I cite

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.

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?

It's better not to know or yet more evidence Lacan is right

Class was disturbing today. Incited by Hegel's ethical defense of war, the students shifted to US militarism in Iraq. But that's not the way at least half of them described it. These students were more comfortable with a language of security, of keeping America safe.

More important than actual security, though, was the sense of security. That's what the students (again, about half or maybe just a third) really wanted to protect, the sense of security. One argued that the state does not have the right to tell the people everything. A couple said that they there were lots of things that they just didn't want to know. The state should take care of it, look after things, but not tell the people. It will just lead to paranoia.

One started to suggest a harm principle: the state should be mindful of causing harm. So it shouldn't tell the people too much about terrorists and airplanes because this will lead them not to fly and will hurt the economy. And what about carcinogens in the environment? Guantanamo Bay? Torture? It's better not to know. We can't do anything about it.

It seems what the people really want is protection of their right not to know.

At least they will have a struggle on their hands: the other half of the students opposed them, vehemently, fiercely, construing them as a fundamental aspect of the central problem, an aspect to be cut through.

Left drive (first in a series on drive)

Copjec:

the death drive achieves its satisfaction by not achieving its aim. . . . The full paradox of the death drive, then, is this: while the aim (Ziel) of the drive is death, the proper and positive activity of the drive is to inhibit the attainment of its aim; the drive, as such, is zielgehemnt, that is, inhibited as to its aim, or sublimated, "the satisfaction of the drive through the inhibition of its aim" being the very definition of sublimation.

Could this begin a story of post-Marxism? And so in the sixties and seventies, leftists lost their desire. They lost their faith in communism, their desire for a socialist state. Some argued that the system requirements of advanced states could not be managed by bureaucracies. Markets were more efficient. Others argued that the basic premises of Marxism, a working class and the determining role of the economy, were essentialist and essentially wrong. The very aim of Marxism seemed to be death, the death of the political, the end of politics staged as the withering away of the state (which now looks more like the neoliberal fantasy and nightmare of the Real).

And so leftists shift, make themselves shift, make themselves to be shifted, away from their desire and into an economy of drive. They sublimate their political aims. They name their sublimation democracy (r-r-r-radical democracy) and say that it is good, the only good.

And this democracy is so satisfying. It delivers. Round and round they circle, enjoying all the while. Enjoying the process, the arguments, the little daily struggles. Enjoying the visibility and the revelation, desecretization, the making public. Enjoying the voice, their voice, hearing voices, giving voices, including ever more voices. The sublimation of the political in democracy produces extensive opportunities for intensive enjoyment. To imagine meeting the aim of politics is dismissed in advance, packaged as a dangerous death wish, fantastic desire, impossible dream.

Surveilling the Gaze

If I had time to what I want to do, instead of doing what have to do because in the past I thought that I would want to do it, I would consider how Lacanian discussions of the gaze might inflect thinking about surveillance (I did a little of this in Publicity's Secret). Joan Copjec in Imagine There's No Woman, asks what the gaze is:

It is that excess object, encountered as some disturbance within point of view, which makes visible the emptiness of the transcendental position, the absence of the transcendental subject. For, to be looked at from all sides by a nomadic gaze is to experience ourselves as visible in the world, as sunk within a perspective on which there can be another perspective, whereas to be visible to an all-seeing God would be to experience ourselves as part of a whole. In the first case, the other perspective threatens to demolish or overwhelm our own, while in the second this radical antagonism of perspectives gives way to the sense that God's view enlarges or rectifies our own. In the latter case we are no longer visible in the world, but fully visible only outside it.

and, a bit later, on the relation between exposure and veiling:

It is not that feeling oneself vulnerable, unconcealed before a prying eye,  one reacts by concealing oneself; rather, that which is exposed by the gaze is a veiling.

This Is Not A President

Read Diane Rubenstein's new book, This Is Not A President (just published by NYU press). The cover here isn't the same as the one on my copy of the book (and imho gives the wrong impression, like Rubenstein is primarily an anti-Hillary). The book is great--virtuoso Lacanian theory with big doses of Baudrillard and Derrida. The chapters focus on the last twenty years of presidents--Reagan, Bush 1 and 2, Clinton, and, then Hillary.

And, if you haven't already, look at Lauren Berlant's new blog, supervalent thought.