A while ago we were discussing in class the passage in King Lear where Cordelia replies to her father's demand for the expression of love with:
"I love your Majesty according to my bond, no more, nor less,".
Someone questioned whether we can still really understand or identify with this feudal notion of love as duty, as a kind of formal obligation. Cordelia's reply, the student said, surely sounds rather cold to our ears, as if Cordelia's relation to her father is analaogous to the relation between serf and lord. Its as if she's saying, I suggested, "my love does not emanate from me, but from the rules of the Symbolic Order, from the moral matrix in which, unchosen, we live. I love you via fidelity to this code". The other daughters, by contrast, make the gesture of expressing a love that is theirs.
Another student interjects with 'But isn't it really the same today". Initially,I thought this would be another 'nothing's changed, everything is universal' spiel. But not quite. The idea was rather that the 'feudal' notion was in fact the formalisation of what today is merely implicit - a kind of tyrannical superego imperative to love one's parents. Except today, the fact that it isn't formalised and defined actually increases its binding power.
i.e., with the feudal bond, in my capacity as Daughter, I understand these definite obligations and duties, I can measure and direct my love according to an explicit Symbolic regime... Where however these 'bonds' are not formalised and defined one is tyrannised by a kind of guilt. One can never know whether one is 'doing the right thing', and this guilt ('am I loving as I should?') is a more tenacious bond than the 'bond' proper.
Note, however, that in our 'postmodern' world, with the absence a pre-agreed set of Symbolic guarantees and prescriptions, there is what looks like an attempt to reverse this. Thus, I encounter this site, which quotes Cordelia words in the following context:
A "bond" does not have to refer to an intimate, all-consuming relationship. When Cordelia told her father in Shakespeare's play, King Lear, "I love your Majesty according to my bond, no more, nor less," he became furious, because he wanted her to make a flowery and exaggerated declaration of her love. Cordelia understood the deeper truth, that meaningful relationships can be defined by formal rules and boundaries.
However, among many differences between this and the older feudal code, the former has no 'transcendental guarantee'. Today, one chooses the rules by which to live, out of a recognition that there is no 'Big Other' - it doesn't exist, but we need one nonetheless. Similarly, I have seen syllabuses for classes on 'Journalism and Ethics' which state 'this course will help the student devise ethical guidelines appropriate for them'. You are bound by a rule, but this rule has been tailored to suite your 'individuality', your individual needs. In contrast, of course, earlier notions of duty and law were chillngly indifferent to your 'individual needs'. What appears the same is in fact the exact reverse.
Increasingly, then the Big Other is both reflexive and married to a prevailing ideology of 'individualism'. Here is Zizek (inevitably):
There is no symbolic order or code of accepted fictions (what Lacan calls the 'Big Other') to guide us in our social behaviour. All our impulses, from sexual orientation to ethnic belonging, are more and more often experienced as matters of choice. Things which once seemed self-evident - how to feed and educate a child, how to proceed in sexual seduction, how and what to eat, how to relax and amuse oneself - have now been 'colonised' by reflexivity, and are experienced as something to be learned and decided on.
Rule Girls' are heterosexual women who follow precise rules as to how they let themselves be seduced (accept a date only if you are asked at least three days in advance etc). Although the rules correspond to customs which used to regulate the behaviour of old-fashioned women actively pursued by old-fashioned men, the Rule Girls phenomenon does not involve a return to conservative values: women now freely choose their own rules.
But this reflexivity itself takes place within a certain horizon, one in which certain suppositions about 'choice' and 'individuality' pass unquestioned.