Aesthetic theories seem to fail insofar as they forgo their obligation to accept themselves as subjective. Kant seems least to attempt to disguise this fact. Judgment as a word retains its true subjective uncertainty. As used in court (and at court, perhaps?) to judge is to weigh the basic facts and come to some conclusion, a conclusion which context gives the weight of some specific set of ethical standards. But if aesthetic judgment is to avoid populism (as it ever seems so determined to do), it must take on a belief in some true standard of objectivity while simultaneously and steadfastly refusing to subject its conclusions to testing.
Kant exposes this. He knows that no matter what conclusion is drawn by another regarding beauty, we are always inclined to a personal experience. The desire to test for ourselves. In this way, social conceptions of beauty, which characterize much of the interest in popular culture, act as aesthetic conduits. And so any totalizing aesthetic theory acts as nothing less or more, in any logical sense, than a preference for the movies of Franรงois Truffaut over those of Jean-Claude Vann Damme. It seems to me, then, that the denigration of the opposite opinion must necessarily be based on ethical grounds. According, that is, to some idea of the 'right' or 'just' way, to some act of judgment. To do so in the name of aesthetic theory, then, looks like just the type of political aestheticism which Benjamin warns us so vehemently against. From here my concern regarding Adorno arises. By drawing such a large part of human artistic production under a single net, and then condemning it outright, Adorno draws a most personal line between himself and any concept of mass. Mass is the medium with which Benjamin (and Marx) were so fascinated. Mass is the medium of the revolution, and yet for Adorno, the masses have been massively mislead, and his aesthetic theory attempts single-handedly to 'right' their course. I am lead by Benjamin to suspect such a presumption. For Benjamin, the masses which arose as a result of the industrial revolution will necessarily lead to their redemption. He mostly avoids any attempt to make judgments regarding the objects of consumption, except to acknowledge them as significant, and to acknowledge in technological change an infinite capacity to shock us. His love for movies stems for their capability to appropriate masses. He understands that mass reaction contains something qualitatively different than that found in individual contemplation. He may well lament the relative scarcity of human contemplation (many like him still exist, Adorno), but he understood the potential for change to reside not in an individual understanding, but as the result of mass (re)action.
Adorno's aesthetic, because it positions itself in opposition to the entire realm of popular arts, because it qualifies every potential artwork in relationship to its status as a commodity, leaves literally no object to judge but the viewers own mind. We might justify this in the music industry by some concept of 'selling out.' Such and such a band were so dope, man, until they sold out. Now they just make music for the masses. But not only does this justification seem to suggest its own two-dimensional quality, it also does not help us with regards to other artists, nor in the ever-growing complexity of other media. For example, what do we make of a film which gets maid by a major motion picture company, under a descent but not unreasonable budget, for an all but non-existent audience. If the film is sophisticated (say for example, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), it might merit Adorno's classification as art. Here it is, it has navigated (as it must) the evil, collusive complex of the culture industry, and it has retained some aspect of its resistance to commodification. It represents itself as a hero to the cause of the worker. It represents itself as art by denying itself. So far so good; until such a movie gains a wider audience. Friends tell friends, and in true Gladwellian style, the fashion tips, and suddenly everyone is watching it. Now the film seems to defy the nature of Adorno's aesthetic. It seems that it is not nearly so difficult as everyone supposed, and so perhaps does not resist in the way that we thought it might it's own easy consumption by the masses. What are we to make of this? Adorno's aesthetic again seems reduced to no more than some petty and conflicted notion of 'selling out'.
This tendency is seen on a broader (read: more massive) scale in the social tendency to deny the quality of a film that has been made based on a favorite book. While there my be a relatively small number of people who lament the fall of literature from Franz Kafka to Dan Brown, there are many more who might lament the shift from page to film for works such as The Lord of the Rings (or even more democratically, for Harry Potter). Here we have a much broader group of people making what is ostensibly the same judgment that Adorno makes, but in order to distinguish between a group of aesthetic objects all of which might be classified by him as pure commodity. I can hardly see Adorno granting Harry Potter the status of art object. (If he might perhaps for Sorcerer's Stone, than certainly not by the release of The Chamber of Secrets--obvious as the product of an industrial complex.) However, someone who decries the movie versions of these books invariably does so by recourse to some notion of difficulty as related to mass appeal. It doesn't allow for your imagination. It changed some of the best parts. The movie just got Voldemort all wrong. A fan of the book pre-film-adaptation qualifies himself as such through his reaction to the film as much as through his reaction to the book. To say nothing of the millions of new readers who flock to the book as a result of the movie. Adorno may well point to the conspiracy between J. K. Rowling, Scholastic, and Warner Brothers, it would be harder to explain away had the original book qualified for him as art. Suddenly, with a million new readers and a revived printing cycle, the book doesn't seem so steadfastly to refuse its commodity status.
Equally relevant to this problem might be the Oprah effect, which, while initially reserving for itself books that might fall well short of Adorno's critical gaze, more recently has adopted some titles which before might have found their way onto his list (2005: The Sound and the Fury; 2007: The Road, Love in the Time of Cholera). Adorno might only explain this extreme commodification by making some claim to his own 'correct' reading of the texts, as opposed to the message of subjugation which is inevitably inscribed upon the texts by the culture industry. But to do so is either to call into question any immanent critique which may have lay dormant in the work while it was still difficult and unpopular--while it still seemed to resist its own commodification--or to admit Oprah Winfrey (the culture industry might find no one better qualified for its own embodiment) as a potential disseminator of objects of true aesthetic quality. Either of these options seems to undermine Adorno's entire point of view.
Benjamin celebrates the transition from the primacy of the page to the seduction of the screen, not because he understands film to be in any way a better medium (I think he still might hold the opposite opinion), but because he understands in the transition to mass-media an entire revolution in the patterns of human thought. He glimpses the fact that, in a mass-media environment, recourse to any single medium, or the patterns of thought required in the processing of single media (of which he mentions contemplation) might seem antiquated, quaint, and tirelessly ideological.
This is the trap into which Adorno seems to fall. He fails to recognize, to inhabit, the shift in consciousness which is afforded--insisted upon--by the advent of mass-media. He insists upon a hierarchy of art which is grounded equally--and no more innocently--in ritual and its power structures as is the body of work which he casts aside with a grimace by employing his epithet, "the culture industry." And so he comes across sounding like a crotchety grandpa lamenting the music of 'kids these days!', with no more grounding for his disparagement of Weezer than they have in their distaste for Glen Miller.
However, I find myself to be sympathetic to Adorno, if only because I perceive as well as he the capacity for Capitalism to produce ever larger amounts of self-fulfilling, self-actualizing, internally-promotional bullshit. I might even be inclined to associate my own ethical views with his, had they not lead him to so undemocratic a conclusion. As an attempt to recuperate what seems useful in Adorno's theory, it might prove fruitful to consider artwork in general, even (perhaps especially) that class of artwork which seems most conducive to consumption, as containing within it something akin to Adorno's immanent critique. This, to me, seems more dialectical: to wonder how a multi-million dollar blockbuster might contain within it the suggestion of its own denial. To tease out the ways that Spiderman 2 expresses a refusal to allow an identity between the universal and the particular, and especially the ways that it does this without recourse to pre-mass patterns of thought, through a Benjaminian reception in distraction. Capitalism, according to Marx, contains within it the seeds of its own destruction. If we take him at his word, it seems unlikely that these seeds would not be germinating in the symbol-rich soil of the culture industry.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
On the History of Consciousness
On the Origin of Species (1859)
Capital, Volume 1 (1867)
The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
The General Theory of Relativity (1915)
Course in General Linguistics (1916) - Lectures 1906-1911
Quantum Uncertainty (Heisenberg) (1927)
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Teaching Benjamin
"The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility" (reprinted in my Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition) represents my first exposure to the work of Walter Benjamin. Since I first read it over the summer, in preparation for Dr. Rasula's course on Metropolitan Modernity, I have read many more of his short essays as well as a large chunk of The Arcades Project. It was therefore exciting to revisit this essay in the context of teaching it to a group of students, many of whom may have been experiencing Benjamin for the first time.
It became clear to me as I reread the essay (my fourth reading, I think) just how it has become such a pivotal piece of writing in so many fields. Each reading, after time has passed and outside study undertaken, brings a whole new set of ideas to the fore, possibilities for understanding which had not exposed themselves until the current moment. In this sense, Benjamin achieves stylistically and rhetorically what he sets out to achieve historically, a series of discrete "dialectal images" which constitute "the relation of what-has-been to the now" (Arcades Project 462).
Benjamin begins the essay with an appeal to Marx's theory of political economy, stating that when Marx set out his ideas regarding base and superstructure, Capitalism was still in its infancy. Benjamin asserts that only now (in 1936, almost seventy years after the publication of the first volume of Capital) can we begin to analyze the effects of the base on the formations of the superstructure. Benjamin acknowledges that Marx was acting as a prognosticator, and that his own work must also "meet certain prognostic requirements" (1052). This is one of those places where I feel like Benjamin is talking to us. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin explains that "history leads the past to bring the present into a critical state" (471). His interest in Paris in the nineteenth century (to which he dedicated a large amount of time and effort in compiling The Arcades Project) sprang from his understanding of a certain confluence between that time and his own, like a window into the past that might bring the present into clearer focus. This same window, I suspect, we sense when we approach much of Benjamin's work, and especially the "Artwork" essay. He looks back 70 years to Marx; we look back 70 years to him. And so much of what he is exploring in the "Artwork" essay has become, in true prognostic style, central to the modes of our everyday existence.
It became clear to me as I reread the essay (my fourth reading, I think) just how it has become such a pivotal piece of writing in so many fields. Each reading, after time has passed and outside study undertaken, brings a whole new set of ideas to the fore, possibilities for understanding which had not exposed themselves until the current moment. In this sense, Benjamin achieves stylistically and rhetorically what he sets out to achieve historically, a series of discrete "dialectal images" which constitute "the relation of what-has-been to the now" (Arcades Project 462).
Benjamin begins the essay with an appeal to Marx's theory of political economy, stating that when Marx set out his ideas regarding base and superstructure, Capitalism was still in its infancy. Benjamin asserts that only now (in 1936, almost seventy years after the publication of the first volume of Capital) can we begin to analyze the effects of the base on the formations of the superstructure. Benjamin acknowledges that Marx was acting as a prognosticator, and that his own work must also "meet certain prognostic requirements" (1052). This is one of those places where I feel like Benjamin is talking to us. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin explains that "history leads the past to bring the present into a critical state" (471). His interest in Paris in the nineteenth century (to which he dedicated a large amount of time and effort in compiling The Arcades Project) sprang from his understanding of a certain confluence between that time and his own, like a window into the past that might bring the present into clearer focus. This same window, I suspect, we sense when we approach much of Benjamin's work, and especially the "Artwork" essay. He looks back 70 years to Marx; we look back 70 years to him. And so much of what he is exploring in the "Artwork" essay has become, in true prognostic style, central to the modes of our everyday existence.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Lacanian Mathematics
Lacan asserts that language is a formulation only of "the correlations between signifier and signifier" with no recourse to any referent, either in the real world or at the core of our self, both of which are cut off from any true communicability (The Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism, 2nd Ed., p. 1174). If we take him at his word, language is no more than an internally consistent system. This at first seems supremely ironic: the very system we employ to relate our ideas about our selves and the outside world is limited precisely in its ability to reference these two 'objects.' Language itself defines a 'no-man's-land' of physical existence between Self and Other. However, it seems to make sense insofar as language is a social phenomenon, and so must have meanings which are in constant flux according to their current status in the social construct.
Lacan's formulation effectively reduces almost every possible argument to a question of semantics. If we can make no reference to the real in our communication with other people, what we must essentially be arguing for is a specific set of relationships between words. That is to say, if I argue that a Jellyfish Sandwich from the Corner Cafe in Carrollton, GA is the best sandwich in the southeast, what I am really arguing for (as far as Lacan is concerned) is a certain relationship between the word (and conceptual utterances surrounding the word) "Jellyfish" and the word "best" and "sandwich" and "southeast" and "Corner Cafe" (along with their associated utterances--what Saussure might call the paradigmatic connections).
This fact might shed some light on Lacan's interest in mathematical formulas. After all, what theoretical construct illustrates relationships more specifically than math? Instead of attempting to justify, in any more conventional (and more traditionally rhetorical--read by Lacan as 'roundabout') way his ideas concerning desire, Lacan simply constructs the following mathematical relationship:
Lacan's formulation effectively reduces almost every possible argument to a question of semantics. If we can make no reference to the real in our communication with other people, what we must essentially be arguing for is a specific set of relationships between words. That is to say, if I argue that a Jellyfish Sandwich from the Corner Cafe in Carrollton, GA is the best sandwich in the southeast, what I am really arguing for (as far as Lacan is concerned) is a certain relationship between the word (and conceptual utterances surrounding the word) "Jellyfish" and the word "best" and "sandwich" and "southeast" and "Corner Cafe" (along with their associated utterances--what Saussure might call the paradigmatic connections).
This fact might shed some light on Lacan's interest in mathematical formulas. After all, what theoretical construct illustrates relationships more specifically than math? Instead of attempting to justify, in any more conventional (and more traditionally rhetorical--read by Lacan as 'roundabout') way his ideas concerning desire, Lacan simply constructs the following mathematical relationship:
“...desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second, the phenomenon of their splitting” (1186).
Reduced in Lacanian fashion to mathematical symbols, this amounts to
D = d - a
Thus desire is by its nature unsatisfiable, if for no other reason than it is represented by the removal of our real appetite for its satisfaction. By this reduction, Lacan sidesteps the necessity to "argue" for his formulation, as well as all the difficulties which he perceives might necessarily result from trying to get us, the audience, to understand exactly what relationship between terms he is attempting to achieve. These mathematical formulas tend to come off as somewhat humorous, embedded as they are within pages of text, convoluted in its system of representation, ostensibly explaining the very complexities of language that they work ironically to undercut. However, what Lacan sacrifices in the these formulations in the way of 'straightforward' complexity, he more than gains back in 'straightforward' ambiguity.
Another benefit to Lacan's recourse to mathematical formulas in his discussion of language is to highlight language's status as an abstract system. From the time we experience complex algebra or Euclidean geometry, we grow comfortable with the idea that mathematics works only insofar as it depends on the rules of a system. Euclidean geometry does not need to correspond to the real world in order to be usefully applied. Part of its strength, in fact, stems from the regularizing effect that systematization has on the 'real' world of experience. By foregrounding mathematical formulations, Lacan is making the same argument for our ideas about language, which we are perhaps less inclined to think of as an abstract system if only because it is the system by which we must necessarily navigate our everyday lives.
That said, I think it might be fun to play around a little with Lacanian mathematics. By the application of the transitive property to the above formulation, Lacan also seems to set up a whole range of relationships which are achievable through simple mathematic maneuvering. Each term in the equation can be isolated:
d = D + a
a = d - D
What does it mean to suggest that our demand for love is simply our Desire added to our appetite for satisfaction? Perhaps in love we find our unquenchable Desire at least partially satiated? As interesting is the idea that our appetite for satisfaction is the difference between our demand for love and our unquenchable Desire to know directly, which suggests a familiar dichotomy between 'love' and 'lust', between 'need' and 'want'. However, rather than opposing them to one another (as the more traditional cliche might be inclined to do) Lacan suggests that they are intricately related through the same conduit of Desire which shapes our relationship to language, and thus both to our inner selves and the outside world.
Lacan also represents the relationship between signifier and signified in terms of the formulation S/s. While it seems that a primary reason for this visualization is that Lacan wishes us to see the Signifier as Over the Signified, in prominence and importance as well as in the role it plays in language (the signified 'reigns', so to speak), Lacan's obvious penchant for mathematics suggests that this might equally be read as "the sign = the Signifier divided by the signified," or perhaps better: "the sign = the signified divided into the Signifier." And Lacan's use of big and small letters is also employed with regards to the Other, which is opposed to an inner self that Lacan terms "objet petit autre", or the object of the little o. So we are left with a conception of the individual as represented by O/o, where O represents our outer self, the Other, which Lacan defines as “the very locus evoked by the recourse to speech” (1185). Once again we confront the bar, at which position Lacan locates the all-but-uncrossable gap between truth and symbol. It is all to tempting then, to set up an equivalency:
S/s ~ O/o
And a whole range of suggestions is evident from this formulation. First of all, the relationship of the Other to the Signifier is made clear, and the signified is consigned in the formula to a position equivalent to that of the inner self (o). This all seems to fit Lacan's own pronouncements very well. However, what happens when we play our little mathematics games with this formula and come up with:
S(o) ~ O(s)
or further
S ~ O(s) / o
Perhaps we might read the first formulation as "the Signifier is multiplied through the objet petit a as the Other is multiplied through the signified." If we take the two sides of the equation to be stating the same thing in different ways (in the same sense that 2+2=4 does not necessarily indicate an operation so much as a simple equivalency), we might achieve a clearer understanding of the relation of the signified as Saussurian "concept" to the multiplicity of things which each concept must reference. The multiple and fragmented Other from which all signifiers ultimately must spring is bound up by the seemingly singular signified concept. The inverse of this relationship is represented by the first half of the equation, where the signifying linguistic element becomes multiple and fractured as it attempts to enter the inner self.
The second equation manages to isolate the Signifier, which we can now usefully take to equal "the inner self divided into the Other as multiplied through the signified."
Perhaps we might read the first formulation as "the Signifier is multiplied through the objet petit a as the Other is multiplied through the signified." If we take the two sides of the equation to be stating the same thing in different ways (in the same sense that 2+2=4 does not necessarily indicate an operation so much as a simple equivalency), we might achieve a clearer understanding of the relation of the signified as Saussurian "concept" to the multiplicity of things which each concept must reference. The multiple and fragmented Other from which all signifiers ultimately must spring is bound up by the seemingly singular signified concept. The inverse of this relationship is represented by the first half of the equation, where the signifying linguistic element becomes multiple and fractured as it attempts to enter the inner self.
The second equation manages to isolate the Signifier, which we can now usefully take to equal "the inner self divided into the Other as multiplied through the signified."
A Note on Lacan's Syntax
In his essay, "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious" (excerpted in my Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition), Lacan explores the ways in which the signifier takes its meaning solely as it relates to other signifiers. It does not make reference to the real (like Saussure, Lacan brackets the referent), nor does it identify directly with the signified (which Lacan considers off limits to the language center of the individual). As to how the signifier takes on meaning in utterance, Lacan says:
“...the signifier, by its very nature, always anticipates meaning by unfolding its dimension before it.[...] 'I shall never...', 'All the same it is...', 'And yet there may be...'. Such sentences are not without meaning, a meaning all the more oppressive in that it is content to make us wait for it.[...] From which we can say that it is in the chain of the signifier that the meaning 'insists' but that none of its elements 'consists' in the signification of which it is at the moment capable.” (1175)
Lacan's concept of the way that meaning unfolds has implications for our understanding of syntactical power. It suggests the power that we locate in Jamesian style. James's sentences often seem endlessly to postpone the completion of meaning that we long for. Indeed, often the entire structure of his stories is based on a continual unfolding and revealing. (This is the signifying chain on the level of narrative structure). The mysterious, oppressive atmosphere of so many of his stories might be traced to this quality of the signifier. The same quality of linguistic uncertainty is employed by Poe and other writers of mystery and detective fiction: they 'work' only insofar as they postpone final meaning at least until the end of the story. (James often seems to refuse it even then.)
The same set of tools which are employed by James and Poe in the interest of suspense, mystery, or negative tension are used by Steve Martin in the interest of comedy. In his memoir, Born Standing Up, Martin discusses his theory of comedy. To paraphrase, he recalls a realization that most comedy worked on the principle of a punchline, so that even those routines without an explicit punchline followed a pattern of build up and release. What concerned Martin was the fact that this often led to automatic laughter, a laughter which resulted from the release of tension. This seemed too contrived to be real, and in the interest of subverting the tendency, he developed his comedy routines so that they forever gave the impression of being on the cusp of a punchline. In this way, his routine was forever building toward a moment of release which never materialized. Audiences were not 'handed' there moments of release prepackaged in punchlines, and so were forced to carve out their own moments. The laughter that resulted, while at first more piecemeal and fraught with tension, seemed for Martin to be truer. People were not just laughing because that's what they were supposed to do. Indeed, they were laughing because they had to, because there was no other option for them to release the continually built-up tension of the comedic moment.
Lacan's Mirror, Letter
Through his synthesis of Saussurian linguistics and Freudian psychology, Lacan attempts to give us a more complete and nuanced picture of both systems of thought as well as of the nature of our own existence.
I think it is important to note, from the outset, that by applying (and to a great extent, also extending) the Saussurian model of language into the core of the human psyche (as it relates to our subconscious), Lacan necessarily pushes any theory of existence into a realm of uncertainty and relativity. In his essay, "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," (excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed.), Lacan quickly does away with the possibility of discussing reality at all when he states that
The reason for this impossibility, Lacan posits, is the fact that there necessarily remains within us sections of ourselves that are untranslatable in any language. This quality of the incompleteness of language Lacan develops into a complete explanation of human existence as it manifests itself in human psychology.
In "The Mirror Stage as Formative..." (also excerpted in the Norton), Lacan sets about explaining what he conceives to be the moment of an initial separation of self from self-image. He locates this moment at the time that a baby first identifies itself in a mirror. (Thus, "Mirror Stage"). Before this moment, Lacan suggests, the baby is a bundle of "turbulent movements" that he can feel animating him (1165). We might find an analogy for this state in Nietzsche's Dionysiac, associated as it is with immediate sensory experience and fleeting sensation. Lacan's pre-Mirror baby has no sense of itself beyond the fragmented pieces of sensory data that it compiles from the world around it. It does not conceive of itself as a unified being. During this time, it might be inclined to consider its mother's breast as much a part of its existence as the feeling of hunger which the milk helps to subside. The sensation of warmth provided by blankets likewise is not conceived as separate from the self.
All of this changes, Lacan says, when the baby makes the "primary identification" of its self in the mirror (1164). In this identification, the baby conceives of itself as a unified whole for the first time. This has the effect of drawing forth the child's ego, as he conceives of a certain power and agency associated with a unified self. Lacan says that the idea of a unified self is primarily an aesthetic realization, based as it is on the form of unity presented in the mirror. However, the "agency of the ego," in order to establish it's self-image, must necessarily subject that pre-Mirror sensory data to a degree of repression, and so, Lacan says, the ego in this way is from the beginning situated "in a fictional direction" (1165). The mirror image, Lacan continues, "symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination" (1165). This alienation occurs because at the same time that the child conceives of himself as a unified being, he must also recognize all of those things which are evidently not a part of that self, including (not least of all) his mother's breast.
We can see Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic at play in the interaction which Lacan conceives of between the child and his mirror image. Here, the child understands the image in the mirror to be Other than himself. It is not actually part of himself, but the child incorporates this "specular I" as Other into himself when he begins to interact with others. Thus Lacan's concept of "paranoiac alienation" occurs as the true self (the inner, inexpressible, and fragmented self that the child first knew) is subdued, enslaved and repressed by this "specular I" in its first attempts to interact socially.
From a scientific standpoint (one to which I, despite [because of?] my deep-seated romanticism, am ever inclined to resort), the question arises whether the mirror in this stage must be a literal mirror (in the sense that the identification taking place must be an actual literal reflection of the child), or if it might as easily be seen as a figurative mirror, in which the child’s individual mirror image comes together finally in his mind as he unifies the sensed anatomy of his own body and the perceived unity of other humans. It seems that if we are to consider the mirror to be literal (there is some suggestion that we are), Lacan’s theory has implications for our understanding of pre-industrial societies. For thousands of years the only mirrors available might have been the calm surfaces of bodies of water. Prehistoric babies would not likely encounter such a reflection until well into their lives. How much earlier today’s young children are surely exposed to any literal reflection of themselves. (The little musical swing that we bought for my son Will when he was born had a little mirror positioned just above his newborn head, for easy viewing.) Does this earlier exposure suggest that the mirror stage might be reached earlier in life for modern man? If, in order to avoid such a difficulty, we consider the latter to be true, and the mirror to be figurative, we are put in the position of asking what the immediate stimulus might be for the child to unify his self-image. Truthfully, this same issue arises in the literal-mirror model, since I think we can safely assume that Will did not unify his self-image the first time we laid him in the musical swing. In this sense, Lacan's theory lacks clarity as so many other developmental models seem to (my wife, in this connection, suggests Piaget's cognitive development model). Lacan goes farther than Freud in explaining the roots of the consciousness we experience, but he shirks the question of why it should be this moment, this stimulus, rather than any other which causes the necessary fracture.
In "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," Lacan attempts to trace out the implications of the fracture of self-consciousness which occurs in the Mirror Stage. He begins by positioning the individual, from the very start, in the context of society and culture through our relationship with language, to which he attributes the structure of the unconscious. Lacan observes:
He perceptively downplays the traditional dichotomy between individual and society, between nature and nurture. Lacan sees these two elements as so intimately interwoven as to be ultimately indivisible. However, the real revolution is Lacan's assertion that the unconscious itself contains "the whole structure of language" (1169). Saussure was astute in his recognition that language is something complete which we enter into as we learn it. We do not have to create language anew because it already exists in the world separate us. Lacan goes a step further by stating that language is the structure by which our subconscious is organized. Language, in other words, at least in its structure is an inborn trait. By identifying himself with an image, the child has already undergone a shift in his consciousness from the 'real' (that state of immediate sensual interaction with the world) to the 'imaginary' (literally, associated with his image, his fractured ego self). When the child enters into language, he undergoes a second transition, into the realm of the 'symbolic.' Interactions at the level of society and culture, undergone through our employment of language, are therefore removed from reality by two degrees.
I think it is important to note, from the outset, that by applying (and to a great extent, also extending) the Saussurian model of language into the core of the human psyche (as it relates to our subconscious), Lacan necessarily pushes any theory of existence into a realm of uncertainty and relativity. In his essay, "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," (excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed.), Lacan quickly does away with the possibility of discussing reality at all when he states that
“...this primordial distinction [between signifier (S) and signified (s)] goes well beyond...the bi-univocal correspondence between the word and the thing....[N]o signification can be sustained other than by reference to another signification..." (1171).
The reason for this impossibility, Lacan posits, is the fact that there necessarily remains within us sections of ourselves that are untranslatable in any language. This quality of the incompleteness of language Lacan develops into a complete explanation of human existence as it manifests itself in human psychology.
In "The Mirror Stage as Formative..." (also excerpted in the Norton), Lacan sets about explaining what he conceives to be the moment of an initial separation of self from self-image. He locates this moment at the time that a baby first identifies itself in a mirror. (Thus, "Mirror Stage"). Before this moment, Lacan suggests, the baby is a bundle of "turbulent movements" that he can feel animating him (1165). We might find an analogy for this state in Nietzsche's Dionysiac, associated as it is with immediate sensory experience and fleeting sensation. Lacan's pre-Mirror baby has no sense of itself beyond the fragmented pieces of sensory data that it compiles from the world around it. It does not conceive of itself as a unified being. During this time, it might be inclined to consider its mother's breast as much a part of its existence as the feeling of hunger which the milk helps to subside. The sensation of warmth provided by blankets likewise is not conceived as separate from the self.
All of this changes, Lacan says, when the baby makes the "primary identification" of its self in the mirror (1164). In this identification, the baby conceives of itself as a unified whole for the first time. This has the effect of drawing forth the child's ego, as he conceives of a certain power and agency associated with a unified self. Lacan says that the idea of a unified self is primarily an aesthetic realization, based as it is on the form of unity presented in the mirror. However, the "agency of the ego," in order to establish it's self-image, must necessarily subject that pre-Mirror sensory data to a degree of repression, and so, Lacan says, the ego in this way is from the beginning situated "in a fictional direction" (1165). The mirror image, Lacan continues, "symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination" (1165). This alienation occurs because at the same time that the child conceives of himself as a unified being, he must also recognize all of those things which are evidently not a part of that self, including (not least of all) his mother's breast.
We can see Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic at play in the interaction which Lacan conceives of between the child and his mirror image. Here, the child understands the image in the mirror to be Other than himself. It is not actually part of himself, but the child incorporates this "specular I" as Other into himself when he begins to interact with others. Thus Lacan's concept of "paranoiac alienation" occurs as the true self (the inner, inexpressible, and fragmented self that the child first knew) is subdued, enslaved and repressed by this "specular I" in its first attempts to interact socially.
From a scientific standpoint (one to which I, despite [because of?] my deep-seated romanticism, am ever inclined to resort), the question arises whether the mirror in this stage must be a literal mirror (in the sense that the identification taking place must be an actual literal reflection of the child), or if it might as easily be seen as a figurative mirror, in which the child’s individual mirror image comes together finally in his mind as he unifies the sensed anatomy of his own body and the perceived unity of other humans. It seems that if we are to consider the mirror to be literal (there is some suggestion that we are), Lacan’s theory has implications for our understanding of pre-industrial societies. For thousands of years the only mirrors available might have been the calm surfaces of bodies of water. Prehistoric babies would not likely encounter such a reflection until well into their lives. How much earlier today’s young children are surely exposed to any literal reflection of themselves. (The little musical swing that we bought for my son Will when he was born had a little mirror positioned just above his newborn head, for easy viewing.) Does this earlier exposure suggest that the mirror stage might be reached earlier in life for modern man? If, in order to avoid such a difficulty, we consider the latter to be true, and the mirror to be figurative, we are put in the position of asking what the immediate stimulus might be for the child to unify his self-image. Truthfully, this same issue arises in the literal-mirror model, since I think we can safely assume that Will did not unify his self-image the first time we laid him in the musical swing. In this sense, Lacan's theory lacks clarity as so many other developmental models seem to (my wife, in this connection, suggests Piaget's cognitive development model). Lacan goes farther than Freud in explaining the roots of the consciousness we experience, but he shirks the question of why it should be this moment, this stimulus, rather than any other which causes the necessary fracture.
In "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," Lacan attempts to trace out the implications of the fracture of self-consciousness which occurs in the Mirror Stage. He begins by positioning the individual, from the very start, in the context of society and culture through our relationship with language, to which he attributes the structure of the unconscious. Lacan observes:
“...language and its structure exist prior to the moment at which each subject at a certain point in his mental development makes his entry into it....[T]he ethnographic duality of nature and culture is giving way to a ternary conception of the human condition--nature, society, and culture--the last term of which would well be reduced to language...” (1169-70)
He perceptively downplays the traditional dichotomy between individual and society, between nature and nurture. Lacan sees these two elements as so intimately interwoven as to be ultimately indivisible. However, the real revolution is Lacan's assertion that the unconscious itself contains "the whole structure of language" (1169). Saussure was astute in his recognition that language is something complete which we enter into as we learn it. We do not have to create language anew because it already exists in the world separate us. Lacan goes a step further by stating that language is the structure by which our subconscious is organized. Language, in other words, at least in its structure is an inborn trait. By identifying himself with an image, the child has already undergone a shift in his consciousness from the 'real' (that state of immediate sensual interaction with the world) to the 'imaginary' (literally, associated with his image, his fractured ego self). When the child enters into language, he undergoes a second transition, into the realm of the 'symbolic.' Interactions at the level of society and culture, undergone through our employment of language, are therefore removed from reality by two degrees.
In explaining the structure of this Language itself, Lacan reproduces the formula put forward by Saussure, translating it in Lacanian fashion into an algorithm: S/s, where S represents the signifier and s the signified. Lacan here places a great deal of stress on the bar separating the two, a barrier which he says "initially...resist[s] signification" (1171). This bar takes on greater significance later, as he explore the signification of the phallus. For now, it is enough to say that this bar is largely uncrossable, and that any suggestion of a direct relationship between S and s is misleading. To demostrate this, Lacan reproduces the diagram employed by Saussure to explain the relationship between signifier and concept:
And couples it with his own, corrected and refined image:
It should be noted that, in reproducing Saussure's image, Lacan has flipped it, in order to make it match with his formulation S/s. (in Saussure's original, the concept is on top, the sound-image on bottom, which accords with his view that the sound-image flows from an attempt to represent, to signify, the concept). This change also has the effect of placing the primacy on the signifier, rather than the signified, which is key to Lacan's understanding of the final inaccessibility of the signified in any attempt at signification.
The difference between these two images lies in Lacan's conception of language as a power in identity formation. The second image presents two signifiers with seemingly identical signifieds. The speaker then is left with a choice which requires that he enter into one or the other, and in so doing, fit himself (or herself) to a notion of identity which is defined by language (as a system external to the self). While Lacan's example ostensibly deals with sexual identity (which he seems to consider as primary in identity formation), the same diagram might well serve in any number of cases, as far as it relates to Saussure's pardigmatic axis of signification. The choices we make with regards to language, what word we choose as signifier for any given signified, help to define our identity in relation to society.
Lacan here introduces what he terms "the signifying chain," which is the chain of signification by which we attempt communication, and which he characterizes as "rings of a necklace that is a ring in another necklace made of rings" (1174). The image is appropriately abstruse, and suggests in language the quality of a fractal, ever diverting from any specific connection to reality. The signifying chain is indicative in grammar of "the level of the unit immediately superior to the sentence," and in verbal utterance, "the level of the verbal locution" (1174). In other words, the signifying chain is active at the moment that a complete meaning is attempted in language. Lacan allows that this meaning is developed either by recourse to metonymy (the substitution of words based on partial signification) or by metaphor (the substitution of signifiers which cross the barrier of signification).
Mytonymy is basically a repetitive act, and does not require any creation, as it simply substitutes signifier for signifier based on similarity or relationship in meaning. This seems similar to Saussure's paradigmatic axis, which finds attached to any signifier other signifiers which have a related meaning. Indeed, Lacan echoes Saussure when he states that "[t]here is in effect no signifying chain that does not have, as if attached to the punctuation of each of its units, a whole articulation of relevant contexts suspended 'vertically', as it were, from that point" (1175). This suggests that any utterance implies a substitution, some other chain which would work equally well to perform the intended meaning. It also suggests that any utterance might well imply its opposite, and that the implication of opposing meaning is equally as important in our attempts to understand the meanings of opposite. (This seems again to suggest language as a system of negative relations: we define any single concept not so much by what it is as by what it isn't).
Metaphor is more complicated, and I'm not quite sure what to make of it. Lacan allows that metaphoric construction is "creative or poetic" in that it represents a "crossing of the bar" of signification which allows for the "passage of the signifier into the signified" (1179). This formulation is confusing, considering Lacan's insistence up until now (and later, in his discussion of the Phallus) of the inviolability of the bar, the essential inaccessibility of the signified in any attempt at signification. Perhaps we must understand this simply as stating that metaphor is creative in that it sets up new linguistic relationships between signifiers, new arrows pointing to new signifieds (which perhaps still remain essentially out of reach). If at one time 'love' and 'rose' were metonymically isolated, metaphor has since crossed the bar, so that the two words now are bound by associative meaning.
Lacan finishes his essay on "The Agency of the Letter" with a deconstruction of Descartes assertion that "I think, therefore I am." Lacan identifies the error in this assertion as the assumption that human thought represents the epitome of existence. Thought, Lacan has shown, is a determinate of language, which is necessarily symbolic and repressive of reality. To hold to Descartes' formula is to "deny oneself access to what might be called the Freudian universe," all that part of existence which eludes consciousness (1180). The reformulation of human consciousness around linguistic construction means that, henceforth, it is no longer "a question of knowing whether I speak of myself in a way that conforms to what I am, but rather of knowing whether I am the same as that of which I speak" (1180). Because the true inner self, the 'real', is eternally cut off by our recourse to language, we must forever wonder whether what we are 'really' bares any relation to how we are represented in our speech. Lacan thus reformulates the saying, first as, "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think," and finally as, "I am not wherever I am the playing of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think" (1180). While these reformulations can be seen partially as a humorous Lacanian subversion, they suggest what is really at the core of his philosophy: that human 'reality' must necessarily lie forever beyond the scope of explanation.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Freud, Bakhin, and the Human Dream
The following represents a one-page tutorial I prepared for the graduate-level section of my Contemporary Literary Theory Course. I have reproduced it here as means of keeping the blog in continued conversation with itself. The issues addressed represent continuations of previous discussions, and also suggest topics which may find future voice in the blog.
The Structuralist theory of Frye and Levi-Strauss suggests that novelistic form is a cultural displacement of mythic forms which modernity compels us to censor and repress (98-99, 126). However, as McKeon proposes, the novel might also be fruitfully seen, through the lens of Freud’s dream-work schema, not as the displaced object itself (that found in the dream-content), but as a type of long-form dream interpretation. To look at the novel in this way suggests that whatever displacement has happened (either for Freud’s individual dreamer or for the society as a whole) has done so before maturity (i.e., modernity, adulthood) arrives on the scene. We might take myth to represent a sort of dream-stage of humanity, in which the individual elements of our collective human dream-wish have been condensed and displaced--and significantly overdetermined--in the archetypes of the myth-mind. Modernity, then, can be conceived as mankind’s collective awakening and subsequent (ongoing) attempt at a “talking cure”: the various artistic and social forms (including the novel) represent our various attempts at a macro-level dream interpretation.
For the child Freud describes in “Family Romances,” fantasies allow the appropriate and necessary “freeing of [the] individual” which must occur as he grows up (156). These fantasies take some seemingly distorted forms, but Freud points to the fact that they “still preserve, under a slight disguise, the child’s original affection for his parents” (158). By conceiving of himself as a changeling, the actual son of an Emperor and Empress, for example, the child projects into fantasy the ideal qualities he once placed within the parents themselves, but which have since become disillusioned in the child’s more mature and intelligent critique of his parents. A child who emerges successfully (into ‘normality’ as Freud conceives it) is one who can eventually reposition himself as an individual in relationship to the individuals represented by his parents (cf. Hegel).
So also, as Bakhtin points out, does the novel represent a human tendency to dislodge tradition, to “destroy this boundary” between the “valorized” (328) temporal space of myth and the “openendedness” of “still-evolving contemporary reality” (323). For his conviction that “[t]he epic past...lacks any relativity, that is, any gradual, purely temporal progressions that might connect it with the present,” we might find an analogy both in the mindset of Freud’s child as well as in the content of the dream as received by the dreamer upon waking (323).
The parents of the small child in Freud’s “Family Romance” represent “the only authority and the source of all belief,” and are thus initially valorized and idealized in his mind. It is by a process of relativization – one that, similar to the relativizing force presented by Bakhtin, occurs through a process of increased intelligence and external comparison – that the child comes to be disillusioned of the valorized parents and thereby achieves his individuality.
Freud’s dream-content likewise lacks temporal continuity. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud explores the difficulty presented by attempts to narrate dream-content as a series of causes and effects, of beginnings and endings – in short, in terms of the same logical relationships modernity associates with ‘development’ – concluding that “dreams have no means at their disposal for representing these logical relations,” but rather “reproduce logical connection by simultaneity in time” (NATC, 2nd Edition, p. 821-22). That Freud leaves the task of (re)establishing these connections to the “interpretive process” is significant to Bakhtin’s understanding of “novelization,” which concerns itself directly with abolishing the “distance” associated with an atemporal worldview in the interest of understanding “contemporary reality” (328).
Further Questions:
The Structuralist theory of Frye and Levi-Strauss suggests that novelistic form is a cultural displacement of mythic forms which modernity compels us to censor and repress (98-99, 126). However, as McKeon proposes, the novel might also be fruitfully seen, through the lens of Freud’s dream-work schema, not as the displaced object itself (that found in the dream-content), but as a type of long-form dream interpretation. To look at the novel in this way suggests that whatever displacement has happened (either for Freud’s individual dreamer or for the society as a whole) has done so before maturity (i.e., modernity, adulthood) arrives on the scene. We might take myth to represent a sort of dream-stage of humanity, in which the individual elements of our collective human dream-wish have been condensed and displaced--and significantly overdetermined--in the archetypes of the myth-mind. Modernity, then, can be conceived as mankind’s collective awakening and subsequent (ongoing) attempt at a “talking cure”: the various artistic and social forms (including the novel) represent our various attempts at a macro-level dream interpretation.
For the child Freud describes in “Family Romances,” fantasies allow the appropriate and necessary “freeing of [the] individual” which must occur as he grows up (156). These fantasies take some seemingly distorted forms, but Freud points to the fact that they “still preserve, under a slight disguise, the child’s original affection for his parents” (158). By conceiving of himself as a changeling, the actual son of an Emperor and Empress, for example, the child projects into fantasy the ideal qualities he once placed within the parents themselves, but which have since become disillusioned in the child’s more mature and intelligent critique of his parents. A child who emerges successfully (into ‘normality’ as Freud conceives it) is one who can eventually reposition himself as an individual in relationship to the individuals represented by his parents (cf. Hegel).
So also, as Bakhtin points out, does the novel represent a human tendency to dislodge tradition, to “destroy this boundary” between the “valorized” (328) temporal space of myth and the “openendedness” of “still-evolving contemporary reality” (323). For his conviction that “[t]he epic past...lacks any relativity, that is, any gradual, purely temporal progressions that might connect it with the present,” we might find an analogy both in the mindset of Freud’s child as well as in the content of the dream as received by the dreamer upon waking (323).
The parents of the small child in Freud’s “Family Romance” represent “the only authority and the source of all belief,” and are thus initially valorized and idealized in his mind. It is by a process of relativization – one that, similar to the relativizing force presented by Bakhtin, occurs through a process of increased intelligence and external comparison – that the child comes to be disillusioned of the valorized parents and thereby achieves his individuality.
Freud’s dream-content likewise lacks temporal continuity. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud explores the difficulty presented by attempts to narrate dream-content as a series of causes and effects, of beginnings and endings – in short, in terms of the same logical relationships modernity associates with ‘development’ – concluding that “dreams have no means at their disposal for representing these logical relations,” but rather “reproduce logical connection by simultaneity in time” (NATC, 2nd Edition, p. 821-22). That Freud leaves the task of (re)establishing these connections to the “interpretive process” is significant to Bakhtin’s understanding of “novelization,” which concerns itself directly with abolishing the “distance” associated with an atemporal worldview in the interest of understanding “contemporary reality” (328).
Further Questions:
- How does the destruction of distance explored by Bakhtin in the first section of our reading (“Epic and Novel…”) inform or play-out in his discussion of Novelistic Discourse?
- Bakhtin gives us a model of the novel “on the border between the completed, dominant literary language and the extraliterary languages that know heteroglossia” (337). How might this model inform our reading of James and Jamesian style?
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