it apparent in the open setting of a public lecture. And so the myth of equality is upheld and the differentials of power kept underwraps.

Poll: 44% of Democrats think Bush officials committed 'war crimes'

The Raw Story | Poll: 44% of Democrats think Bush officials committed 'war crimes'.

A new survey of Democratic voters has found 44 percent believe President Bush and members of his administration committed war crimes during their term, which ended Jan. 20.
...
Among the general populace, just 25 percent agree with the assessment that the Bush administration is guilty of war crimes. By contrast, 70 percent of Americans believe it would be "bad" should these officials be brought up on charges, including 53 percent of Democrats.

The poll was released Monday through Rasmussen.

Whether Americans believe it or not, the former President and Vice President have both admitted to approving torture -- or, as they call it, "enhanced interrogation tactics" -- in direct contravention to the Geneva Conventions.

"I supported it," said Vice President Cheney, regarding the practice known as "water-boarding," a form of simulated drowning. After World War II, Japanese soldiers were tried and convicted of war crimes for water-boarding, a practice which the outgoing Bush administration attempted to enshrine in policy.

"I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the agency in effect came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn't do," he said during a Dec. 2008 interview. "And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it."

"My view is the techniques were necessary and are necessary," President Bush told Fox News with little more than a week to go in his administration.

Arendt's Human Condition (1): biopolitical or metaphysical?

I may have mentioned before an article by Miguel Vatter in which he presents Arendt's thought in terms of a positive biopolitics. He points out a doubling in biopolitics: the biological life that is the object of political control can become the subject of resistance to domination (which is not to say that it can be self-governing). To my mind, this misses the more important point already made by Foucault: biopolitics is society's governance of itself, or, a form of governmentality that cannot be reduced to control or to a dichotomy between control and resistance. Nonetheless, his is an important reminder to consider Arendt's discussions of inclusion of biological life in politics as well as her account of natality. Accordingly, this is one of the books assigned for my course. As I've been doing with Schmitt and Foucault, I'll place some of my initial reflections here.

In the preface, Arendt makes clear that she is giving something that Foucault would later call a "history of the present." She wants to look at how society has developed to get us to the place where we are, a place she describes as the result of a two-fold evacuation or abandonment, the flight from earth to space and from the world into the self. To do this, she will focus not on what we think but on what we do--labor, work, and action.

But there is more to the preface than that. There are also three themes that resonate well with Foucault's discussion of bipolitics.

1.   Power over life leads to the possibility of annihilation:

a.   A concern about an intervention in life, a making artificial of life. Humans attempt to separate themselves from 'all mere animal environment,' from earthly nature which seems to be a kind of prison from which we try to escape. So humans want to separate themselves from animal nature, from the earth that constitutes the human condition.

b.   Life escapes the human desire to build an artificial world, to divide from the animal and become artificial.

c.   The desire to escape imprisonment on earth is manifest in the attempt to create life in a test tube, to 'produce superior human beings.'

d.   The intervention in life in an attempt to escape it, or to make it a product of human artifice, results in an ability to destroy all organic life.

2.   There are a set of scientific developments which evade the political terrain staked out in the 18th century. Arendt doesn't put it in these terms. Rather she expresses the problem in terms of speech: speech makes man a political being. This speech, she tells us, is falling away, is losing its efficacy. The world of scientists is a world where speech has lost its power, but our society is becoming scientized. Sciences and scientists are displacing the speaking that is the very definition of the political. There is a problem, then, of depoliticization.

3.   The whole of society has become transformed into a laboring society. Politicians think of their work in terms of the life of society. Meaningful activities have been supplanted by focus on making a living, and when that focus is necessary, what is left?

Problems with drive

On the one hand, it's depressing and humbling to realize that one is absolutely clueless, doesn't understand a thing, is utterly perplexed. On the other, that's why I moved into political theory (from Soviet Studies): I figured it would always be interesting, there would always be more to learn etc. Still, it's unnerving when what one doesn't know is at the heart of work that one has already done. Enough circling around the lack: what I don't understand is Zizek's account of drive (although I recommend Adrian Johnston's remarkable books on both drive and Zizek).

The easiest way to express the problem is that it seems that a strong strand in Zizek's writings has a kind of optimistic view of drive: drive is the key to radical politics, drive is some version of the Act, drive is disruption. And this seems to trump both drive as stuckness (to the extent that what is a stuckness in one sense is a disruption in another sense) and drive as sublimation. At the very least, I would think that there is no political valence to drive; it is as likely to have politically conservative effects as it is radical ones. In fact, to me it seems more likely to have politically conservative effects, particularly under conditions of communicative capitalism.

For example, death drive, Zizek points out (FTKNWTD) 'is a pure insistence that ignores the constraints of reality.' This sounds exactly like my experience on Facebook over the last 24 hours, as well as my experience the first time I played Civilization, loaded photos on Flickr, or found the reality television show about the obesity clinic. Isn't is possible, then, that there is in highly networked settings a reality that is forged out of the compulsion to ignore reality's constraints?

Another example: scopic drive, the making oneself seen, making oneself visible to the Other's gaze. This again seems a fundamental component of communicative capitalism, something that has become a commonplace, part of conventional practice. In his discussion of a Hitchcock film (Shadow of a Doubt), Zizek emphasizes the way not just that the effect precedes its cause but the way the gaze generates the event that it perceives. He refers to this a 'cut in the continuous texture of reality' and a 'momentous inversion of the temporal order' indicative of the 'intervention of the Real.' But what if under conditions of communicative capitalism, something much more mundane is at stake?

It's hardly a surprise today that people play for cameras. So, photogs chase Katie Holmes carrying Suri Cruise. The little girl is upset. The photos snap it. The tabloids ask: what's wrong with Suri?

We make ourselves visible to a multiple others. In a way, this compensates for the lack of a big Other. You could almost say that social networking technologies are the practices of not only this compensation but also this acknowledgment. It's like the materialization of the ideology of 'there is no Other.' Precisely because there is no Other, one works to create some kind of set of others or groups of others.

Here is an instance of the aspect of Zizek's argument I don't understand. The passage follows from a discussion of the painful withdrawal that creates Openness:

This is what Freudian sublimation is (in its Lacanian reading): not the displacement from the direct 'actualization' of a drive to its more cultured ersatz-satisfaction, but the intervention of a certain Hemmung, an obstacle which thwarts the direction realization of the drive, and thus opens up a space through which another dimension can shine. The Freudian name for this inherent obstacle is, of course, the death-drive, and we can thus clearly perceive the inherent link between the death-drive and sublimation: the death-drive, as it were, 'clears the plate', and thus creates the Void/Opening in which the Other Thing can appear. What is thereby 'sublimated' is not the raw direct satisfaction, but the impossible/real ('noumenal') Thing itself.

I don't get this. I had thought that from a Lacanian perspective all drives were the death drive and only apparent as and in their distortion. Drives are already distorted as they are structured through loss. And so if we are dealing with drive we are already dealing with indirect satisfaction. What I don't see, then, is how this enables 'another dimension' to shine through and what this other dimension might be.

I think that the passage that follows this one makes this same point that I am making, but I'm not sure. Zizek writes:

disturbance is primordial and the Thing is ultimately nothing but the Schein created by the disturbance. And is not the perfect example of the generative power of this disturbance the fact that the only letter which fully and effectively reached its destination is the unsent letter?

I wonder if the movie Eagle Eye helps here. The title can be read in at least three ways: detailed and accurate surveillance, being watched by a predator, and the symbol of the American people. The conceit of the film is that these three are the same in the form of a computer/database/participatory network--or, what if the constitution were materialized as a computer? The result is awful, a horrifying unfreedom at the heart/as the realization of collective freedom (biopolitics, anyone?). The American Thing is the appearance created by the disturbance/distortion of drive. But is this an opening/Void for the Other Thing to appear? The simplest explanation would be yes, by pushing the ideology of we the people to an extreme the underlying drive that gives the shape to the symbolic is made to appear (the symbolic appears in its distortion).

But I find this mightily unsatisfying, particularly if drive is supposed to do some analytical work that is beneficial to political theory.

Zizek: how to break with biopolitics

In his introduction to the edited volume of Robespierre's writings, Zizek presents the radical stance of Lenin and Lacan (a stance that does not search for cover for the revolutionary act in the big Other) as the only possibility

that allows us to break with today's predominant mode of politics, post-political biopolitics, which is a politics of fear, formulated as a defense against a potential victimization or harassment. Therein resides the true line of separation between radical emancipatory politics and the politics of the status quo: it is not the difference between two different positive visions, sets of axioms, but, rather, the difference between the politics based on a set of universal axioms and the politics which renounces the very constitutive dimension of the political, since it resorts to fear as its ultimate mobilizing principle: fear of immigrants, fear of crime, fear of godless sexual depravity, fear of the excessive state itself (with its burdensome taxation), fear of ecological catastrophes--such a (post)politics always amounts to a frightening rallying of frightened men.

Questions:

1.   In what sense is biopolitics a politics of fear and in what sense is this a fear of potential victimization? Within a Zizekian frame of the decline of symbolic efficiency, we would have fragile imaginary subjects always competing and never certain and thus always vulnerable. It's not clear to me, though, what (if anything) specifically underlies the notion of biopolitics mentioned here. If we bring Foucault in here, we can fill out the notion of state-phobia. We can also understand these proliferating fears in terms of a project of governmentality that takes making live as its objects.

2.   What does Zizek mean by 'constitutive dimension of the political'? Does he mean fundamental antagonism/class conflict? The friend/enemy distinction? The raising of particular claims to the level of the universal?

3.   What are the repercussions of thinking in terms of an opposition between an axiomatic politics and a non-axiomatic politics? Is the mapping of this opposition onto the distinction between radical-emancipatory and status-quo necessary and, if so, in what sense?

Zizek asks:

How are we to break out of this (post)politics of fear? The biopolitical administration of life is the true content of the global liberal democracy, and this introduces the tension between democratic form and administrative-regulatory content. What, then, would be the opposite of biopolitics.

I'm not sure I understand what he means by 'tension' here. Foucault's discussion suggests not a tension at all, not a parallax, not a problem, but the realization of the democratic form in the administrative-regulatory content: this is what democracy looks like. And this is where I also see the link with Schmitt--democracy as a total state, a vehicle for the introduction of previously separate or distinct realms of life under the domain of the political, their availability for intensification, their becoming-objects-of-politics. Perhaps, "tension" is the word Zizek uses to avoid saying "and this results in the failure of the democratic form insofar as it is realized in its administrative-regulatory content."

Nonetheless, his subsequent suggestion as to what would be the opposite of biopolitics suggests as much:

What if we take the risk of resuscitating the good old 'dictatorship of the proletariat' as the only way to break biopolitics?

He presents dictatorship as a formal determination, as the underlying mode of functioning of any state insofar as it relies on unquestioned/unquestionable suppositions. It seems to me that this is a variation on the theme of law as crime, the irrational injunction, the obscene supplement of power. But, if this is the case, if any state is formally a dictatorship, then how does the dictatorship of the proletariat break with biopolitics/liberal democracy? Presumably because it it forfeits an illusion or abandons the fantasy of some kind of legitimacy. Zizek writes:

The state in its institutional aspect is a massive presence which cannot be accounted for in the terms of the representation of interests--the democratic illusion is that it can . . . one can also put it in Benjaminian terms: while democracy can more or less eliminate constituted violence, it still has to rely continuously on the constitutive violence.

Zizek then turns the dictatorship into the violence of the democratic explosion (primarily via Ranciere and the part of no part). It starts to seem, then, that the break with biopolitics that he has in mind is an aspect of the violent, explosive, 'intrusion of the egalitarian logic' of democracy in contrast to its regulatory dimension (democracy is terror). But this move is then sublated as well; enter Badiou and the Soviet experience circa the 1920. What really matters is institutionalization; these are the decisive moments, the attempts to change every day life in its rituals of marriage and funerals, its organization of factory and apartment life.

It looks like biopolitics. It smells like biopolitics. It moves like biopolitics. It is also likely based on knowledge about the species life of humans. Why isn't it biopolitics? One answer would highlight 'proletarian' dictatorship as a break with biopolitics' neoliberal frame. But this would suggest the impossibility of a socialist biopolitics, a suggestion that is initially unconvincing (although if it were possible it would have to rely on a set of different loci of attachment to society). Zizek's answer (although he doesn't say this directly) seems to be: because it embraces the constitutive dimension of the political rather than relying on fear as a mobilizing principle. 

Why would embracing the constitutive dimension of the political break with biopolitics? It seems clear that it breaks with post-politics: it doesn't take unity as a goal or ideal; it doesn't posit society as a totality as its object of intervention but instead proceeds from the conviction that collective decisions and steering is possible.

Preoccupied

I just received an email with a pdf of a piece written on the New School occupation. I think it's quite wonderful and provocative (I particularly appreciate their discussion of critique as the means by which "every possible liberation is foreclosed." They are absolutely right. Want hold off the possibility of radical politics? Turn it into a course with assigned reading. Look to the words of professors for authorization. Make it the subject of an academic conference.)  You can read the whole thing here: Download Preoccupied-reading. I've pasted an excerpt below.

To defuse spontaneity, have a meeting. Then another, and another. Wait ten minutes, and then start over. This is the logic of the radical liberals. Ashamed of the failures of the 60’s, they seek to relive its worst moments and rectify them in the present, as if that would bring honor to the cemeteries which house their dead. Every site of conflict is deemed counterproductive, and every moment of possibility is deemed too soon. Believing that they are the true heirs to the “lessons” of the past, they smother the present with their dead language, providing false directions that lead only to entrenched stability. Comfort is their goal, and compromise is their strategy. Their tactics vary from scripted civil disobedience to scripted civil obedience. They embrace their own image, incapable of moving forward without a mirror to guarantee their existence. Names, demands, and identities fill their arsenal, and one should be wary of their approach. To expose them does not mean to oppose them directly, for opposition can produce a sense of legitimacy of their project. Rather, like certain villagers do to state authorities when they come by to see how their colony is doing, one should nod and agree, and then act according to their complete irrelevance. Indifference can be a weapon if it used right. These individuals should be made redundant, entirely superfluous.

Avoid them at all costs.

the curved space of appearance

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