Operational Closure and the Reception of Events

One of the central axioms of sociological systems theory is the thesis that systems process events according to their own internal organization. As Luhmann puts it in his magnificent work Social Systems,

The environment receives its unity through the system and only in relation to the system. It is delimited by open horizons, not by boundaries that can be crossed; thus it is not itself a system. It is different for every system, because every system excludes only itself from its environment. Accordingly, the environment has no self-reflection or capacity to act. Attribution to the environment (external attribution) is a strategy of systems. But this does not mean that the environment depends on the system or that the system can comman its environment as it pleases. Instead, the complexity of the system and of the environment-- to which we will later return --excludes any totalizing form of dependence in either directions. (17)

For Luhmann, the fundamental distinction in sociological systems theory is the distinction between system and environment. Systems constitute themselves by distinguishing themselves from an environment. However, the key point is that, to put it in Hegelian terms, the relationship between system and environment is not an "external positing" where the environment is one thing and the system is another thing, but rather the unity of the environment is itself constituted by the system, such that the relation between system and environment is a self-referential relation constituted by the system itself. Any occurance taking place that the system attributes as coming from the environment but which doesn't fit the frame of this distinction is simply coded as noise or chaos.

It is for this reason that systems are characterized by "operational closure", such that events are processed according to the organization of the system in such a way that what an event is is always-already predelineated by the organization of the system. As Luhmann writes a bit further on,

Information occurs whenever a selective event (of an external or internal kind) works selectively within the system, namely, can select the system's states. This presupposes a capacity for being oriented to (simultaneous or successive) differences that appear to be bound to a self-referential operational mode of the system. "A 'bit' of information," as Bateson says, "is definable as a difference which makes a difference." This means that the difference as such begins to work if and insofar as it can be treated as information in self-referential systems.

Therein lies an immense extension of possible causalities and a discplacement of the structural problematics under their control. the extension goes in two directions. On the one hand, given the capacity to process information, things that are not present can also have an effect; mistakes, null values, and disappointments acquire causality insofar as they can be grasped via the schema of a difference. On the other, not just events but facts, structures, and continuities stimulate causalities insofar as they can be experienced as differences. Remaining unchanged can thus become a cause of change. Structural causality makes self-determination possible. Systems can store up possibilities of affecting themselves and, with the help of schemata that employ differences, can retrieve these at need. It should be noted, however, that structure does not operate as such, on the basis of a force dwelling within it. It merely enters into the experience of difference, which makes information possible, without necessarily determination what will take place there. Thus a system creates its own past as its own causal basis, which enables it to gain distances from the causal pressure of the environment without already determining through internal causality what will occur in confrontations with external events...

As a result of all this, the operational mode of self-referential systems changes into forms of causality that to a large extent reliably prevent it from being steered from outside. All the effects that one wishes to acheive ab extra either in the system or with it assume that the system can perceive impulses from without as information-- which is to say, as the experience of difference --and can in this way bring about an effect. Such systems, which procure causality for themselves, can no longer be "causally explained" (except in the reductive schema of an observer), not because their complexity is impenetrable, but on logical grounds. (40-41)

In short, systems do not function according to linear relations of cause and effect such as the transfer of motion that takes place in one billiard ball hitting another, but rather function according to a system specific causality that governs how events "impinging" on the system are received. What counts as information for a system, will depend on codes and programs belonging to the system. Elsewhere, in his beautiful and very accessible work, The Reality of the Mass Media, Luhmann explains that these codes are binary distinctions that determine how events are to be sorted as information. Programs then define how information is to be put to use by the system in question. Thus, for instance, the legal system perhaps organizes all events into information according to the code of legal/illegal, whereas the news media system processes all events according to the code information/non-information, and so on.

One of the key implications of this understanding of operational closure is that information cannot be transferred from one system to another. As Luhman puts it in The Reality of the Mass Media,

If, in addition, one starts out from the theory of operationally closed systems of information processing, the generation of information processing, the generation of information and the processing of information must be going on within the same system boundaries, and both differences to which Bateson's definition is geared must be distinctions in the same system. Accordingly, there are no information transfers from system to system. Having said that, systems can generate items of information which circulate between their subsystems. So one must always name the system reference upon which any use of the concept of information is based. (19)

The reason for this is immediately clear: If there are no transfers of information from system to system, then this is because information is only information for a specific system by virtue of the distinctions employed by that system. Insofar as different systems employ different distinctions to sort information, it follows that the event sorted according to the operative distinctions produces different information in both cases. It is for this reason that systems are not susceptible to "steering" from the outside, as the manner in which the system receives these events will be governed by the distinctions employed by that system. In this regard, Luhmann has a number of very pessimistic things to say about Marxist ambitions to steer the social system through either the economic or social system.

It seems to me that all of this is highly revelant in the context of Badiou's theory of the event. Very briefly, for Badiou an event is an occurance that fits none of the predicative categories governing what he calls a situation. In the lexicon or encyclopedia of the situation, there simply is no name for the event. Put in Luhmann-speak, an event is that which evades the binary codes governing how events are to be transformed into information. According to Badiou we can never demonstrate that an event has truly taken place precisely because there are no categories in the situation for counting the occurance. Consequently, the event is little more than chaos or noise. For Badiou, a subject is that agent that emerges in the wake of the event that resolves to count the event as belonging to the situation and to re-evaluate all elements of the situation in light of the implications this event has for the structure of the situation. There is thus a distinction, for Badiou, between subjects and individuals. Prior to nominating and becoming agents of an event, all of us are individuals. However, in being siezed by an event I become a subject by bearing active fidelity to the event, sustaining it through this fidelity, and seeking to transform the situation in light of the event.

In light of Luhmann, two serious concerns arise in relation to this theory of the event: First, if all systems process events in terms of system specific distinctions or codes, how is it possible for individuals to be open to events at all? Individuals are either their own systems or are iterations of the broader systems to which they belong through interpellation (Althusser's ISO's). It would seem that an individual must already be prepared to receive an event in order to be capable of discerning an event as an event rather than as mere noise or chaos. Consequently we can ask, "what are the conditions for the possibility of being receptive to an event in Badiou's sense of the word?" Second, is Badiou, perhaps, overly optimistic about the transformative possibilities of events? If subsystems of a system-- society --process events according to their own codes, there is a serious question as to how these subsystems could be open to the re-interpretations undertaken by the subject of an event. I don't have answers to these questions and am not offering these observations as a way of demolishing Badiou. Rather, these are questions posed for further work and thought.

Social Sciences and Apres Coup

The brilliant Foucaultisdead and I have been having an interesting conversation surrounding asperger's syndrom and my recent remarks on the symptom that reminded me of this piece I wrote a number of years ago surrounding concerns about how diagnosis functions in contemporary American clinical contexts. In response to his call take opportunities to make Lacanian psychoanalysis more available to the mainstream media and lay public, I wrote a rant worthy of my recent mood, that reminded me of this piece:

I tend to be a bit more pessimistic about what is easy from the standpoint of the mainstream media and lay people, as it seems to me that a good deal of the contemporary constellation in the United States where therapy is concerned is premised on the complete eradication of the subject from discourse. From the side of the various therapeutic orientations, not only do we have the vested economic interests of insurance companies that would like to see the minimization of lengthy costly treatment through medication and a set number of consultations (usually around twelve, sometimes more though at a frequency of every two weeks to every month), but also the rise of the predominance of the discourse of the university where every patient must be neatly subsumable in a diagnostic category in advance such that there are no surprises (hence the DSM-IV, which is largely for the benefit of insurance companies, not practitioners).

On the side of those seeking treatment, the growing collapse of various identities due to globalization in economics and media technologies and the continued crumbling of the big Other, has led to a corresponding increase in symptoms of hysteria such as anxiety disorders, as well as omnipresent depression (what's being mourned here?). As a result, rather than a discovery of oneself as a subject as in analysis, therapy-- which I always distinguish from analysis --has precipitated the search for a master capable of naming the subject, thereby guaranteeing a minimal ontological substantiality. The new names of the subject are strange indeed: Borderline, depressive, schizoid, dissociative, panic, etc. In being given these names-- the name of the symptom here always comes from the guru therapist, and is not an act of self-naming with respect to the symptom as in the case of analysis... One wonders why the therapist feels compelled to diagnose at all --the patient assumes a minimal identity.

Or to put it a bit differently, one wonders why it isn't more widely recognized and thought about that nomination or diagnosis is not simply descriptive of a pathology, but also is performatively formative of identity for the patient that then identifies with the nomination and takes it as a descriptor of his being. Addiction becomes all the more powerful in *nominating* myself as an addict, for instance; and, of course, we can recognize the performative and ritual aspects of this performativity in 12 Step programs where the first step is "admitting you have a problem", i.e., agreeing to nominate yourself and bring a certain identity into being, thereby positing the Other or making it exist at one and the same time (it's not a mistake that one of the steps consists in placing oneself in the hands of a higher power).

Although they have no idea what they are in their day to day interpersonal relations (how could they in a world where there are layoffs every couple of years, where family relations continously crumble, where relationships are virtual, and where ethnic and national identities progressively recede) their new name as "depressive", "anxious", "dissociative", "borderline", etc gives them an identity, a *knowledge* (in the imaginary), of who they are that then serves both as a self-reinforcing feedback loop (the patient must enact the identity and begins to read up on their "disorder" in the self-help section to play the role and disover who they are), and a new set of rights and protocols surrounding victimhood in their interpersonal relations. These are unheard of nominations that have come to replace the older and failing nominations like family names, national names (American, German, French, English, etc), and ethnic names (Jew, Catholic, and so on...), and therefore provide the new ideal ego (for the ego ideal of the therapist's gaze) of a very peculiar sort.

All of this functions as a massive defense formation against the void and singularity of their unconscious and the way in which life in contemporary capital calls for us to give way on our desire. The focus on the subject has always been what has guaranteed psychoanalysis the status of a "ghetto science" and has always invited a sense of defensive horror. "What, no master to name me or university to categorize me? What, an auto-elective nomination? Gasp!" As Kurtz says at the end of Apocalypse Now, "The Horror! The Horror!"

Although I'm not entirely sure that my argument fully holds up in terms of more recent developments in my thinking about psychoanalysis, I think much of it remains solid. I believe this post also converges with some of N.Pepperell's thoughts on self-reflexivity and critique. Hopefully others will find it of some interest. I'm really rather shocked that no one has written a Foucaultian style analysis of the history of the DSM-IV and how it's used in Anglo-American clinical contexts. Without further ado:

Social Sciences and Apres Coup

There can be little doubt that the division between hard and soft sciences functions as an unbridgeable chasm defining the division between objectivity and subjectivity for conventional wisdom. The standard rap seems to be that hard sciences are able to present an impartial view of the phenomena they seek to describe, whereas soft sciences (the human sciences) are unable to objectively represent their phenomena due to the inherent complexity of what they seek to describe. In other words, the human science are thought to contain too many variables, to be too complex, to be properly described.

No doubt there is a measure of truth in this evaluation, but, as is so often the case with conventional wisdom, this point is true for the wrong reasons. The standard fantasy underlying the opposition between hard and soft sciences is the thesis that these sciences (psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, history, etc.) are themselves ultimately reducible to the principles of the hard sciences, but have not yet been reduced by virtue of our inability to pierce the complex set of variables involved in these phenomena. Thus we look to fields like neuroscience and the field of genetics as possibly offering us the bridge through which social phenomena will finally be reducible to physical phenomena.

The dream is that someday all psychic phenomena will be reducible to brain events and interpretable in terms of electro-chemical reactions. This has already had a tremendous impact on both psychological theory and practice, where mental disorders are regularly reduced to certain electro-chemical profiles in the brain and treated through various chemical cocktails. This approach is regularly supported through observations of the brains of people suffering from these disorders, coupled with studies of families in which these disorders appear.

Two points should be made at this juncture: First, patients suffering from disorders such as obsessional neurosis, psychosis, depression and whatever other illness we might like to cite will show certain electro-chemical profiles in their brain. The person influenced by psychoanalysis should not be ashamed of admitting this point. Though, as we shall see, it should be admitted with reservations. Second, it is likely that in many of these cases certain mental disorders will appear consistently in the families of those suffering from these disorders. Psychoanalysis should unabashedly admit both of these points.

However, as is so often the case, the problems with the physicalist approach to the study of human phenomena are to be found at the level of certain fundamental theoretical assumptions that are not philosophically or theoretically sound. In short, physicalist psychology and the therapeutic practice that accompanies it is based on a fundamental confusion surrounding the notion of causality and how it functions in the field of social phenomena.

Here-- deviating a bit from Lacan's analysis of causality as it functions in psychoanalysis ("Science and Truth"), though not disagreeing with him --we might say that physicalist psychology confuses what Aristotle called "material causality" with what he called "efficient causality". For Aristotle, the material cause of something consists of the substance that thing is made of. Thus, for instance, the material cause of a statue might be the bronze of which it is fashioned. By contrast, the efficient cause of something is that by which the thing comes to be. In the case of the statue, the efficient cause would be the artist who fashioned the statue.

The problem with physicalist psychology is that it treats the material cause (the brain, genetics) as if it were the efficient cause of mental disorders and then proceeds to treat the material cause rather than the psychic structure itself. If this approach is mistaken, it is mistaken first because the simple presence of an electro-chemical profile in the brain is not enough to establish that the brain is the cause of the mental disorder. All we have established here is that all psychic phenomena require an inscription of some sort. This does not establish the origin of the inscription. Assuming that we adopt some sort of materialist ontology (in other words, that we reject any mind/body dualism), it should come as no surprise that any psychic phenomena will express itself as a trace in the brain. But this is not enough to establish that the brain is the cause of the mental disorder, only that the mental disorder is inscribed, as it were, in the brain.

The case is similar with respect to genetics. The fact that a certain mental disorder can be found to repeat in a family is not sufficient to establish that the disorder is genetically grounded or caused. The very mark of the social is to be located at the level of language or the transmission of "codes" that, like DNA, replicate themselves and proliferate through the field of those upon whom they supervene. In fact, such structures are a necessary condition for something being a family at all. As Lacan has shown us, these symbolic structures inform the nature of self-identity and interpersonal relationships in a way that cannot be underestimated, and thus can produce the repetition of disorders (in much the same way that a curse repeats throughout the family of Oedipus) through a family. This is true even in the case of adoptive children that display mental disorders found in their biological parents. The simple fact of being the adopted child, of being the child without a parent or the abandoned child, can produce far reaching effects in the psychic economy of the child. There is no reason to suppose that these mental disorders could just as easily be explained from a social or environmental perspective (a symbolic, rather than genetic perspective).

It seems to me that these variables tend to go unexplored in the field of US psychology. No doubt this is for the reasons that Derrida has cited regarding the nature of the signifier... Namely, that the very fact that in speech I hear myself speak tends to produce the illusion of a relation of immediacy between the act of speaking and hearing myself speak such that I overlook the constitutive role the signifier plays in structuring my thought and self-identity. I efface my alienation in the act of speaking, but in such a way as to further alienate myself.

The problem with contemporary psychology is that it is founded on what might be called the medical gaze. This has profound consequences for how therapy is actually practiced in the United States. The medical gaze is that gaze in which the doctor treats himself as being independent of the illness from which is patient suffers. Thus, for instance, when a doctor diagnoses his patient with cancer it is clear that the doctor cannot be thought of as a part of the patients cancer or that his diagnosis has any causal effect on the patient's cancer.

The medical gaze is uncritically extended to the practice of therapy in the US as well. Thus, for instance, when the therapist (not the analyst) diagnoses someone with a particular mental disorder they do so on the assumption that they are not a part of the disorder and that their diagnosis has no effect on the disorder. In other words, the therapist thinks of him or herself as being independent of the person that they diagnose... As being numerically or ontologically unrelated to that person. This is equivalent to saying that the relation between the suffering patient and the therapist is conceptualized as an external relation such that the patient would be what they are regardless of whether or not she entered the therapist's office.

The therapist/psychologist is thus the one who subtracts herself from the equation. In doing so she adopts an observational view of the patient, in which the patient is conceived as being something simply looked upon such that the looking does not effect that which is looked at. While I am certainly simplifying things here, there can be little doubt that there's more than a little truth in this evaluation of how therapy is today organized. This is immediately evident the moment you walk into a therapists office and are given a five hundred question test to take in which your disorder is neatly categorized according to the prevailing wisdom of the then current university discourse.

Here, then, in this final point, we at last reach Lacan. For it is with respect to 1) the material causation of psychic phenomena, and 2) the belief that diagnosis has no effect on the person diagnosed, that we find the difference between psychoanalysis and psychology. As the sociological theorist Niklas Luhmann has pointed out, social systems differ from classical physical systems in that they 1) have the ability to represent themselves, and 2) the manner in which they represent themselves can have an effect on how the system itself is organized. Zizek makes a similar point in his amusing discussion of what he calls "the subject supposed to believe." From the perspective of the functioning of social systems, what is at issue is not what I myself believe, but what I believe my neighbor believes. Thus, for instance, at the beginning of Bush's term I, being a savvy, intelligent person, might very well believe that Bush's rhetoric about the waning economy is really a lot of hot air, but I think that my friend Larry and a lot of his friends are complete morons who will take this rhetoric seriously (i.e., believe it) and start selling their stocks madly. For this reason, if I am prudent, I too will sell my stocks lest I become the victim of the ignorant belief of my fellows. Here the description of the system (Bush's description of the economy) comes to have an effect on the economy even if I think descriptively that it is nonsense.

The therapist, as opposed to the analyst, is someone who believes that the normative and descriptive use of concepts can be clearly kept apart. In other words, they fail to take account of the self-referentiality of social systems or the manner in which descriptions of social systems are themselves causal variables of these systems. In their use of diagnostic categories drawn from the DSM-IV, the therapist believes that their act of naming or diagnosing their patient is a purely descriptive act, with no normative dimension (Here U.S. psychological practices scream for a Foucault-style genealogical analysis that examines the relations of power implicit in these categorizations. An academia myopically fixated on the continent as if it were the only place where history takes place, has not yet taken on such an important task... At least, not to my knowledge). Why else would the therapist reveal her diagnosis to the patient? The only rationale for revealing a diagnosis is the belief that the diagnosis is a purely descriptive affair that has no effect on the patient and how the patient comports herself.

Unfortunately, social and psychic systems, unlike physical systems such as those found in two billiard balls hitting one another, are such that it is impossible to clearly separate the normative and descriptive functioning of categories. The minute that a descriptive category is applied to a patient, it already begins to function as a normative category.

For instance, when a patient is diagnosed as suffering from borderline bi polar depressive disorder, that diagnosis comes to function as a norm for the patient in which all actions are evaluated. Suddenly the patient finds a way to comprehend and understand all their past actions, as well as a way of determining their future actions. For instance, we can imagine a patient that begins to let herself run loose a little bit more simply because she is a borderline bi polar manic depressed person.

Moreover, these diagnoses have great importance in interpersonal relations as well, given that they allow the patient to change their social status, getting benefits for their disorder and sympathy for their suffering. In other words, diagnosis proves to be a path to jouissance or enjoyment. For this reason, mental illness might today be one of the real forms of protest against the system of capital and the way in which it shackles us to interminable labor. Through mental illness we are able to recoup some of our stolen jouissance by forcing business and state to afford us special privileges. Could the person suffering from mental illness be one example of the modern proletariat or subject of revolution? How might the plethora of multiplying symptoms be transformed from mute inscriptions of alienation to revolutionary subjectivity? In other words, how might this proletariat be brought to consciousness about the true meaning of their symptom... Or how might they move from "enjoying their symptom" in an unconscious way, to becoming the agent of their symptom?

Regardless of whether or not this is the case, the category thus begins to function as an imperative of how I act and behave and thus effects the psychic system that it originally set out merely to describe. This is an example of the strange logic of apres coup or the manner in which the signifier functions in terms of "what it will have been". The odd thing about social and psychic systems as opposed to physical systems is that they do not obey the ordinary temporal logic of cause and effect. In physical systems (at least those at the Newtonian scale) we are accustomed to the notion that the effect follows the cause. However, strangely, in social and psychic systems what is taking place in the present can have effects on what is taking place in the past such that the manner in which the past functions with respect to the present is itself transformed. This, for instance, is what occurs when we arrive at a new picture of what happened in the past such that we transform how we behave in the present. Reinterpretations of the colonization as they've functioned in the struggles of American-Indians here come to mind. On the one hand we have pre-critical theories of colonization in which matters were framed in terms of the famed meeting of the Pilgrims and the Indians, on the other we have the pictures of brutal colonialist exploitation that have served as a catalyst for rethinking the status of existing American Indians today. The signifier thus does not simply describe past events-- it is not merely descriptive or referential --but has an entirely different temporal structure than the sort of structure we find in ordinary physical phenomena such that it can actually PRESCRIBE certain phenomena. It is precisely this dimension that is overlooked in the contemporary field of therapy, where words are thought to function in a way that is only referential, for the sake of communication. The simple act of naming something, already transforms the way in which that thing behaves.

Closely connected with this phenomenon of apres coup, is that of imaginary transference. The issue here would be that the patient already approaches the therapist as the one who has knowledge of their symptom and, who's favor, they would like to win. In other words, they look at the therapist as a potential friend or figure of authority who's favour could be beneficial and serve as a source of pleasure. A failure to take account of this intersubjective dimension of the relationship between patient and analyst leads to further complications with diagnosis in that we can imagine all sorts of scenarios in which the patient imagines themselves into the symptomology of the disorder as a way of filling what she believes the therapist desires her to be. A great deal more should be said on this. What is here important is that the therapist subtracts herself from the therapeutic setting at both her and her patients peril.

It is very simple to see what follows from ignorance to the interrelated phenomena of apres coup and transference in the therapeutic setting: A failure to be aware of how these things function and effect psychic and social systems cannot but lead to alienation. The first alienation would be at the level of the university discourse, in which the patient is alienated in an abstract system of significations (S2, the system of medical knowledge) that prevents him from discovering the concrete way in which his own psychic system is structured or even discovering that his symptoms are in fact meaningful (physicalist psychology is distinct from psychoanalysis is that it is based on the premise that symptoms do not mean or signify anything, but are just accidents of electro-chemical and genetic malfunctions). Second, it is alienation incarnate in that the relation between therapist and patient is asymmetrical in that the therapist is held to have knowledge of the patients symptom while the patient is ignorant. In short, it does not lead the patient (now analysand) to that point in which they discover that the only real authority or subject supposed to know is the unconscious itself. For this reason, the patient never reaches that moment of separating from the big Other or discovering that the big Other does not exist. Their very attempts to heal themselves, thus further lead to alienation such that their actions themselves come to reinforce the power of the very forces against which they were originally fighting. This is what Judith Butler, following Foucault, has referred to as the danger that arises should it be true that subjects are themselves produced by the juridical systems of power in which they seek representation. This suggests that the very attempt to seek representation produces further subordination to power and domination in that the categories of psychological knowledge are themselves discursive constructions that produce particular subjectivities. The value of psychoanalysis, in this context, is that the silence of the analyst with regard to diagnosis and the emphasis on the speech of the analyst allows the analysand to separate from the big Other (as represented by analyst) and discover those hollows or spaces where the Other lacks as those places where it, the analysand, might come to be. Analysis provides the possibility of a leap out of these infantalizing power relations.

It is for these reasons that psychology can be nothing but alienation incarnated. So long as these things are not taken into account, psychology cannot but maintain us in an infantile state in which autonomy and singularity are never reached. No wonder that the only solution currently offered to us is that found in chemical cocktails, in which one is prescribed the life of a waking dream, rather than knowledge of the real of their desire and the separation from the big Other that comes with it... No wonder the only thing offered to us is further alienation in the big Other or the set of diagnostic categories prescribed by the DSM-IV in which our sole consolation is that our psychic structure comes to be normalized by being medicalized and thereby socially acceptable. This is not nothing, but it also cannot compare to discovering the real of one's desire.

Rough Theory-- Critical Subjects

N.Pepperell over at Rough Theory has written a very nice response to my recent post on recoding the social. N.P. writes:

What I want to do here is draw attention to something about the subject - the critical subject - that seems often overlooked in social theoretic discussions, but that seems to me to bear a strong importance for another question you have asked here - a question I also think is vitally important:

what renders an individual susceptible to an event in the first place?

I think you are quite right to ask whether, given the hypothesis that social relations can be defined in ordinary time, so to speak, by what you have called the encyclopaedia (by what I might tend to call a particular network of concrete social relations), we are then in a very difficult position when it comes to explaining how individuals might possess the potential to become subjects - or, as you have expressed the point:

if the regime of the encyclopaedia is as total as Badiou and Ranciere suggest, if the encyclopaedia is organized precisely around disavowing the possibility of anything that isn’t counted, then what are the conditions of possibility under which a subject might be produced at all.

You then move on to discuss the notion that our situatedness in any context is never complete - I’ll come back to this point. What I wanted to point out first, not because I think it’s something that you have missed (I take your points as, in a sense, assuming my own - I just want to take the opportunity to spell something out very explicitly here), but because it seems to be something both glaringly visible, and yet often missed in formulations such as those you quote from Badiou and Ranciere: if the encyclopaedia were complete, surely we would not be able to name it as such. Surely the fact that we are engaged in critical discourse already gives the lie to claims - even if these claims understanding themselves to be critical...

This is exactly the sort of question I'm getting at. Either critique is already itself a product of what I'm here calling the encyclopaedia (I'm more inclined to adopt N.Pepperell's language of "concrete social networks"), or the subject is never completely interpellated by the system of social relations in which its enmeshed. If the latter, it then becomes possible to both explain the subject of critique, but also to explain how one and the same subject seeks to proper up the inconsistencies and symptoms of the encyclopaedia so as to maintain its own tenuous identity... Or something like that. I need to develop what I'm getting at in far more detail, and I realize that a few of my comments towards the end of the previous post were hastey, psychologistic reductions... More placemarkers for future development, than final statements.

Rhetoric and Philosophy

The last few days I've been rather amiss in blogging. I've been heavily immersed in research and just haven't had much time to write. Happily, however, I received a call for an on-campus interview today. Hopefully it won't be the last such call.

In a rather pointed post, Kenneth Rufo responds to one of my queries as to how it is possible to be influenced. Kenneth quotes me from my Forcing the Event entry, where I write,

I think this really gets to the core of the issue. To put it in Kantian terms: "What are the conditions for the possibility of being influenced." I've seen some work done among the systems theory that's promising in that it analyzes the manner in which systems are selectively open to their environment, but the problem here, I think, is that there's a tendency among systems theorists to place too much emphasis on the agency and autonomy of the system to the detriment of the environment. In many instances I did not explicitly choose my own influences, yet I wasn't simply a passive formation of pre-existent influences either.

To this Kenneth responds,

You know, there is a field that actually spends a fair amount of time on this exact question: rhetoric. It's got a long tradition, it precedes philosophy, and there's a subfield that deals with social movements, though I can't speak to the quality of that scholarship. For particular people you might enjoy, I suppose I'm obligated to suggest Kenneth Burke, though he's hardly my cup of tea. I'd also recommend a few contemporary scholars: Celeste Condit (she's done some ideographic studies of abortion, genetics, and a few other topics), Barb Biesecker (articles more than book, though her Addressing Postmodernity is pretty good), Michael Hyde (more of an ethical, Levinas/Heidegger influenced version of rhetoric), John Durham Peters (his Speaking Into the Air is masterful), and Christine Harold (who's book OurSpace comes out in April). I can be more specific if you have a particular example of symbolic structuration you're grappling with, or if you can clarify what such a structuration might be in practice. Not that rhetoricians have any particularly final answer, but it might be useful to look at the stuff. As for the dialectical arrangement you're alluding to, I'd at least advocate some engagement with Bourdieu, since his theory of structuration is predicated on a conception of agency as a dialectic between habitus and agent.

I think, perhaps, Kenneth here misses the focus of my original question and elides two distinct concepts: The concept of influence and the concept of persuasion. While these two concepts are interrelated, they are nonetheless distinct and respond to different issues. It is impossible for me to be persuaded without being influenced, however, I can quite easily be influenced without it being a matter of persuasion. What is at issue here are questions about the selective openness of organizations to the world. That is, an organization, whether it be a biological organism, a subject, a social system, etc., is only selectively open to the world and thus can only be selectively influenced. For instance, I am unable to perceive ultra-violet light.

As I see it, one of the central assumptions of vulger historicist approaches is the idea that we are unilaterially conditioned by an environment. That is, the idea is that we're born in an environment and somehow this environment makes us what we are. This view is common, for instance, to both Foucault and Bourdieu. What this account of individuation misses is the way in which subjects are only selectively open to an environment such that there's a way in which we always choose our cultural and historical influences. Zizek expresses this point brilliantly in Tarrying With the Negative through the lense of Hegel's "doctrine of essence" in the science of logic. There Zizek writes that,

Another way to exemplify this logic of 'positing the presuppositions' is the spontaneous ideological narrativization of our experience and activity: whatever we do, we always situate it in a larger symbolic context which is charged with conferring meaning upon our acts. A Serbian fighting Muslim Albanians and Bosnians in today's ex-Yugoslavia conceives of his fight as the last act in the centuries-old defense of Christian Europe against Turkish penetration; the Bolsheviks conceived of the October Revolution as the continuation and successful conclusion of all previous radical popular uprisings, from Sparticus in ancient Rome to Jacobins in the French Revolution (this narrativization is tacitly assumed even by some critics of Bolshevism who, for example, speak of the 'Stalinist Thermidor'); the Khmer Rouge in Kampuchea or the Sendero Luminoso in Perud conceive of their movement as a return to the old glory of an ancient empire (Inca's empire in Peru, the old Khmer kingdom in Cambodia); etc. The Hegelian point to be made is that such narratives are always retroactive reconstructions for which we are in a way responsible; they are never simple given facts: we can never refer to them as a found condition, context, or presupposition of our activity. Precisely as presuppositions, such narratives are always-already 'posited' by us. Tradition is tradition insofar as we constitute it as such. (126-7)

The point here is subtle but important: The subject is never simply a product of history or the result of conditioning, but rather posits those conditions through which it might be influenced and constitute itself. Or, where the writing of history is concerned, there is always an invisible subject-- invisible insofar as there is no signifier for the subject --that posits x as history. Along these lines, my dear friend Melanie enjoys poking fun at me for my psychoanalytic narratives here on Larval Subjects, as she sees something false or contrived in the way I narrate myself. Here she is absolutely correct in that I often portray myself as a product of the events I narrate, as a sort of emergence, rather than as positing these events myself as a way of producing my presents. Indeed, my narratives are a sort of buffoonery. Sadly I haven't yet developed the literary talent of Lars in his narrative conventions. Whatever the case may be, the Lacanian subject is a void, a lack, that animates the signifying chain. In short, the Lacano-Hegelian subject is-- unlike the historicists --never simply a product of conditioning individuation such that it could be reduced to being a historically determined subject position. The question is one of how this lack, this nothingness, this absence of any successful identification, is handled and lived.

Zizek makes this point well apropos Hegel's discussion of identity in the science of logic. Quoting Hegel, Zizek writes,

Father is the other of son, and son the other of father, and each only is as this other of the other; and at the same time, the one determination only is, in relation to the other... The father also has an existence of his own apart from the son-relationship; but then he is not father but simply man... Opposites, therefore, contain contradiction in so far as they are, in the same respect, negatively related to one another or sublate each other and are indifferent to one another. (SL 441)

The inattentive reader may easily miss the key accent of this passage, the feature which belies the standard notion of the 'Hegelian Contradiction': 'contradition' does not take place between 'father' and 'son' (here, we have a case of simple opposition between two codependent terms); it also does not turn on the fact that in one relation (to my son) I am 'father' and in another (to my own father) I am myself 'son,' i.e., I am 'simultaneously father and son.' If this were the Hegelian 'contradiction,' Hegel would effectively be guilty of logical confusion, since it is clear that I am not both in the same respect. The last phrase in the quoted passage from Hegel's Logic locates the contradiction clearly inside 'father' himself: 'contradiction' designates the antagonistic relationship between what I am 'for the others'-- my symbolic determination --and what I am 'in myself,' abstractedly from my relations to others. It is the contradiction between the void of the subject's pure 'being-for-himself' and the signifying feature which represents him for the others, in Lacanian terms: between $ and S1. More precisely, 'contradiction' means that it is my very 'alienation' in the symbolic mandate, in S1, which retoractively makes $-- the void which eludes the hold of the mandate-- out of my brute reality: I am not only 'father,' not only this particular determination, yet beyond these symbolic mandates I am nothing but the void which eludes them (and, as such their own retroactive product). (130-1)

This, then, is one of the meanings of Lacan's discourse of the master:

S1--->S2
--
$

When Lacan remarks that "the signifier represents the subject for another signifier" it must be understood that the subject as such never appears in the signifier or that the subject is always effaced by the signifier. That is, when the subject falls under the signifier it suffers an aphanisis or disappearance, which is why Lacan will claim, in "Position of the Unconscious" that the subject is a temporal pulsation that disappears the moment that it appears and that can only be tracked through the traces it leaves (traces in symptoms, bungled actions, dreams, slips of the tongue, etc). These formations of the unconscious, in effect, are attempts to fill the void that is the subject, to produce a signifier that would be adequate to that void once and for all or that would be capable of naming it. However, this void is ineradicable (i.e., it's a constitutive result of the individual's subordination to the signifier). As Lacan will write, "For what the unconscious does is to show us the gap through which neurosis recreates a harmony with the real-- a real that may well not be determined" (Seminar XI, 22). There is always one signifier too few and it is for this reason that there is no subject without a symptom (Seminar 22: RSI).

It is here that Lacan differs most radically from the postmoderns. Where the general trend of theory today is to reduce the subject to power, history, language, subject-positions, etc., Lacan demonstrates that between symbolic identity and the subject there is always a gap. The "cash-value" of this move is immense-- On the one hand, Lacan is able to answer the question of why the subject is led to identify in the first place. As Freud had already argued well before Lacan, the ego dimension of the subject (which is always a misrecognition) is the precipitate of identifications. But what is it that motivates these identifications? Lacan's answer is that my flight to the Other, to the signifiers of the Other, is the attempt to fill my "want-to-be" through identification. I look to the Other to tell me what I am. However, just as the central hole in a torus can never be filled, every identification is ultimately a failed identification (which is yet another reason that the formation of symptoms such as the symptom of the "Jew" for the German nationalist) as the hole insists and subverts the identification. As a result, there is always a kernal of resistance to any field of identification. The aim of the cultural critic should therefore be to lay bare these tensions, these antagonisms, so as effect a change in the symptom and how the symptom is organized. From the historicist standpoint this would be impossible as historicism is essentially Leibnizian: "Everything has a reason!" What it is unable to think is the kernal of contingency, of non-being, at the heart of any positive formation. The question here becomes one of devising technologies to shift the symbolic coordinates of narrative fields of identification so that antagonism as such might become thinkable.

None of this, of course, is to deny Kenneth's observations about the importance of rhetoric. I work closely with rhetoric and with rhetoricians-- at my school they're my primary interlocutors. In my view, the central insight of the rhetoric tradition is that the subject is inherently intersubjective... Which is to say, the subject is constituted in the field of the Other. Even if poorly executed, this is part of Zizek's own brilliance. On the one hand, Zizek has recognized the central importance of Lacan in giving us a truly rigorous intersubjective conception of the subject that thoroughly breaks with the tradition of seeing the questions of philosophy posed strictly in terms of subject-object relations. The minimal dyad is a triad: not subject-object, but rather subject-Other-object. No one has gone further than Lacan in thinking through the manner in which the subject's desire, all its object relations, it's very being in the world is thoroughly caught up in relations to the Other. This insight was glimpsed in philosophy beginning with the progressive shift towards language, history, and power in philosophy-- all of which led to a philosophical crisis surrounding questions of presence --but it is with Lacan that this topology is thoroughly elaborated. On the other hand, Zizek has clearly seen that only something like Hegelian dialectic-- beginning with the lord/bondsman dialectic in the genesis of self-consciousness --is successful in escaping the metaphysics of presence insofar as it conceives the subject's relation to the world and the Other in terms of self-relating negativity capable of discerning itself in difference itself. This is a project that needs to be worked out far more thoroughly and rigorously. It is to the credit of the rhetoricians that they recognized from the beginning that questions of epistemology, ontology, metaphysics, ethics, etc., were questions of intersubjectivity and relations to the Other, such that any posing of these questions in restricted subject-object terms were bound to be truncated and mutilated.

However, where Kenneth's remarks seem to suggest an opposition between rhetoric and philosophy, I would prefer to see something like a Lacanian real or parallax. As Zizek describes it,

The key problem here is that the basic 'law' of dialectical materialism, the struggle of opposites, was colonized/obfuscated by the New Age notion of the polarity of opposites (ying-yang, and so on). The first critical move is to replace this topic of the polarity of opposites with the concept of the inherent 'tension,' gap, noncoincidence, of the One with itself. This... is based on a strategic politico-philosophical decision to designate this gap which separates the One from itself with the term parallax. [already extensively thematized in the brilliant For They Know Not What They Do..., that no one bothers to read]. There is an entire series of the modes of parallax in different domains of modern theory: quantum physics (the wave-particle duality); the parallax of neurobiology (the realization that, when we look behind the face into the skull, we find nothing: 'there's no one at home' there, just piles of gray matter-- it is difficult to tarry with this gap between meaning and the pure Real); the parallax of ontological difference, of the discord between the ontic and the transcendental-ontological (we cannot reduce the ontological horizon to its ontic 'roots,' but neither can we deduce the ontic domain from the ontological horizon; that is to say, transcendental constitution is not creation); the parallax of the Real (the Lacanian real has no positive-substantial consistency, it is just the gap between the multitude of perspectives on it)... (7)

And so on. And to this I add the parallax of language between rhetoric and philosophy, or language in its address to an-Other where I can use the truth to tell a lie-- WIFE: "Were you out with that redhead at the bar lastnight?" HUSBAND: [Sarcastically] "Of course darling, and after we rented a hotel room and had sex that's illegal in 42 states all night long." WIFE: "Sorry, I just thought I smelled perfume on you and my imagination got away with me." --and language in its demonstrative and referential function to the world. The key point, of course, is that we are not to choose one or the other horns of the parallax but are rather to think them in their very gap, in their very heterogenoues irreducibility to one another. My rhetorician colleagues always express a sort of bitterness and hostility towards philosophy (no doubt they're still angry over Plato banishing them from the Republic), and philosophers, of course, express a disdain for rhetoric, as can be witnessed in the solipsistic rigor of texts such as Descartes' Meditations, Hegel's Logic, or Husserl's Ideas, where a palpable negation of the Other (as reader) seems to take place in the deductive meditations. Likewise, the rhetor often seems to reject questions of Truth. Indeed, today it increasingly seems that the most audacious and unforgivable thing one can do is proclaim a Truth. There is a veritable prohibition against Truth. Yet if the subject is constituted in the field of the Other, if the subject is an effect of the signifier in the real of the biological body, then there can be no question of choosing between rhetoric or philosophy. Rather, there can be no worldly statement that doesn't already make reference to both the Other and the other, no demonstrative statement that is a solipsistic intellectual reverie. Rather, it's high time that the parallax gap, the central antagonism motivating this inaugural division of disciplines and practices, be thought in its own right.

Suture!

For any interested, J.A. Miller's fundamental article "Suture" is now available online. J.A. Miller presented this during the 12th seminar and it arguably changed a good deal of Lacan's own trajectory by formalizing his thought. As Lacan later said about the young 18 year old, "The Miller isn't half bad." Anyone interested in the Lacanian subject can find it here... Of course you'll be disappointed to discover that you now have to read Frege and a number of other philosophers of mathematics.

What's in a Name?

He was passionate about the Revolution and spoke of freedom, equality, egalitarianism; yet his reasons for believing were too subtle, to clever, too philosophical not to attract the suspicion of the party leaders. Unfortunately I could not see a happy ending for Dr. Zhivago.

~A passage about one of my imagos

K-Punk has written a nice post on blogging and pseudonyms that relates to some of the issues I've been discussing in the last few months regarding my name. K-Punk writes:

Perhaps writing - or more specifically, writing about oneself - only reveals the inherently split nature of the subject: the 'the other one, the one called Borges ... the one things happen to' in 'Borges and I' is the subject of the statement, the Borges who observes that 'I do not know which of us has written this page' is the subject of the enunciation. Any use of the pronoun 'I' will always exposes this split, this spaltung.

It seems to me that this reminder of the split status of the subject is crucial for discussions of virtual engagements. The standard story has it that the net allows us to playfully create our own identity however we like, without the usual constraints that attend our day to day subjectivity. However, this sort of split is already constitutive of subjectivity as such: I am perpetually split between my imaginary imago that functions as an ideal ego for an ego ideal (a particular gaze from which we see ourselves as lovable) and my unconscious desire. Indeed, Lacan describes the imago structuring the ego as not only a semblable, but as a frozen statue constitutive of frustration itself, as I am never able to coincide with this ideal image of what I'd like to be. Between the lived body that farts and belches and moves in a less than graceful way and the body-image constitutive of the ego, there is always a disadequation or gap such that the imaginary is itself split or fissured, generating frustration and a perpetual remainder. Are not our net personae precisely such statues? Well worth the read.

Lacan or Weltanschaung? The Discussion Continues

My Argentinian friend, the analyst Gracelia Ferraro, has honored me with another letter responding to my remarks about the situation of psychoanalysis in the United States and asked that I post it here. I have been remiss in not posting it earlier and hope she will graciously accept my apology. Gracelia writes,

One addition to Lacan's "obscurantism" and the difficulty of reading his work: Lacan uses this speech to make "real", as a dream, that there is no sense of senses or there is no metalanguage. The unconscious is never clear or rational but always enigmatic and I appreciated the difficulties in reading Lacan as part of my training as an analyst. So even if I agree with the fact that simplifying may be useful from the teaching point of view, very useful, the thesis that it is efficacious "transmitting" an encounter with how the rhetoric of the unconscious works is quite inane. We see here the same ethical problem that haunted Freud during the last years of his discoveries. Should we do anything to keep the psychoanalysis alive? (See Ernest Jones’s discussion with Freud about the foundation of the IPA as related to medical vs. psychoanalytical practice). Should we keep its foundations intact with such a high price to pay: fewer analysts with no social or academic achievements? We have to keep in mind that Lacan’s interest in the institution pertains to his question of how an analyst is made. What desire animates an analyst? How does one's own analysis leads to it?

I understand the cultural context you explain as being representative of our cultural differences, and obviously you must be correct according to what I can read elsewhere. However in my country, the problems are of a different shape but lead to the same problem: The Psychoanalytical Institution (APA) loves the symbolic and the mirror stage, but have mixed it with anything at hand resulting in a lame heterodoxy or heterology , while keeping the “contratransferencial” form of interpretation.

We cannot make ourselves the keepers of orthodoxy or the “truth” which being half said reaches the impossible, but we have to care about the enigmatic shape of unconscious and not confuse it with either the mystical or over rational “scientific” biases. That is how I understand what is at stake with Lacan's engagement with knots or mathemes within his discourse: a complete “transmission” of the concept.

How can the Academy can take the extreme and exceptionally precise enunciation "there is not a sexual proportion"? what biologist will agree?. We can trace this extraordinary (for the common sense) assumption back to Freud. But you see Levi, these are questions not discussed, we prefer to see Lacanian “concepts” everywhere except where they have to be seen: at the less-one of the subject, the parletre … Many think that Lacan is a structuralist because of Derrida's influence on Academics (I guess). We need to stress this point if we don’t want to be so divided between our practice and “ the world”.

I have nothing more to add, except perhaps to raise the question of whether the subject is, in fact, present in discussions of Lacan in the United States. By this I am not referring to the level of the concept, where one heroically defends the concept of the subject against postmodern, neuropsychological, and post-phenomenological declarations that the subject is dead. Within Lacanian practice, the subject is never encountered as such, but always fades behind the signifier, disappearing the moment that it appears. The subject is present as enigma. What the appropriations of psychoanalysis by cultural studies risks is an illusory mastery of the subject or suturing shut of the unconscious on the premise that psychoanalysis provides the tools to decipher all formations of the unconscious.