Zach Slanger. The Will-to-Jouissance: Postmodern Hedonism between Enjoyment and Anxiety
Alumni/ae 6:23 PM
Alumnus Zach Slanger has continued research as he gets ready for what will no doubt be promising graduate studies. He is also working as a teacher in the Writing and Tutorial Center, so for those students who want to discuss their work or get help with your course work in the Department of Social Science, you are in great luck to have him until a graduate school whisks him away from us. If you would like to hear a brief reading from the original thesis, click here or visit the archive.org page for Zach's and all of the other student's thesis readings.
Zach Slanger
The Will-to-Jouissance:
Postmodern Hedonism between Enjoyment and Anxiety
Work-in-progress
from
Perverse Strategies
The
Will-to-Jouissance:
Postmodern Hedonism between Enjoyment and Anxiety
In
Seminar II,
Jacques Lacan presents a counter-intuitive inversion of Dostoyevsky:
“If God doesn’t exist, then nothing at all is permitted any
longer.”1
Without God, that is, without structure provided by a relation to
some sort of Other, subjects are impotent. As Nietzsche famously
proclaimed in 1882, God is dead. The
death of God is a symptom of a larger trend, the slow death of the
Lacanian Other. The Other is, within Lacanian theory, the realm of
symbolic relations, which includes the Law, culture, and language.
As the Other declines, society becomes more and more an archipelago
of independent islands, divided from each other and unable to relate
to each other, lacking a social bond. In
their joint seminar titled “The Other Who Does Not Exist and His
Ethical Committees,” Jacques-Alain Miller and Eric Laurent discuss
the state of the Other today. Laurent says, “The great torment in
civilisation is how to come together in the present state of the
Other, which is in tatters.”2
The problem in postmodern society is one of the social bond: How can
a social bond exist and be maintained in the absence of the Other of
the symbolic register?
This
fragmentation of the Other inhibits the production of truth, insofar
as truth requires the structure that is organized and maintained by
the symbolic order of the Other. Lacan
speaks of the fragmentation of the Name-of-the-Father (which is the
signifier of the Other’s existence) into the Names-of-the-Father,
which in turn reveals the inexistence of the Other. This
fragmentation and pluralization of the Name-of-the-Father
“disintegrates it, devastates it from within, by equivocation, by
attacking the bond of the signifier with what one believes to be its
signified.”3
It undermines the singular existence of the Other; the Other as
symbolic field ceases to exist. The Other instead becomes ephemeral,
fleeting. This brings with it all kinds of problems regarding truth
and the social bond. Subjects,
as a collective, are no longer initiated into the symbolic order
because they are no longer duped by it. The
postmodern era is the era of the non-dupes, of the subjects who are
not duped by the existence of the Other. Once subjects refuse to be
duped by the Other, the Other ceases to exist. For this reason,
those who refuse to be duped, the non-dupes, are those who err the
most: les non-dupes
errent. They err
because they reject the symbolic fiction that knits together social
life and produces truth. The passage to the Names-of-the-Father
reflects this refusal to be duped through its fragmentation of the
signifier that signifies the Other. Without the Other, without a
discourse that can provide points of orientation and thus help the
subject to navigate and participate in the social-symbolic production
of truth, the subject is doomed to repeatedly err, to wander.
Only
once the subject has been castrated, has partially lost his access to
jouissance,
can he be initiated into the symbolic order of language, Law, and
desire; the symbolic order qua
structure requires a renunciation of jouissance.
However, as Lacan says,
“in our day, there is no
longer a trace, absolutely anywhere, of initiation.”4
The postmodern subject is thus aligned with the Lacanian pervert.
Insofar
as the pervert underwent alienation but not separation, the pervert
has only a transient relationship to the Other qua
symbolic structure. The pervert is not duped by the Other. The
failure to enter into structure through separation results in the
subject remaining caught within the jouissance
of the Other. The subject thus fails to gain symbolic space for
himself. He who lives without structure lives under the greatest
tyranny, the tyranny of jouissance.5
Without the Other qua
symbolic structure, nothing at all is permitted any longer. This is
the status of the pervert and, I will argue, it is the status of the
postmodern subject.6
This
form of postmodern oppression can be found at both the individual and
the social levels (insofar as these are not discrete but
interpenetrate each another). At the level of the individual, the
maternal superego, extrapolated by Slavoj Žižek
from Lacan’s later seminars, has supplanted the paternal superego,
voicing to the postmodern subject an injunction to “Enjoy!” At
the level of society, Zygmunt Bauman has identified a shift from
technologies of discipline to technologies of seduction, which
require subjects to consume and enjoy. The impossibility of
satisfying these demands for enjoyment elicit intense feelings of
anxiety in the subject so that the postmodern subject is always
caught between a will-to-enjoyment and the anxiety regarding his
inability to fulfill this will. Enjoyment and anxiety intersect in
postmodern hedonism, in the hedonism that follows the collapse of the
Other.
However,
before interrogating postmodern hedonism under the maternal superego
and technologies of seduction, a closer look at the perverse fantasy
is required in order to illuminate the similarities between the
condition of the postmodern subject and that of the perverse subject,
especially as they relate to the jouissance
of the Other.
The
Perverse Fantasy
The
fundamental fantasy of the pervert plays an important role in his
subjectivity. This is because the fundamental fantasy is the
subject’s unconscious imaginary projection of his relation to the
Other and the desire of the Other. In other words, the fundamental
fantasy is the most basic formation of all of the subject’s other
fantasies and therefore it reflects the subject’s position
vis-Ã -vis the Other.
Inevitably, this relation orders much of the subject’s life and his
relations to others. Lacan presents the perverse fantasy in the
algebraic equation: a
<> $.7
This
equation is the inverse of Lacan’s equation for neurotic fantasy: $
<> a.
Lacan explains the reason for this thus: “Strictly
speaking, [perversion] is an inverted effect of fantasy. It is the
subject who determines himself as an object, in his encounter with
subjective division.”8
In these equations, the
subject is represented by the figure on the left and the subject’s
mode of jouissance
is represented by the figure on the right. The lozenge in the middle
represents the two movements of the paternal function, alienation and
separation, and is read as “in relation to,” so that the equation
for neurotic fantasy is read as “the split subject in relation to
object a.”
The equation for perverse fantasy is read as “the object-cause of
jouissance
in relation to the split subject” (Dominique Miller alternatively
phrases it “object a
working the subject”).9
This highlights the difference between the jouissance
of the pervert and that of the neurotic. The neurotic aims to
experience jouissance
through relating to objects
a as a split subject,
attempting to defy the Other’s demand for a sacrifice of jouissance
via castration; the jouissance
of the Other threatens
the neurotic, and the neurotic attempts to avoid it at all costs.
Perverts, on the other hand, attempt to be the object
a for the Other.10
As Jacques-Alain Miller describes it, “the pervert devotes himself
to the Other’s jouissance,
the Other’s sexual enjoyment, trying to restore lost sexual
enjoyment to the Other.”11
The neurotic fantasy provides answers to the fundamental questions
of the neurotic: “Who am I?” and “What am I in the desire of
the Other?” The perverse fantasy is unique precisely because of
its lack of a question. The pervert knows exactly what he is in the
desire of the Other: he is the object
a, that which
completes the Other, that which fills in the Other’s lack. Since
the pervert has undergone alienation, the pervert recognizes the lack
in the Other. This lack begs the question, “What am I in relation
to this lack?” As Bruce Fink tells us, “To the question ‘What
am I?’ the pervert responds, ‘I am that,’ that something that
she is lacking.”12
In
“Kant with Sade,” Lacan presents the following diagram as the
schema of the perverse fundamental fantasy:
Figure
113
In
this schema, the subject begins from the position of the object
a. V represents the
volonté-de-jouissance,
or the will-to-jouissance,
which is the Other’s will as understood by the perverse subject.14
This will is the voice that, in Kant, is explained as “an auto-,
non-divisive affectation” but in Sade as the voice of an other.15
The perverse subject responds to this voice, this will, offering
himself to the Other in his role as object
a so as to fulfill the
Other’s will-to-jouissance.
This inevitably exposes his partner (playing the role of Other) as a
split subject ($), a subject of lack. Now that this lack has been
exposed, the pervert can fill it in with jouissance.
The jouissance
that the perverse subject offers the Other in his role as object
a completes the Other,
filling in his lack and relieving him of his status as a split
subject, creating instead S, or the unbarred “brute subject of
pleasure.”16
The Other, now complete, comes into existence for the perverse
subject.
As
a result of this operation of the fundamental fantasy, Lacan
describes the pervert as “the subject reconstituted through
alienation at the cost of being nothing but the instrument of
jouissance.”17
The perverse fantasy positions the subject as the object that works
tirelessly to bring jouissance
to the Other. Stephanie Swales explains this well: “The pervert
believes that what the Other lacks and thus wants is jouissance,
and he sets out to bring jouissance
to the Other and thereby make the Other exist through being complete.
Through his endeavors to plug up the lack in the Other, the pervert,
as instrument, gains jouissance
for himself.”18
The relationship between the pervert and jouissance
is a unique one. In the essay “The Subversion of the Subject and
the Dialectic of Desire,” Lacan says of Alcibiades, “[he] is by
no means a neurotic… he is the epitome of desirousness, and a man
who pursues jouissance
as far as possible.”19
This is the status of the pervert: the pervert is he who goes
furthest along the path of jouissance.
He travels this path, however, in relation to the jouissance
of the Other.
The
perverse fantasy reflects the pervert’s Oedipal, childhood relation
to the first Other in which the first Other experienced jouissance
and the child experienced jouissance
but also anxiety regarding the first Other’s overproximity.20
In childhood, the pervert experienced the first Other (or mOther) as
deriving jouissance
from his body. At the same time, the child himself experienced
jouissance
through the attention of the first Other, in addition to the anxiety
caused by the fear that this attention might consume him entirely,
might swallow him up. Thus,
the perverse subject never
encounters the Other of desire, but remains in relation to the Other
of demand, the difference between desire and demand being that demand
can only be satisfied by a single object (in this case the pervert
himself) whereas desire, in its metonymic operation, is always
already a desire for something else (i.e. it can never be satisfied).
What this means for the perverse subject is that there is no
possibility for a symbolic space between himself and the first Other,
since the second Other does not intervene and demand separation,
resulting in an overproximity that is the source of intense anxiety.21
However, this also means that he retains access to the
jouissance-filled
relationship with the first Other that he would have lost through
separation.
The
pervert enjoys his own instrumentalization by the Other, while also
feeling anxiety about it. As a result, the jouissance
of the Other and the jouissance
of the pervert reproduce each other in a cyclical fashion. There is
thus a jouissance-filled
relationship between the pervert and the first Other through which
the pervert attempts to join the first Other by identifying as her
imaginary phallus and thus filling in her lack with jouissance.
It is precisely this relationship that the paternal function seeks
to put an end to via castration. The failure of castration in
perversion results in the continuation of this jouissance-filled
relationship. However, the pervert does not necessarily wish to
travel this road to jouissance.
In perversion there is a simultaneous attraction and aversion to
jouissance.
It is because of the latter that the pervert seeks out castration,
that the pervert seeks to make the (Lawgiving) Other qua
agent of separation exist. For our purposes here, it suffices to say
that this conflict fundamental to perversion is at the core of
postmodern hedonism as it operates through the maternal superego and
technologies of seduction. The postmodern condition is one of
suffering under the tyranny of jouissance.
The
Maternal Superego: The Individual and
Jouissance
In
Seminar XX,
Lacan presents a new operation of the superego. The superego, Lacan
says, no longer functions as a voice of prohibition but as a voice
that demands enjoyment: “Nothing forces anyone to enjoy (jouir)
except the superego. The superego is the imperative of jouissance
– Enjoy!”22
This contrasts with the traditional Freudian superego, the voice of
prohibition, “No!” Lacan’s punning of le
nom-du-père (the
Name-of-the-Father) with le
non-du-père (the
No-of-the-Father) prior to 1972 demonstrates the Freudian functioning
of the superego, whereas les
non-dupes errent (the
non-dupes err) demonstrates the Lacanian superego, the superego
operative in the epoch of the non-dupes. With the fragmentation of
paternal authority (the Name-of-the-Father) and the Other, the
superego no longer enunciates a paternal, prohibitive “No!,” but
instead pronounces an unrestrained “Enjoy!” Jacques-Alain Miller
demonstrates how this new superego originates in the collapse of the
Other:
Can
we speak today of a major neurosis of our times? If one was able to
do it, one could say that its principal determinant is the
inexistence of the Other – in so far as it rivets the subject to
the pursuit of surplus-jouissance.
The
Freudian superego produced things like prohibition, duty, and indeed
guilt – so many terms which make the Other exist. These are
semblants
of the Other. They suppose the Other.
The
Lacanian superego, that which Lacan sifts out in Encore,
produces, for him, a completely different imperative – Jouis.
This is the superego of our civilization.23
Without
structure provided by the Other, the pursuit of desire in its
socially-mediated character is forsaken, replaced by the pursuit of
individual jouissance.
This pursuit is demanded of the subject by the Lacanian superego.
Slavoj
Žižek,
building on Lacan’s revised concept of the superego from Seminar
XX, names this new
manifestation the “maternal superego.”24
However, before delving further into Žižek’s
theorization of the maternal superego it would be helpful to situate
the maternal superego within Lacan’s theory of perversion. Paul
Verhaeghe says of perversion and the maternal superego, “Perverse
anxiety is often understood as an oedipal anxiety, that is, an
anxiety about the castrating father. This is wrong; the anxiety is
about the maternal superego. It was the first Other who was in
control, and the perverse scenario is explicitly aimed at reversing
this situation.”25
As explained previously, the pervert’s castration anxiety is not
an anxiety aroused by the castrating father qua
second Other, but an anxiety caused by the overproximity of the first
Other who blocks the second Other and threatens to swallow up the
child in her own jouissance,
in the jouissance
of the Other. In opposition to the prohibitive “No!” of the
second Other, the first Other says, “Yes! Enjoy!” In the
pervert’s experience of the first Other, the first Other endeavors
to prolong the dual, jouissance-filled
relationship between the child and herself, preventing interference
from a third party so that she may continue to derive jouissance
from the child. As a result, the pervert never undergoes separation.
The first Other’s voice, her demand for jouissance
(whether real or
imagined), lives on in the superego of the uncastrated perverse
subject.
Žižek’s
most detailed elaboration of the maternal superego can be found in
the fifth chapter of his book Looking
Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture.
Here, Žižek outlines
his theory of the three successive types of libidinal economy in
modernity: “the ‘autonomous’ individual of the Protestant
ethic, the heteronomous ‘organization man,’ and the type gaining
predominance today, the ‘pathological narcissist.’”26
The introduction of the pathological narcissist coincides with the
advent of the maternal superego as the narcissistic subject of
postmodernity is dominated by the maternal superego and its
injunction to “Enjoy!” Žižek
says of the pathological narcissist and the maternal superego:
Instead
of the integration of a symbolic law,
we have a multitude of rules to follow – rules of accommodation
telling us “how to succeed.” The narcissist knows only the
“rules of the (social) game” enabling him to manipulate others;
societal relations constitute for him a playing field in which he
assumes “roles,” not proper symbolic mandates; he stays clear of
any kind of binding commitment that would imply a proper symbolic
identification. He is a radical conformist
who paradoxically experiences himself as an outlaw….
this disintegration of the ego- ideal entails the installation of a
“maternal” superego that does not prohibit enjoyment but, on
the contrary, imposes it and punishes “social failure” in a far
more cruel and severe way through an unbearable and self-destructive
anxiety. All the babble about the “decline of paternal authority”
merely conceals the resurgence of this incomparably more aggressive
agency. Today’s “permissive” society is certainly not less
“repressive” than the epoch of the “organization man,” that
obsessive servant of the bureaucratic institution; the sole
difference lies in the fact that in a “society that demands
submission to the rules of social intercourse but refuses to ground
those rules in a code of moral conduct,” i.e., in the ego- ideal,
the social demand assumes the form of a harsh, punitive superego.27
The
shift from organization man to pathological narcissist, from paternal
to maternal superego, involves a shift from symbolic mandates to
performative roles, a shift from the ego-ideal (the symbolic position
from which you imagine the Other sees you) to the ideal-ego (the
imaginary identification that you assume) and thus also a shift from
symbolic to imaginary relations, a collapse of the symbolic into the
imaginary and the real, a shift from symbolic Law to loose social
“rules,” all of which culminates in an even more oppressive
structure of power, one which demands hedonistic enjoyment from
subjects and causes anxiety and self-destructive behaviors. These
shifts that Žižek
outlines are the shifts brought about by the decline of the Other.
As
the link between pathological narcissism and the maternal superego
may imply, the shift from paternal to maternal superego has important
implications for the social bond. The rise of the pathological
narcissist dominated by the maternal superego is a symptom of the
further individualization of society and the breaking down of the
social bond. The pathological narcissist searches out detours and
short cuts to jouissance
outside of the social bond. The postmodern hedonist is divided from
society by his concentrated concern for himself and his jouissance,
driven by the internalized demand for jouissance
of the first Other. Little else outside of advancing his own
enjoyment (and by extension that of the first Other) matters, making
social organization increasingly difficult. This influx of
jouissance
is matched by an influx of anxiety, in part because the dissolution
of the social bond obscures the social production of contradictions
and inequalities with the result being that the postmodern
pathological narcissist experiences these problems as personal
failures. Failure is felt more intensely, as it is experienced as a
failure of the individual rather than as a failure of society.28
Any failure to enjoy, to succeed, to live up to the demands of the
maternal superego also results in intense anxiety.
Rik
Loose, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, speaks of the dissolution of the
social bond and the relationship to jouissance
in postmodernity in terms of addiction, which he recognizes as one of
the “New Symptoms.”29
The New Symptoms are those symptoms which psychoanalysts encounter
increasingly more often and in new forms, which therefore require a
somewhat different theorization and approach than in the past.
Addiction in postmodern society is a strategy for pursuing jouissance
within the restrictions set by the maternal superego, namely by
avoiding the attainment of jouissance
within the Law of the Other through the social bond. It is a
strategy favoring the pursuit of individual jouissance.
Loose writes, “addiction is a choice for jouissance
that is administered independently of the structure that determines
the social bond with other people… the effect that addicts pursue
is something that takes place to a large degree independently of the
Other.”30
Because of its immediacy, individual jouissance
better satisfies the
subject and the maternal superego that drives him: “the addicted
subject decided to take a shortcut via the toxic route of the body
and, as such, avoid the less immediate, and thus less satisfactory,
detour via the social bond.”31
Loose poses a very important question near the end of his essay:
The
question we should ask ourselves now is the following: what happens
to the administration of jouissance
– which is ultimately a jouissance
of the body – when the administrative machinery is forced to
function increasingly on its own as a result of the decline of the
function of the symbolic law? This is a legitimate question because
in the discourse of capitalism the function of the law has been
replaced by the function of freedom. From the perspective of this
ideology we have all become individual free agents who operate at a
distance from others and indeed the law that mediates between us and
others and who, paradoxically, become increasingly dependent on
objects of jouissance.32
Loose’s
answer to this question is that postmodern addiction necessarily
results from the administration of jouissance
independent of the Other. Increasingly, jouissance
is administered for individuals by individuals insofar as they are
free to choose, absolved from all commitments to the social bond via
the symbolic Law of the Other.
The
decline of the Other and its Law is the causal factor behind this
shift to the maternal superego; the maternal superego is the logical
consequence of the loss of the Law. As Žižek
explains, “Law is the agency of prohibition which regulates the
distribution of enjoyment on the basis of a common, shared
renunciation (the ‘symbolic castration’), whereas superego marks
a point at which permitted
enjoyment, freedom-to-enjoy, is reversed into obligation
to enjoy – which,
one must add, is the most effective way to block access to
enjoyment.”33
The Law is a symbolic pact between subjects that creates rules for
enjoyment within society, allowing for permitted enjoyment and for
transgressions of the Law that yield even greater enjoyment. Without
the Law, these permitted enjoyments become obligatory enjoyments,
leaving no room for transgression. Žižek
describes this obligatory jouissance
in Kantian terms:
The
superego imperative to enjoy thus functions as the reversal of Kant’s
“Du kannst, denn du sollst!” (You can, because you must!); it
relies on a “You must, because you can!” That is to say, the
superego aspect of today’s “non-repressive” hedonism (the
constant provocation we are exposed to, enjoining us to go right to
the end and explore all modes of jouissance)
resides in the way permitted jouissance
necessarily turns into obligatory jouissance.34
This
postmodern hedonism in which the superego supersedes the Law presents
the subject with a forced choice: Enjoy! or suffer the anxiety of not
enjoying. This choice is not really a choice since enjoyment can
never be achieved when it is imposed. The postmodern maternal
superego demands what it simultaneously withholds, subjecting the
individual to anxiety over his failure to meet its impossible
demands. The maternal superego is unrelenting, continuously wringing
out the last drops of jouissance
from the subject it persecutes with its demand for more and more
jouissance.
It is not so much the subject who enjoys as it is the Other (in the
form of the maternal superego) who enjoys by instrumentalizing the
subject towards the production of jouissance.
Thus, as Žižek
concludes, by demanding enjoyment the maternal superego in fact
prohibits enjoyment, eliciting instead anxiety regarding the
jouissance
of the Other.
This
relationship between the instrumentalization of the subject and the
jouissance
of the Other manifests in an analogous form in the wider social order
in the form of technologies of seduction, which will be explored in
the next section.
Technologies
of Seduction: Society and Jouissance
From
the 1960s until his death in the mid-1980s, Michel Foucault theorized
what he called “disciplinary power” as exercised through
technologies of discipline. According to Foucault, in the modern
period power is invested into the bodies of subjects through the
disciplinary practices of such institutions as prisons, schools,
hospitals, asylums, and the military. These technologies of
discipline create “docile bodies,” bodies that work to increase
the efficiency of power structures by regulating themselves.35
However, some theorists have observed shifts in the functioning of
power in postmodern society; increasingly, theorists argue that
technologies of seduction are displacing the technologies of
discipline identified by Foucault.36
The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman was the first theorist to identify
this shift in his essay “On Postmodern Uses of Sex.” The French
philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky expanded upon Bauman’s concept in his
book Hypermodern Times.
These works will be considered in relation to the perversity of
postmodern hedonism, which has been our focus thus far. Technologies
of seduction reflect the expansion and proliferation of the maternal
superego into the wider social realm, infecting society with its own
will-to-jouissance.
In
the beginning of “On Postmodern Uses of Sex,” Bauman gives an
account of Foucault’s theory of power in terms of discipline,
panopticism, normativity, and health. Bauman then explains the
transformations that these operations of power have undergone in
postmodernity. Using a discourse of eroticism, Bauman describes the
search for ever newer and greater pleasures in postmodern society as
an emerging cultural norm.37
He says, “The great majority of people – men as well as women –
are today integrated through seduction rather than policing,
advertising rather than indoctrinating, need-creation rather than
normative regulation. Most of us are socially and culturally trained
and shaped as sensation-seekers and gatherers, rather than producers
and soldiers.”38
In short, in postmodern society power molds subjects into consumers
rather than producers. People are seduced through advertising and
the creation of new needs in order to sustain hegemonic power
structures. As consumers, subjects are seduced into seeking out the
new, the novel, the strange, the unique, the pleasurable, whatever
may provide the subject with sensations and stimuli. Technologies of
seduction are effective because “postmodern culture eulogizes the
delights of sex and encourages the investment of every nook and
cranny of the Lebenswelt
with erotic significance.”39
The empirical results of this investment of a will-to-jouissance
in the body of the postmodern subject and this investment of erotic
significance in the postmodern lifeworld are evident in the recent
surge in tourism, spectacular entertainment, and rampant consumerism.
For
Foucault, health is the standard by which a subject’s compliance
with the disciplinary regime is measured. The “healthy” body is
one that follows the norms imposed by the institutions of
disciplinary power; the healthy body follows the law, adheres to the
rules of social conduct in public, engages only in approved forms of
sexual activity, etc. With the collapse of the Other, of the Law,
there are no longer any norms to follow. Instead, as Žižek
has established, there are rules for jouissance,
which can be located in Bauman’s concept of “fitness.” Fitness
is the new standard by which compliance with power structures is
measured and, as we will see, it is a very problematic one. Bauman
defines fitness as being “always on the move or ready to move,
capacity for imbibing or digesting ever greater volumes of stimuli,
flexibility and resistance to all closure.”40
An alternative definition articulated through the lens of
psychoanalysis might be: the
degree to which a
subject demonstrates his ability to enjoy, his capacity for
jouissance.
In this formulation, fitness takes on the role of a measure of the
success of the maternal superego on a social level. Just as the
maternal superego can never be satisfied, thereby eliciting intense
anxiety in the perverse postmodern subject, “Fitness is a
never-to-be-reached horizon looming forever in the future, a spur to
unstoppable efforts, none of which can be seen as fully satisfactory,
let alone the ultimate. Pursuit of fitness, its little triumphs
notwithstanding, is shot through with incurable anxiety and is an
inexhaustible source of self-reproach and self-indignation.”41
The inevitable failure of the postmodern subject to enjoy at the
behest of the maternal superego and social demands for fitness
results in anxiety, both in regard to his failure to enjoy and to the
overproximity of the enjoyment of the Other, which he provides.
Bauman
describes fitness as being even more oppressive than health when it
comes to social standards for compliance, as Žižek
describes the maternal superego as being even more oppressive than
the paternal superego. This is because fitness is problematic in
three ways: there is no upper limit to fitness (thus its status as an
ever-receding horizon), fitness can be neither objectively measured
nor effectively communicated, and finally the subject assumes the
individual responsibility for playing both the role of he who
experiences sensations and he who measures sensations, paradoxically
requiring that the subject experience sensation from both a
subjective position and from the objective position of an external
observer.42
Given this state of affairs, Bauman provides a grim prognosis:
“Added to the two previously signaled troubles, that additional
worry makes the plight of the fitness-seeker an agony of which our
health-conscious ancestors had no inkling. All three troubles daily
generate a great deal of anxiety; what is more, however, that anxiety
– the specifically postmodern
affliction – is unlikely ever to be cured and stopped.”43
Here, Bauman explicitly links anxiety to fitness and postmodern
technologies of seduction; anxiety is the result of the postmodern
subject’s inevitable inability to live up to the hedonistic social
demands for enjoyment. The postmodern subject continuously suffers
from the “fear that some precious kinds of sensation have been
missed and the pleasure-giving potential of the body has not been
squeezed to the last drop.”44
The
standards (well, no longer standards, shall we say guidelines?) for
physical beauty in postmodernity reinforce Bauman’s concept of
fitness. In postmodern society, the attractive female body is thin
but toned while the attractive male body is muscular and well
defined. These physiques suggest that the subject is capable of
adventurous, sensation-seeking pursuits, whether they be rock
climbing or kinky sex. The attractive postmodern body is tan and may
be adorned with piercings and tattoos, which suggest surplus time and
money capable of being spent in the pursuit of new sensations. These
postmodern bodily aesthetics reflect the subject’s narcissistic and
hedonistic pursuits; they communicate the subject’s fitness, his
capacity for jouissance.
The attractive body is the one that contains the most signifiers of
enjoyment. Of further significance is the fact that these physical
characteristics in no way correlate to social values outside of the
will-to-jouissance;
that is, they are not signifiers of anything having to do with the
social bond, such as industriousness, the maternal, or integrity (as
in past standards for physical beauty). They are signifiers of pure,
individual enjoyment.45
It
is in this way that the dissolution of the social bond is the sine
qua non of the
maintenance of postmodern power structures as exercised through
technologies of seduction. As Bauman tells us, “The weakening of
bonds is an important condition of successful social production of
sensation-gatherers who happen as well to be fully fledged, effective
consumers.”46
Technologies of seduction are most effective when deployed against
subjects divided by the pursuit of individual modes of jouissance.
The social relation between individuals must therefore be
interrupted to the greatest extent possible. Since technologies of
seduction are utilized against individuals, they further contribute
to the individualization of subjects; they tie subjects to individual
modes of jouissance
ever more tightly. In this way technologies of seduction are
self-replicating, they produce their own conditions for reproduction.
Gilles
Lipovetsky elaborates on the transition from technologies of
discipline to technologies of seduction first recognized by Bauman.
Lipovetsky writes of “the move from a capitalism of production to
an economy of consumption, the replacement of an unbending and
disciplinary society by a ‘society of fashion’ restructured from
top to bottom by technologies of ephemerality, novelty and permanent
seduction.”47
In postmodernity, as previously stated, the rigidity of structure
has fragmented into ephemeral and fleeting flows. The supplanting of
production by consumption contributes to this transience in the form
of seduction and enjoyment. However, this indulgence does not come
without a price; it dwells in a juncture with anxiety. Here, once
again at the intersection of enjoyment and anxiety, we find
postmodern hedonism: “The consumerist fever for immediate
satisfactions, the aspirations toward a playful and hedonistic
lifestyle, have of course by no means disappeared – they are being
unleashed more than ever: but they are enveloped in a halo of fears
and anxieties.”48
Lipovetsky’s elaborations on Bauman’s concept solidify the
reciprocity between the maternal superego and technologies of
seduction regarding the compliance of postmodern subjects with
structures of seductive power.
The
effects of postmodern hedonism, of the will-to-jouissance,
are numerous and are not compatible with an effective social bond.
In 1972, Lacan theorized a shift from the discourse of the master to
the discourse of capitalism with important implications for the Law
and jouissance.
Renata Salecl describes these consequences thus:
Lacan
wondered whether this ‘Discourse of Capitalism’ represents a
rejection or, better, a foreclosure of castration. This foreclosure
comes when society abandons all limits in order to make a push
towards limitless jouissance.
There is no longer a symbolic father to establish the rule of law.
The drive for jouissance
at all costs leads to
all kinds of toxic mania and excess – alcohol, drugs, shopping,
workaholism. Capitalism frees the slave and makes him a consumer,
but limitless consumption will end with the consumer consuming him-
or herself.49
Under
the discourse of capitalism, the postmodern subject is pushed to
enjoy at all costs, both on the individual level by the maternal
superego and on the social level by technologies of seduction. The
Law is defunct, no longer serving to restrict and distribute
jouissance.
All that remains in its absence is the superegoic demand for
jouissance
(the internalized voice of the first Other): “Consume! Enjoy!”
As Rik Loose reminds us, “there is nothing that sells more than the
promise of total enjoyment and the fear of not being part of that
experience.”50
In
the final section, we will examine this relationship between the
postmodern subject’s will-to-jouissance,
the jouissance
of the Other, and late capitalism.
The
Jouissance-Filled
Relationship of Late Capitalism under Postmodernity
Another
name for our current era is the “Information Age.” This
appellation refers to the computerization and digitalization of
information in postmodernity. The control, collection, and
transmission of information have become increasingly central to the
economy of late capitalism. As David Harvey tells us, information
has become a commodity in the post-Fordist system of flexible
accumulation: “accurate and up-to-date information is now a very
highly valued commodity. Access to, and control over, information,
coupled with a strong capacity for instantaneous response to changes
in exchange rates, fashions and tastes, and moves by competitors is
more essential to corporate survival than it ever was under
Fordism.”51
This marks what some (e.g. Lipovetsky) have described as a
transition from an economy of production to an economy of
consumption; corporate attention is increasingly focused on the
consumption side of capitalism, on the things people purchase and
enjoy. For this reason, information concerning the consumption
habits of individuals has become a central component of late
capitalism.
This
focus on consumption is related to the flexibility of late
capitalism. As Harvey suggests, flexibility allows for nearly
immediate responses to equally immediate changes in the economy and
in patterns of consumption. Harvey explains the relationship between
flexibility, rapid change, and consumption in terms of aesthetics:
Flexible
accumulation has been accompanied on the consumption side, therefore,
by a much greater attention to quick-changing fashions and the
mobilization of all the artifices of need inducement and cultural
transformation that this implies. The relatively stable aesthetic of
Fordist modernism has given way to all the ferment, instability, and
fleeting qualities of a postmodernist aesthetic that celebrates
difference, ephemerality, spectacle, fashion, and the commodification
of cultural forms.52
With
the transition from a rigid regime of production under Fordism to a
flexible regime of consumption under post-Fordism, changes occur more
often and more rapidly. This requires a method for tracking these
changes, and has thus resulted in the centrality of information in
late capitalism. As Harvey writes, “Control over information flow
and over the vehicles for propagation of popular taste and culture
have likewise become vital weapons in competitive struggle.”53
Late capitalist competition is less and less concerned with labor
and resources and increasingly concerned with the transmission of
information to and the collection of information from consumers.
For
this reason, market research is a major business in late capitalism.
Increasingly, the kinds of surveillance used in the service of
technologies of discipline are being used in the service of
technologies of seduction. These technologies of seduction
increasingly exert control over individuals insofar as individuals
acquiesce to this seduction. Oscar H. Gandy, Jr. demonstrates this
in his 1995 essay “Tracking the Audience: Personal Information and
Privacy.” Gandy writes, “Surveillance and rationalization also
imply an increase in the ability of capitalists to exercise control
over individuals in their roles as employees, consumers, and
citizens.”54
Consumer practices are surveilled in ever new and increasingly
invisible ways thanks to the advances of digital technology. Gandy
speaks of certain practices of surveillance; he describes the
voluntary use of devices that track when individuals watch television
and what programs they watch (in exchange for prizes or other
rewards), as well as the tracing of magazine coupons to exact
addresses and other surveillance activities.55
The point of this surveillance is to create consumer profiles.
These consumer profiles increase the efficiency of advertising by
isolating certain pieces of information about individuals, ensuring
that advertisements get to the individuals most likely to purchase
the products being advertised. In this way, Gandy tells us,
“Reading, viewing, listening, banking, communication, and shopping
activities will increasingly display the same quality of commercial
transactions. As such, those transactions will provide the
surveillance information necessary for the efficient operation of
capitalism as its reach is extended into all aspects of life.”56
Clearly, surveillance has come a long way since 1995. With the
introduction of the Internet, Gandy’s prediction has come true to a
greater degree than perhaps even he himself anticipated.
Gandy
speaks of audiences in two ways: as products and as laborers.
Audiences are products in the sense that the consumer profiles
attached to them are created, bought, and sold.57
The information acquired about audiences is a commodity to be
exchanged. Audiences are laborers since they do the “work of
watching commercials, making sense of them, and ultimately behaving
as consumers appropriate to their social position.”58
The reception of advertisements is not a passive activity; it
requires work on the part of the consumer who views them. Insofar as
audiences are laborers, their labor has been made more efficient in
two ways. First, the length of commercials has decreased over time
so that viewers now view more commercials per minute than ever
before.59
Second, with advances in surveillance technologies, the
advertisements audiences see are increasingly tailored to them in
their specificity as individuals.60
For
Gandy, this labor of the audience is exploitative. However, this is
not to suggest that the audience is not recompensed for their labor.
Gandy writes, “The payment for this work is the pleasure,
stimulation, or entertainment derived from consuming the material
that appears between the commercial messages.”61
The payment for this labor comes in the form of the jouissance
of consumption. In exchange for the work of watching and
interpreting commercials, posters, and other advertisements the
audience member receives jouissance
via the purchase of the product advertised. This enjoyment is in
turn productive. It is through this enjoyment that the first Other
qua
capitalism enjoys; the first Other enjoys through the profits it
derives from the consumer. There is an entire economy of jouissance
here. Was it not the jouissance
of television viewing (i.e. spectacular entertainment) that placed
the audience member in a position to see the commercial in the first
place? In this way, subjects qua
consumers experience jouissance
as they themselves provide jouissance
to the first Other.
Postmodern subjects exist in a perverse, jouissance-filled
relationship with the first Other qua
capitalism in which subjects are situated as the instrument of the
jouissance
of the first Other, who demands more and more jouissance
via the maternal superego and technologies of seduction.
A
recent opinion piece in the
New York Times
reflects this positioning of the postmodern subject. The article is
titled, appropriately, “Facebook is Using You.” The author, Lori
Andrews, explains a topic that has been of much concern recently:
Facebook and personal information. She clearly explains the way in
which the labor of consumers is utilized by the social networking
site Facebook: “Facebook makes money by selling ad space to
companies that want to reach us. Advertisers choose key words or
details – like relationship status, location, activities, favorite
books and employment – and then Facebook runs the ads for the
targeted subset of its 845 million users.”62
The author describes the similar practices of the Internet search
engine Google. Users provide these websites with jouissance
in the form of information which in turn provide them with
opportunities to consume (through advertisements), thus providing
them with jouissance.
And of course, their subsequent consumption provides the first Other
with jouissance
in the form of profits. The increasing privacy concerns surrounding
such practices of information collection and of targeted advertising
reflect the anxiety that subjects experience regarding the first
Other’s overproximity and the jouissance
of the first Other in late capitalism. In positioning ourselves as
the instruments of the first Other’s jouissance,
we attempt to fill in the first Other’s lack. It is the resulting
lack of lack that causes us to feel anxiety before the first Other
who now threatens to consume us, to swallow us entirely.
Conclusion
The
rise of the Internet reflects the rapidly expanding rationalization
of surveillance practices and technologies of seduction. As
surveillance practices infiltrate further and further into everyday
life, technologies of seduction become increasingly
self-perpetuating. These technologies of seduction provide subjects
with jouissance
in exchange for information about their enjoyment, and this
information in turn provides the means for further seduction.
Postmodern subjects are thus caught in the jouissance
of the Other, both enjoying and feeling anxiety regarding their
position as the instrument of the Other’s jouissance.
This unique operation of power functions at the level of the
individual as well in the form of the maternal superego, which
demands more and more jouissance
from the subject. This postmodern variety of hedonism serves to
perpetuate and reinforce the dominance of late capitalism, in part by
furthering the individualizing and atomizing forces inherent to the
operation of power under late capitalism. This effectively inhibits
the formation of a collective resistance against the present field of
power relations.
New
forms of resistance are required to oppose these new and more
flexible operations of power. Undoubtedly, new strategies of
resistance are already being deployed; what remains to be seen are
what form these strategies are taking, how they are opposing the
current constellation of power relations under late capitalism, and
how effective these strategies might be in their resistance. We
postmodern subjects need to invent a new theory and practice of
coming together in an Other, a new form of social bond, through which
we can resist the seductions and the promises of jouissance
of late capitalism, but also an Other that is less exclusive and less
oppressive towards marginal groups than previous social relations.
Until then, without a God qua
Other, we will remain fundamentally unfree; nothing at all will be
permitted.
1
Jacques Lacan, Seminar
II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of
Psychoanalysis,
trans. Sylvana Tomaselli, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York, W. W.
Norton & Company, 1997), 128.
2
Jacques-Alain Miller and Eric Laurent, “The Other Who Does Not
Exist and His Ethical Committees,” in Almanac
of Psychoanalysis: Psychoanalytic Stories After Freud and Lacan,
trans. Michele
Julien, Richard Klein, Kevin Polley, Mischa Twitchin, and Veronique
Voruz, eds. Ruth Golan, Gabriel Dahan, Shlomo Lieber, and Rivka
Warshawsky (Tel Aviv: Groupe Israelienne de l'Ecole Europeene,
1998), 35.
4
Jacques Lacan, “Lecture on November 20, 1973,” in The
Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XXI: The Non-Dupes Errent,
trans. Cormac Gallagher (unpublished copy for personal use).
5
The French word jouissance
most closely translates into English as “enjoyment,” but this is
still not quite adequate and so jouissance
is
often left untranslated. Lacan makes an important distinction
between jouissance
and
plaisir
(pleasure). Pleasure is submitted to the law of the pleasure
principle, which prohibits pleasure from going beyond a certain
point. Jouissance
is this beyond of the pleasure principle, the point at which
pleasure becomes so intense as to be instead pleasure in pain.
Rather than the reduction in tension under the pleasure principle,
jouissance
involves
an increase in tension. Jouissance
is what is prohibited by the pleasure principle and what must be
renounced in the castration complex during Oedipalization, and this
prohibition is what pushes subjects to seek out jouissance
and to transgress against the pleasure principle (via the drives).
Jouissance
plays a unique role in each of the clinical structures; in this
paper, we will be focusing on jouissance
within perversion.
6
It is essential to bear in mind that perversion in the Lacanian
system is not a term of moral judgment, but instead refers to a
clinical structure.
7
Jacques Lacan, “Kant with Sade,” in Ecrits:
The First Complete Edition in English,
trans. Héloïse
Fink, Bruce Fink, and Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company,
2006), 653.
8
Jacques Lacan, Seminar
XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,
trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 1998), 185.
9
Dominique Miller, “A Case of Childhood Perversion,” in Reading
Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud,
ed. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Janus (Albany, NY:
State University of New York, 1996), 297.
10
The object a
is what the subject hopes to find in the other, the object which
will fulfill his desire. It is simultaneously the object of desire
and the object-cause of desire, that which puts desire into motion.
It is a surplus of jouissance
which is closely associated with the drives. It is also the
leftover of the real that remains after the entry into the symbolic.
In identifying with the object a,
the pervert is identifying with that which can plug up the lack in
the Other.
11
Jacques-Alain Miller, “A Discussion of Lacan’s ‘Kant with
Sade,’” in Reading
Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud,
ed. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, Maire Jaanus (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1996), 213.
12
Bruce Fink, A
Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psyhchoanalysis: Theory and
Technique
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 175.
13
Jacques Lacan, Schema 1 from “Kant with Sade,” in Ecrits:
The First Complete Edition in English,
trans. Héloïse
Fink, Bruce Fink, and Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company,
2006), 653.
14
Stephanie S. Swales, Perversion:
A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Subject
(New York, NY: Routledge, 2012), 92.
19
Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of
Desire,” in Ecrits:
The First Complete Edition in English,
trans. Héloïse
Fink, Bruce Fink, and Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company,
2006), 699-700.
20
Dylan Evans says of anxiety, “anxiety arises when the lack is
itself lacking; anxiety is the lack of a lack.” In this way, the
pervert produces his own anxiety as a result of his production of
jouissance
for the Other.
Dylan
Evans, An
Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis
(New York: Routledge, 1996), 12.
21
Lacan himself did not use the terms first Other and second Other; he
used mother and father, or paternal function. In the interest of
political correctness and because of the many changes in the family
as institution since the time of Lacan’s writings, I am following
the lead of Paul Verhaeghe and avoiding gendered terms for the
child’s caretakers, thus first and second Other. By first Other
is meant the
primary caretaker, the first person to whom the child attaches
libidinally. By second Other is meant the paternal function, that
which serves to separate the child and the first Other and thereby
introduce the child into the symbolic register. Perversion is
constituted in the failure of the second Other to separate the child
and the first Other.
22
Jacque Lacan, Seminar
XX: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge,
trans. Bruce Fink, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W. W. Norton
& Company, 1998), 3.
24
The adjective “maternal” is, for obvious reasons, problematic.
By maternal, Žižek
refers to the fact that this superego functions prior to the
separation from the first Other (or mOther) provided by the paternal
function. The maternity of the Lacanian superego should not be
interpreted as being related to femininity or to maternity in a
literal sense, but as being logically prior to the paternal function
and to the paternal superego.
25
Paul Verhaeghe, On
Being Normal and Other Disorders: A Manual for Clinical
Psychodiagnostics
(New York: Other Press, 2004), 411.
26
Slavoj Žižek,
Looking
Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 102.
28
Zygmunt Bauman, “Critique – Privatized and Disarmed,” in The
Individualized Society
(Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 106.
29
While addiction is most often thought of in terms of drugs, it is
important to note that a subject can develop an addiction to any
object insofar as addiction is a dependency on an object rather than
on others (i.e. the social bond).
30
Rik Loose, “Modern Symptoms and their Effects as Forms of
Administration: A Challenge to the Concept of Dual Diagnosis and to
Treatment,” in Lacan
and Addiction: An Anthology,
ed. Yael Goldman Baldwin, Kareen Malone, and Thomas Svolos (London:
Karnac, 2011), 5.
33
Slavoj
Žižek, For
They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor
(London: Verso Books, 2008), 237.
35
Michel Foucault, Discipline
and Punish,
trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 136.
36
This is not to suggest that disciplinary power no longer functions.
Rather, technologies of discipline and technologies of seduction
co-exist, with the latter becoming increasingly more prominent.
Both technologies operate through surveillance and panopticism, as
will be made clear in the final section of this chapter.
37
Zygmunt Bauman, “On Postmodern Uses of Sex,” Theory,
Culture, and Society
15, no. 3-4 (1998): 21.
45
Think of the Club Kids of the 80’s, Bret Easton Ellis’s literary
characters of the 90s (Patrick Bateman, Victor Ward), and the cast
of Jersey
Shore in
the 2000s.
51
David Harvey, The
Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural
Change
(Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1990), 159.
54
Oscar H. Gandy, Jr., “Tracking the Audience: Personal Information
and Privacy,” in Questioning
the Media: A Critical Introduction,
eds. John Downing, Ali Mohammadi, Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi
(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995), 224.
62
Lori Andrews, “Facebook is Using You,” New
York Times,
February 4, 2012, accessed March 6, 2013.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/opinion/sunday/facebook-is-using-you.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Pratt Institute
Main Brooklyn Campus
200 Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn, NY
200 Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn, NY
For more information, please visit our official page
Pratt Institute Admissions
