Freud Memorial Lecture

Zizek is giving the Freud Memorial lecture on 8th July: 'On The Amorous Enlightenment of Adults.'

yo, exchange value

Odd. Last week I sold a second-hand coffee machine on ebay and actually got more than I paid for it in the first place. Meanwhile, I was thinking of bidding for a bookcase that ended up going for 20 pounds less than it would have cost new (ie 200). The mentality seems to be ‘that’s a bargain, I must have it’, like its ontologically a bargain irrespective of what price you pay for it. Then somehow you’ve ‘won’ the item, like your wily strategy of paying over the odds outsmarted the other poor saps. Perhaps ebay should be required to say, instead of ‘you’ve won the item’, “you’ve paid some money in exchange for a second-hand commodity."

Two argumentative fallacies noted in passing.

You make some generalisation about X; your opponent objects to the content of this generalisation. You say ‘but we make generalisations all the time, surely you can’t object to generalisations’ – you thus overlook the obvious point that it isn’t the fact of generalisation being objected to but the particular generalisation you in fact made.

Similarly, you make some specific assertion of cultural difference – ‘X people don’t respect personal space’; someone objects to this characterisation. You say, ‘but surely you recognise that there are cultural differences’. You pretend that the objection to the particular difference asserted was really an objection to the assertion of difference

Objection to content is misrepresented as an objection to the categories through which the content is articulated.

'negative testing'

"The use of the term ‘non-literate’ to describe cultures that are not based on literacy is an example of what Michel Certeau calls ‘negative testing,’ in which a condition of lack and perpetual deficiency (the “non” in non literate) is ascribed the object of research. No longer possessing autonomy (for it exists now only in relation to the criteria by which the dominant order defines itself), the Other culture is disempowered and is unhinged from its own principles of organisation…. A research gap ensues because what constitutes the literate is specific while the non-literate becomes vague (it can be anything that is not literate)."

Moe Meyer, 'Dance and the Politics of Orality'.

> the important thing, then, would be to discover and describe those 'principles of organisation' (we find such an attempt in the work of Walter Ong, for example) rather than simply compile an inventory of what 'literate' principles are lacking. Generalisations based on such 'negative testing' are often not so much false, then, as useless - like saying Essex is a non-zoroastrian society.

All the same, the moment of 'negative testing' must presumably be necessary to any investigation?

'Nothing is more bourgeois than to be afraid to look bourgeois' - Andy Warhol (attributed) diagnosing part of what would later be termed Aaronovitch syndrome.

'Where's it coming from?'

I remember, some years ago, a well-attended seminar at Oxford given by a fairly senior academic, Dr X. It was on colonial discourse. Afterwards a number of questions followed, including one from an American graduate student that was heavily critical. The criticisms were in no way ‘personal’ but were certainly articulated with some force. Dr X did not address them directly. He replied instead as follows: “I’m detecting quite a lot of hostility in what you’re saying, and I’m just wondering where that hostility is coming from.” He said this with an air of almost irenic enquiry or gentle concern.

But precisely this position of enunciation, this irenic enquiry, is not a possible one. Its clinical (in both senses) denial of the argument offered, deliberate non-recognition, patronising concern, assumed luxury of detachment – all compose a position of power that refuses to speak its name.

Incidentally, nor are ‘hostility’ and the argument necessarily dissociable. In other words, far from the argument being ‘motivated’ by hostility (and just a kind of mask for this hostility) it is, or can be, equally true that the hostility (read passion) is motivated by the argument. And it is worth pointing out too that we can indeed have a passionate interest (the canard of ‘disinterested truth’ is an academic fiction) in getting to the truth, rather than this passion automatically feeding the prosecution case, whether that case be couched in academicising or psychologising banalities.

Golem

Camouflage

Roger Caillois destabilized the benign reading of mimicry, presenting a psychoanalytical examination where the dialogue between self and environment is called into question. Caillois drew attention to the lack of a rational connection between camouflage and survival, and as Dawn Ades explained, both Caillois and fellow camouflage essayist, Jacques Delamain, “challenge any neat division between scientific classification of natural phenomena and poetic metaphors found in nature.”[2] Caillois pointed out that the adaptation hypothesis of camouflage is flawed in numerous ways. For example, insects which are unpalatable anyway are still camouflaged, as are insects which are hunted by smell, which makes any efforts at visual disguise redundant. Some insects are so well-camouflaged that they are pruned by gardeners, or the “even sadder” case of the Phyllia, who “browse among themselves, taking each other for real leaves…”[3] or, cannot find each other when it comes time to mate. The enigma of disguise as display is evident in the Oxyrrhyncha, or spider crabs, who “haphazardly gather and collect on their shells the seaweed and polyps of the milieu in which they live … deck[ing] themselves in whatever is offered to them, including some of the most conspicuous elements…”

via here

Dogmatic antiDogmatists

I’ve noticed a tendency of referring to atheists – including myself – as ‘dogmatic’. ‘You atheists are so dogmatic’ D. says to me, before employing all kinds of predictable sophistries (‘God is a way of keeping open the space of what we don’t know’. The exact reverse of the truth btw). It’s a tedious rhetorical trick, for the following reasons. Firstly, as if theists, by contrast, are famously open to the possibility of god’s non-existence, always flirting with the option that their whole belief system is founded on illusion and error. Secondly, it of course begs the question: implying that the issue is still in the balance, it could go either way. This, of course, is precisely what atheists don’t think. (but neither do theists). It’s a similar move to creationists talking about ‘dogmatic evolutionists’; and no doubt there were once ‘dogmatic round-earthers’..

John Berger: Ten Dispatches About Place

Berger has a new book, Hold Everything Dear, Dispatches on Survival and Resistance.

Meanwhile, I came across this:

I’m getting into a train . . . i’ll call you later’Ten dispatches about place
By John Berger

1. Somebody inquires: Are you still a marxist? Never before has the devastation caused by the pursuit of profit, as defined by capitalism, been more extensive than it is today. Almost everybody knows this. How then is it possible not to heed Marx, who prophesied and analysed the devastation? The answer might be that people, many people, have lost all their political bearings. Mapless, they do not know where they are heading.

2. Every day people follow signs pointing to some place which is not their home but a chosen destination. Road-signs, airport embarkation signs, terminal signs. Some are making their journeys for pleasure, others on business, many out of loss or despair. On arrival they come to realise they are not in the place indicated by the signs they followed. Where they now find themselves has the correct latitude, long-itude, local time, currency, yet it does not have the specific gravity of the destination they chose.
They are beside the place they chose to come to. The distance which separates them from it is incalculable. Maybe it’s only the width of a thoroughfare, maybe it’s a world away. The place has lost what made it a destination. It has lost its territory of experience.
Sometimes a few of these travellers undertake a private journey and find the place they wished to reach, which is often harsher than they foresaw, although they discover it with boundless relief. Many never make it. They accept the signs they follow and it’s as if they don’t travel, as if they always remain where they already are.

3. The details in the image on this page were taken by Anabell Guerrero in the Red Cross shelter for refugees and emigrants at Sangatte near Calais and the Channel tunnel. On orders from the British and French governments the shelter was recently shut down. Several hundred people were sheltering there, many hoping to make it to Britain. The man in the photographs - Guerrero prefers not to disclose his name - is from Zaire.
Month by month millions leave their homelands. They leave because there is nothing there, except their everything, which does not offer enough to feed their children. Once it did. This is the poverty of the new capitalism.
After long and terrible journeys, after they have experienced the baseness of which others are capable, after they have come to trust their own incomparable and dogged courage, emigrants find themselves waiting on some foreign transit station, and then all they have left of their home continent is themselves: their hands, their eyes, their feet, shoulders, bodies, what they wear and what they pull over their heads at night to sleep under, wanting a roof.
Thanks to Guerrero’s image we can take account of how a man’s fingers are all that remain of a plot of tilled earth, his palms what remain of some riverbed, and how his eyes are a family gathering he will not attend. Portrait of an emigrant continent.

4. “I’m going down the stairs in an underground station to take the B line. Crowded here. Where are you? Really! What’s the weather like? Getting into the train - call you later . . .”
Of the billions of mobile telephone conversations taking place every hour in the world’s cities and suburbs, most, whether they are private or business calls, begin with a statement about the caller’s whereabouts. People need straight away to pinpoint where they are. It is as if they are pursued by doubts suggesting that they may be nowhere. Surrounded by so many abstractions, they have to invent and share their own transient landmarks.
More than 30 years ago Guy Debord prophetically wrote: “The accumulation of mass-produced commodities for the abstract space of the market, just as it has smashed all regional and legal barriers, and all corporate restrictions of the Middle Ages that maintained the quality of artisanal production, has also destroyed the autonomy and quality of places.”
The key term of the present global chaos is de- or re-localisation. This does not only refer to the practice of moving production to wherever labour is cheapest and regulations minimal. It also contains the offshore demented dream of the new ongoing power: the dream of undermining the status and confidence of all previous fixed places, so that the entire world becomes a single fluid market.
The consumer is essentially somebody who feels or is made to feel lost unless he or she is consuming. Brand names and logos become the place names of the Nowhere.
Other signs announcing Freedom or Democracy, terms plundered from earlier historical periods, are also used to confuse. In the past a common tactic employed by those defending their homeland against invaders was to change the road signs so that the one indicating Zaragoza pointed in the opposite direction towards Burgos. Today it is not defenders but foreign invaders who switch signs to confuse local populations, confuse them about who is governing who, the nature of happiness, the extent of grief, or where eternity is to be found. And the aim of all these misdirections is to persuade people that being a client is the ultimate salvation.
Yet clients are defined by where they check out and pay, not by where they live and die.

5. Extensive areas which were once rural places are being turned into zones. The details of the process vary according to the continent - Africa or central America or southeast Asia. The initial dismembering however always comes from elsewhere and from corporate interests pursuing their appetite for ever more accumulation, which means seizing natural resources (fish in Lake Victoria, wood in the Amazon, petrol wherever it is to be found, uranium in Gabon, etc), regardless of to whom the land or water belongs.
The ensuing exploitation soon demands airports, military and paramilitary bases to defend what it is being syphoned off, and collaboration with the local mafiosi. Tribal war, famine and genocide may follow.
People in such zones lose all sense of residence: children become orphans (even when they are not) women become slaves, men desperadoes. Once this has happened, to restore any sense of domesticity takes generations. Each year of such accumulation prolongs the Nowhere in time and space.

6. Meanwhile - and political resistance often begins in a meanwhile - the most important thing to grasp and remember is that those who profit from the present chaos, with their embedded commentators in the media, continuously misinform and misdirect. Their declarations and all the plundered terms they are in the habit of using should never be argued with. They have to be rejected outright and abandoned. They will get nobody anywhere.
The information technology developed by the corporations and their armies so they could dominate their Nowhere more speedily is being used by others as a means of communication throughout the Everywhere they are struggling towards.
The Caribbean writer Edouard Glissant puts this very well: “The way to resist globalisation is not to deny globality, but to imagine what is the finite sum of all possible particularities and to get used to the idea that, as long as a single particularity is missing, globality will not be what it should be for us.”
We are establishing our own landmarks, naming places, and finding poetry. Yes, in the meanwhile poetry is to be found. Gareth Evans:
As the brick of the afternoon stores the rose heat of the journey
as the rose buds a green room to breathe and blossoms like the wind
as the thin birches whisper their stories of the wind to the urgent in the trucks
as the leaves of the hedge store the light the day thought it had lost
as the nest of her wrist beats like the chest of a sparrow in the turning air
as the chorus of the earth find their eyes in the sky
and unwrap them to each other in the teeming dark
hold everything dear

7. Their Nowhere generates a strange, because unprecedented, awareness of time. Digital time. It continues forever uninterrupted through day and night, the seasons, birth and death. As indifferent as money. Yet, although continuous, it is utterly single. It is the time of the present kept apart from the past and future. Within it only the present is weight-bearing, the other two lack gravity. Time is no longer a colonnade, but a single column of ones and zeros. A vertical time with nothing surrounding it, except absence.
Read a few pages of Emily Dickinson and then go and see Lars Von Trier’s film of Dogville. In Dickinson’s poetry the presence of the eternal is attendant in every pause. The film, by contrast, remorselessly shows what happens when any trace of the eternal is erased from daily life. What happens is that all words and their entire language are rendered meaningless.
Within a single present, within digital time, no whereabouts can be found or established.

8. We will take our bearings within another time-set. The eternal, according to Spinoza (who was Marx’s dearest philosopher) is now. It is not something awaiting us, but something we encounter during those brief yet timeless moments when everything accommodates everything and no exchange is inadequate.
In her urgent book, Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Sonit quotes the Sandinista poet Gioconda Belli describing the moment when they overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua: “Two days that felt as if a magical, age-old spell had been cast over us, taking us back to Genesis, to the very site of the creation of the world.”
The fact that the US and its mercenaries later destroyed the Sandinistas in no way diminishes that moment existing in the past, present and future.

9. A kilometre down the road from where I’m writing, there is a field in which four burros graze, two mares and two foals. They are a particularly small species. The black-bordered ears of the mares, when they prick them, come up to my chin. The foals, only a few weeks old, are the size of large terrier dogs, with the difference that their heads are almost as large as their sides.
I climb over the fence and sit in the field with my back against the trunk of an apple tree. They have made their own tracks across the field and some pass under very low branches where I would have to stoop double. They watch me. There are two areas where there is no grass at all, just reddish earth, and it is to one of these rings that they come many times a day to roll on their backs. Mare first, then foal. The foals already have their black stripe across their shoulders.
Now they approach me. They smell of donkeys and bran - not the smell of horses, more discreet. The mares touch the top of my head with their lower jaws. Their muzzles are white. Around their eyes are flies, far more agitated than their own questioning glances.
When they stand in the shade by the edge of the wood the flies go away, and they can stand there almost motionless for half an hour. In the shade at midday time slows down. When one of the foals suckles (ass’s milk is the closest to human milk) the mare’s ears lie right back and point to her tail.
Surrounded by the four of them in the sunlight, my attention fixes on their legs, all 16 of them. Their slenderness, their sheerness, their containment of concentration, their surety (horses legs look hysterical by comparison). Theirs are legs for crossing mountains no horse could tackle, legs for carrying loads which are unimaginable if one considers only the knees, the shanks, the fetlocks, the hocks, the cannon-bones, the pastern-joints, the hooves. Donkey’s legs.
They wander away, heads down, grazing, their ears missing nothing; I watch them, eyes skinned. In our exchanges such as they are, in the midday company we offer one another, there is a substratum of what I can only describe as gratitude.
Four burros in a field, month of June, year 2005.

10. Yes, I’m still amongst other things a marxist.

Desire

There is a passage in Joyce's The Dead that tells us much about desire. As the annual dinner dance breaks up, Gretta, Gabriel's wife, is profiled at the top of the stairs; she is singing an Irish song. For a moment her husband Gabriel fails to recognise her:

Gabriel had not gone to the door with the others. He was in a dark part of the hall gazing up the staircase. A woman was standing near the top of the first flight, in the shadow also. He could not see her face but he could see the terra-cotta and salmon-pink panels of her skirt which the shadow made appear black and white. It was his wife

But the revealing line is that she appears to Gabriel ‘like a symbol of something’. The fact of being ‘symbolic’ is enough, prior to any symbolised content. He apprehends ‘that’ she signifies but not ‘what’, and it this which excites Gabriel’s sexual desire, when his wife becomes vaguely hieroglyphic.

What is also curious here is the link between the aesthetic and desire, proverbially kept apart in the Kantian regime. For when Gabriel sees Gretta as symbol (or rather resembling a symbol) he places her in an imaginary art-work, a picture that thinks might be called ‘distant music’. So it is that this ‘aestheticising’ move - when Gretta has been replaced by an image of herself, turned into a signifier of some opaque X - is simultaneously the onset of desire. It is this, the state of 'having significance' which is a property of the aesthetic - that gets under the skin.



But this brief parable of desire is re-writable at once on a political level. For the ‘distant music’ to which Gretta is attuned is an Irish song, in the old ‘Irish tonality’. It transports her to the West of Ireland, to her youth and into Irish tradition (both things already invested with significance earlier in the tale). Gabriel, the Anglicised ‘West Briton’, the Dubliner, who was earlier in the story berated for not knowing what should be his own (i.e. his own country), who is ‘cultivated’ in English and continental culture, is nonetheless aroused precisely when Gretta is suddenly attuned to Irish tradition and to the West.

It is thus also the fact of cultural difference, and of cultural alienation, which curiously excites Gabriel. Arguably, however, the ultimate ‘content’ of his wife’s strangeness, turns out to be desire itself – Michael Furey’s fatal love. It is this which at the end of the tale is revealed to be the true X ‘symbolised’ by Gretta’s ‘distance’, and which removes him from his wife just at that point when he had thought himself closest. What arouses Gabriel leads him ultimately toward a traumatic encounter with her own passionat attachment, an encounter which leaves him unrecognisable to himself.

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Misrepresenting Metaphor

Ok, this relates both to the comments on metaphor, below, and to the previous post on meaning and representation. Lakoff understands metaphor as cross domain mapping, which is to say as a cognitive operation. Time is understood in terms of space – “let’s face the future” “let’s put that behind us” etc. Metaphor helps us know one ‘domain’ by reading it in terms of another. And conversely, we might argue, for example, that thinking of time in terms of space blocks our true understanding of time – it is miscognition, or misrepresentation. This is all fine. But the additional point is that such metaphors are selected not only for their cognitive adequacy, but for the forms of life which they enable, facilitate and produce. The Greeks practised the art of memory. As part of this, it was useful to conceive of memory as a house, with different categories of mnemonic object ‘located’ in different rooms. The point of this was not at all to better conceptualise what memory was really like (ie correct cognition), it was to improve one’s memory. And it apparently worked – the metaphor, we might say, changed its object (rather than forming a ‘correct representation’ of it). Or again, thinking of the past as ‘behind’ us helps organise our relation to the world - thinking of the past as infront of us and future as that dark place behind us, into which we reverse, might be part of a radically different organisation of life. So, in many cases metaphor needs to be understood not in terms of ‘how well does it conceptualise its object’, but in terms of ‘what does it make available’, how does it help us get around, organise our lives etc.

Ulysses: returning to the same point

Wanted to return to the comments Ulysses and just expand a little. Georg Lakoff talks about metaphor as ‘cross-domain’ mapping. For example, when you say ‘she was really cold to me’, emotion is understood – or ‘mapped’ – in terms of temperature; when we say ‘the past is behind me’, time is mapped in terms of space. One ‘domain’ (the target domain) is understood in terms of the other (the source domain).

So it is that Ulysses is understood as a kind of cross-domain mapping with 1904 Dublin as the target domain and Homeric myth as source domain. It's this which seems to me only half-true. What happens rather is that the ‘source domain’ (the Homeric) is broken up and disseminated through the target domain; and instead of being a domain of stable meaning which spontaneously 'reads' early 20th C Dublin, it is used, almost as the unconscious would use it, for jokes, puns, semantic hyperlinks and so on. As with the unconscious too, there is ‘overdetermination’ – Molly is not only Penelope but at one point Circe too, so that ‘penelope’ and ‘circe’ slide and reattach. New resemblances and significances are produced from the ruins of a distant mythic substrate.

If we see this from the point of view of novelistic construction, it is clear that a mythic element, such as the ‘no man’ of the Cyclops episode, is not approached in terms of ‘what is the contemporary equivalent of this? (ie who is the modern signifier of this signified)’ but ‘what different meanings can this signifier generate?’ You then put the signifier to work in the text, like a little programme, throwing up various puns, correspondences etc

Deleuzian Belch

The reason why books on Deleuze are so often disappointing is that they offer only paraphrasable ideas, whereas the pleasure of reading Deleuze himself lies in a style of thinking and writing that indeed comes to rest in paraphrasable ideas but also moves through and beyond them.

Having said that, I was recently looking at an essay on Deleuze and the logic of sensation by Jennifer Slack. It offers (I think) an account of Deleuze's critique of ‘Meaning’ – Meaning in the sense of a ‘hidden’ signified, a ‘deep’ content that replaces the thing itself. Meaning is here equated with representation. We hear a scream, a hiccup. ‘What does it mean?’ = ‘what does it represent?’: (Slack:)“Are you a scream of lost love representing recognition in a narrative of pain and abandonment? Are you a cry of happiness representing release in a narrative of joy?” Slack continues: “Deleuze writes that this practised application of representation ‘implies the relationship of an image to an object that it is supposed to illustrate’… Even though a scream ‘no more resembles what it signals than a word resembles what it designates’, we demand to know what narrative, what organisation of intelligible relationships renders this response – a scream, a tear, a frisson – a knowable object.”

This seems to me baffling and confused (yes, these things may be all mine). Now obviously a scream does not ‘resemble’ what it 'signals' in the sense that an iconic sign does. A scream is, presumably, something like an index or manifestation of X (as 'signal' indeed implies) as opposed to a ‘representation’ of X. The fact that it does not ‘resemble’ what it signals in no way rules out questions about what it ‘signals’ (more on this shortly). What also seems slightly remiss, above, is that the phrase she quotes from Deleuze about ‘the relationship of an image to an object..’ specifically concerns figurative painting (it’s from the Bacon book) rather than a more general ‘application of representation’. The concepts patiently extracted from Bacon are transposed elsewhere and made into generalities (wheras Deleuze talks about empiricism as extracting concpets from multiplicities).

Anyway, what seems strange to me is an apparent conflation of meaning and representation. Again, the ‘logic of representation’ as summarised by Slack seems to be that a thing only has value as a bearer (or representative) of its Meaning; instead of this, we must grasp the thing in terms of its immediate affects on the bodies around it, in terms of what it produces and the relations it sets up . The obvious response to this is that ‘Meaning’ is not eccentric to affects, production and enacted relations.

For example, the ‘meaning’ of sticking two fingers up at someone does not lie in its ‘representing’ the expression ‘fuck off’ but also in what it does – intimidates, disrespects, threatens or whatever. More generally, anything from a burp (Slack’s own eg, I think) is not meaningful because it ‘represents’ something but because it intervenes in an already meaning-full world. The belch does not ‘represent’ some content. It breaks up the stilted formalism of the job interview, derails the awkward silence of a dinner party, or confirms some laddish solidarity. The effects of this belch will fully depend on what field of meaning it interrupts (or corroborates). The disturbance that something makes within an extant field of meaning, the relations it produces, are its meanings. Within a different meaning-full world it would not have the same repercussions nor incite the same disturbances.

Sometimes, in Deleuzian commentary, there is this elusive and favoured notion of the a-signifying mark or pure sensation, spots or lines of unclothed intensity anarchically murdering (common) sense. This, somehow, is the naked thing-in-itself divested of Meaning. But what has escaped the net of signification is fully mediated by what it has escaped just as nudity is mediated by clothing. Only within and in relation to this world is it 'a-signifying' and, as such, belongs to it by way of negation. And I think GD would give me an approving belch on this one.