Move Along Folks, Nothing to See Here!

The last few days have left me feeling despondant and without a thought in the world, though I'm dreaming a good deal, which must, from an analytic point of view, mean that I'm doing some serious thinking. I feel as if my brain has fallen out of my ear. Last night's dream involved an old friend Dan, who first introduced me to philosophy in highschool, holding a German luger pistol to my head and laughing as I squirmed. I wonder what that's all about. In the dream it turns out that after all these years he still works at Long John Silver's as a fry cook. My father has such a gun... Hmmm.

At any rate, in my quest to better understand the series of critical questions that N.Pepperell over at Rough Theory has been posing vis a vis the conditions for the possibility of critique, I've returned to Adorno's Negative Dialectics, a text that always, for some reason, fills me with guilt... The guilt of a missed encounter. Just in traversing the first few pages, I can see why N.Pepperell has been intrigued by a good deal of the work I've been doing here, as much of Adorno resonates closely with Lacan and Zizek. The following remarks are more placeholders than anything else, designed to forge a sort of translation device or lexicon, rather than to propose an argument. Of course, any translation is already an interpretation, so perhaps I should bear that in mind.

In a striking remark that cannot fail to ring significantly to the Lacanian ear, Adorno claims that,

The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy... It indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived.

Yet the appearance of identity is inherent in thought itself, in its pure form. To think is to identify. Conceptual order is content to screen what thinking seeks to comprehend. The semblance and the truth of thought entwine. The semblance cannot be decreed away, as by avowal of a being-in-itself outside the totality of cogitative definitions... Aware that the conceptual totality is mere appearance, I have no way but to break immanently, in its own measure, through the appearance of total identity. Since that totality is structured to accord with logic, however, whose core is the principle of the excluded middle, whatever will not fit this principle, whatever differs in quality, comes to be designated as a contradiction. Contradiction is nonidentity under the aspect of identity; the dialectical primary of the principle of contradiction makes the thought of unity the measure of heterogeneity. (5)

This is perhaps the pithiest expression of the Lacanian borromean knot between the symbolic, the real, and the imaginary I have ever encountered. I have never been particularly fond of the term "imaginary" in Lacanian psychoanalysis, as it too readily lends itself to common usages suggesting what is false or imagined, whereas for Lacan the imaginary pertains to the dimension of the image, of our identification with our bodily image that always differs from the lived body of movement, that we can never fully assume or be identical with. Of course, this is part of the point in Lacan's use of language: It is a pedagogy that teaches the difference between signifier and signified, of their radical discontinuity, and that enjoins us not to assume the signified as inherently attached to the signifier, but to look for it among those signifiers immanently attached to it in a text or the speech of an analysand. The imaginary is the domain of identification, and marks our yearning for completeness, wholeness, totality, and identity. Dylan Evans puts it nicely in his Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis,

The basis of the imaginary order continues to be the formation of the ego in the mirror stage. Since the ego is formed by identifying with the counterpart or specular image, identification is an important aspect of the imaginary order. The ego and the counterpart form the protypical dual relationship, and are interchangeable. This relationship whereby the ego is constituted by identification with the little other [the mirror image or image of another person] means that the ego, and the imaginary order itself, are both sites of a radical alienation; 'aleination is constitutive of the imaginary order' (S3, 146) [we are alienated insofar as we are never identical to the image, hence the identification generates rivalry and aggressivity as can often be witnessed in the blogosphere when various bloggers go to war with one another in thinly veiled struggles for prestige and recognition]. The dual relationship between the ego and the counterpart is fundamentally narcissistic, and narcissism is another characteristic of the imaginary order. Narcissism is always accompanied by a certain aggressivity. The imaginary is the realm of image and imagination, deception and lure [deception insofar as I confuse myself with what I am not, my frozen image]. The principle illusions of the imaginary are those of wholeness, synthesis, autonomy, duality and above all, similarity [images appear whole, whereas language and movement are not]. The imaginary is thus the order of surface appearances which are deceptive, observable phenomena which hide underlying structure; the affects are such phenomena. (82)

Returning then to Adorno, then, the concept can loosely be translated into the domain of the symbolic, while the totality or whole can be translated into the domain of the Lacanian imaginary. As Adorno will say a few pages later, "No object is wholly known; knowledge is not supposed to prepare the phantasm of the whole" (14). Those philosophical systems that present the whole such as, for instance, Whitehead, can be situated as the symbolic under the dominion of the imaginary. They fantasize an image without remainder, without blindspot or tain, without gaze before which they dance. And it is remarkable that variants of holism so often paradoxically generate aggressivity.

The real then, of course, would be the remainder that resists conceptualization. This remainder seems to function in a two-fold way. When Adorno suggests that to think is to identify, he immediately seems to back up, expressing hesitation, treating this remainder as the motor that propels the imaginary yearning for identification. It is precisely because the object differs from itself, that thought strives to identify. A perfect identity would leave no space, no gap, calling for the thing to be thought. The thing would reside purely within itself, never producing the distance that calls for it to be thought. It is only insofar as identity already is minimally indifferent that we're driven to try to identify. As Hegel puts it in an important passage in the Logic (and I think Adorno is pretty far off the mark in his interpretation of Hegel),

This proposition in its positive expression A = A is, in the first instance, nothing more than the expression of an empty tautology. It has therefore been rightly remarked that this law of thought has no content and leads no further. It is thus the empty identity that is rigidly adhered to by those who take it, as such, to be something true and are given to saying that identity is not difference, but that identity and difference are different. They do not see that in this very assertion they are themselves saying that identity is different; for they are saying that identity is different from difference; since this must at the same time be admitted to be the nature of identity, their assertion implies that identity, not externally, but in its own self, in its very nature, is this, to be different. (413)

Hegel goes on to argue that the contradiction embodied in the principle of identity is not simply that identity is different from difference-- though this is true as well --but immanent to identity itself as a contradiction or difference between form and content. At the level of form, any proposition of the form "x is..." calls for a predicate that enriches the subject with some new content. For instance, I say a "pen is a utensil". However, at the level of content, all we get is "A is A", such that the predicate gives us no additional content, but merely repeats, tautologously, the initial subject. What we thus get is a marking of the difference betwen form and content. It is precisely because the content fails that we are able to become aware of the form of this species of propositions. Thus, even in the most formal presentation of identity already contains the elusive remainder within it or its own resistance to complete conceptualizations or symbolization.

We might begin from an epistemic stance, arguing that this remainder is a deficiency in thought, a deficiency in knowledge, that could perhaps be surmounted by gaining more information and understanding. Here the world, in-itself, would be free of such remainders and would be complete. It would simply be a matter of a disadequation between thought and being. However, in a vein very similar to Zizek's, Adorno goes on to claim that in fact it is the world itself that is antagonistic, that doesn't have the smooth functioning of the signifier (when conceived under the dominion of the imaginary):

However, varied, the anticipation of moving in contradictions throughout seems to teach a mental totality-- the very identity thesis we have just rendered inoperative. The mind which ceaselessly reflects on contradiction in the thing itself, we hear, must be the thing itself it is to be organized in the form of contradiction; the truth which in idealistic dialectics drives beyond every particular, as onesided and wrong, is the truth of the whole, and if that were not preconcieved, the dialectical step would lack motivation and direction. We have to answer that the object of a mental experience is an antagnoistic system in itself-- antagonistic in reality, not just in conveance to the knowing subject that rediscovers itself therein...

...Regarding the concrete utopian possibility, dialectics is the ontology of the wrong state of things. The right state of things would be free of it: neither a system nor a contradiction. (10-11)

The obvious target here is Hegel, who Adorno portrays as the thinker of a complete and whole system where everything has its place. However, when Hegel speaks of absolute knowledge, it is precisely this antagonism, this remainder, reflected back into the thing itself (rather than the knowing subject) that he is speaking of. Put a bit differently, reality is already dialectical in itself, or just is this tension between the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. The real is the undoing of any totality, but is also the motor that drives towards totality. Therefore it has an ambiguous status.

I realize here that I am only repeating points that I've already made to N.Pepperell: That the non-identity of identity is the necessary but not sufficient condition for critique, that it is what accounts for how critique is possible in the first place. However, it is a first step, I think, in unfolding the question of self-reflexivity, or accounting for the conditions for the possibility of a critical subject. What is needed in addition to this is a socio-historical account of the conceptual web such a subject swims in at a particular juncture... A conceptual web that must already be non-identical to itself to be recognized as such. Additionally, my interest in all of this, revolves around questions of how it is possible to philosophically appropriate psychoanalysis and various other forms of social theory drawing on some explicit or implicit notion of the unconscious. These forms of thought remain dogmatic so long as they are baldly or empirically asserted as is so often the case. Moreover, it is clear that philosophical stances based on the primacy of the classical subject such as those found in Descartes or Husserl, are inadequate in dealing with anything resembling the unconscious or social systems. Finally, embedded approaches such as Heidegger's or Merleau-Ponty's seem to inevitably lead to mystical obscurantism. What a dialectical approach provides is precisely the means of thinking the identity of identity and difference... And what is the unconscious but that "Other scene" that differs from identity but which I nonetheless am?

Apologies for the scattered and random remarks.

The Diacritical Production of Identity

During the final phase of his work extending from roughly 1964 to the end of his life, Lacan came to focus increasingly on the role of the Real in the triad composing the Symbolic, Imaginary and Real. This entailed understanding the formations of the unconscious-- roughly symptoms --as attempts to recreate a harmony with the Real. As Lacan puts it,

Whenever we speak of cause... there is always something anti-conceptual, something indefinite. The phases of the moon are the cause of tides-- we know this from experience, we know that the word cause is correctly used here. Or again, miasmas are the cause of fever-- that doesn't mean anything either, there is a hole, and something that oscillates in the interval. In short, there is a cause only in something that doesn't work. Well! It is at this point that I am trying to make you see by approximation that the Freudian unconscious is situated at that point, where, between cause and that which it affects, there is always something wrong. The important thing is not that the unconscious determines neurosis-- of that one Freud can quite happily, like Pontius Pilot, wash his hands... For what the unconscious does is to show us the gap through which neurosis recreates a harmony with a real-- a real that may well not be determined" (Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 22).

The product of this attempt to re-create a harmony is of course the symptom. A symptom can be anything from the dramatic compulsion to repeatedly wash one's hands to a simple slip of the tongue or dream. What is important is that the symptom is a response to a gap, lack, or absence which is characteristic of the Real.

Lacan gives two key formulations in characterizing the specific difference of the Real: On the one hand Lacan claims that the Real is that which always returns to its place. In the middle Lacan something qualifies as real if it has this quality of always returning to its place. Here, then, we might think of the movement of the planets. We can see how this characterization of the Real evolves over the course of his thought insofar as the symptom comes to increasingly be conceived as that which always returns to its place. In fact, we might even think of that final moment of analysis which involves identification with the symptom, as consisting in the eternal return of the symptom. While it is certainly true that the movement of the symptom produces an endless variety of symptomatic formations, the lack or absence around which these formations occur is always the same. Analysis thus consists in the mapping of this lack in its sheer nonsensical being (the movement from symptoms imbued with meaning and the sinthome as a pure process). This mapping of the real was what was at stake in Lacan's discussions of zeros and ones in seminar II and the Seminar on the Purloined Letter. Part of traversing the fantasy consists in coming to stand before this fundamental void borne of castration covered over by fantasy.

On the other hand, Lacan characterizes the Real as what is impossible. It is with this formulation of the Real that we truly enter Lacan's mature thought. Here the claim that the Real is the impossible should not be equated with idiotic common sense platitudes to the effect that man will never fly or pigs and donkeys cannot mate. As Lacan remarks in Seminar XX, impossibility is not to be understood as the opposite of possibility. Moreover, we ought not understand impossibility as being defined in terms of what people or a given culture believes is possible or impossible. Rather, the sort of impossibility Lacan has in mind are formal impossibilities like the sort that arise in logic or mathematics. Most often these formal impossibilities have to do with sets that do not include themselves like the set of all sets that do not include themselves. Such entities generate irresolvable paradoxes. Thus there is a special relationship between paradox and impossibility as it pertains to the Lacanian Real. The graphs of sexuation, along with the stances of hysteria ("am I a man or a woman") and obsession ("am I alive or am I dead") can be seen as variations of these set theoretical paradoxes.

Thus, for instance, the problem with the set of all sets that do not include themselves is that if the set of all sets that do not include themselves includes itself, then it is simultaneously a part of itself and its own whole. On the other hand, if the set of all sets does not include itself as a member of itself, then it would appear that it is not, in fact, the set of all sets that do not include themselves. The set of all sets us therefore a paradoxical notion. We encounter a very concrete example of this in the paradox of the Barber of Seville. If the Barber of Seville cuts everyone's hair but those who cut there own hair, who cuts the Barber's hair? According to this proposition the Barber cannot cut his own hair because he cuts everyone's hair except those who cut their own hair. Yet someone else cannot cut the Barber's hair because he cuts everyone's hair except those who cut their own hair. The symbolic thus generates paradoxes, these paradoxes express formal impossibilities, and these formal impossibilities are what characterize the Real. Moreover, these impossibilities are intriguing in that they always return to their place. They always occur in the same place and thus mark a certain invariance in the symbolic which otherwise does not exist (cf. Seminar XX where Lacan remarks that language does not exist. We'll see why in a moment). Lacan will define three fundamental fantasies revolving around these paradoxes: the non-existence of the sexual relation, the origin of our being as subjects, and the non-existence of Woman.

Although Lacan would not explicitly formulate this position until the sixties, he had already been moving in this direction with respect to his understanding of neurosis as early as the mid fifties. For Lacan a neurosis isn't a pathological deviation from normality, but is rather a specific structure organizing a specific sort of symptom. In Seminar III, The Psychoses, Lacan articulates these structures in terms of specific questions. Thus, in the case of obsession, the structure is expressed by the question of whether I am alive or dead. Am I alive or am I dead? This question is only intelligible when thought in terms of how the obsessional relates to the master or the mythological primal father as articulated in the masculine side of the graph of sexuation. By contrast, hysteria is expressed in terms of the question of whether I am a man or a woman, which only becomes intelligible in terms of how feminine desire is organized in terms of identification with the desire of the Other. Now, what might not be evident at first glance is that both of these questions are expressions of specific impossibilities or the Real.

If we refer obsession to the masculine pole of the graphs of sexuation presented in Seminar XX, then we see that the paradox characterizing obsession has to do with the nature of castration and jouissance. According to Lacan, the claim that there is no being that is not submitted to the phallic function implies that there exists at least one being that is not subordinated to the phallic function. The male side of the graphs of sexuation can therefore be understood as involving the dialectic between the master and the slave. Recalling that obsession is closely related to the discourse of the master, when the obsessional asks whether he is alive or dead, we can translate this as a question as to whether all jouissance is ceded to the master (that mythological being that isn't subordinated to the phallic function) or whether he, the slave, maintains some jouissance for himself. The question of whether I am alive or dead is thus a question about whether or not I must sacrifice all my jouissance, and is premised on the fantasy that I might eventually obtain total or complete jouissance by besting the master. What we have here is a formal impossibility characterizing the logic of the phallic function or castration. When I enter the symbolic order I am forced to sacrifice my jouissance (by observing the laws of kinship exchange), yet I still imagine (unconsciously) that somewhere there is some being that makes no such sacrifice. It is this that leads Lacan to characterize obsession as the desire for an impossible desire.

The case is similar with respect to hysteria, for in asking whether I am a man or a woman the formal impossibility encountered is the non-existence of The Woman. La Femme n'existe pas. I will not get into the details of Lacan's claim that The Woman does not exist or that there is no unified category of Womanness capable of including all women. Most fundamentally Lacan's claim is premised on the claim that there is no signifier for Woman or that the big Other is incomplete, thereby entailing that L'Autre n'existe pas. In this connection, Lacan, in seminar XX, equates Woman as such with the Other. In a moment we'll see why the big Other cannot be said to exist. For the moment it's important to note that this formal impossibility gives rise to the hysterical desire for an unsatisfied desire. For in his search to discover what Woman is, the hysteric's desire is referred to the desire of he who desires Woman so as to discover what Woman is. In short, the unsatisfied desire desired by the hysteric isn't simply her own unsatisfied desire, but the unsatisfied desire of an Other through which she might learn what Woman is and thereby become the semblance of Woman as such. It is in this regard that Lacan was led to claim that "The Woman is the symptom of man" (Seminar 22: RSI). For insofar as The Woman does not exist-- meaning their is no consistent category of women capable of including all women --any woman (note the case) is but a semblance of Woman arrived at through identification with an-Other's desire. The symptoms encountered in the treatment of hysterics and obsessionals are thus products of the specific form that these formal impossibilities take. Identifying with your symptom entails identifying with the specific formal impossibility or Real governing your subject position.

Beginning in 1964-65, with Seminar XII, Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis, Lacan came to focus more seriously and intensively on the formal structure of these impossibilities characterizing the Real. Here what we have is a sort of Goedelian psychoanalysis, or a psychoanalysis founded on the formal impossibility of producing a closed system. Lacan expressed this impossibility with the aphorisms that "there is no universe of discourse" and "there is no metalanguage". Although these two claims are closely related, they both express slightly different points. Thus when Lacan says "there is no universe of discourse" what he is essentially claiming is that discourse, language, can never form a closed totality, unity, or whole. This refers to Cantor's paradox or the impossibility of forming a set of all sets insofar as the subsets of such a set would always be greater than the initial set by the power-set axiom. It can also be taken to refer to Russell's paradox, insofar as the signifier has the feature of not belonging to itself and thus cannot form a totality.

Language is always constitutively incomplete. This isn't simply a contingent accident such that we could finally rectify it by adding one more (encore!) signifier, but is an essential feature of any system or the mark of systematicity as such. From a psychoanalytic perspective this logic is seen most clearly in Totem and Taboo and Group Psychology and the Analysis of Ego. The consistency of the social system is only made through the subtraction or addition of a particular element, such that this element has the paradoxical status of simultaneously being a part of the system and outside the system. By contrast, when Lacan claims that there is no metalanguage, he is essentially claiming that there is no point of view one can adopt on language that would allow one to survey the whole from the outside. We are always already inside of language such that we are dialecticized by language. Thus we have two formal impossibilities or Reals characterizing the being of the symbolic.

Why, then, is there no metalanguage or is it impossible to take a point of view on language that would survey the totality from outside of language. There is, of course, the mathematico-logico demonstration that there is no whole of any formal system whatsoever. Consequently, if there is no whole of any formal system whatsoever, there can be no whole to survey. However, if there is no metalanguage, this is also by virtue of the fact that language is diacritical such that every "element" of language takes on its identity by virtue of its difference to the other elements. Insofar as each element only takes on its identity with respect to the other elements, no element is every simply present, but is already dispersed or "contaminated" by the other elements.

In Seminar XIV, The Logic of Fantasy, Lacan expressed this point with the aphorism that "the signifier cannot signify itself" which is equivalent to the matheme S1 ---> S2. Every signifier only produces effects of meaning through its relation to other signifiers. Insofar as every signifier only produces effects of meaning through its differential relation to other signifiers, it follows that any attempt to formulate a metalanguage, to give a description of language from the "outside", is already differentially included in language and thus a part of the very thing it seeks to describe. Thus we encounter another formal impossibility or Real, characterizing the impossibility of ever arriving at simple identity with oneself. As many post-structuralist thinkers have observed, identity is always already contaminated by difference by virtue of the diacritical play of language. This is just another way of saying S1/$ in the discourse of the master.

Zizek gives a terrific example of this principle in his magnum opus, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. As Zizek remarks in the context of a discussion of Hegel's distinction between boundary and limit,

National identification is an exemplary case of how an external border is reflected into an internal limit. Of course, the first step towards the identity of the nation is defined through differences from other nations, via an external border: if I identify myself as an Englishman, I distinguish myself from the French, Germans, Scots, Irish, and so on. However, in the next stage, the question is raised of who among the English are 'the real English', the paradigm of Englishness; who are the Englishmen who correspond in full to the notion of English...However, the final answer is of course that nobody is fully English, that every empirical Englishman contains something 'non-English'-- Englishness thus becomes an 'internal limit', an unattainable point which prevents empirical Englishmen from achieving full identity-with-themselves. (110)

Zizek's point is that insofar as a nation is defined by a boundary, it's identity can only be established in its difference to other nations. We can readily observe this phenomenon at work in personal identity as well; for as Lacan shows in the second cell of the graph of desire, my identity is only arrived at differentially in relation to others.

What we have here is thus the Real of identity or the way in which identity, properly speaking is impossible. Neither a nation nor a person is able to ever arrive at identity with itself insofar as it is differentially structured with respect to other nations and identities. Thus when Zizek claims that social antagonisms are always structured around an impossible Real, one way of understanding him would be to point to this formal impossibility of achieving identity. This impossible Real is not without consequences; for as a traumatic impossibility it turns the accomplishment of identity into an insistent demand. Despite the fact that identity is formally impossible insofar as it is always-already contaminated by difference, identity or respite from the play of diacritics is nonetheless demanded. Just as the Real of castration produces desire in the subject, the Real of impossible identity produces a sort of collective desire or fantasy. Identity must be accomplished even if impossible. In this respect, identity is not established through a totalization of the system in question, but is instead produced by having some contingent entity stand for the totality of entities. For instance, some particular type of Englishman-- perhaps the working man --comes to stand for all Englishmen. This addition to the system is simultaneously a part of the system and outside it, and functions in such a way as to grant the system a semblance of identity with itself. It is notable that the unconscious functions in exactly this way. The function of the symptom is in fact that crazy addition that allows the otherwise untotalizable unconscious to hang together as a consistent whole. The symptom is always a +1 that stands in the place of the absence lying at the center of the unconscious structured like a language. It is therefore a S(-A-) or a signifier of the barred Other. Yet in functioning in this manner it simultaneously reveals and conceals the fact that the Other is barred. In this respect, the symptom recreates harmony with what would otherwise be infinite deferral. This is why the symptom can also be understood as a metaphor. By contrast, the operation of addition by which an untotalizeable system takes on the semblance of totality is itself subject to the diacritical movement which effaces identity and is therefore in danger of collapsing. For this reason the addition of one element is never enough. In addition to this +1 there must also be a subtraction (-1) which accounts for the failure of this totalization in advance. It is here that the logic of contamination emerges in connection to those fantasies of collective wholeness. For in every semblance of totality there is always a contamination or cries of a virus corrupting the identity of the system. This contamination is a strict corollary of the crazy identity established through the addition of that one extra signifier and functions to account for the failure of this signifier or the manner in which this signifier itself is effaced by the diacritical play of differences. The subtracted signifier or contaminant is always the immigrant, the ethnic other, women, liberals, etc. It is for this reason that those discourses most characterized by the call for identity (nationalistic discourses, individualistic discourses premised on the ego, etc.) are always most characterized by discussions of their Others or those supposed invaders contaminating the identity of the discourse. In fact, what the discourse encounters in these Others is its own disguised Real or the manner in which it always already differs from itself. In short, these Others are the objets a that the identity has had to sacrifice in order to constitute itself in the semblance of totality. For that which is repressed always returns.