I cite

Who, we?

Today I came across a tirade against someone's use of the word 'we' in a piece of academic critical media theory writing. The upshot: to use 'we' is to suggest proud egoistic self-mastery as well as hypocritical participation in the social order. Now, I didn't read the essay being criticized. I'm taking up the attack on 'we,' then, not as a discussion of specific criticism but because the attack is a commonplace among left theorists. I've been seeing it rather frequently in graduate student papers, a critique wielded with intense sincerity, as if the person who used the term were singularly responsible for the invasion of Iraq or the genocide against Native Americans (a horrible term itself, but I'll save discussion of it for later). Attacking 'we' is a cheap shot that substitutes for engaging someone's argument. It's one of those pc monkey-tricks along the lines of "you erase difference in a logic of the same" and "what do you mean by 'women' given that there are differences between and among women?"

"We" can be annoying when the author is referring to herself in the first-person plural, like the Queen. "We think that set theory radically subverts biopolitics." But, although annoying, this assertion of 'we' is neither more nor less an indication of self-mastery than the assertion of an "I." Both designate the speaking position of the author. In English, they are grammatically pretty useful, enabling the avoidance of unwieldy passive voice constructions. They also render the author accountable for a position. For example, the issue isn't whether torture may be considered a lawful interrogation technique; the issue is whether the Bush administration viewed it and authorized it as a lawful interrogation technique. And,insofar as we speak in first person constructions, "I'll have cheese, please," aware that we split subjects, subjects who err, subjects who are spoken through, subjects who are uncertain and in flux, no pronoun, plural or otherwise, can install an already impossible mastery. This is the challenge of responsibility: taking it even when mastery is impossible.

Some of us write with 'we' as a way of including ourselves in the group being criticized: "as bloggers we waste way too much time." This kind of writing is sometimes difficult in feminist classrooms where women students are pulled between referring to women as 'they' or as 'we'. The inclusive 'we' can also be useful in attempts to interpellate a collective, to call into being a 'we' where there might not have been one before. Politicians also use this version of 'we'. For critical theorists, this 'we' strikes me as crucial: no one is outside ideology.

One of the trickiest "we's" comes in when the author is trying to speak of and to a discipline or movement, for example, where 'we' refers to political theorists in general or the left in general. So the writer might say something like "political theorists have ignored the emotions; we need to take emotions into account." And the critical response is--whom do you have in mind? Can't be Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hobbes, or Hume, for a start. This is the easiest use of 'we' to avoid, primarily because it isn't necessary for the point.

Ultimately, what bugs me the most about critiques of 'we' is the way that they mobilize a suspicion toward collectivity and privilege individualism. To this extent, they are little machines or engines of neoliberalism, neoliberal-bots that drive writers and thinkers to dismantle any collective sense or feeling of solidarity in advance, to suspect such sentiments rather than be responsible to them. Most of us who write in contemporary left political and media theory have been reading and writing about difference for a long time now. It's time that we redirect the suspicions leveled toward collectivity toward suppositions of individuality and autonomy.

Supervalent Thought: On Potentiality

Link: On Potentiality, #1 « . . . . . . . Supervalent Thought.

I think I think that there is no politics without loss, without a serious shifting of the terms of living of the sort that produces incompetence at life, an incompetence we can look forward to if we can bear it but that has to be lived at best awkwardly, at worst, dramatically. Potentiality discourse feels too sunny to me. There, we are already all potential. Our solidarity is structural and comes from a thing we cannot be rid of: the vital right to belonging as such. At the same time, though, the work of solidarity, the activity of being not just in existence but in desire together, requires being in the room with the possibility that people don’t share your objects or your imaginaries, and that people will have to give up different things to get to the place of the better good life that you’re risking making imaginable, let alone available.

Theory & Event 11.2 now available

The new issue of Theory & Event is now online and available to subscribers through Project Muse. As you will see below, the issue explores themes of terror and political violence.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_&_event/

Below you'll find the table of contents for the issue as well as the editors' introduction.

Table of Contents:

"We are all torturers now": Accountability After Abu Ghraib
Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn

Necessary Interruption: Traces of the Political in Levinas
Erica Weitzman

Lethal Freedom: Divine Violence and the Machiavellian Moment
Michael Dillon

Event or Exception?: Disentangling Badiou from Schmitt, or, Towards a Politics of the Void
Colin Wright

Imagining Extraordinary Renditions: Terror, Torture and the Possibility of an Excessive Ethics in Literature
Nathan Gorelick

Reviews
Critique of Abysmal Reasoning
Brian Goldstone

Imperialism and the Intimate Self
Robert Lee Nichols

Escaping the Cult, Recuperating Victims
Judy Rohrer

Reason and Revolution Redux: Antonio Negri's Political Descartes
Robert T. Tally

The very big Other

I'm frustrated with In Defense of Lost Causes. Zizek writes:

the example of cyberspace clearly demonstrates how the big Other is present more than ever: social atomism can only function when it is regulated by some (apparently) neutral mechanism--digital solipsists need a very complex global machinery to be able to persevere in their splendid isolation.

and

The task of radical politics is therefore not to denounce the inadequacy of every small other to stand in for the big Other (such a 'critique' only reinforces the big Other's hold over us) but to undermine the very big Other and, in this way, to untie the social bond the big Other sustains. Today, when everyone complains about dissolving social ties (and thereby obfuscating their hold over us, which is stronger than ever), the true job of untying them is still ahead of us, more urgent than ever.

These passages come from a section of the first chapter. One of the general ideas, I think, is Zizek's oft-repeated account of the claustrophobia that results from the decline of the symbolic, the loss of a space of appearances wherein something stands for something more than itself. The only way these particular passages make sense to me, then, is if one assumes a very different notion of the big Other to be at work. We could call it the very big Other or the psychotic big Other, designating thereby the monstrous imaginary other that merges with the Real when the paternal function is foreclosed. So long as no small other can appear as more than what it is, so long as it remains simply itself in its idiotic empiricality, we remain mired in immanence, seriality, strings and strings of S2.

The cyberspace example, though, doesn't work. Rejecting characterizations of contemporary media that emphasize the suspension of social ties, Zizek writes:

in order for an individual to immerse herself in the virtual space, the big Other has to be there, more powerful than ever in the guise of cyberspace itself; this directly universalized form of sociality which enables us to be connected with the entire world while sitting alone in front of a screen.

Can the codes and connections enabling networked communications be understood as a form of the big Other? I don't think so. Not if the big Other is indistinguishable from the Symbolic. Part of the pleasure of digital media is the sense that what one does or sees or writes doesn't register to the big Other, that it connects or enables snippets of intensity without 'counting;' shoot, even 'counting' doesn't quite count (the big Other doesn't know how many returns I get when I google my name). It makes more sense to think of the internet in terms of the merging of the imaginary and the Real, the Real networks and transactions, the matrix, combined with what we imagine these networks and transactions to be for us. So it could be the very big Other, the scary, necessary, and now inextricables codes and protocols we can't quite escape.

What could it mean for Zizek to say that the true job of untying social ties is ahead of us? that the task of radical politics is "to undermine the very big Other and, in this way, to unite the social bond the big Other sustains"? It has to involve some version of seeing or experiencing the ties as representing something else.  Perhaps it means that another has to be able to appear as symbolizing something more; so we have to relinguish our human ties to enable the appearance of inhuman ones.

Return to drives

I shouldn't be surprised that Zizek has already observed Laclau's failure to distinguish between desire and drive. The posts or detailed work I did on it will come in handy at some; I'll be able to use it somewhere. And it's not like the conceptual tools I applied in working out my little criticism of Laclau weren't developed by Zizek anyway. Still, confronting my utter unoriginality is still not the highlight of my morning.

In In Defense of Lost Causes, Zizek writes:

Laclau should be criticized here for confounding desire (sustained by fantasy) with drive (one of whose definitions is also "that which remains of desire after its subject traverses the fantasy"): for him, we are condemned to searching for impossible fullness. Drive--in which we directly enjoy lack itself--simply does not appear on his horizon.

Can global capitalist democracy have a human face?

At first glance, the question 'is global capitalist democracy with a human face enough?' doesn't help much to open up thinking about the dilemmas of the present. One way to approach its limits and maybe put it to work is by breaking the implicit claims apart, word by word.

Global: since the global is not the world or even a world insofar as antagonism is Real, the question begins with the fantasy of a totality, a fantasy that the next term, capitalist, either reinforces as ideology or ruptures as Real. Thus, the next term

Capitalist: already contradicts and calls into question the first as well as the second, unless

Democracy: remains but an empty signifier.  After all, there isn't an institution for a global democracy; democracy and capitalism are incompatible; democracy isn't global in its theory or practice.

Human: is rather shocking in contexts of homo sacer, the critique of human rights, and the ongoing critical engagements with the anthropomorphic machine. In fact, it's so counter to Zizek's anti-humanism (what kind of neighbor is the human neighbor, anyway?) that it seems part of a phrase constructed for radio (tertiary orality?), especially when we recall his critical responses to Levinas's

Face.

And

Enough: for what? For a slogan? A platform? An aspiration? Ideological formations combine dissonant and even contradictory ideas. We could then imagine left responses to the question (or, differently put, the implied left enunciating position): "yes, that's enough for us!"  We could be so fortunate to live in such a wonderful world!

Is it enough because its impossibility sustains desire? enough because the ideal lets us keep enjoying: global! capitalist! democracy! these are all the best goodies! the political equivalent of a chocolate chocolate chip cookie (why the combination of chocolates?). Those who are left out, excluded from or deprived of any of the three, have something to fight for. The obvious incompatibility and emptiness is surefire protection against Laclau-inspired critique. Or maybe the slogan, global capitalist democracy with a human face!, is a slogan for the multitude (and a lot easier to swallow than the joy of being communist!).

More Copjec and Laclau (fifth in a series on drive)

Laclau is quite explicit about the relation between his discussion of hegemony and Copjec's discussion of drive. The problem, though, is that there seems to be a difference between these discussions that Laclau doesn't acknowledge. He writes:

The logic of objet petit a and the hegemonic logic are not just similar: they are identical.

For him, the 'logic of objet petit a' seems to mean "making an object the embodiment of a mythical fullness." This seems to overlap with the idea of the elevation of the object to the dignity of the Thing. But that Lacanian notion remains vague and indistinct, hovering between the logic of desire and the logic of drive.

Laclau writes:

The aspiration to that fullness or wholeness does not, however, simply disappear; it is transferred to partial objects which are the objects of the drives. In political terms, that is exactly what I have called a hegemonic relation: a certain particularity which assumes the role of an impossible universality. . . . With this we reach a full explanation of what radical investment means: making an object the embodiment of a mythical fullness.  Affect (that is, enjoyment) is the very essence of investment, while its contingent character accounts for the 'radical' component of the formula.

I will leave to the side a discussion of how affect and enjoyment are not, strictly speaking, synonymous. What interests me here is that Copjec does not say that in drive an aspiration is transferred. She writes:

The partial object or object of lack is the one that emerges out of the lack, the void, opened by the loss of the original Plenum or das Ding. . . . The object a . . . is that something more in the external object ... which adds nothing to this object, predicates nothing more about it--except that it satisfies the drive. . . . The elevation of the external object of the drive . . . does not depend on its cultural or social value in relation to other objects.

Laclau renders creation out of nothing as transference in order to preserve his claim for an aspiration to fullness. But there is nothing in Copjec's account of drive that suggests that the drive's capacity to provide enjoyment has anything to do with the loss aspiration

There is also a difference between Laclau's use of one of Copjec's gestures to Deleuze's discussion of the close up and Copjec's critical point. Laclau brings out the line that says the close up discloses "the whole of the scene itself." Yet Copjec emphasizes that objet petit a is neither a whole, nor a part of a whole, but a part that replaces a whole. She writes:

"Drive to come" translates the idea that the object of the drive is partial; it does not promise a future free of this partialness.

The partial object neither embodies mythical fullness nor assumes the role of a mythical universality. It is partial and this partiality is satisfying. This is what sublimation looks like: satisfaction in something partial. If this were an article in Cosmo it would call it 'settling.'

Laclau can't have it both ways. He can't have his logic of hegemony and objet petit a. Objet petit a is not itself a 'logic.' It is a part of no-part, an excess at the site of lack and a lack at the heart of desire. As the latter, it can operate within a logic of desire as a marker of impossible fullness. But as the former it is part of a different logic of drive. As I see it, Zizek's point against so-called radical democracy is that is takes satisfaction in the little things, the day to day business of politics. I would add that under communicative capitalism, so-called radical democracy is captured in the circuits of drive, circling around whatever neoliberalism gives it, enjoying it. And I use 'whatever' here deliberately, hoping to point to whatever being as what replaces identities in the politics of drive.

Copjec, Laclau, and Zizek (fourth in a series on drive)

Laclau claims that his notion of partiality converges with with the psychoanalytic notion of a partial object, that is a partiality functioning as a totality. Indeed, his critique of Zizek hinges on this point:

what Zizek is ignoring is the whole logic of the objet petit a, which as I argued above, is identical to the hegemonic logic. That the object is 'elevated to the dignity of the Thing' is what Zizek seems to exclude as a political possibility. The alternative he presents is: either we have access to the Thing as such, or we have pure partialities not linked by any totalizing effect. I think that  a Lacanian such as Zizek should know better.

It seems to me that Laclau is relying on a one-sided reading of Copjec here. Her account of drive depicts the object not as elevated to the dignity of the Thing at all. We could say that it is noThing, nothing at all, and drive is the circuit around this nothing that becomes something because of the circuit.

I tried to express something like this idea in my discussion of drive in Publicity's Secret. There I consider the way the secret becomes the scoop in communicative capitalism. Some stupid, trivial bit of information becomes something by being construed as revealed--diet secrets of the stars! What's there to care about in Britney Spear's latest traffic accident? Nothing. No Thing. There is no there there. But there is the circulation of drive around this nothing that makes it something, that makes it deliver something extra, something that is in it more than itself.

Laclau's mistake, I think, is to construe the partial object in terms of totalizing effects that make it represent an absent fullness. Britney's driving problems don't stand in for anything. They deliver jouissance on their own. Thus, Copjec reads Lacan as proposing

that sublimation ought to be thought not as the substitution of a culturally valorized object for one that is immediately gratifying sexually, but as a changing of the object itself.

Out of nothing (no Thing) the drive creates an object

a thing in the very place where unified jouissance, das Ding, is absent . . .

Later she writes:

It is as if the very function of the drive were this continuous opening up of small fractures between things. . . . The drive continues to circle the object because the latter is never identical to itself, is split from itself. . . . It is not only the object of the drive that is split from itself; the subject, too, is fractures through the drive's repetitions.

At this point, I fail to see any totalizing effects here, unless totalizing is the same as fragmenting. Perhaps another way to say this is that Laclau posits a hidden S1 underneath the S2.

So Laclau's critique of Zizek on this point is not persuasive. Zizek does not presume the possibility of a new convergence with the lost maternal thing (which would be impossible since this is a retrospective assumption anyway, as Laclau acknowledges). Like Laclau (but contra Laclau's charge) he allows for the elevation of a contingent object to the dignity of a Thing.  But he recognizes as well the work of the drive in politics in terms of partialities with no totalizing effects, partialities that are nothings that deliver, affectively charged nothings in place where there is no unified jouissance or imagined fullness.

I know full well that Britney's traffic dilemmas are nothing. That's why I enjoy them.

Laclau might be right on one point: Zizek accuses him of resignation. It could be more accurate to say that what Laclau engages in is sublimation, the sublimation of revolutionary energies. This sublimation, then, is democratic drive or the sublimation of political desire into democracy. Democracy

Copjec and Laclau (third in a series on drive)

Crucial to Laclau's account of populist reason as an index of the logic of hegemony is the idea of the transformation of the particular in the name of a transcendent universality, that is, of a "moment of fusion between partial object and totality." As he writes:

This is why Copjec is absolutely right to insist on the Lacanian distinction between desire and drive; while the first has no object and cannot be satisfied, the second involves a radical investment in a partial object and brings about satisfaction. This is also why, as we shall see, later, political analyses which attempt to polarize politics in terms of the alternative between total revolution and gradualist reformism miss the point: what escapes them is the alternative logic of objet petit a--that is to say, the possibility that a partiality can become the name of an impossible totality (in other words, the logic of hegemony).

Laclau suggests that the partial object can become the name of an impossible totality. What does this mean? It seems easy to answer at first: the universal is accessible via a split in the particular between itself and what it stands for. But Laclau is employing a logic of drives here, so the matter is rather different. Is he saying that the object of the drives stands in for a totality, that is, for the inaccessible maternal object? Is he saying that the object of drives is indistinguishable from its name? Is he saying that a name can be an object?

It seems to me that Laclau is saying that the object of drives represents the object of desire, that it provides enjoyment whereas the object of desire is forever unreachable. It's like a vehicle for accessing the impossible object, for getting a little piece of it, for participating it or sharing in it.

But this is a mistaken use of Copjec. First, the drive depends on an object but is indifferent to it. The object is a means to enjoyment, but that enjoyment is not beyond it but in it (more than itself, like the weed a small child might give her mother). Anything could work (as a gift); but, not anything does (because it is not given). What makes something the object of drive is the relation to it, not the thing itself (the weed). Laclau, though, mistakenly emphasizes the object instead of the circulation of the drive around it.

Second, and more important, the object of drive does not stand in for an impossible totality. It is not simply a switch in relation to an idealized and impossible fullness. The switch in relation is also a change in the object; what matters is the relation to the new object, the enjoyment in and of this new object, not this object's (fantastic) role as a representative of the Thing. Copjec writes:

The first thing to note is that this idea of the drive's indifference to an external object is at odds with Lacan's definition of sublimation as 'the elevation of an ordinary object to the dignity of the Thing.' This formulation is admittedly confusing; it misleads Lacan himself at points to conflate sublimation and idealization. In these instances the ordinary object seems to become the representation of the Thing, of a noumenal beyond, and that has the effect of erecting a barrier to jouissance, which is now conceived as inaccessible.

Copjec's description here can be applied to Laclau's appeal to objet petit a: he views it as a partiality naming an impossible totality, a representation of the Thing, a marker of transcendence. This is not what Copjec emphasizes in her discussion of drive. In fact, it's the opposite (as if Laclau misses the point or only uses half of it):

But there are also moments when elevation does not seem to entail this function of representation but rather entails--in a reversal of the ordinary understanding of sublimation--the substitution of an ordinary object for the Thing. One seeks satisfaction from an ordinary object instead of waiting vainly for the arrival of the Thing. This is the only way to comprehend the satisfaction Lacan experiences on seeing a series of matchboxes, found objects, that were collected by his friend, Jacques Prevert. What strikes Lacan is the extraordinary dignity of these little cardboard boxes, the dignity of their thingness.

There is a change in the object. Drive circles around an object, getting enjoyment from this circulation. Without the object, it would not circulate (and get enjoyment). The object is not a means to something beyond it. The split is not between something that appears and a transcendent beyond; the split is in appearance.

The partiality, then, is not naming an impossible totality. It names itself.

Copjec and Lefort (second in a series on drive)

Copjec:

the inhibition that prevents the drive from achieving its aim is not understood within Freudian theory to be due to an extrinsic or exterior obstacle, but rather as part of the very activity of the drive itself.

The aim of the drive ... is death--or, as Freud alternatively puts it: "the restoration of an earlier state of things," a state of inanimation or inertia. Now, this state exists, according to the theory, only as a retrospective illusion, never as an actual state...Psychoanalysis rewrites this mythical state as the primordial mother-child dyad, which supposedly contained all things and every happiness and to which the subject strives throughout his life to return.

Copjec persuasively demonstrates Lacan's innovation in re-reading Freud. Lacan moves away from the supposition of lost wholeness or unity. Yes, jouissance (unity, the Thing, the Good) is lost (opening a hole in being) but there is a representation of this loss that itself provides enjoyment (representation other than the order of signifiers that seemingly captured jouissance, leaving aside as untranslatable some aspects of our primary relation to it). More precisely, there is a representation (Vorsteullungreprasentanz or ideational representative) that lets in or represents jouissance. In drive, jouissance is accessible, not out of reach.

This little representative is an object. The object functions as a little representative or delegate, but not of some primary unity or massive Thing-jouissance elsewhere. Rather, it is representative of the loss of the Thing (loss of the support of the organic body). Copjec:

It is the loss of these supports that causes the fracturing of the surface order of appearances, a splitting within being and not between being and its beyond.

There might be some resonance between Copjec's discussion of drive and Lefort's famous discussion of democracy as an empty place. Lefort's description begins with a primal unity, an embodied unity of the people in the prince:

Power was embodied in the prince, and it therefore gave society a body.

Democracy results from the rupture and dissolution of this unity. What was one become many. In place of the substantial materiality of the prince is a new set of relations between power, law, and knowledge. As they

become disentangled, a new relation to the real is established; to be more accruate, this relation is guaranteed within the limits of networks of socialization and of specific domains of activity

Disembodied power operates symbolically. What matters:

the important point is that democracy is instituted and sustained by the dissolution of the markers of certainty.

and

when power appears to have sunk to the level of reality and to be no more than an instrument for the promotion of the interests and appetites of vulgar ambition and when, in a word, it appears in society, and when at the same time society appears to be fragmented, then we see the development of the fantasy of the People-as-One, the beginnings of a quest for a substantial identity, for a social body which is welded to its head, for an embodying power, for a state free from division.

The threat to democracy is the Thing, the fantasy of unity that has real effects. Totalitarianism, structured along the lines of an engulfing Mother, is the ultimate threat, a threat that must be posited to account for democratic desire for the law. Might, then, the threat or the place of the threat in the structuring of democratic desire be a retrospective illusion, never an actual state? And might not another account attend to democracy as drive, as the sublimation of the politics such that democracy is political inhibition?